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The illegal-based economy
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.

(Bill Glahn) This, from the Minneapolis Star Tribune,

School leaders fear declining attendance during ICE surge will also lower state funding.

Public schools depend on the children of illegal aliens to keep up enrollment levels and extract more money from state taxpayers.

More students means more teachers, which means more public school teacher union members, which means more union dues, which means bigger donations to the Democratic party.

Neil Munro of Breitbart has promoted the hypothesis that much of the opposition to ICE can be traced back to economic incentives.

Democrats in Minnesota have gone all-in on an illegal-immigrant-based economy.  The more people (legal or otherwise) present in the state who are dependent on government benefits means bigger budgets for governments and more power to the Democrats who control those budgets.

To that end, public schools in Minnesota have sued the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security in an effort to kick ICE out of the state (File No. 26-cv-1023). It’s one of many such lawsuits filed by Democrats and Democrat-controlled institutions.

The Star Tribune reports,

Because the money to pay teachers, counselors, bus drivers and principals is tied to attendance, officials fear prolonged absences by students in hiding will lead to declining state funding for schools.

I hate to tell the schools, but many of those students are not “in hiding,” but have departed back to their home countries, never to return. A rude awakening awaits the new school year in the autumn.

More Dildos
Every delay has consequences.

(John Hinderaker) I wrote yesterday about anti-ICE protests in Minnesota that feature dildos, I guess as a sign of the maturity and seriousness of the activists. Here is more footage along the same lines. First the video, then a comment or two:

Anti-ICE activists in Minneapolis are now sticking dildos to their own heads to protest against arresting criminal illegal aliens.

They're also throwing the dildos at federal agents and assaulting federal vehicles.

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 8, 2026

These people are deeply disturbed. Apart from the fact that many of them are criminals, there is something seriously wrong with them. It is often said that liberalism is a mental illness. Watching these people in action, it is hard to dispute that assessment.

Right wing gains around the world
Why resist verification?

(Bill Glahn) From BBC News,

Japanese stocks surge as Takaichi secures historic election victory.

Right-wing Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi gambled on a snap election for parliament and won a huge victory, giving her ruling party not just an outright majority, but an outright supermajority.

Less successful was the gamble taken on a snap election in the northeastern Spanish region of Aragon by the leading center-right Peoples Party (PP). Together with the 2nd-place socialists, PP lost a total of seven seats, all at the expense of the right-wing party Vox.

The shift leaves PP more dependent than before on their right-wing Vox allies in the region’s governing coalition. Oops.

The exception that proves the rule can be found in the Portuguese presidential election. The socialist candidate prevailed over the right-wing candidate to win the mostly-ceremonial post.

The right-wing Chega party (“Enough!”) was founded in only 2019, and improved on their third-place finish in the 2021 contest.

Chega finished as the 2nd-largest party in the Portuguese 2025 parliamentary election, forming the official opposition to the leading center-right party, the Social Democratic party (PSD). In the 2026 presidential contest, the PSD candidate failed to advance out of the first round of voting, finishing a distant 5th.

In a fit of spite, the center-right PSD put their support behind the socialist presidential candidate in the final round of voting to deny the right-wing Chega the win.

The right wing is on the march around the globe. Everywhere, it seems, except in the United States.

Newslinks for Wednesday 11th February 2026
We're watching the same failure loop.

Allies admit Starmer is too ‘weak’ to sack Streeting after coup speculation

“Sir Keir Starmer is currently too “weak” to sack leadership rival Wes Streeting, the UK prime minister’s allies have admitted, as an uneasy truce descended on the Labour party. The health secretary, suspected by Number 10 of being part of a coup attempt, has been forced to put his ambitions on hold, declaring on Tuesday that Starmer had his “full support”. Starmer urged cabinet ministers to get on with their jobs and to bring an end to leadership speculation, which was sparked after Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called on Monday for the prime minister to quit. With tensions between Number 10 and Streeting running high, Starmer’s team said the aim now was to calm the situation and reach the relative safety of a House of Commons half-term recess, which starts on Thursday. “I don’t think he can sack Wes, I don’t think he has the strength to sack anyone right now,” said one Starmer ally. “He’s too weak.” A member of Starmer’s team said: “Sacking Wes would just uncork even more political chaos of the kind we’re trying to avoid.” Streeting told reporters that Starmer had not threatened to sack him. Streeting’s team strongly denied the health secretary was working with Sarwar to bring down the prime minister, in what was seen by cabinet ministers as a failed coup.” – Financial Times

Streeting still ready to challenge Starmer despite show of unity, allies say – The Guardian

Starmer ‘too weak’ to sack Streeting, allies admit – Daily Telegraph

Buy Rayner and Sell Streeting, Say UK Labour Insiders as Drama Ebbs – Bloomberg

Miliband and Burnham turn on Streeting over ‘coup attempt’ – Daily Telegraph

Ministers warned not to copy Wes Streeting’s release of messages with Peter Mandelson – The Guardian

Comment:

And the winner from all this is … Ed Miliband – Daniel Finkelstein, The Times

The Starmer palace coup is a national disgrace – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph

Dismal PM is rudderless but what follows will be far worse… UK is being dragged into socialist future it never asked for – Ross Clark, The Sun

Why I’ve bet on unflashy John Healey to lead Labour – Matthew Parris, The Times

If Labour lurches to the Left, the market mayhem will make Truss fiasco look like fiscal rectitude – Alex Brummer, Daily Mail

Anyone who thinks Rayner is the answer to Britain’s problems needs their head examined – Allison Pearson, Daily Telegraph

> Today:

Mandelson did for Morgan, now Kemi wants Keir’s scalp but be careful what you wish for

Miriam Cates: Starmer and Johnson are very different men, but their downfalls are very similar

> Yesterday:

What the Tories see when they look at Starmer

Peter Franklin: Does it matter if the Conservative Party becomes the Kemi Show? …

The Vapidity of Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends
How is this acceptable?

(John Hinderaker) I have probably paid less attention than the average person to the Jeffrey Epstein saga, but in the wake of the latest, vast document dump I have been reading what some commentators are saying. So here, for what it is worth, are a few observations.

First, the dog that isn’t barking. I take it that in all of the millions of emails that have now been released, there is no evidence of anyone other than Jeffrey Epstein having sex with underage girls. I don’t think that is surprising: as I noted here, twelve young women gave evidence in the Florida prosecution of Epstein. Not a single one of them mentioned any man other than Epstein. Likewise, when the feds prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell for procuring underage women, they charged her with procuring girls for only one man: Jeffrey Epstein.

The idea that Epstein had a “client list” and ran some kind of international pedophile ring was always, I think, a myth. And this seems to be confirmed by the absence of any such evidence in the releases of Epstein documents to date. Although, to be fair, if Epstein supplied underage girls to anyone, Prince Andrew seems to be first on the suspect list.

So what do the Epstein documents show? The vapidity of the world’s supposed elite, I think. Epstein was a minor player in the world of finance, but he was regarded as an intellectual–a thinker!–with strong connections at both Harvard and MIT. Intellectuals like Larry Summers, former President of Harvard, were in his orbit, along with numerous members of the business elite.

James Marriott takes up this theme in the London Times: “Jeffrey Epstein circle’s ‘big ideas’ were vacuous guff.”

Whoever runs Private Eye’s fortnightly compendium of pretentious quotations, Pseuds Corner, could take the next few years off and delegate the task to an algorithm with access to the Epstein files.

***

Epstein retails banal opinions as if they are sage reflections (“I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives”) and tarot-and-crystals-adjacent woo (“The soul I describe as the dark matter of the brain”), as if he is reporting from the front line of science. The temptation is to chalk this up to “the banality of evil”. But it illustrates something else worth paying attention to: the vacuousness of the international business elite.

For all their self-importance, these powerful and wealthy men — always at a conference or on the way to Davos (“giving a talk tmrw about data visualization”) — display no remarkable insight into life or the world. “I’m wowed by people of great ideas,” said Epstein, meaning something like “I am wowed by the same buzzwords as everyone else in my circle”.

Like so many of his friends, Epstein was pretentious but, outside of the obscure financial niche where he apparently made money, …

Climate Change: What Can’t It Do?
How is this acceptable?

(John Hinderaker) Global warming morphed into climate change so that liberals could complain about any inconvenient weather and blame it on free enterprise. Thus, we have the absurd situation where liberals claim that “climate change” causes both excessive heat and excessive cold, whichever happens to be occurring at the moment.

This makes no sense. Saying that climate change causes warmer (or colder) weather is circular. It is like saying that my weight change caused me to get heavier. Blaming both heat and cold on climate change is like saying that my weight change caused me to get both heavier and lighter, at different times.

In any event, it isn’t true. Both extreme heat and extreme cold in the U.S. have become less frequent, not more frequent:

In the United States, which is the focus of the [New York Times] article, the picture is even less supportive of the “both hot and cold” claim. As meteorologist Chris Martz notes in his X thread posted here, extreme heat and extreme cold have both declined since the early twentieth century. As shown in the graphs he created (seen below) the blistering heat of the 1930s and 1950s still stands out as the hottest peak periods on record, while cold waves dropped sharply after the late 1980s. Comparing the 30-year periods 1901–1930 and 1996–2025 using GHCN-Daily station data, Martz finds cold waves decreased by about 31 percent and heat waves by about 20 percent.

These trends are consistent with the fact that extreme weather events have been getting less frequent. If human CO2 emissions are responsible for recent climate trends in the U.S., we should be grateful to our fossil fuel industries.

A final note: a few days ago, the Washington Post reportedly laid off 14 of its 19 “climate journalists”–an amazing number! That can only be a good thing. If every publication laid off all of its “climate journalists,” there would be much less misinformation in the world.

As Helene Survivors Wait for State Help, Some Victims of Earlier Hurricanes Are Still Out of Their Homes
Be honest—this is ridiculous.

In the 459 days that Willa Mae James spent living in a Fairfield Inn in Eastern North Carolina, her footsteps wore down paths in the carpet: from the door to the desk, from the bed to the wooden armchair by the window, her favorite place to read the Bible.

The 69-year-old retired dietitian had been sent there in July 2024 by North Carolina’s rebuilding program after Hurricane Florence ravaged her home and many others in 2018. The state had promised to help thousands of people like her rebuild or repair. But it had taken the program years to begin work. James spent nearly six years living in her damaged house in Lumberton, where floodwaters had turned the floorboards to pulp, causing her floors to sink and nearly cave in.

Of the more than 10,000 families who applied, 3,100 were still waiting for construction five years after the storm. Thousands of others had withdrawn or been dropped by the program. As of November, more than 300 families were still waiting to return home.

And James was the last of more than 100 displaced homeowners staying at the hotel.

“It’s like being in jail,” James said. “Everybody else done moved back home in their houses, enjoying it, except me.”

On the other side of North Carolina, nearly 5,000 homeowners find themselves waiting for the state government to help them rebuild after 2024’s Hurricane Helene. Gov. Josh Stein created a new program, Renew NC, promising to learn from the problems of the previous program that left James and thousands of others hanging for years.

Renew NC is just getting off the ground; the program began accepting applications in June and has completed work on 16 of the 2,700 homes it plans to repair and rebuild. But through public records and interviews with homeowners, The Assembly and ProPublica have found that some of the same problems that plagued the earlier program are surfacing in the Helene recovery.

Video by Nadia Sussman/ProPublica

That earlier program, which has the similar name ReBuild NC, was set up after Florence decimated a region that had been hit by Hurricane Matthew two years earlier. ReBuild NC was designed to help low- and moderate-income homeowners restore their homes by hiring and paying contractors to complete the work.

But the North Carolina Office of Recovery & Resiliency, which runs the program, failed at nearly every step, according to reports by outside consultants, journalists and auditors. It struggled to manage its $779 million budget and couldn’t keep track of expenses. It rarely held contractors accountable for delays that dragged out projects and drove up costs for temporary housing and storage. ReBuild NC provided only limited resources to understaffed local governments that couldn’t handle the volume of permit and inspection requests.

At the same time, the agency was laden with “administrative steps, paperwork, and procedures” to comply with federal regulations, according to a state auditor report. And rigid rules meant the agency spent money rebuilding homes that needed less expensive repairs, some homeowners said.

“The response from North Carolina to hurricanes Matthew and Florence was a disaster,” State Auditor Dave Boliek said in a statement …

The surprising reason why Americans could face high beef prices for years
Every delay has consequences.

Beef prices are soaring — and economists warn Americans shouldn’t expect relief anytime soon, as the U.S. cattle herd shrinks to its smallest size in 75 years.
The massive decrease in cattle numbers has been caused by years of drought, soaring costs and an aging ranching workforce. Agricultural economists and ranchers alike say rebuilding herds will take years, meaning beef prices aren’t likely to ease anytime soon.
"The biggest thing has been drought," said Eric Belasco, head of the agricultural economics department at Montana State University. 
Years of dry weather have wiped out grasslands across the West and Plains, leaving ranchers without enough feed or water to sustain their herds. Many have been forced to sell cattle early, even the cows needed to produce the next generation of calves, making it difficult to rebuild America's herds.
THE COST OF THIS GROCERY STAPLE IS NEARING RECORD HIGHS — AND AMERICANS CAN'T GET ENOUGH
Data from the Kansas City Federal Reserve found that with each incremental increase in drought severity, cattle-producing regions see about a 12% drop in hay production, a 5% rise in hay prices, a 1% reduction in herd size and a 4% decline in farm income.
That slow recovery isn’t just economic — it’s biological, according to Derrell Peel, a professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University.
"The fact of the matter is there’s really nothing anybody can do to change this very quickly," Peel said. "We’re in a tight supply situation that took several years to develop, and it’ll take several years to get out of it."
Peel, who specializes in livestock marketing, said it takes roughly two years to bring cattle to market and several years to rebuild herds — leaving little room for short-term relief.
THE SINGLE CRUSHING PROBLEM AMERICAN CATTLE RANCHERS WISH TRUMP WOULD FIX INSTEAD
And once herds shrink, the loss is hard to reverse. 
That reality is unfolding deep in ranch country. Cole Bolton, owner of K&C Cattle Company, whose pastures stretch along the soft edge of the Texas Hill Country, said the cattle industry is still in the early stages of recovery.
"I think it’s going to take a while to fix this crisis that we’re in with the cattle shortage," Bolton told Fox News Digital. "My message to consumers is simple: folks, be patient. We’ve got to build back our herds."
About 1,000 miles away, Will Harris, a fourth-generation cattleman in Bluffton, Georgia, said the ripple effects of the shrinking cattle herd are now landing squarely on consumers.
"The American cattle herd is smaller than it has been since the 1950s and that …

