Hey, won't you play another somebody's done some tabbies wrong song ...
Austrian president says all women should wear a hijab to show solidarity with Muslims:
— Dr. Maalouf (@realMaalouf) February 10, 2026
“With increasing Islamophobia, we may have to ask ALL women to wear a headscarf to show solidarity with those who do so for religious reasons.”
This is mental illness.pic.twitter.com/O8gUktbZ3k
Ed: It's a cult. It's also a surrender by the West to the forces that wish to destroy its liberty and enlightenment. The Gates of Vienna have seen better centuries.
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Barak Ravid at Axios: President Trump told Axios in an interview on Tuesday that he's considering sending a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East to prepare for military action if negotiations with Iran fail.
Why it matters: The U.S. and Iran resumed negotiations last Friday in Oman for the first time since the 12-day war in June, but Trump has simultaneously launched a massive military buildup in the Gulf. "Either we will make a deal or we will have to do something very tough like last time," Trump told Axios.
Ed: I suspect that a second carrier group is already on the way. Trump thinks the Iranians will make a deal this time, but on his terms, not Ali Khamenei's. If not, Trump wants to be ready.
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“Any deal that does not include significant limitations on the range of Iran’s ballistic missiles will be woefully inadequate from Israel’s perspective”
— Grizzly Joe 🇺🇸🇮🇱 👊 (@GrizzlyJoeShow) February 9, 2026
Netanyahu hopes to ensure Trump addresses the most urgent threat from Iran: ballistic missiles https://t.co/Z0DSl0x03D
Ed: Any deal has to effectively deal with all of the risks posed by the regime. That includes ballistic missiles AND its terror proxy armies, as well as its violent oppression of the Iranian people. Anything that ignores thos threats are a waste of energy and leverage.
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WSJ: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012 with his wife and children, years after Lutnick said he had cut off ties with the convicted sex offender.
“My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple. They were there as well with their children, and we had lunch on the island,” Lutnick said during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. Lutnick said he and his family spent roughly an hour on the island and then left. “We were on family vacation,” he added.
Lutnick said he searched for his name through the files released by the Justice Department from its Epstein investigation, and among the millions of pages found about 10 emails connecting him with the disgraced financier over a 14-year period. “I didn’t look through the documents with any fear whatsoever, because I know, and my wife knows, that I have done absolutely nothing wrong in any possible regard,” Lutnick said.
“I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with that person. OK?” he said.
Ed: A family vacation lunch ... on Pedo Island? That doesn't exactly sound as though Lutnick "barely" had a connection to Epstein. Little St. James was a private island, not a tourist destination. That doesn't mean that Lutnick did anything criminal, but Epstein would have had to arrange that lunch, and this took place five years after the plea deal Epstein took that marked him as a Level 1 sex offender. It's a demonstration of terrible judgment, not to mention the credibility issues this explanation raises.
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I might just spend the next year laughing so hard that I'm in danger of rupturing my abdomen.
— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) February 10, 2026
Yes. The evidence that Donald Trump was a Federal informant in the Epstein case has been trickling out for a couple of years now. I am too libertarian to be MAGA and by no means Donald… https://t.co/YZse9W7hwj
... I am too libertarian to be MAGA and by no means Donald Trump's biggest fan, but I noticed this.
What are the Trump-hating media and the Left (but I repeat myself) going to do now that these court documents are going public? They've backed themselves into a corner by incessantly screaming "Trump is a pedo!" despite the fact that he never went to Little St James and cut times with Epstein after Epstein hit on a 14-year-old Mar-A-Lago employee.
Absolutely brilliant move by Trump not to exculpate himself by saying in public "I helped the law take Epstein down". Now his enemies are in so deep that all of their choices are horribly self-destructive.
Ed: Trump probably didn't plan this, at least not until the DoJ alerted him to this record being in the files. I wonder if he even remembered his call to the local police chief (not the feds). But everything else Raymond writes here applies in spades. Click through to read it all.
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Tanya Lukyanova at The Free Press: The material released was divided into 12 batches, or “data sets.” Roughly 400 videos live in a folder called Data Set 8, which contains prison closed-circuit television footage, including hallway cameras and angles from inside Epstein’s cell. But the vast majority of the videos—and by far the most revealing ones—are in Data Set 10. These are videos seized from Epstein’s devices: footage he recorded himself, received from others, or downloaded from the internet.
Individually, most of these videos tell us little we didn’t already know; but taken together, they paint the most vivid picture yet of Epstein’s dark world: his lavish lifestyle and twisted worldview, his mannerisms and quirks, his sense of humor—and sense of impunity. The videos are heavily redacted, to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims. In some clips, these redactions mask explicit content. In others, they lend an air of criminality to otherwise innocuous-seeming footage.
