2026 - Wk 09 - Notes and Links
Andy's Newslather
Ten Things in the News This Week
Amazing photos of the Italian Alps.
Woman handed gift card receipt for £63 quadrillion.
Rival mariachi musicians brawl in street.
The latest fashion thing is something your plumber can get behind.
Family brings corpse to the bank to prove the family member was deceased, in order to get estate funds unlocked.
M*****bating in court not ‘inappropriate’ if nobody notices, prosecutors argue.
More people have moved out of America last year than moved into it. UK applications are up, and some US citizens may be eligible for Canadian passports. Maaaaaaaybe you want to see if you’re on the list.
Poop is in full bloom at the Unko Museums for Japan’s cherry blossom season.
A bumper berry harvest has New Zealand’s weird flightless parrot in a rare mood for romance. Yeah. I needed to read this headline twice, also.
Data this Week
The Human Flatus Atlas plans to measure the explosivity of farts.
Cities are safe: London shows how social media distorts fear. Newsletters are good, however.
Donald Trump’s 2024 election win increased the social acceptability of prejudice, study reveals.
Left-handed men’s dominant armpit smells more masculine and intense — but only to fertile women not on the pill.
Narcissists are persuasive speakers but terrible writers, study finds.
Massive US study finds higher cancer death rates near nuclear power plants. This from the No S*** Sherlock Institute.
Science and Tech this Week
No. Not that Hitler. Another Hitler has had to withdraw 35 scientific papers from publication.
Besides running tech operations at the UK’s Post Office, their interim CTO is also removing and replacing the error-ridden software that a public inquiry linked to 13 people taking their own lives and ruining the lives of hundreds of employees. Here’s a documentary about the scandal.
A runaway black hole is barrellig along, churning up everything, and leaving in its wake a heap of newborn stars. Good on ya, Blackie!
Stop buying things connected to the internet: Man accidentally gains control of 7,000 robot vacuums.
EU investing in next-generation vaccines. RFK is investing in apple cider vinegar you can rub on your elbows.
Mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!
Artificial Intelligence
Amazon would rather blame its own engineers than its AI.
The video game industry is caught between cost-cutting and players who derisive to AI generated products after a glitchy games have shipped
Jack Dorsey’s Block is cutting more than 4,000 jobs, or nearly half its workforce, as part of a deliberate shift toward becoming a smaller, ‘intelligence-native’ company built around AI. The headline sounds way better than ‘Incompetent CEO lays off five years of overhiring’. I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that most of their revenue comes from bitcoin and crypto transaction fees and that the bitcoin price has recently halved.
Pope: Guys, write your own sermons.
ISIS teaching recruits how to use AI ‘responsibly’. Yes. Those guys.
AI maker Anthropic decides to drop its pledge of building safe systems. Remember when Google had ‘Don’t be Evil’ as its motto?
Joke of the Day: Meta’s AI safety director gave an AI thingie unfettered access to her e-mail, it deleted everything.
Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases
Anthropic claims to have discovered ‘Industrial scale theft’ of their IP by the Chinese.
Data center builders thought farmers would willingly sell land, learn otherwise.
Why fake AI videos of UK urban decline are taking over social media.
An AI coding bot took down Amazon Web Services.
A hacker exploited Anthropic’s AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information.
As we linked to last week, an AI Agent wrote to badmouth the human who disliked the code it produced. There’s a bit more that’s come to light thanks to the human in question stepping forward.
Inaccurate evidence from an AI tool led to police pursuing a ban on Israeli football fans, MPs find.
Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases -- but security researchers say the real bottleneck is notdiscovery. The project closed its bug bounty program because maintainers could no longer handle the flood of poorly crafted bug reports.
Infographics
The flow of US voters and nonvoters from 2020 to 2024.
How to lie with charts.
Resources
Do you need to group links. Here’s a snazzy free thing to tidy your web links.
Simulate sea-level ruses to figure out where not to buy a beach home.
Viewing Pleasure
This week’s comedy clip: Deleted scenes from the comedy series Green Wing.
And now for some sad news, the Internet’s favourite fox, Finnegan Fox, is no more. However, check out the archives of creature’s antics at the Save a Fox channel.
Vegas doesn’t care if you visit.
Why did we stop making small, affordable pickup trucks?
A year ago, we lost Gene Hackman. Here he is showing what a great actor he was. (Strong language warning.)
Listening Pleasure
Tales of the Unexpected
Unintended consequences and correlations
Whoopsie! A sprawling Chinese influence operation was accidentally revealed by ChatGPT. The operation existed to intimidate Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials.
Quartz helped Japan’s watchmakers nearly drive Switzerland’s watch industry out of business. But the Swiss fought back and saved that industry. Sent in by one of you.
ICE agents keep shooting themselves in training sessions.
A popular brain supplement linked to shorter lifespan in men.
Remember to tell toll bridges, where your plate is registered, that the car you sold is no longer yours.
US: We demand NATO countries spend more on weapons. No! No! Our weapons. You have to buy our weapons. Don’t spend that money on your own manufacturers!
An online beauty expert accidentally revealed to be a completely normal and attractive woman when her digital makeup accidentally switches off.
A man had a brain tumour removed, but the damage turned him into a pedophile.
Crazy Crime
‘…they had a brief “verbal interaction” before the man fled from the room.’
Man sets a fire to solve his spider problem. He now has two problems. He also has a ‘I am a dumbass’ expression in his mugshot.
Techno DJ jailed after selling 60,000 fake plane parts to major airlines.
A Los Angeles man was jailed for serving alcohol to a hawk.
‘They arrested the Poopetrator!’
A South Korean woman, 21, is accused of using ChatGPT to plan double murders.
Naked gent in casino charged with murder. Not exactly naked. He was wearing a hat and shoes.
Republican Texas mayor arrested for trafficking millions in cocaine after campaigning hard on border security.
Woman allegedly punches another woman during a rotisserie chicken dispute
Investigators unravel $12 Million ticket fraud scheme at the Louvre.
Strange Headlines
Mind your manure manners.
The understated headline of the week has a clear winner.
For the man who has everything.
Russia sends migrants into Europe through secret tunnels?
Two widows were married to the same gent at different times. After he died, they wed each other.
Stuff
Linguistic Goof of the Week: He’s not the brightest bulb in the drawer.
Weird Wiki: That strange way that sovereign citizens have of speaking has a name - Quantum Grammar.
Weird EBay: I bet you don’t have one of these.
Tepid Dystopia
A man in trouble calls emergency services, who hang up when he can’t speak. Naturally, they block the dead man’s family from presenting the matter to the public oversight board.
Plantir sues a small Swiss magazine for accurately reporting that the Swiss government decided not to buy it. The Swiss government is completely fine with laundering the money of the world’s richest rapists and Nazis; so it must be pretty bad for them to reject your product.
Canadian oil pipeline company: socialize the risk, privatize the profits.
A Belgian politician was banned from entering the US for having the same opinion as many US citizens.
There is one word explaining the men in the Epstein files. So why is no one saying it?
A Southeastern Louisiana University scientist who discovered alarming levels of toxic chemicals in Lake Maurepas was abruptly removed from her research position last week without explanation. Here’s a follow-up article where she comments. Political corruption is catalogued in this documentary about Louisiana librarians.
In response to Trump’s annexation threat, Canadian shoppers are boycottin US-made groceries. Guess what at least one Canadian grocery chain is doing?
The Brexit campaign kicked off a decade ago. Here’s how 10 promises made to voters hold up today.
Russia excels in propaganda. It may fail at most everything else, but its propaganda machinery is top notch.
Most corrupt systems persist not because they are liked, but because they are perceived as “unavoidable.” This is an expectations equilibrium.
Conflict Studies
Four years ago, Russian news agencies published an article declaring victory in Ukraine’s capital. Yep.They deleted it.
Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years.
Estimating the number of war dead in Russia is complicated, but different sources can be triangulated to avoid the overcounting that’s happening in breathless western headlines.
Switzerland leads Europe in the technology found in Russia’s weapons
‘We don’t have infantry’: Ukraine’s war machine evolves into machine war.
The true costs of Russia’s four-year invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s ‘fortress economy,’ isolated from the world, is an increasingly barren patch.
African countries tell Russia to stop recruiting, and Russia blinks. Yep, mighty Russia.
Ukraine built a $50B defense industry in four years. In the same period, Russian arms exports have halved, and the reputation of those arms with it.
Russia made up to $1.68 billion selling state-owned gold in January as prices hit record highs.
Ukraine’s Flamigo missile in operation may reveal some of its capacities.
People Watching
We’ve heard about incels, but what about femcels?
Not every client becomes a longer-term patient, and not every client is looking to do that kind of work. But to deny the intimacy that we experience as mental health professionals is to miss something essential. There is nothing more lovely than looking at my appointment book for the week and seeing a list of the names of people I’ve come to care for deeply. I had no idea how intensely moved I would be by this work.
