Odds and Ends — 12 February 2026

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Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, AI, and Debt:

UK central bank taps companies for distributed ledger settlement

Anthropic safety researcher quits, warning ‘world is in peril’

Why the OpenClaw AI agent is a ‘privacy nightmare’

Israelis Arrested Over Alleged Insider Polymarket Trades on IDF Military Secrets

Flash Fiction:

”We’re not getting any younger. We’ve really got be putting more away.”

”You actually think our 401(k) will still be there by the time we need it? That our bankrupt government won’t seize them all?”

”We’ll end up living under a bridge eating goldfish crackers we got out of a dumpster!”

”Meh, there’s worse things to eat than retired goldfish.”

Written for this prompt.

Coronavirus and Public Health:

A Tragedy of Early COVID Has Finally Been Explained

Politics:


Trump's retribution campaign hits a losing streak

President Trump has increasingly tested how far political retribution can stretch into the justice system, but his efforts to prosecute his perceived political opponents during his second term have repeatedly fallen short.

———— Minnesota Under Siege ————

Why Minnesotans Still Haven’t Backed Down From Fighting ICE

It’s freezing. It’s terrifying. And it’s potential deadly. But anti-ICE activists are not giving up.

Walz says Minnesota needs to focus on recovery after ‘damage’ of ICE surge

White House border czar Tom Homan, who is overseeing Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, said the immigration enforcement operation will soon wind down.

I will believe it when I see it.

———— Smile. You’re on Candid Camera. ————

———— Pam Bondi ————

Pam Bondi Hearing Goes Nuclear

Attorney General Pam Bondi and House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) literally screamed at each other during an oversight hearing after Raskin demanded she stop talking over his members.




———— The Epstein Coverup ————

———— El Paso ————

———— Autocracy R Us ————

Congress Showed ICE Leaders Images of ICE Brutality. The Response Was Telling.

No Grand Jurors Voted to Indict 6 Democratic Lawmakers

None of the D.C. grand jurors who heard the Trump administration’s pitch on why they should indict Democratic lawmakers over a video urging members of the military and intelligence communities to uphold their oaths believed the Justice Department had met the low threshold of probable cause, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
It’s exceedingly rare for a federal grand jury to reject prosecutors’ attempts to secure an indictment, since the process is stacked in the government’s favor. Federal grand juries need a minimum of 16 members to have a quorum, and they max out at 23 members. Just 12 grand jurors need to agree that the government had probable cause to indict, a threshold much lower than the unanimous ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard that a petit jury needs to convict.

IRS Improperly Disclosed Immigrant Tax Data

The Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, appearing to breach a legal fire wall intended to protect taxpayer data.

Meet the ‘Cabal’-Hating ‘Special Government Employee’ Involved in the Fulton County FBI Raid

———— Mors Imperii ————

Serendipity:

Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened.

Apocryphal, but still a hoot:

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Badge thanks to arcange@arcange

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Odds and Ends — 12 February 2026 | Ecency