It is because of that impression left by the videos, as well as the difficulty of accessing the files, that we’ve decided to publish all 14 hours of the footage contained in Data Set 10.
Ed: Why bother? They only matter if they provide evidence of crimes. This seems more prurient than substantive, to the point of being gross. Lukyanova provides her own analysis for those who choose not to view the videos themselves, and that only tends to confirm that there's no good reason to watch them at all. YMMV, though, so click through if you're interested.
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Coming soon to Las Vegas casinos: an ATM that melts down your gold jewelry at 2200°F, verifies the purity and weight, and then transfers the value (minus fees) to your bank account. This will devastate the local pawn shop industry. pic.twitter.com/C9oAfivLBH
— Las Vegas Locally 🌴 (@LasVegasLocally) February 10, 2026
Ed: This is a very bad idea. First off, people will shove material into this machine in attempts to fool it into paying off for non-gold metals. I'd love to own the field service concession for these machines. But even more, a lot of jewelry thieves will fence their goods for their meltdown values, and the process will destroy the evidence for them. Finally, even the casinos have to realize how it will look when they encourage their customers to melt down the family heirlooms to play craps for another hour. Or at least one would hope they would.
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Jerusalem Post: The Trump administration has been repeatedly threatening to withhold federal funds from Harvard and several other universities in recent months over issues including pro-Palestinian protests against Israel's war in Gaza, campus diversity, and transgender policies.
The Friday statement, issued by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said that, beginning inthe 2026-2027 school year, all graduate-level professional military education, fellowships, and certificate programs will be discontinued, though military students already attending classes will be allowed to complete their studies.
"University leadership encouraged a campus environment that celebrated Hamas, allowed attacks on Jews, and still promotes discrimination based on race," said Hegseth.
The Department of Defense also claimed that Harvard’s relationships with foreign powers, such as China, and "an on-campus culture that is incongruent with military and American values and interests."
Ed: The Trump administration's war with Harvard continues. This didn't get a lot of attention over the weekend, but it's significant in another aspect. The Pentagon fought with the Ivy League for years to get access for ROTC and these kinds of programs. It's interesting that they don't see enough value in campus access under these conditions now.
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I get that “the elites” is a nebulous thing, but the claim that being overweight wasn’t necessarily unhealthy was definitely a dominant narrative coming from all sorts of institutions in recent years. https://t.co/rMPzsXgDEP pic.twitter.com/QQMtTKy8rc
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) February 10, 2026
Ed: It was EVERYWHERE. But now that GLP-1 drugs are here, we are about to be gaslit by the Protection Racket Media and told that no one ever suggested obesity wasn't a health problem. It's straight out of Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
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- NIH: Fat shaming is making people sicker and heavier - PMC
- Harvard: Unpacking fatphobia, weight discrimination, and their deadly repercussions
- AAMC: Shame on us for shaming people with excess weight - AAMC
- American Psychological Association: The burden of weight stigma
- HuffPost (today!): Mike Tyson's Super Bowl Ad Tried To Fat-Shame America — Here's Why It ...
Ed: For a number of years, the medical professions put far more effort into combating fat-shaming than it did in finding effective therapies to treat obesity. The accidental discovery of the impact of GLP-1 meds on obesity finally put an end to it – mostly – but only because the progressive elites can now handle it with criticism of the behaviors that lead to obesity. The reaction to the Tyson ad shows that the elites still won't discuss it in terms of behavioral changes.
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And here’s a snippet of the “curricular review tool” used by UCSF, which warns clinicians about “anti-fat bias” and discourages the use of BMI as a proxy for illness.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 10, 2026
“Consider whether your curriculum falsely equates body size with health.”
UCSF is a top five medical school. pic.twitter.com/fWehwDbJNf
Ed: I'm pretty sure that UCLA and UCSF medical schools qualify as "elites." They certainly sell themselves that way.
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City Journal: More than 20 percent of Americans express little or no confidence in scientists to “act in the best interests of the public,” according to Pew’s latest polling. Just 13 percent gave that answer in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic. The figure varies sharply by political ideology, rising to a third among Republicans and falling to a tenth among Democrats.
It’s easy to see where this polarization and declining public trust come from. The ongoing “reproducibility crisis” in the social and behavioral sciences has revealed that a lot of high-profile research is flawed; some is even fraudulent. Other research is widely perceived as ideologically skewed.
Ed: The problem isn't just perception. The "fat positivity" movement in medical schools is evidence that science has taken a back seat to progressive agendas.
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This dog deserves a gold medal pic.twitter.com/owybkx46lj
— Shooter McGavin (@ShooterMcGavin) February 10, 2026
Ed: After the event, four reporters demanded to know Doggo's position on ICE.
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