Emmylou Harris: ‘It’s a lot harder, isn’t it, to just live a long life?’
The Ancient Greeks had six essential tips for health. Essential is doing a lot of heavy lifting because they didn’t have sanitation, antibiotics or X-Rays.
What your car says about you.
Hey, I don’t remember posting this.
Post of the Week
For the record, I don’t write these.
This happened at my last job, and I still think about it with a specific kind of satisfaction. The company rolled out this initiative, where every Monday before nine a.m., each employee had to complete a short digital wellness form. Five questions, rated one to five, things like “how are you feeling about your workload this week,” “rate your current stress levels,” and “how supported do you feel by your team.”
The stated purpose was to help management identify burnout early and improve culture.
The actual context was that we had just had three people leave in two months, and senior leadership was being asked uncomfortable questions by HR about team morale.
I want to be clear that I filled out every single form with complete honesty. If my stress level was a four, I put four. If I felt unsupported by my team, I put two. If my workload felt unmanageable i said so. Every week, accurately, without softening anything. Most of my colleagues, I later found out, were putting three or four on everything, regardless of how they actually felt, because they didn’t want to flag it on anyone’s radar.
After about six weeks i got a meeting request from my manager and her manager. They were concerned about my wellness scores and wanted to check in. I said I appreciated that and asked what they planned to do with the information I had been providing, since I had been honest each week and hadn’t noticed any changes to the things I had flagged.
There was quite a long pause.
My manager said the forms were more of a temperature check than an action plan. I said I understood and asked what the threshold was for it to become an action plan. Neither of them had an answer. The forms were discontinued about two months later, citing low engagement across the team. I had one hundred percent completion.
Quotes found On-Line
Prison worked! I’m 100 per cent normal now.
What if restaurants made food from customers who were not allowed to leave?
The corporate press spent more time going after Luiji than the men in the Epstein papers.
I have devised a simple rough test to tell our domestic deplorable MAGA specimens from a genuine made in Russia propaganda account. Ask if they agree that Putin is a murderous dictator. The former will reply something like “ Yes, he is, but who cares et cetera, et cetera”. The latter will desperately try to avoid the question or simply disappear.
Garlic gutting devices take two minutes to use and five minutes to clean.
Naming your child with a unique spelling just makes it easier to track your child in a database.
Any job can be remote in spirit.
They shout at you online because in the real world, they’re invisible.
My doctor asked for a favour. He was parched, he said. So we went to the Red Lion next door, and he did my physical while having a pint.
I prefer to use my drinking horn to blow bubbles in the skulls of my enemies.
Why do North Koreans draw the straightest lines? Because they have a supreme ruler
Life is hard enough; just make Pluto a planet again.
A few drinks later, that joke had turned into a plan.
When my wife told me to stop acting like a flamingo, I had to put my foot down.
Looks like the US women’s hockey team has more balls than the men.
Most Americans recognize that Ukraine is fighting for what, until very recently, used to be known as American values.
90 per cent of political discourse in the UK is about bins and how many times a week they’re collected.
Why do people with special needs seem to m*****bate so much?
I remember one time the CEO at a former employment (small company, so saw each other all the time) asked me what’s up. I replied sincerely, and he walked out mid-conversation without a word.
You know what? I’ve had some bad days at work lately, but at least no one has taken me aside to talk to me about farting too much. Thank you.
I love it when Russian trolls pretend to be Trump-supporting red state MAGA Americans and then accidentally unmask themselves by using British English words that no American uses.
I don’t go to my college fraternity reunions. Where did all of these old people come from? Mick Jagger once said something like, “If you’re a celebrity, always stay in the public eye.” He said the public will accept that you’re aging if they see it happen, but they’ll be shocked if they haven’t seen you for a long time.
As someone who is well-versed in both math and ducks, I can say with authority that no self-respecting duck would let itself be moved about in the world, nor go near a loud turbine engine.
Women love to watch curling, just to see a man who scrubs the floor.
The VP Ops has a fake cover on this car’s automatic shift lever to make it look like he’s driving a manual. When I lifted it off at a traffic light, he started screaming at me.
I can’t bear the thought of the person I love turning to dust after death. Would it be legal to freeze the body at home?
Graveyards are full of people who thought they had more time.
An old colleague of mine used to work for Buck Pal about 15 years ago. She was told never be in a room alone with him [Prince Andrew], and when he makes his appearance at the Christmas party, back against the wall, girls. They’ve known who he is for decades.
