Let’s bring back that great tradition from my column days, eh? The items roundup!
I do not have a Ring doorbell, or any other kind of doorbell that tells me who is standing on my doorstep. Of course, I live in a safe suburb, and honestly have no need for one, although I gather I’m in a shrinking minority. Just judging by my social-media scans, posts about Ring doorbells have gone from “this scoundrel stole my Amazon package” to “this scoundrel came onto my porch at 9 p.m. and I don’t know him” to “this woman walked past my house; anyone recognize her?”
I wish I were kidding.
The Ring rewards paranoia, which makes it the perfect product for a paranoid age. Fear and anger stalk the land, and you never know who will be waiting on the other side of the door. Someone selling vinyl siding, or a right-winger in a latex mask and fake cop uniform bent on shooting you dead.
That said, we choose not to live that way. We have a small window in our front door, which gives me a pretty good idea who is outside. It does mean shooing away the vinyl-siding salespeople, but interacting with other humans is a life skill, and I like to stay in practice. Alan offered to buy Kate one for her house, and she said, “No, I hate that surveillance-state crap.” Girl was raised right.
Anyway, Hamilton Nolan sums up my feelings about Ring perfectly:
Crime. “Crime.” “Crime!” It is a conceptual delivery system for an unhappy life of fear. Reject it as a category of being. Reject it as an intellectually coherent object. Reject it as a lens with which to view the world. Life is a series of surprising events, some bad and some delightful. The unfolding of these events makes up the wondrous parade of life itself. Defining this entire parade by the theoretical possibility of a small handful of negative outliers does not guarantee you peace of mind. Rather, it guarantees the opposite: an unceasing focus on the worst, a needless hypervigilance bleeding into anxiety. Thrown into this disordered state, you find yourself easy prey for those who would invent solutions to this imagined problem that they themselves have conjured. The mask of safety hides the sallow face of the predator.
You want to point a freaking camera at every postal worker and cookie-selling Girl Scout and dinner party attendee that approaches your door? What is this, a house, or a prison? It is plainly crazy. It is far afield from reasonable. Its normalization is evidence of a latent societal sickness. We don’t point cameras at our friends. We don’t leer suspiciously at our neighbors. We don’t assail humanity with an accusatory spotlight. These things are not okay.
I continue to be over-interested in the Epstein story. This week’s revelations include that Epstein had an Ohio State medicine-employed gynecologist on retainer, sending him something like $25,000 a quarter for some time. How conveeeeeenient. The doctor’s explanation: ”I did not provide any clinical care for Jeffrey Epstein or any of his victims. I was a paid consultant for the New York Strategy Group regarding potential biotech investments from 2001 to 2005. I had no knowledge of any criminal activities; I find them reprehensible and I feel terrible for Epstein’s victims.” I feel so much better now.
Don’t ever change, Jeanine Pirro:
Washington’s US Attorney Jeanine Pirro tapped a dance photographer who worked for her decades ago as one of the prosecutors who tried—and failed—to convince a grand jury to indict six Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, said two people familiar with the situation.
Steven Vandervelden maintained an active photography studio when presenting federal charges to the grand jury against the six members of Congress for creating a video reminding military service members of their rights to refuse unlawful orders.
…Vandervelden—who had a long career as a local prosecutor in Westchester County, N.Y. where Pirro was district attorney —declined to comment on the investigation into the lawmakers, calling it a potentially open case. In a brief phone interview Wednesday, he confirmed he is the same Vandervelden who posted an update to his studio’s Instagram account several hours earlier.
Anyone who pays attention to federal courts knows how unusual it is for a grand jury to decline to indict; a grand jury is a prosecutor’s show, the scales so absurdly tilted in their direction that it’s where we got the famous ham-sandwich line. For some reason, that last sentence in the excerpt above made me cackle.
Speaking of federal incompetence, am I alone in wondering why it is taking so long to find an 84-year-old woman, dead or alive? I am simply flummoxed by the Nancy Guthrie case. Can anyone explain where it is now? I’m not paying super-close attention, and am wondering if I missed something important. For the last week it’s something about a video, Bitcoin, “we will pay” and utter radio silence from law enforcement. Is this a local failure or Kash Patel’s hollowed-out FBI?
Finally, it was just yesterday that one of my group chats was discussing Nicole Curtis, who hosts a show called “Rehab Addict” on one of those cable channels I don’t get anymore. She’s had ownership of a particular house in Detroit for years now. I wrote about it for Deadline Detroit in 2021, and happened to ride past it maybe last summer. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in the intervening years. But yesterday, on that group chat, someone mentioned that she was finally doing work on it, with the camera crew, of course.
But! RECORD SCRATCH! It appears the house will not be the star of the next season, as Curtis dropped an N-bomb in the course of taping this week, and faster than you can hit your thumb with a hammer, she was fired, the show cancelled, all evidence of it wiped from the corporate website, AND the clip itself leaked to the celebrity-gossip media.
What a dumb way to lay waste to your career, but I have no doubt she’ll land on her feet. Pretty blondes tend to do that.
As I told my friend last night, the celebrity-gossip media hustle the way the regular media did back when the cotton was high. I realize they often pay cash for leaks; maybe we should try doing that.
And that’s it, folks! The weekend awaits! Let’s enjoy it together.
Brandon said on February 13, 2026 at 3:37 am
I’m not paying super-close attention
Neither am I, actually.
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David C said on February 13, 2026 at 5:49 am
Well hey, at least we’re being kept safe from party balloons. I’ll sleep much better now.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/cbp-shot-party-balloons-anti-drone-tech-faa-closed-el-paso-airspace-so-rcna258731
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john (not mccain) said on February 13, 2026 at 6:58 am
The Rehab Addict incident is why I still buy a ridiculous number of movies on disc. They haven’t memory-holed Blazing Saddles yet, but eventually somebody’s gonna profit off fake outrage over it.
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nancy said on February 13, 2026 at 8:17 am
The fact Curtis was memory-holed so quickly and thoroughly suggests the rumors about her attitude and behavior on and off set were not exaggerated.
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Jeff Borden said on February 13, 2026 at 9:44 am
I’m really excited about removing all the scientific findings on pollution and the erasure of emissions limits on everything from cars to coal plants. Yippee! Come on back smog. We missed you.
Fascinating how the party of pro-life is doing everything it can to damage it. Wars on vaccines. Cuts to scientific research. Slashing Medicare/Medicaid. Putting red meat at the top of the food pyramid. It never stops.
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Mark P said on February 13, 2026 at 10:08 am
I’m pretty sure everything that’s happening in the US right now can be divided into two categories. There is feeding the ego and bank account of Trump, and there is turning the US into a Russia/Nazi Germany shithole disguised as a libertarian nightmare hellhole for the benefit of billionaires. Both require destroying the government, and we are far past halfway on that journey. In fact, we have passed the point of no return. I don’t know what our final destination will look like, but it won’t be the pre-Trump world we used to know.
I have seen several predictions of the various ways the country could turn back from a Trumpian dictatorship, and returning to a functioning democracy is down on the list. Of the other possibilities, a military takeover seems the least horrible, assuming it happens before Trump turns the military against he people.
Many years ago I passed a long Army convoy on an interstate highway. I was thinking how wonderful it was that I didn’t have to be afraid of the military. I knew I could pass the entire convoy and give everyone in every truck or jeep the finger without worrying about being shot. Those were the days.
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Icarus said on February 13, 2026 at 11:05 am
I have never heard the term that Nicole Curtis used and it doesn’t strike me as an intentional racist insult. When I went to college in Missouri, I used the term “jury rigging” for something and my roommate said he knew it as “N-rigging”. But then he also believed his sister got pregnant without having actual P-V penetrating sex so there’s that.
In our Chicago house, I use to work from home long before COVID made it more common. I bought a cheap knock-off ring like camera from WOOT because I would get interrupted by people wanting to take a pole or make sure I’m voting for their candidate or sell me something. It’s much easier to dismiss someone from a camera than face-to-face. Unfortunately, the camera only worked about 40% of the time.
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alex said on February 13, 2026 at 11:27 am
The last celebrity to get cancelled for running her mouth like that was Paula Deen in 2013, unless I’m forgetting somebody.
There are Apprentice tapes of Tubby dropping N-bombs, per the former producer who wrote an expose during the run-up to the last election, but NBC has buried them. The course of history might have been different had someone just leaked the goods.
The Nancy Guthrie case is one of the few stories bridging the political divide these days; it sort of reminds me of post-9/11 where everyone was on the same page about at least something. I felt strangely moved one day recently when a couple of elderly (presumably MAGA) ladies approached me in a country club dining room where I occasionally take lunch because the food is good. Fox News was on the monitor, though silenced. One of the old gals asked me if they’d “found Savanah’s mom yet.” Although I had only paid peripheral attention to the story, I replied that I hadn’t seen anything new.
So DHS is deploying in Indianapolis and I expect we’ll be seeing them around here soon. Kudos to our local government, which has announced that local law enforcement will not be assisting or cooperating with Tubby’s goons.
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Julie Robinson said on February 13, 2026 at 11:40 am
Amazon says they’ve cut ties with Flock, the company that was using Ring data for police surveillance intel, but what happens to the data they’ve already disseminated? And what’s to stop them from quietly doing it again after the furor dies down?
Getting a doorbell camera* seems like the road to buying a gun and then feeling the need to carry. How did Yoda put it? “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering”. *I can see legitimate purposes, especially if you live in a high crime area. But mostly I see it feeding paranoia.
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alex said on February 13, 2026 at 12:13 pm
We didn’t get a Ring doorbell, but we put up trail cams when it became evident that someone was trying to force their way into our back door. We busted the former live-in boyfriend of the lonely lady across the street, who has this bad habit of taking in losers. She’s been single for a couple of years now, but I half expect to see some freeloader moving in again one of these days.
Trail cams use 16 batteries and burn through them in no time flat. Ours have been out of juice for some time now, although I’m paying for a subscription that I should cancel until the next time we might need them. However there is a neighbor with an Irish Setter who lets his dog shit in our yard and never picks up after it and I’d like to post a picture to the HOA Facebook page and thank him for the free fertilizer.
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Sherri said on February 13, 2026 at 12:35 pm
I got a doorbell camera, not because of paranoia about crime or stolen packages, but because I’m home most of the time and I got tired of interrupting what I was doing to shoo away the roof/window/tree/pest control/painting people who “are doing some work in your neighborhood.” A no soliciting sign isn’t enough of a deterrent.
This way, I can check my phone and see if I need to bother to go to the door. I got a system where the video is stored locally, not in the cloud, so if the surveillance state wants to use it, they have to get a warrant for me personally, not just my provider. And I can control how long I store the video.
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ROGirl said on February 13, 2026 at 1:04 pm
I think the Nancy Guthrie situation involves some twisted family shit that is being kept out of the public arena, but who the fuck knows what the FBI is actually doing?
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Dave said on February 13, 2026 at 1:57 pm
We’ve got a Ring doorbell because it came with the house. Every home in our 55+ community has one. We’ve got a couple of cameras, besides, not because we’re worried about crime but because I have a great weakness for gadgets. Never have we ever picked up anything that concerns us but we wonder about the lady who walks her dog almost every single night, summer, winter, fall, and spring anywhere between midnight and 3 AM. We don’t know who she is.
Oh, full disclosure, we had a Ring doorbell in Florida, too, that we bought, because of the aforementioned reason. This is the video I managed to save one day of what had happened the night before. https://ring.com/share/b765ab6f-3f2c-4ccb-81dd-898c2e4780d7
I hope that link works, I don’t think you need a Ring account to see it.
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susan said on February 13, 2026 at 3:07 pm
Kitty! Young one, still has spots. Wonder what happened to its tail, making it so short.
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Colleen said on February 13, 2026 at 3:25 pm
I agree with ROGirl….I think there’s some family stuff with the Guthrie case.
We have a Ring…it came with the house. But you’re right about it feeding people’s paranoia. I have actually seen “this person was in my driveway. Does anyone know who it is?” kinds of posts. People in my neighborhood get all agitated about sales people. My solution is pretty simple…I don’t answer the door. Since I have no sales resistance, it keeps me from going with a different exterminator. Or buying magic beans.
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Brandon said on February 13, 2026 at 3:25 pm
https://reason.com/2026/02/11/the-feds-wont-certify-safe-vaccines-anymore-the-private-sector-is-stepping-up-to-do-it/
Now, the American Medical Association (AMA) is teaming up with the Vaccine Integrity Project at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota to privately evaluate the safety and efficacy of vaccines targeting three viral illnesses for the upcoming 2026–2027 respiratory virus season. The review focuses on immunizations for influenza, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Why is the AMA launching this effort? Because, as the group correctly notes in its press release, “For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) served as the engine of evidence-based vaccine policy in the United States. That system has now effectively collapsed.”
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Peter said on February 13, 2026 at 4:21 pm
FARTN@@@@@? Well, you have to give her style points for creativity – 50 years in construction and I’ve never heard that term, and I have heard plenty.
As for Ring – didn’t they or someone just like them have an ad in the Super Bowl? If I remember, the ad said that 10 MILLION dogs go missing each year, but thanks to their products and surveillance, each day they rescue a dog!
That sounds impressive, until I did the math – 365/10000000 = .000000365% your dog will be rescued because of a Ring camera. Impressive! Truly a Trumpian accomplishment.
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Carter Cleland said on February 13, 2026 at 10:28 pm
Hey Dave @ 13 – that’s a bobcat, right, with the spots on its haunches?
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Sherri said on February 14, 2026 at 12:14 am
Too much of the times these days, I feel like a crazy person. It’s impossible to describe the world we live in today without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. Nothing seems to be built on solid ground.
The people who proclaim themselves Christian the loudest are the most gleefully cruel people imaginable. A whole industry has built up around delivering bribes to an openly corrupt president. The judiciary is doing its best, hindered by a Supreme Court that is indifferent to the Constitution.
But, eventually, Trump will go away, one way or another. The man will not live forever. And post-Trump, I don’t think MAGA is the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem is the oligarchs who have been taking advantage of the Trump corruption/incompetence/lack of regulation to accumulate and consolidate power.
So, as we approach the midterms and beyond, consider who will take on the oligarchs, and who will not. Much of the establishment elected Democratic Party will not take on the oligarchs; they’ll be looking to direct some of the cash flow their way, rather than shut off the cash flow.
So ask yourself, will this candidate fight the oligarchs? Have they fought the oligarchs before, or appeased them to get their money?
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Gretchen said on February 14, 2026 at 2:21 am
Brian Driscoll served as the head of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team until Kash Patel fired him for refusing to hand over a list of agents who investigated Trump and January 6. I would guess that he would have some expertise to bring to a kidnapping investigation. Many FBI agents who normally investigate crimes have been fired or are re-deployed to immigration enforcement. I think it’s pretty clear that the gutted FBI under incompetent leadership is unable to investigate a real crime. Agents report that Patel is more concerned about what he’s going to post on social media than finding out what happened.
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Deborah said on February 14, 2026 at 10:18 am
We’ve talked about getting some kind of camera system for the condo building in Santa Fe aimed at the entry gate but no one seems interested. We’re on the cusp of a bad neighborhood, the only problem so far has been people getting into mailboxes which is a problem all over the city, so we moved the boxes closer to the building and made them assessable from the back side and they lock to avoid that problem.
We do get visited by a lot of critters because we’re close to the river, who knows what kind of nocturnal animals we would get to see if we had a camera, worth it to me for that alone.
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Jakash said on February 14, 2026 at 1:13 pm
Dave @ 13,
It was fun/cool seeing the bobcat(?) stroll up and hop on the wall. I then watched the rest of the video, hoping it would meander back, but in the meantime enjoyed spending a minute just enjoying that charming, impressionistic black-and-white space.
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Dave said on February 14, 2026 at 2:42 pm
Yes, it was a bobcat, we used to see coyotes in our Florida neighborhood but we never saw a bobcat, although we did once see something kind of sneaking around one evening that we thought might have been a bobcat but it was a distance away and we weren’t sure.
We captured a low speed collision that happened in front of our house but neither party wanted to pursue it and the video is long gone.
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Jeff Gill said on February 14, 2026 at 10:04 pm
This is worth a quick trip to Xwitter.
https://x.com/ejeancarroll/status/2022850677823733906
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Deborah said on February 15, 2026 at 9:00 am
That’s weird. Has to be fake. I hope I didn’t get some kind of a virus from clicking on that.
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alex said on February 15, 2026 at 10:01 am
A good read about the sorry state of public trust in journalism. Gift article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/opinion/jeff-bezos-washington-post.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MVA.zun4.RTptpw8UN_P2&smid=url-share
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Dorothy said on February 15, 2026 at 11:39 am
Our kids wanted us to have a security system here in our new house, so we got a RING camera. We use Simply Safe. I have the jingly sound turned off because it makes Nestle bark like a lunatic when it goes off. But Mike has it turned on, so my efforts to stop the dog from going ape-shit are nil. However in November last year the camera came in handy.
A little after 1 AM, some idiot in our neighborhood, wearing a mask cuz he’d been at his own Halloween party, claimed he was in a drunken state and thought he was at his parents’ house, not ours. How did I know who it was? Well I did a screen shot of him. Put it on our neighborhood Facebook page. Within an hour I got a private message from a young woman in our neighborhood book club and she told me who it was. Seems he’s the same jerk who paid his step son to come around and do that ‘bang on the door and run away’ nonsense the last week of August just before school started. He was bragging about it at the pool on Labor Day, and she overheard him. He doesn’t like my politics, so you can figure out who HE supports. She said “He doesn’t like you and this was him, I’m confident, because I was at that party and he was wearing that mask.”
I am not friends with this guy on Facebook but because we’re both in the neighborhood group, I can message him. He made this lame excuse that he was drunk and confused our house with his parents. And he was trying to ‘scare’ his parents by ringing the bell and running away. I did not buy it for a moment. Our house looks nothing like his parents. Our garage door faces forward, parallel to the street. His parents’ house is four doors down from us and their garage door faces sideways, perpendicular to the street. I read him the riot act. I was beyond pissed. I said “What kind of step father are you to be teaching your stepson to do that kind of thing?! Someone shot and killed a kid in Texas for doing that same stupid banging on the door and running away!” And I also lit into him for thinking his parents would enjoy being ‘scared’ at 1 AM with a doorbell ringing. He apologized, and even stopped at the house with a written note apologizing again and giving me tickets to a show that I could not attend anyway. I will never trust him and he’s damn lucky I haven’t spilled the beans on our Facebook group page because he sells insurance, and has a lot of clients here. If it got out that he was the one who made our dog explode with frothing barking at 1 AM on Novemver 1st, I think his reputation would take a serious hit.
Sorry for the long rant – you can guess that I’m still pretty angry about it. Re Nancy Guthrie: I don’t think family is involved. My theory is that someone delivered something to her house not long ago, and put two and two together and figured out who her daughter is. Figured it’d be a good way to make a lot of money by kidnapping her. But I’m feeling pretty sure she’s died because of not having her medication, or mistreatment where she was taken. They’ll likely never see her again. The desert is a big place. I’m picturing the end of Breaking Bad when Hank and his police partner were dispatched and buried. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler but the show ended at least 10 years ago, right?)
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Deborah said on February 15, 2026 at 1:27 pm
I agree, I don’t think Nancy Guthrie will ever be found. She probably died from her heart issues fairly soon which would be a blessing in an odd way. That poor family, so sad.
We’re in our favorite place to relax, in Desert Hot Springs, CA. We figured out that we’ve been coming here for 33 years. Not every year, there was a multi year gap in there but it’s been fairly consistent. A woman had bought it and tried to make it chi chi but thankfully failed and the last few years it’s back to its zen like simplicity and solitude.
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Dexter Friend said on February 15, 2026 at 5:09 pm
The neighbor who has a loud motorcycle but no garage keeps it in the front yard all winter. He points a Ring-type camera at it now. I have not gotten one, never been broken into…yet.
My friend who blew a $400,000 inheritance on a construction project which he had gotten 1/2 finished but then went broke and had to sell the land and the half-done home for pennies on the dollar still follows the finance pages, and he swears BitCoin transactions can easily be traced, contrary to every ransom transaction I have ever read about.
I need clarification, you wise sharps know…what’s truth?
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Sherri said on February 15, 2026 at 6:34 pm
The truth, Dexter, is complicated. The whole point of Bitcoin was for money in a low trust environment; every Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) transaction is recorded on a blockchain. So Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous, but they can be pseudonymous, and unlike banks and other more legitimate financial institutions, not all crypto wallet sites adhere to “know your customer” laws. So, the transaction can be traced, but connecting the transaction to a real person can be difficult. It can be impossible as long as the criminal keeps the loot in Bitcoin, but converting it to fiat currency creates a risk. There’s no legitimate way to convert crypto to fiat currency without following KYC regulations, but crypto money laundering exists, with the biggest operations in China.
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