Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 20, 2026
Supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford Has Crossed Into The Mediterranean. The carrier’s rush to the Middle East comes as the military build-up in the region appears to be approaching its crescendo.
Pensions cost the government 10% of GDP. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries… Though Brazil’s share of young people is similar to that in Chile or Mexico, its pension spending is already at Japan’s level. That is despite a modest reform in 2019 that introduced a minimum retirement age. The population is ageing rapidly. Without reform, its social-security deficit, or the shortfall between contributions and payments, is set to rise from 2% of GDP today to over 16% by 2060.
Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs
With today’s Supreme Court ruling affirming the illegality of President Trump’s emergency tariffs, the country will now be about $2 trillion deeper in the hole. With the national debt already the size of the entire U.S. economy and interest on the debt costing more than $1 trillion this year, this is very bad news. Congress should work quickly to fill that hole. Whatever one feels about the tariffs themselves, the country needs that $2 trillion in fiscal improvements.
Past: CFT clearly met those criteria, Isaacman said today. But NASA did not classify the mission as a Type A mishap during and shortly after CFT, apparently because agency officials were too focused on getting Starliner certified to fly operational astronaut missions to the ISS. “Concern for the Starliner program’s reputation influenced that decision,” Isaacman said today. “Programmatic advocacy exceeded reasonable balance and placed the mission, the crew and America’s space program at risk in ways that were not fully understood at the time decisions were being contemplated. This created a culture of mistrust that can never happen again, and there will be leadership accountability.”
Current: Just to be clear here, NASA declared its recent test a “successful wet dress rehearsal” despite missing its T-30s target by almost five minutes, botching the dreaded Orion hatch close out procedure, and managing to achieve up to 16% H2 due to copious leakage at the fueling interface. For reference, the lower flammability limit, and system requirement, is just 4%, beyond which this nightmare fuel can burn and detonate in air. The “wet dress” was so successful, in fact, that they have to do it all over again in the unspecified near future. But before that, the same team ran a “(no) confidence test” on the leaky fueling interface which failed badly enough that they buried it until 8pm on the following Friday.
On Thursday, the Center for American Progress, a prominent left-leaning think tank that often cultivates policy ideas later adopted by the Democratic Party, proposed a two-year freeze on the prices of 24 food items, such as strawberries and ground beef.