Breaking the Fourth Wall: Left-wing groups defiant as GOP sheds light on groups tied to China
Notice what's missing.

As House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith dropped the gavel at 10:05 a.m. on Tuesday opening a hearing on "malign foreign influence," the groups under scrutiny did not retreat, apologize or go silent.
They escalated.
Inside Room 1100 of the Longworth House Office Building, Smith warned that the U.S. nonprofit sector had become a vulnerability exploited by foreign adversaries. Outside the hearing room — across social media — far-left organizations tied to Marxist tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham, born in the U.S. and living in Shanghai, pressed forward with rhetoric vilifying the United States for its alleged "colonial policies" and "imperialism" and amplifying narratives aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, and communist allies like Cuba.
"This is not politics. It’s about national security," Smith said, as he opened the hearing titled "Foreign Influence in American Nonprofits: Unmasking Threats from Beijing." He said the committee was investigating "money trails" behind tax-exempt groups accused of "sowing chaos, fueling antisemitism," and interfering in elections.
HOUSE COMMITTEE INVESTIGATES LEFT-WING ORGANIZATIONS ‘SOWING CHAOS’ ACROSS US
During the hearing, Smith sharpened the warning.
"The CCP is taking advantage of our tax-exempt sector," he said.
For any organization allegedly breaking nonprofit tax laws, he said: "We’re coming for you!"
Breaking the fourth wall, Fox News Digital examined how the Singham network positioned itself outside the hearing room. A flurry of social media posts reveal that, even as Smith's words echoed in the hearing room, the ecosystem he described was aggressively putting forward their own rhetoric of defiance.
On Tuesday, during the hearing, CodePink, co-founded by Singham’s wife Jodie Evans, was circulating a narrative accusing the United States of enabling atrocities abroad. On its X social media account, CodePink shared an article claiming Israel had "evaporated" Palestinians in Gaza, concluding: "Horrors beyond comprehension — made possible by the United States."
The message mirrored language long pushed by U.S. adversaries, including the terrorist group Hamas. 
While CodePink activists often crash hearings, screaming interruptions and heckling Republicans, they didn't show up for this hearing, where their name was invoked several times for scrutiny.
In his opening remarks, Smith waved letters he had sent the night before to BreakThrough BT Media, a multimedia nonprofit, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, a think tank – both media entities funded by Singham – demanding …

Iran, Gaza, and ending military aid to Israel hang over Trump and Netanyahu meeting
Who benefits from this decision?

President Donald Trump will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House this week, with Iran and Gaza topping the agenda. But hanging over the visit is a quieter shift that could reshape America’s alliance with its most important ally.

The meeting is the first one at the White House since Netanyahu announced his plan for Israel to “taper” off its reliance on American military aid over the next decade. Netanyahu’s pitch is tailor-made for Trump’s America First agenda: Phase out billions in U.S. military aid and let Israel buy its own weapons like any other customer.

Yet, while Trump seems unsold, even one of the biggest military hawks within the GOP is on board.

“The aid we have provided to Israel has been a great investment, keeping the IDF strong, sharing technology, and making their military more capable — to the benefit of the United States,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the U.S. military, which is the best in the world and in great demand.”

Graham, who is facing a primary challenge as he seeks reelection this year, said that given Israel’s strong economy, there is no reason “we need not wait ten years.”

American military aid to Israel has become more controversial for Democrats and some libertarian and America First Republicans since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, amid criticism of how Israel has prosecuted its war against the terrorist organization in Gaza.

Former President Joe Biden even temporarily paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel in May 2024 in response to concerns regarding the number of civilian casualties.

But the U.S.-Israel military aid relationship, premised on a 10-year memorandum of understanding that is poised to expire in 2028 and its annual provision of about $3.8 billion in military assistance, representing roughly 15 to 20% of Israel’s defense budget, has provided the United States with some leverage over Israel when the two countries have had disagreements in the past.

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and Trump’s former special representative to Iran, Elliott Abrams, explained how complicated it could be to convince the president.

“If the issue arises, I think Netanyahu will want assurance that Lindsey Graham’s idea of a much quicker cut off is not taking hold in the administration,” the Vandenberg Coalition …