Party Balloons

Two big pops to the reporters who ran with "cartel drones" instead of party balloon.

LOL NYT:

Trump administration officials have warned for months about Mexican cartels using drones near the U.S.-Mexico border, saying they are used to surveil border agents and smuggle drugs.

Mexican officials have publicly been more skeptical, downplaying the threat drones pose at the border.

What is clear is that drones have become a prominent tool and weapon used by Mexican cartels across Mexico in recent years, according to cartel operatives, security analysts and some government officials on both sides of the border.

Wednesday Evening

Probably better blogging tomorrow

America's Worst Evening News Program

CBS Evening News.

Good Job, Kash

Doing well, as always.

A man who says he was detained for questioning as part of the investigation into Guthrie's disappearance has told reporters that he was "terrified" by the ordeal.

Thread

Busy until later.

Sure Why Not

Is this "Trump is stuck in 1987" or "rich coal guy gave him a billion bucks."

Sure Why Not

The FAA announced a 10 day closure of airspace around El Paso and then promptly lifted it.

Probably an antifa threat.

...ah it was going to be Pearl Harbor. Maybe the Jarhanpur invasion. 

Morning

Wacky Wednesday.

America's Worst Humans

Greg Bovino and Charles Exum.

Happy Hour

Get happy

The Only Option

The obvious move. Anything else would have been ridiculous.

Don't Join The Panopticon

I'm not sure dystopian scifi ever predicted that people would pay for the privilege.

So They All Know What The Number Is

Trumpers and affiliated are all panicked about the jobs numbers. I suppose they could just be guessing, but I'm so old I remember when any hint that government data would be broadly disseminated before the official release would have been treated as a nuclear event by economists.

Peter Navarro: "The jobs report comes out tomorrow. We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like ... Wall Street has to adjust for the fact that we're deporting millions of illegals out of the job market."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 10, 2026 at 2:19 PM

Nobody Knows In America

Being in SoCal at the moment, the freaking out about Spanish is very "funny." One thing about East Coast big metro provincialism is the people (liberals and conservatives) who live there think diversity and multiculturalism are uniquely East Coast things.

Painting with a very broad brush here, but diverse (Latino, Asian) populations and their culture presences are much more integrated and visible generally here than on the East Coast, and that's the case in other non-NYC/DC metro parts of the country as well.  That isn't unique to supposedly liberal California, either.

And Is That True

Not sure if this is an "open the schools" or "stop assuming rich con men are smart" thing with this reporter.

 

The tech billionaire, who aims to launch an initial public offering for the newly combined company this year, argues that vast fleets of satellites powered by solar energy and cooled by the vacuum of space will become the cheapest way to generate AI computing power. Musk believes this will happen within the next three years.

Ah, yes, cooled by the vacuum of space, notable for lack of its conduction and convection and of course unimpeded solar radiation exposure much of the time.

You don't actually freeze instantly when your spacesuit gets a hole, though it is very unpleasant in other ways!

About Those Vaccines

It is all fun and games until children start dying.

Dr. Mehmet Oz has urged Americans to get vaccinated against measles, one of the strongest endorsements of the vaccine yet from a top health official in the Trump administration, which has repeatedly undermined confidence in vaccine safety. 

 

Dr. Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services director, told CNN on Sunday that there was a simple solution to the raging measles outbreak in South Carolina, which has infected more than 900 people and become the largest U.S. outbreak in recent history.

 

“Take the vaccine, please,” Dr. Oz said. He also pledged that there “will never be a barrier to Americans getting access to the measles vaccine.”

Happy Hour

I did see my first Cybertruck. The reality is so much worse than pictures.

A Genuine Problem

That we went from "gambling is a thing you can do in Vegas, and then a few other places" to "bet the farm using your phone" in a few short years is a problem!

The Supreme Court unleashed this craze in 2018, ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association that federal prohibitions against states legalizing sports betting were unconstitutional. Eight years later, 40 states and the District of Columbia have allowed some type of online gambling. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that gambling was the second-highest service-sector industry for GDP growth between 2019 and 2024, behind only software publishing.

I used to think limited sports betting was relatively healthy (relatively), in that there was a time lapse between "pushing the button" and the result. No constant hamster treat rush like slots or similar. But that was before gambling on your phone, the immense variety of parlay bets partial game betting, and half of sports coverage being devoted to gambling.

The Inscrutable Acts of Elon Musk, Supergenius

The author of this piece is a longtime Elon fluffer. 

We cannot know Musk’s full rationale for pivoting to the Moon, at least in the near term.

Because he is a con man!!!  Lol:

All of this may sound like it’s straight out of the pages of a science fiction novel, and it pretty much is.

People Didn't Actually Vote For This

I don't say that to defend Trump supporters whose reasons for voting for him were Not Good, regardless. And some of them do want and love "this."

I say it to point out that Trump does not have any kind of popular mandate for what is happening. You can think they were racist idiots for this, and generally cruel still, but plenty of Trump supporters truly believed that the country was filled with violent criminal "illegals" and that this was the problem Trump would be "solving."   

Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump's first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News. 

People believe stupid things about immigration and immigrants. They believe that the solutions to these fake problems are something other than what they are. Again, that isn't a defense of them, mostly, but that people love the idea of removing all of those criminals that Joe Biden brought in to rape your wives, and illegally vote for Democrats does not mean they love "this."