Link round-up for 28 February 2026

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

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With cats, location is everything.

This home-made elevator still needs some work.

It's possible to make a space movie without a big budget.

Cats assert themselves.

Here is some bad driving.

When approaching something that might be dangerous, do a test to see if it is safe.

This car has appeal.

Here are some observations from the internet.

They're staying alive, Star Wars style.

Yikes, it's a Sontaran invading Earth!  Oops, never mind.

This café in Ontario looks like a perfect Halloween venue.

What an asshole.  Notice he got it in the face himself, though.

Not sure where this beach is, but it's an impressive scene.

The ocean is a terrifying place.

The complexity of the human brain is still a daunting challenge to science.  Eventually we will fully understand it, but it's certainly the biggest job science has ever taken on.

Stanford researchers have developed a "universal vaccine" which will protect against covid, flu, colds, and many other respiratory infections.  It works on mice but hasn't been tested on humans yet.

Evidence is growing that the shingles vaccine reduces the risk of dementia and may even slow down aging.

There is great value in the blood of pediatricians.

Don't fall for the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.

Learn about Josephine Baker, a most unusual spy (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

A couple of privacy-defense extensions to consider:  AdNauseam not only blocks ads but also generates fake clicks to mess up the advertisers' data, while TrackMeNot does random fake search-engine searches to obscure your real search history.

The Cybertruck is a death trap (found via Earth-Bound Misfit).

These frozen chicken products are being recalled due to glass contamination.

Having a wishlist on Amazon enables a stalker to discover your address.

Some tips here on how to respond to the spreading measles outbreak in the US.

This is the kind of thing that can happen if you have "smart" appliances in your home.

Here's a free program which will alert you if some scumbag is using "smart glasses" near you.

As promised, Firefox has rolled out its "kill switch" to disable "AI" browser features.  Here's how to use it.

Discord is beginning to back down from its intrusive, privacy-threatening "age verification" plan after a huge user backlash.  Keep up the pressure.

In a data breach at Substack in October, hackers stole personal data on seven hundred thousand users.  Substack didn't discover the breach until February.

Another data breach has put the healthcare and other data of at least twenty-five million Americans at risk.

Those tanker trucks you see on the freeway can be dangerous.

This is stupidmaxxing.

They kept claiming gender ideology is science.  It's actually more like religion.

Here's another example of the mess "AI" makes in workplaces that adopt it.

This person exists.

The political process is being sabotaged by barrages of fake "AI"-generated e-mails which swamp actual feedback from voters.

Yes, they are coming for your children.

A sharp eye for clues led to the rescue of an abused child.

"Women must not be allowed to meet without male supervision."

You can't help homeless people by destroying what little property they have.

Here is a picture of Donald Trump.

Less nuclear power means more global warming.

Denver has directed its police to protect peaceful citizens from ICE.

OpenAI now recognizes that its plan to spend almost one and a half trillion dollars it doesn't have was too ambitious.  Instead, it will just spend six hundred billion it doesn't have.

"The modern state may treat self-description as an act of courage that we must not doubt.  But the psychology of public violence has not changed because we've gone weak at the knees for zee/zi/zir."

California's governor Newsom is trying to drag work-from-home state employees back to the office just like a common evil CEO.  A public employees' union is fighting back.

A bungling "AI" agent has caused another service outage at AWS.  Amazon insists on blaming human error, which is technically true -- the actual responsibility lies with whatever idiot human gave control of an important system to a tool known to be hopelessly error-prone.

People like this are perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.

The British are going all out to investigate the Epstein scandal, even as our own useless DoJ tries to cover it up.

The governor of my state says that data center growth here is "not sustainable", but is expanding tax breaks that encourage it, while mumbling about maybe doing something next year and needing more study.  Any real action to stop this shit is going to depend on grassroots resistance, just like elsewhere in the country.

Here is what it's like living four hundred yards from a data center (found via Miss Cellania).

The police in a Kansas town spied on and investigated a man who wrote an op-ed they didn't like.

Two Tennessee legislators are pushing a bill to impose the death penalty on women who have abortions.

As "AI" metastasizes through healthcare, reports proliferate of a growing wave of errors and patient injuries.  Regulatory systems that were supposed to prevent such horrors were largely crippled by DOGE layoffs in 2025.

We need to know what, or rather who, is on these videotapes, and what they're shown doing.

There's one group that commits a vastly disproportionate share of gun violence relative to its share of the population.

Greedy, lying, arrogant billionaire tech CEOs are having a big sad because everybody hates "AI".

"If you want use a fake name.  Bring your girls."  It turns out that arch-quack Deepak Chopra was pretty cozy with Epstein.  Here are several billionaires who were also suspiciously chummy with Epstein.

RFK Jr doesn't like vaccines, but he's cool with toxic pesticides in your food.  Some of Trump's voters are not happy.

The Trumpazoids claimed that "AI" contributed half of US GDP growth.  It actually contributes..... nothing.

Grey, soulless data center developers encounter people who know there's more to life than money.

There were plenty of early warning signs about this guy.

Top Democratic politicians (and some Republicans) are starting to pay heed to the massive public backlash against "AI".

Efforts to prosecute anti-ICE protesters keep failing because the protesters didn't do the things they were accused of.

Cities across the country are turning against mass surveillance, with at least thirty cities canceling Flock contracts over the last year.  In many places, freedom-loving citizens are taking matters into their own hands.  Get this through your heads, politicians, people don't want to be watched and that will never change.

In a flagrant attack on the Second Amendment, some legislator in California has proposed a law banning the sale of any 3D printer that doesn't have software installed to prevent it from printing gun parts.  This seems unlikely to work, for technical reasons (legislators are notoriously ignorant of computer technology), but imposing intrusive rules on every 3D printer in the whole state is still massive government overreach.

The Pentagon is now urgently trying to develop defenses for US military infrastructure against drone attacks.  Evidently they're paying attention to the lessons of the Ukraine war.

Bernie Sanders is campaigning for California's billionaire tax initiative, which is still opposed by the parasite class's puppet governor Newsom.

Hegseth's effort to pressure Anthropic into helping develop government surveillance capabilities is now turning even the "AI"tardosphere against the megatrumpazoids.

Where the government is allowed to ban "hate speech", whatever opinions the government doesn't like will be classified as "hate speech".

Some fantasy stories are not harmless.

In Australia, lesbians still have to fight for the basic right to hold women-only meetings.

You may have heard of Quentin Deranque, the French student activist who was beaten to death by antifa thugs a couple of weeks ago.  It turns out he was killed trying to defend Collectif Némésis, a feminist resistance group attacked by the brain-dead left because it refuses to shut up about the problem of Muslim sexual violence.

France is learning from Ukraine's experience, working to adapt to the drone warfare of the future.

A new alliance is emerging between Israel and India, two front-line democracies facing a common jihadist threat.

The Iranian theocracy encourages people to step on US and Israeli flags, but most Iranians refuse to do so.  Anti-regime protests have returned to Iran's universities, although the scale of resistance is nothing like what was seen in January.

US imports from China have fallen dramatically, now comprising only 9% of our total imports.  As of December, we import more from Taiwan than from China.

Must-read of the week:  On 3 December 2024, South Korea's president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, ordered military censorship of the mass media, and took other steps to impose an authoritarian regime.  Within hours, amid massive street protests, South Korea's legislature smacked him down.  Within a month, he was impeached and arrested.  Now he's been sentenced to life in prison.  The full story is an inspiring reminder of what a vigorous democracy looks like.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  a parody video Brokeback of the Dead, Jonathan Pie on the Epstein scandal and British royalty, an image round-up, and who I am, part 2 -- ancestry and culture.

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My personal detox achievement this week:  I didn't read anything about the State of the Union address.  Not a single word.

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