Link round-up for 10 January 2026

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

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Exercise your cat.

Some people are not good at cooking.

The three wise men meet the modern world.

These cats are drama queens.

Not everyone does well at the gym.

Don't be rude to the bus driver.

Have some lighthearted advice.

Every house needs a cat tube.

View the hideous fate of a rubber duck.

Alligators argue about fishing, and things escalate.

These men get very unhappy when their sports teams lose.

Is it wise to cultivate loyalty, or is rule by raw power enough?  (I can see why this guy wanted absolute power -- to stop people from laughing at his hat.)

This is a large wave.

Check out the creepy photography of Karen Jerzyk.

The Belleville neighborhood of Paris displays a wide range of street art.

Airships in the old days were flimsy, dangerous, and must have been scary as hell to board (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

How can we create warning symbols that will still be understood thousands of years from now?  It may be impossible.

GLP-1 drugs do work for weight loss, but then it can be dangerous to stop taking them.

A treatment under study at Stanford restores damaged knee cartilage and prevents osteoarthritis from developing, based on tests in mice.

Congress has ridden to NASA's rescue, saving its budget from the cuts Trump's flunkies would have imposed.  So, credit where credit is due, they did their job well in this case.

The current flu season looks to be the worst in thirty years, with at least five thousand Americans dead of the disease so far.

Google search's "AI" summaries get basic medical information wrong, in ways that could endanger people who believe them rather than relying on real medical sites.

Modern cars collect staggering amounts of information, some even monitoring conversations and facial expressions of people inside the car.

Here are some tips on spotting "AI" fakery.

Here's a listing of various kinds of sites to avoid and sites to use, based on their "AI" policies.

If you post a picture of yourself on Twitter, here's what will happen (applies mostly to women).  Just yesterday Twitter implemented its idea of a "solution" -- limit this capability to paying users only -- and it doesn't work anyway.

If you use Gmail, it's about to start shitting up your in-box with "AI".  I recommend Proton Mail as an alternative.

Chatbots are susceptible to "prompt injection" attacks to steal sensitive data, and the nature of the technology makes the problem practically impossible to fix.

Here's some of the shittiest new "AI" gadgetry.

This New York supermarket is collecting biometric data on every person who enters.

Google TV wants you to use "AI" to generate fake videos from your own photos.

How much do demons know?  As you read this, remember that there are millions of people in the US who take this kind of stuff completely seriously -- and they vote.

Ignorant people are easier to fool.

This is a lame attempt at honor among thieves.

Ford is going to start putting "AI" in its cars.  Just another step in the trend of loading up cars with endless electronic crap nobody asked for, to justify insane prices.  Read the comments too.

Enshittification is real.

People worldwide are starting to turn away from the fake world of social media, chatbots, video games, and chronic online-ness.  There seems to be a hunger for reality and authenticity.

A citizens group in Washington state has turned in almost half a million signatures for a ballot initiative to keep boys out of girls' sports in the state.

Microsoft's arrogant fucktard CEO begs us to stop calling slop slop.

Even for rich people, a healthy society is pleasanter.

"What's the best place to meet a man in 2026?"

This journalist debunked a fake exposé on food delivery services which has been circulating widely on Reddit and Tumblr.  The supporting evidence seemed convincing, but had been faked with "AI".

Rural Trump voters are noticing that he hasn't gotten grocery prices down.

Alaska is about to deploy an "AI" system to "help" people use the court system, even though testing shows it gets even the simplest questions hopelessly wrong.

There's one simple action foreign governments could take to lower prices for their consumers and ruin US tech CEOs -- especially Elon Musk.  What's not to like?

Venezuela claims the US attack targeted a scientific research institute and a medical warehouse -- acts of barbarism, if true.

Reminder:  The Epstein files include a vast amount of video footage which could reveal and confirm the identities of many of his child-abusing clients.  We're now almost a month past Congress's deadline for releasing all the files and not a single client has yet been publicly unmasked.  Release the damn information, all of it -- with proper provision to protect the victims, but it needs to come out.

2025 was the year giant corporations went all out on forcing "AI" into every possible gadget.  No surprise that it was also the year when the mass backlash against "AI" really got going.  The article gamely tries to put a positive spin on public rejection, but the best it can do is speculate that "people don't yet know what they want out of AI", while all the actual cases it cites show that people just don't want "AI".  Read the comments on the article too.

