Link round-up for 21 February 2026

Various interesting stuff I ran across on the net over the last week.

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Oh no, the giraffe has escaped!

Apparently Batman is an idiot.

Delivery robots are on the job.

Pay attention to the warning signs.

These guys attached a skateboard to a wire and left it out to tempt thieves.

Whatever your name is, it probably means something in some other language somewhere.

Anton LaVey was wrong -- sometimes stupidity is painful.

The patient is prepped for the exam..... oops.

He really wants to beat up this guy.

The gym can be a dangerous place.

They decided to try a new local restaurant.

Huge collection of colorful marbles here.

See the subtle hues of clouds (click pictures to enlarge).

What is the sound of hot water hitting ice?

Eighty minus eighty equals zero.

This is Adrastea, one of Jupiter's smallest moons.

Cognitive brain training can help stave off the risk of dementia for as much as two decades.

How did ancient peoples build such amazing things?  Lots of ways, none of them involving aliens.

Rising young US scientists are going to work in Europe or other areas overseas, driven out of US institutes by Trump's constant disruptions and funding cuts.  And fewer foreign scientists are coming here to study and work.  Trump is literally blowing the country's brains out.

Get more exercise and you won't be so prone to freaking out over the news.

There's nothing there.

Are you familiar with the sidewalk rule?

The government is stepping up spying on travel by Social Security recipients.  I wasn't aware that benefits can be cut off if you leave the country for a long enough time.  Congress needs to fix that.

Beware of quacks.  They can really hurt you.

"AI"-generated passwords are far less random, and far easier to crack, than they appear.

TikTok has a new feature which reveals your location to others and apparently cannot be turned off.

Learn what "AI;DR" means -- you're going to be seeing it a lot.

Do not allow any "smart" anything in your home.

How much is your car spying on you?  Check this out.

Even the best machine translation gets these kinds of details wrong.

Semantic ablation is why using "AI" to edit your writing makes it bland and boring.

"Smart" glasses are empowering perverts to harass women.

Remember NFTs?  They're still around and still junk.

Anything that "AI" can do, probably doesn't need doing at all.

Here's some advice from Carl Sagan about distinguishing reality from nonsense.

If you're dating somebody who uses a chatbot, get out now.  No matter how normal the person seems now, he or she is at risk of becoming dangerously deranged.  Using a chatbot should be seen as equivalent to using meth or crack.

The Ring "dog finder" ad was the worst backfire in Super Bowl history.

I wonder how much this kind of mask costs.  They'd certainly be effective at defeating facial recognition systems.

Take a dive into the stygian depths of self-indulgent, delusional narcissism.

This meeting has something missing.

"Not even the glass shattered" -- but the driver did.

For a long time, the US remained more religious than most other developed countries -- but since 2015 religion has been declining faster here than almost anywhere else.

Yet another supposedly impressive "AI" demonstration turns out to have been faked.

The Epstein files are the tip of a vast iceberg of evil at the core of our political and financial "elite".

Microslop is pushing a massive new further shittyization of our whole relationship with computers -- we will rent everything instead of owning it, and keep programs and files on "the cloud" (which just means computers owned and controlled by some mega-corporation, not by us) rather than on our own devices.  As the article says, Linux is your best option now.

Detailed surveys show how US voters are turning against trans ideology over time.  It's not hurting Democrats much right now because voters are so turned off of the Republicans due to other issues, but it's going to be a negative for the left so long as the left insists on supporting it.

Interesting discussion here of the "friend-enemy" trap which underlies much of the political polarization in the US (found via SilverAppleQueen).  Some of it's a bit gobbledygooky, but there's some valuable material here, especially in parts 2 and 8 with examples of rhetoric to watch out for, and part 6 on the damage polarization does.

Everybody claims to believe the "AI" hype, but nobody is actually behaving the way they would if they believed it.

Never forget or forgive the people who cheered for lies.

Measured by crashes per miles driven, Tesla robotaxis crash four times as often as human drivers.  Waymos crash more than twice as often as human drivers.

Americans' trust in clergy has plummeted over the last quarter-century and is now at an all-time low.

Two Democratic senators are leading a push to ban surveillance pricing -- the practice of adjusting prices in grocery stores based on information gained from spying on customers.  This practice has provoked a serious backlash every time a company has been caught doing it.

Americans in general don't attach as much importance to race as political rhetoric would suggest.

Companies that have adopted "AI" are starting to demand actual results.

Delivery robots are making the streets dangerous for wheelchair users.

Here's one fundamental difference between gay rights and "trans rights".

Top-level people are leaving xAI because working for Elon Musk is a pain in the ass.

No big surprise:  Epstein believed in "overpopulation" and hoped that global warming would kill off some of the people he viewed as surplus.  Steven Pinker, who has a good track record of seeing through bullshit, wasn't fooled by Epstein.

The US public's supportive response to the Minneapolis resistance contrasts dramatically with the response to the anti-Vietnam-war protests, which met with little sympathy from most Americans at the time.  Modern communications technology accounts for much of the difference.

Must-read of the week:  What is an MAP?  Unfortunately you need to know.  Read the entire thing, and don't miss Arisu3x3's charming "flag" observation.  Learn the full nature of what's festering in the fetid depths of society.

Apple is the one tech company that hasn't been caught up in the "AI" hype, and investors are starting to notice.

"When the government controls women's bodies, it's not "values" -- it's big government overreach."

The resistance to data centers is almost entirely a grassroots movement; local officials and politicians are mostly bought off by the billionaire-owned giant corporations that build the centers.  One 86-year-old farmer in Pennsylvania has become a local hero by refusing to sell his land to be used for a data center.

The Secular Coalition for America is fighting to uphold church-state separation.

There will be an investigation of Epstein's New Mexico ranch -- and it's being run by the state, not Trump's corrupted feds, so we can hope it will be a real investigation and not another cover-up.

American values still have much to offer the world -- and never forget that those values are solidly British in origin.

Hey Trump supporters, eventually ICE will come after you, too.  It was never really about going after illegals.

Finally doing something good -- the US government is planning to build a system to help Europeans circumvent censorship imposed by their governments.

In many foreign countries (unlike here), the powerful are being held accountable for their crimes.  Here's a detailed discussion of how Brazil stopped Bolsonaro's authoritarian ambitions.  I would observe that, although Brazil's American-style separate branches of government actually did their checks-and-balances job better than the US versions have, the level of mass popular resistance in the US has been far greater.

The UN claims it's about to collapse.  Good riddance.

An underfunded health system is bad enough, but actual laws against providing medical treatment?

Freedom of expression in the UK is increasingly under threat.

British police told defamatory lies about Jews to create a pretext for banning Jewish fans from a soccer game in Birmingham.

Jihadists in Manchester UK have been convicted of plotting what would have been one of the worst terrorist attacks in history.

This Australian author will likely go to prison, not for committing a crime, not even for imagining someone else committing a crime, but for imagining someone else imagining a crime.

The European Union parliament is disabling the "AI" features on all its devices because it can't control the way those features share data.

A child rapist in Norway is scheming to go to a women's prison, and he may get away with it.

Poland's president is now openly calling for the country to have its own nuclear arsenal.  Europe in general is considering a range of options for enhancing its nuclear deterrence, while France continues to guard its independence.

Europe and east Asia, two of the world's big three economic regions (North America being the other), are pursuing closer economic ties, cutting out Trump's unpredictable and tariff-addled US.

Zelensky has awarded a medal to Olympic racer Vladyslav Heraskevych, who was disqualified by the IOC for wearing a helmet honoring athletes killed by Russia.

Ten Ukrainian drone operators out-performed sixteen thousand NATO troops in a simulated battle.  Ukraine's experience in drone warfare is making it a formidable power, one the West should learn from.

Ukraine has destroyed half of Russia's vital Pantsir air-defense systems.  Here is video of some of the hits (fullscreen it to hide the irritating gif some idiot posted at the bottom of the screen).

Oops.

More links at Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a bluntly honest video on Islam, and some guidelines I've found useful for dealing with a stressful world.

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Time has a way of sifting out what is important and what is not.  Most people today who have any education know of Galileo and Newton and have at least some idea of their achievements.  No one except specialist historians remembers the name of the pope who persecuted Galileo, or of the king of England in Newton's time.  Five hundred years from now, it's people like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins who will be remembered from our time.  Trump and Putin and Xi will be forgotten.

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This is what happens when shit-for-brains politicians and ideologists are given authority over science.

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