It’s amazing to think that American conservatism, which claimed to have an intellectual heritage going back to Burke, Hamilton, Hayek and Buckley, would now be a movement whose sole ideology is whatever crazy policy Trump pulls out of his a**.
I could have so much cool stuff if I just had money!
What I am talking about, however, is what passes for mainstream Russian culture - mostly stolen from other cultures and mixed heavily with homicidal depression.
He’s pretty much unrecognizable when he’s not tarted up in his usual Liberace-f***ed-a-hillbilly aesthetic.
Imagine having ‘too many farts’ on your yearly performance review.
There have been several significant Ukrainian advances in Zaporizhzhia and Donbas in the past week, yet corporate media appear to be blind to Ukrainian success. One might be led to believe they are disappointed. After all they have shown huge enthusiasm when reporting minimal Russian advances this winter. In the past two weeks, Ukrainian troops have recovered almost all the ground acquired by Russia in the past six months and yet no one seems to care to report it.
The trouble with having a really good wank is you can’t tell anyone.
You know when you’re at that age when your porn search is for middle-aged women in pyjamas.
In America, if you are convicted of a felony, you lose your voting rights in most states. But, apparently, you can still donate to political campaigns and donate to Super PACs.
The discussion thread has mastitis again. Who’s got the antibiotics?
Could a dwarf hamster run around in someone’s anus?
Vegans fart like locomotives.
Let’s not brag about the men’s hockey team too hard. The USA has a gold medal, but Canada still has a democracy.
A dessert spoon is a medium-sized spoon (6–7 inches) used for eating desserts, featuring an oval bowl that holds about 10ml, whereas a coffee spoon is a tiny spoon (4–5 inches) designed for stirring espresso or demitasse cups. Dessert spoons are roughly 25% larger than a standard teaspoon, while coffee spoons are smaller.
The NYT hasn’t been the NYT that fought all the way to the Supreme Court to expose government wrongdoing in the Pentagon Papers for a very long time now.
I’m thinking about writing a story about someone who beheads people walking while using their phones because they’re oblivious to their surroundings.
Whatever the costs in compromised values or personal dignity, he will never willingly step off the stage.
Adult women get called girls, while 12-year-old girls in the Epstein files get called young women.
Yeah, I’ll be at AWP next week. Alone, Weeping, and Posting.
The AI bros are going down on this ship, and telling everyone to jump on board is odd. They learned from the crypto bros that hyping is something.
These stupid Russian sons-a-bitches could be fighting for freedom back home. A fifth of what has been wasted in Ukraine is all that is needed to overrun the Kremlin and install a democratic government. Hold real elections and re-enter the rules-based society.
I was in daniel about being dyslexic.
Hillary Clinton never met Epstein. Melania was introduced to Trump through Epstein.
Technically, blackmail is more valuable for manipulating the coal markets than humiliating naughty people.
So why is Hillary Clinton and not Melania Trump on the stand right now?
I’d rather be called a pervert than a landlord.
My dog swallowed a bunch of Scrabble tiles, so I took him to the vet—no word yet.
The entire reason I’m a monarchist as a Canadian is that every Canadian knows King Chuck isn’t supposed to do anything. I don’t trust any theoretical replacement to have that same universally recognized irrelevance, especially if it’s an elected position.
Time-sensitive question: Why is grave robbing considered bad?
How many monkeys would it take to become a national security threat?
Management wants us to prove we’re using AI. More realistically, they believe that using AI means “getting more work done faster.” They take that as gospel truth with no qualifiers. So, if you aren’t using AI then clearly you are wasting company time and money, and hence shouldn’t be promoted and maybe should be “transitioned out.” But they are making the obvious mistake of turning a metric into a goal. Employees will game the system. People will “engage with AI” to hit their numbers without using it in a useful way that saves time, especially if they are working on projects which, due to the specifics of the project, AI can’t help with. So, all this will really do is eliminate the honest and talented employees in favor of ones who can’t succeed without AI (due to lack of talent and knowledge), and/or are willing to use it deceptively to advance their positions. Are those the kind of people you want working for you? For big corporations, yes, since those are the kind of people who are most similar to corporate leadership in terms of talent and ethics. Then there are the others who, rather than use AI, find ways to jam it into other people’s workflows, so that those other teams get bogged down in slop, while the teams doing it get credit for expanding the use of AI.
Magnificent Memes
Bon Mots
Funny Photos