Blogger Annie makes the case that the Venezuela intervention especially demands public pressure on Congress to rein Trump in.  I have not written about this issue since I have no special knowledge of Latin America (if it were happening in the Middle East I'd have plenty to say about it), but I'm not sure this is really the hill to die on, given the generally positive response of the Venezuelan diaspora to Maduro's removal.  If Trump were to try to carry out his threat to have the US "run" Venezuela, that would be a different matter.  But go see what Annie has to say about it.

Yann LeCun knows that large language models are not a path to true artificial intelligence.  But his own approach won't work either.

This guy is fully entitled to masturbate in front of your daughter.  The video can be seen here and is completely unambiguous.

We don't need a five-day work week or an eight-hour work day.  We haven't needed them for eighty years.

To let the Republicans win every election for ever and ever, all the left needs to do is claim that this is acceptable.

Wyoming's supreme court has struck down the state's forced-birth laws.

Politicians are noticing that the voters hate "AI".  Keep up the pressure.

What's the latest on the Trump phone?

Several resistance groups are calling for nationwide protests this weekend in response to the Renee Good murder.  Here's a retired police sergeant's assessment of the shooting.

To win elections, there's one word Democratic candidates should avoid using.

A California legislator is introducing a bill to ban "AI" toys for kids for four years.

The MSM use the spin preferred by their billionaire owners.

A man is suing Tesla, alleging that its so-called driving-assistance technology killed half his family.

Trans thugs have now started threatening powerful men, not just powerless women.

The majority of US venture capital is now invested in the "AI" bubble, piling up vast amounts of imaginary assets which will vanish when the bubble pops.

California has enacted a tough data privacy law.  Let's hope other states follow suit.

Trump's Department of Veterans' Affairs will no longer provide abortions or abortion counseling even in cases of rape or the other usual exceptions.

"AI" companies are pushing their failed, dangerous technology on our school system.

Two non-Jewish feminists explain the need to fight against anti-Semitism.

What is Greta Thunberg doing?

It's dangerous to confront a perverted freak.

With Tesla's car sales going down the tubes, Elon Musk looks to humanoid robots as the future of the company.  Unfortunately they're even crappier than the cars.

Events in Venezuela remind us of an important fact about how reality works.

The fatuous Christian "Ark Encounter" theme park may have created a measles super-spreader event.  Meanwhile, the measles outbreak in low-vaccination areas of South Carolina continues to expand, with a hundred new cases identified in just three days.

The ACLU is trying to get even more male criminals moved to women's prisons where they can terrorize the women inmates.

Mark Kelly refuses to be intimidated by Hegseth.

The US justice system coddles violent criminals and abjectly fails to protect innocent people.

The trajectory of the Trump administration does not resemble the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany at all (found via Red State Blues).

The National Weather Service hasn't been able to hire back all the employees DOGE got rid of, so it's started using "AI" to fill in the gaps, with predictable results.

Oligarch Watch blog looks back on the activities of super-rich assholes in 2025.

If Trump attacks Greenland, the EU and UK have the power to wreck the US economy in retaliation by dumping their huge holdings of US Treasury bonds.  (The post cites this option in the context of Ukraine, but a frontal attack on Greenland would be an even greater direct threat to Europe.)  I hope that somebody can explain this to Trump so he will actually understand the potential consequences.

Globally, investors are in rare full agreement on the biggest threat to the world economy in 2026.

The Scottish government is determined to continue putting male criminals in women's prisons, even though doing so is now unconstitutional in the UK.

Woketardia has now reached the point of defending female genital mutilation.

The UK's present leadership seems utterly incapable of dealing with the current threats facing the country.  But it's pressing ahead with plans for spying on law-abiding citizens via digital ID.

December saw a record number of Ukrainian attacks on Russia's oil infrastructure.

Russian-built air defenses in Venezuela completely failed during the US attack.

Faced with an increasingly belligerent China, Japan is rapidly building up its military -- and, yes, the nuclear option is starting to enter serious discussion.

Here's a good discussion on the history of Somaliland and why Israel recently recognized it.

These are the top five African countries by quality of life.  South Africa, for all its deepening problems, ranks first, while three of the other four are Arab countries on the Mediterranean coast.

More links at Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and my best posts of 2025.

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Found via Morning Coffee:


I set this one to start at 3:55 because it's the part from there to the end that is really important: