2026 - Wk 07 - Notes and Links
Andy's Newslather
Ten Things in the News This Week
Why do kids eat their boogers?
EU to ban the destruction of unsold clothing.
It’s only February, and we have an early candidate for Mother of the Year!
Putin recreates Russia’s glorious past, like Brezhnev-era grocery problems.
Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams -- leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus -- are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale.
Russian cyborg pigeon drones begin real-world testing phases.
Hair extensions are the latest thing that will kill you.
‘Smart Underwear’ could help unlock secrets of human flatulence.
The head of the American National Institutes of Health is still angry about SARS-CoV-2. Oh, and wants a second scientific revolution. And barred science journalists from major journals from covering his event.
The next big thing in fashion? Mexican wrestling masks.
Data this Week
It’s an odd-numbered week, so coffee is good for you again!
Large US study examines how many times in a lifetime people experience something apparently called passionate love.
Electric cars are improving air quality.
We’re often advised to wait three days after a date before texting—but there’s no evidence to support this.
Poop! It’s Canada’s secret weapon for public health.
Science Marches On! No. Men can’t detect ovulation by smell.
Science and Tech this Week
Sony shipped the last of its BluRay players.
Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome’s attempts to make it harder.
Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments. Here’s the GitHub project.
IBM said it will triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, even as AI appears to be weighing on broader demand for early-career workers.
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month. Put another way, Discord is shutting down. Discord alternatives searches jump 10,000 percent overnight. Even better, Discord’s age verification rollout has ties to Palantir co-founder and panopticon billionaire maniac Peter Thiel.
Artificial Intelligence
RFK Jr’s nutrition chatbot recommends the best foods to insert into your rectum.
As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts.
The software and technology sectors pose one of the all-time great concentration risks to the speculative-grade credit market, according to Deutsche Bank AG analysts. On with the revolution, comrades!
AI chatbots pose a ‘dangerous’ risk when giving medical advice, study suggests.
Open AI has deleted the word ‘safety’ from its mission.
The romance genre is the front line for AI-generated fiction. Then again, maybe not. Some analysis of the claims made in the article suggest the romance author may have overstated her successes.x
AI could trigger a global jobs market collapse by 2027 if left unchecked, former Google ethicist warns. Yes, the company that removed the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto from their principles had an ethicist. Past tense.
About 4 per cent of all public commits on GitHub are now being authored by Anthropic’s Claude Code, a terminal-native AI coding agent that has quickly become the centerpiece of a broader argument that software engineering is being fundamentally reshaped by AI.
Most use the free versions of AI tools. These lag a year behind what paying users have access to. This is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. Those paying for the best tools, and actually using these daily for real work, know what’s coming. Sent in by one of you.
AI firms cry foul when others scrape their content, the way they scraped everyone else’s.
OpenAI Safety VP reportedly fired for sexual discrimination against her male colleague?
A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organizations to label AI-generated material and mandate that humans review any such content before publication.
The executive in charge of the Firefox web browser says some people in-browser AI tools that are genuinely useful, ‘We’ve heard from many who want nothing to do with AI…’
Why one person thought an AI-Generated historical documentary was a good idea.
Zero-click prompt injection can leak data when AI agents meet messaging apps, researchers warn.
The first signs of burnout are coming from those who embrace AI most.
Last week, a user asked their new AI assistant to read an email. The email contained a line of hidden text with an instruction in it.
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and sophisticated copying of their work.
Infographics
Groundwater around the world.
Analysis of Europe’s Housing Stock.
Resources
You’ve heard of link shorteners? This is one with a twist. It tries to make the link seem creepy/sketchy.
Designing a website and stuck for ideas? Here is some inspiration.
There’s an Epstein Documents visualizer.
Someone mapped a few hundred thousand Wikipedia articles to a 3D Earth to better understand military campaigns across history.
The German general staff’s campaign maps for Operation Barbarossa have been made available online at the Library of Congress website.
Viewing Pleasure
This week’s comedy clip: The Lie Detector.
Why Debunking Flat Earth matters.
In order to understand vomiting, we need to talk about the brain…
10 terrible catwalk outfits.
Hard Times Come Again No More, a song to stiffen your spine.
Listening Pleasure
Rick and Evie are coming back: The cast of 1999s’ The Mummy are reuniting. This was announced on Jerry Goldsmith’s birthday earlier this week. Goldsmith did the wonderful music for that film. Interestingly, this score uses many weird scales.
From online porn and crypto chaos to the rise of tech oligarchs, deepfake AI, and the broken promises of the internet, this podcast covers the Robbert Baron era of the Internet that we’re in.
Sometimes, your lasting pain comes from parents who smiled on the outside.
Tales of the Unexpected
Unintended consequences and correlations
Out of the frying pan and into the fire: Fisherman fleeing elephants killed by crocodile in Zambia
Man accused of $100 Million robbery. What do to? Well, how about..
Client’s heart attack prompted prostitution investigation of a spa.
Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, ‘it was all based on a fallacy,’ writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. ‘Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are.’
Canada shares a border with Greenland, which is European, therefore Canada could join the EU…?
Selfies. Not even once.
The Amazon Ring has become a surveillance dragnet. Here’s a parody ad of what’s happened. Following coverage of its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is cancelling the integration.
Crazy Crime
Criminals are stealing cooking oil from Scottish chip shops.
Rule Number One: Don’t break more than one law at a time.
A British woman who was shot dead by her father while visiting his home in Texas had argued with him about US President Donald Trump earlier that day, an inquest has heard.
When asked why, she said, ‘Because he was being a butthole’.
Vacuum cleaner sex pest is back, with a new charge and a great mug shot.
Funeral home owner gets 40 years in prison for abusing corpses. Seems like a lot. I mean, nobody died.
Teenager accused of £130,000 London shoplifting spree.
Leaking secret military plans may impress this woman you met, but not prosecutors.
The guy who did background checks for ICE was arrested for guess what?
A physician who sold stolen PPE during the pandemic is struck off.
A local Republican was questioned by police after an allegation that he waterboarded his daughter arose. Ah, the party of family values.
The mugshot matches the headline.
Strange Headlines
FBI concluded Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t running a sex trafficking ring for powerful men, files show. That aged poorly, didn’t it?
Fire fears, accidents and emu attacks among safety concerns at Cold War bunker.
Beware the wrath of Kuhn!
Australian farmer cleared of the accusation that he, um… did it with a pig.
The most Canadian headline you’ll read all week.
MyPillow founder Mike Lindell spent the majority of campaign funds buying his own book.
There’s an old joke that if a headline asks a question, the answer is ‘no’. In this case, I’ll say ‘because they’re being idiotic’.
Stuff
Linguistic goof of the Week: Henry VIII railing against ‘the poope’
Weird Wiki: The politician who thought he was a bird.
From the A-List Archives: from Wk 36, 2022: A comedy about a religious summer camp: Murder at Camp Jesus.
Tepid Dystopia
Epstein files reveal deeper ties to scientists than previously known.
The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem suppressed a February 2024 report on northern Gaza because it “lacked balance.” These photos from the UN fact finding trip are visual evidence of the conditions.
Because of course they are. The US is wants to test horse dewormer as a cancer cure.
The modern Olympics sell themselves on a simple premise: the whole world, watching the same moment, at the same time. However, the US VP getting boo’d didn’t get heard in the US feed.
The DOJ deleted an 86-page document titled “Investigation into Potential Co-Conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein” from their data dump. Someone saved a copy. Now, you can too!
Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club.
‘I’ve often found they do a more comprehensive search on appeal…but haven’t found a way to get the more comprehensive search on the first pass: Asking the FBI for Freedom of Information requests.
A mounting body of research is making it harder for companies to justify what most of them still do -- push experienced workers out the door just as they’re hitting their professional peak.
Conflict Studies
From Civilian to Cannon Fodder in 10 Days. What Is Russia’s Military Training?
Russian forces struggle to reestablish network connectivity after losing Starlink.
US military aid to Ukraine dropped 99 per cent in 2025, report finds.
For Ukrainian troops, the North Korea problem isn’t soldiers launching assaults. It’s artillery, lawmaker says.
Welcome to Europe’s most dysfunctional defence collaboration programme.
Empty Ukrainian embassy in Moscow fined for not paying US$71,000 electricity bill.
What happens when you elect a banker. Also, Canada’s spearheding a 14-country fund for large defence projects. Guess what country is not in the group?
Russia lost 31,700 troops in the first month of 2026: 9,000 more than it recruited. In related news, Estonian intelligence says Russia is taking ‘drastic measures’ to recruit new soldiers. Furthermore, NATO estimates that Russia had 400,000 casualties in their invasion of Ukraine last year.
Kenya to confront Russia over ‘unacceptable’ use of its nationals in combat.
Russia attacking Odessa with a new version of its Garpiya-A1 Drones. Note that ‘New’ is not always a synonym for better. It can mean ‘cut the weight and cut the cost’, which can cut the reliability.
Twilight Struggle
American prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris’s hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access “millions of computers and devices around the world.”
‘Wake-up call’ for Greece as air force officer accused of spying for China.
An Asian cyber-espionage group has spent the past year breaching computer systems of governments and critical infrastructure organizations in more than 37 countries, according to the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, Inc. The firm declined to identify the hackers’ country of origin, but hinted that it rhymes with Schmina.
“The actual language surrounding the purges do not provide much detail about what exactly is going on internally, whether it really is corruption, political struggles, outright purges, or something else,”
A 19-year-old Ukrainian teen has been convicted of spying for Russia. Perhaps, to quote Shakespeare, she loved not wisely and too well.
Pro-Kremlin social media accounts are using the Epstein documents in propaganda against Ukraine.
People Watching
Zombo.Com has been updated. (For those not in the know…)
Act now! Don’t let this amazing purchase pass you by!
5 David Bowie songs that sound even cooler today
How words used reveal hidden patterns of personality dysfunction.
Who is the most embarrassing person from your country?
A cheese lover addicted to cheddar spends over £60,000 and eats two blocks every single day.
The British Blitz Spirit is partially a myth. That being said, once the Russian Invasion of Ukraine sputters to a halt, this winter may be mythologized in Ukraine as much as 1940 is in the UK.
Post of the Week
For the record, I don’t write these.
I have a Congo African Grey named “Buster.” He is a genius and can learn a phrase in an afternoon. As a joke, I taught him to scream “THE RAPTURE IS HERE! HIDE THE BOOZE!” whenever he hears a doorbell.
My parents are incredibly conservative and take the end-times very seriously. They came over for dinner last night. As soon as they pressed the doorbell, Buster went into a frenzy. He didn’t just say the phrase; he started flapping his wings and screaming it at the top of his lungs like a winged prophet of doom.
My mom dropped her casserole. My dad started praying on the porch. When I opened the door, Buster flew onto my dad’s shoulder and whispered, “They’re coming for you, Gary” (I don’t know where he learned ‘Gary,’ my dad’s name is Robert). My parents left within 10 minutes, convinced I’ve joined an occult group or that my house is a portal to hell.
Quotes found On-Line
When it comes down to it, Dracula’s kind of a jerk.
Havarti is such a bad name for such a good cheese
Where do y’all put your eyeballs at night?
Having kids is wonderful! It’s like a therapist you don’t have to pay for!
They believe that there are no consequences for their actions, and that there shouldn’t be. It’s why Kirk getting shot was so jarring for them--violence is meant to happen to others, not them…
My father taught me to forage mushrooms around here. There are many rules to use to eliminate poisonous types. One of them was to avoid white gills. I stick to anything that grows out of cow patties. They’re either delicious or psychedelic.
God loves me, not you - a**hole!
Men often have to be convinced that what they experienced was trauma.
I don’t understand about 80 per cent of the comments and messages I receive in Japanese. Even if they’re grammatically correct, sometimes they are incredibly abrupt. For example, wouldn’t it be scary if I suddenly messaged you in halting English, ‘There are hot dogs floating in the American sky’?
The USA had traded its power and influence for our security for a long time. They are no longer interested in such a deal and that is fine. Frankly, it is good that this discourse is taking place the way it does now. It would not be great to find out that the US is unreliable and undependable when it really matters. Them warning us ahead of time is good. Now it’s up to us.
I can’t even count all the times I failed math at school.
Having kids is wonderful! It’s like a therapist you don’t have to pay for!
In a touching tribute to his mentor, Morgan McSweeney has resigned in disgrace (bbc.com)
There was a horrific period in cinema during the 1980s and 1990s when Harvey Keitel wouldn’t stop taking his clothes off.
You just know this was the intellectual equivalent of explaining Wi-Fi to a raccoon.
I never stopped loving you. Or, ever started to be honest.
When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead. The pain is felt by others. The same thing happens when you’re stupid.
In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners - Albert Camus
I told my girlfriend she should embrace her mistakes. She gave me a hug.
I had a friend who was the ultimate “low maintenance” guy—always down for whatever, liked all the same obscure bands I did, and agreed with all my specific political takes. It felt like we were totally on the same wavelength. Then one day I walked into a party and saw him with a completely different group of people, and he wasn’t just hanging out with them, he was them. He had a totally different laugh, he was using slang I’d never heard him speak, and he was loudly arguing the exact opposite political point he’d agreed with me on over dinner the night before. I realized in that moment that he didn’t have a personality; he was just a mirror. He was unconsciously terrified of conflict, so he just downloaded the software of whoever he was standing next to. It wasn’t malicious, but it was deeply unsettling to realize the person I thought I knew was basically just an empty room that I had been decorating with my own reflection.
You cannot really argue with the geological record - it is literally written in stone.
After a courtship that might take days and a prolonged pre-mounting ritual, a giraffe’s mating act lasts but a second or two. So, just like me.
My husband was once wondering aloud about how inconvenient it would be to be a werewolf in real life, having to plan your life around something that happens as often as once a month.. and I just…
Talking to Trump is like negotiating with Al Capone during his syphilitic dementia.
It’s interesting how Mother Nature made chewing optional for some creatures.
My folks hate each other and only stay together because they don’t wanna die alone.
Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember (Angus Wilson and William Burroughs nursed my animadversions – and no doubt the animadversions of others – to the grave). Admittedly, there are some critics who enjoy being insulting well into middle age. I have often wondered why this spectacle seems so undignified. Now I know: it’s mutton dressed as lamb - Martin Amis on literary hatchet jobs.
I’ve been thinking of taking up meditation…I mean, it’s better than sitting around doing nothing.
Being a woman sets you up for a +-50yr subscription for sanitary products.
An ego and a superego walk into a bar. The bartender asks for some id.
What if the dinosaurs deserved it?
Are dictators the most miserable people on earth? I never seen Vladimir Putin happy. Kim Jong Un or whatever his name is looks grouch and downright miserable . And Hitler never looked happy and Jospeh Stalin seemed like he was miserable as well.
My ex-husband suggested couples therapy 2 years after we were divorced. He was concerned because I didn’t want to be his friend.
When I win the lottery, I will buy LinkedIn and turn it off.
Musk wants to build a city on the moon. This man can’t even build a family.
A good indication of this guy’s brain power is that he thought that this statement made him look smart. A scary indication of his followers’ brain power is if they think that this statement made him look smart.No gambling sites were harmed in the harvesting of this data.
The HVAC Program at Greendale Community College has chosen your wife to fulfill her destiny as an air conditioner repair person.
I don’t believe he can read for a minute. That and he keeps repeating the word “perspicacity” as if it’s the only long word he knows. The only problem is, he can’t use it in a sentence, just as a standalone word.
Books like Orwell, Arendt, and even Tolkien keep resurfacing not because people want escapism. They want vocabulary.
The was when the Democrats invented gayness under Carter.
Foreign influence does not always arrive with troops or flags. It arrives through money, leverage, lobbying, debt, trade dependence, compromised officials, and information warfare. When decision-makers place foreign interests above the citizens they serve, sovereignty erodes quietly. The nation remains standing, but its will is no longer fully its own.
When people stop telling the truth, stories step in.
The rate of warming has increased significantly, with the past decade (2015-2024) containing the ten warmest years on record. The rate of warming since 1982 is more than three times as fast as the average since 1850. That’s one Hell of a Liberal hoax.
I hate the way lefties are trying to make Bob Dylan political now.
Is it possible that there’s some kind of technology that hasn’t been discovered that will revolutionize the world again? I’d imagine people living before electricity thought that their time was the most advanced tech there could possibly be. Until electricity was discovered, harnessed, and now the world is completely different to what it was before. What if there was some undiscovered phenomenon called glorp, and one day we’ll discover glorp, how to generate it, use it, and one day people will walk around with glorptronic devices in their pockets. And then people will look back on our time and wonder how we lived without glorp.
If Bitcoin goes below like 40k it’ll trigger a market panic and blow a kneecap off the global economy but also it’ll cause the worst guys you know to stop posting about bottle service and wagyu tasting menus in Miami/Dubai and start posting about how much more fulfilling their lives have been since they stopped caring about material things and got right with God.
Now everyone I make friends with gets a thorough googling before we get close.
The confidence of a white woman in the suburbs who moves in the same social circles as the judge.
Kids and husband away, I decided to treat myself to a luxurious bath. Candles. Foam. Wine. Weed. I got so relaxed that I defecated in the tub.
I invented a new winter sport: Find the AirPod in the snow bank.
Every mushroom is edible at least once.
Why do Americans every year try to turn the Super Bowl into a metaphor for the era? It’s a sports match with a break that has some entertainer-du-jour. That’s it. It’s not the moon landing.
I talk to my shoes, because the box says Converse.
Lady Gaga looks like my sleep paralysis demon.
The effects of the Epstein files are spreading like an oil slick across the Western world.
Where’s your Red Line, America? There’s a Putin photo in the White House.
Meanwhile, the narrative that “America destroyed Russia’s economy” became gospel among a certain set of Western intellectuals who couldn’t accept that Russian actors might have agency in their own catastrophes.
Russia is a country that matters in the way a gangster is powerful and matters.
Why is bacon called bacon and cookies called cookies if you cook bacon and bake cookies?
It’s not the fact that they’re corrupt that annoys me. It’s how cheap they were to buy that does it.
History is well populated by traces of civilizations brought low by climate change, possibly including the moment when the entire human population was reduced to perhaps 1000 individuals (i.e., we almost didn’t make it). So it is interesting that there was much rejoicing that almost the entire collection of climate change efforts, such as they were, have been eliminated by the current administration. Strange that -- almost as though MAGA meant ‘make America go away’. Now, I have never been one to think that a move toward electric cars and homes would do much to reverse the climate change needle. But over time, there was the hope that moving away from hard-hit areas and other defensive moves would moderate the impact. But refusing to do anything until the crisis is upon us does nothing but maximize the costs of survival -- sort of what has happened to FEMA. These sorts of weather extremes are already part of reality, even in the US. With the melting of polar ice, permafrost thawing, and signs that the Atlantic current that warms Europe is weakening, unpleasant new realities seem inevitable. Wonder if the species will survive this time?
Magnificent Memes
Bon Mots
Funny Photos
