Link round-up for 14 February 2026

Various interesting stuff I ran across on the net over the last week. Posting this one a bit early due to computer issues.

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The Venus flytrap catches another victim.

There's no denying this is a man with a hot ass.

You know what this is.

How cute, the neighbor brought her kid over to play on your swing.

Best toy boat ever.

These birds chose poorly.

A blogger rounds up a few local oddities (note:  this blogger does not want political comments).

This is an ice snow snake (冰雪贪吃蛇), a popular winter activity in northeastern China.  Each person is holding the legs of the person behind, but it comes apart a bit over time.

Read this tale of pwning an asshole.

The history of cats is one of fruitful cooperation with humans, except for that nastiness from the pope.

Researchers in Spain have eliminated pancreatic cancer tumors in mice.

Moderna has developed an mRNA flu vaccine, but the FDA won't review it for approval because an ignorant Trumpazoid quack overruled real scientists.  The vaccine is already under review in the EU, Canada, and Australia, where such decisions are made by qualified people rather than by random morons.

This Chinese robot looks remarkable.....

.....but given the history of faked "demonstrations" of Optimus robots at Tesla (actually being remote-controlled by concealed human operators), and China's own track record of tech fakery, I'm suspicious.  Other recent demonstrations of Chinese robotics have been much less impressive.

Children should not be subject to the totalitarian nightmare of routine surveillance.

Forvo is a handy site when you're not sure how to pronounce a word.  Type in any word and it will give you a recording of the pronunciation.  US and British accents are available, and it also works for some foreign languages.

Don't let "AI" "organize" your computer, and FFS keep back-ups of all your stuff on some kind of physical medium like a flash drive or external hard drive that you have in your physical possession.

OpenAI supports Trump and ICE, and if you use ChatGPT, you're supporting them too.

Discord (whatever the hell that is) is threatening to impose age verification on all users next month.  Hackers have already stolen government ID information on seventy thousand Discord users in countries where verification has already been imposed.  There appears to be a rising backlash.

That experiment I linked to a while back, where "AI" was allowed to manage a vending machine, produced results even more ludicrous than originally reported.

TikTok refuses to deny that it's giving user data to ICE.

Those weren't relationships, you idiots.  There is no entity there to have a relationship with.

It's an "AI" success story!  (Do read this, it's great.)

".....starting to suspect that tech bros actually just don't know what reading is....."

After years of obsessing about colonizing Mars, Elon Musk has suddenly pivoted to wanting to build a city on the Moon instead.  I suspect he's starting to lower expectations as it dawns on him that none of this shit is ever going to happen.  Next he'll downshift to talking about a base in Antarctica, then about a Tesla dealership in Alaska, and finally a single Optimus robot in a moderately-cold parking lot somewhere.

Congressman Thomas Massie's relentless fight to get the Epstein files released has infuriated Trump, who is attacking him every way he can, including a primary challenge.

A hiding place that was part of the slavery-era Underground Railroad has been discovered in Manhattan.

Microsoft's Copilot "AI" is turkeying out -- people just aren't using it.

What an evil fascist.

These guys are so consistently wrong -- why should we expect them ever to be right?

Grassroots resistance stopped (for now) a data center in southern California.  All across the country, the anti-data-center movement is spreading and growing in strength.

Elon Musk is just babbling randomly now, sounding like cutting-room-floor bits from some crap science fiction movie written by a hack.

Republicans are pushing a flagrant attack on voting rights that would disenfranchise millions of people.  It's already passed the House, but there's a good chance to stop it in the Senate.  One Republican senator has already come out against it.

Filthy, disgusting perverts are using "AI" to "un-blur" the redacted faces of girls in photos from the Epstein files.  It's unlikely that the faces the "AI" generates will resemble the real faces of the girls, but this shows well what kind of people we're talking about here.

Some of the Washington Post employees Jeff Bezos just fired were foreign correspondents who were abruptly abandoned in foreign countries and war zones, and are now struggling to get home.

Waaah, waaah, I want my blanket!

Here's a detailed dissection of a recent case of "AI" hype.

Nope, not offended at all.

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

Great numbers of Americans now find the basics of a decent life unaffordable.  The fact that 44% actually consider having a family unaffordable is a disaster.  No society where that is the case can survive in the long run.

Is there anything wrong with stealing from a thief?

Trump is using the military to try to prop up the coal industry.

All this means is going back to normal.

43% of Americans want ICE to be reformed, with a further 29% wanting it abolished completely.  That's much higher than the 19% who favored abolition in another survey two weeks ago.

Tech bros are spending big to support pro-"AI" candidates.  Some Democrats, at least, aren't taking their money.

Everybody knows about Epstein's island, but his ranch in New Mexico needs to be investigated too.

"The lawsuits are just starting.  Soon, there will be many."

The MRFF reports that some military commanders are pressuring subordinates to watch the Melania movie.

"AI" is now being added to surgical tools, causing serious injuries to patients, according to recent lawsuits.

In Minneapolis, the resistance continues.  It shows that virtue is common and depravity is rare.

Trump's efforts to abuse his authority to pursue his petty personal vendettas are mostly failing.  Even among Republicans, resistance is increasing.

The Department of Transportation is going to start using "AI" to write regulations.  Get ready for everything to be buggered up.

Miscarriage can be a nightmare -- then ignorant forced-birthers pile on further torments.

The South Carolina measles epidemic is waking up some formerly vaccine-skeptical parents.

In Oklahoma, it's yet another fight over using taxpayer money for religious indoctrination.

Genes don't lie.

Life at an "AI"-infested workplace sounds hellish.

The battle of Minneapolis illustrates how the decentralization of power protects freedom.

Ossoff gets down to the real issues.

That creepy, dystopian "dog-finding" ad during the Super Bowl has provoked such a backlash that the Ring-Flock deal has been canceled.

Almost a thousand Google employees have signed a letter urging the company to cut its ties with ICE.

The Senate is structurally hostile territory for Democrats.  The post suggests things that could be done about this -- statehood for DC and Puerto Rico seems like the most plausible option.  Turning some red states into swing states might also be possible, but that would require changes to the party's ideology (notably on guns) that the activist fringe would fight tooth and nail against.

Trump's tariffs cost the average US household a thousand dollars in 2025, and it's projected to be even more this year.

A forced-birther rally in Washington DC became a measles super-spreader event.  Not too surprising since many of the people who would go to a thing like that are probably also anti-vaxers.

The cryptocurrency crash means investors are betting Trump will fail.

There's growing global support for higher taxes on the billionaire parasite class.

The IOC has utterly betrayed honor and decency.  Heraskevych is the only one who comes away from this with his honor intact.

The Tumbler Ridge mass murderer was not a woman, but a man pretending to be a woman.  Reality-based people are calling out the flagrant lies of the media.

Thank goodness that the land of my ancestors is not in the EU any more -- women in the EU nations are about to lose big on personal safety.

In a civilized country, abuse of women can never be justified on religious grounds.

"When a government treats children as test subjects, it forfeits its moral authority."

Men's fantasies are more important than women's safety.

Even after backing down on Greenland, Trump is still pointlessly antagonizing Europe.  There will be no "return to normal" in our relations with Europe after Trump is gone.

Ten European countries have committed to installing a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind energy.

Vandals have smashed up a Jewish cemetery in Barcelona, part of a recent spate of anti-Jewish incidents there.

Ukraine is beating Russia by focusing on logistics.

Ukrainian drones hit this Russian missile component factory, starting a spectacular fire.

In the wake of the huge massacre of protesters in Iran, several leaders are criticizing the regime and calling for reforms.

The head of one of Dubai's most important companies has now stepped down after his links with Epstein were revealed.

The democratic nation of Taiwan will soon deploy HIMARS and ATACMS missiles on islands within six miles of the Chinese coast, broadening its retaliatory capabilities in case the Beijing gangster-regime attacks.

More links at Red State Blues, Angry Bear, WAHF, and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  two videos on healthy eating, an image round-up, and some personal history that influenced my feelings about politics.

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On Iran, Trump has proven absolutely useless, now apparently trying to negotiate a nuclear deal, which is completely irrelevant to supporting the resistance or bringing down the theocracy.  The Iranian people should never have entertained the illusion that he would keep his word.

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Peter Mandelson is a prominent British diplomat who figures in the Epstein files.  Prime minister Kier Starmer is now in danger of losing his job due to his earlier support for Mandelson's career.