Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign has reportedly once again struck at the heart of Russia’s energy artery, igniting a fire at a key Transneft oil pumping station in the republic of Tatarstan early Monday.

Regional officials confirmed the incident after local media and Telegram channels first reported explosions near the strategic facility, with authorities announcing: “as a result of falling drone debris, a local fire broke out in an industrial zone.”

No casualties resulted from the blasts which took place around 4am at the Kaleykino pumping station. A fire ensued after eyewitnesses reported hearing some seven explosions.

Ukrainian media has cited a source who described, “Tonight, long-range SBU drones caused a ‘bavovna’ (explosion) at the main oil pumping station ‘Kaleykino’ near Almetyevsk in Tatarstan. It receives oil from Western Siberia and the Volga region and mixes it before sending it for export. The station is a key hub for supplying raw materials to the ‘Druzhba’ oil pipeline.”

The Moscow Times also notes: 

Kaleykino serves as a critical receiving and mixing terminal that aggregates crude oil flows from several Russian regions and facilitates the transport of nearly 30% of the country’s crude oil toward major export routes like the Druzhba pipeline.

The Druzhba-1 station at Kaleikino, a critical part of the Druzhba oil pipeline for Hungary and Slovakia for Russian oil, has just been blown up. Now who would stand to gain the most for punishing Hungary and Slovakia? pic.twitter.com/k4lEsmYOlW

— ColonelTowner-Watkins (@ColonelTowner) February 23, 2026

Druzhba has been featured heavily in the news of late, given oil shipments to Hungary and Slovakia via Druzhba were halted after a Jan. 27 airstrike on equipment in western Ukraine.

Ukraine blamed the attack on Moscow, while Hungary is blaming Kiev for deliberately not repairing the pipeline because it doesn’t want it to supply Budapest, or Slovakia, with Russian oil. A political firestorm has ensued ever since.

The controversy has led the Orban government to on Monday block the EU’s proposed €90 billion loan package for Ukraine and also it vetoed the 20th round of anti-Moscow sanctions.

Interesting timing, to say the least…

The Druzhba-1 station at Kaleikino, a rather important part of the Druzhba oil pipeline through which Hungary and Slovakia hope to get their Russian oil, has just been blown to smithereens and most likely won’t be supplying Hungary and Slovakia with oil again anytime soon. pic.twitter.com/7M3aezultz

— Daractenus (@Daractenus) February 23, 2026

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has been very open about its cross-border aims regarding attacks on Russian energy, with a Ukrainian SBU official boasting as follows: 

“The SBU is systematically working to cut down on the extraction and transportation of Russian oil. Our special operations are methodically reducing the filling of the Russian budget with petrodollars, which finance the war against Ukraine. This work will continue to exhaust and gradually bleed the Russian economy.”

At the same time, Hungary and Slovakia’s stances as disrupters of EU policy have been a big ‘win’ for Moscow.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The Metropolitan Police has so far not commented on the viral video of a female police officer defending freedom of speech surrounded by a crowd of angry Muslim men in Whitechapel but it has questions to answer.

The Mail ran the video yesterday.

This is fundamentally a Christian country. We will not tolerate “Muslim areas”.

Credit to this brave police officer. She was defending a Christian’s right to free speech after being told it was a Muslim area. pic.twitter.com/dQChwP3Ecz

— Sarah Pochin MP (@SarahForRuncorn) February 23, 2026

??? “The Risk is they could be assaulted – The fact it’s a very heavily Muslim orientated community”

“There are cameras everywhere and this is already a well patrolled area”

Wow – this is the second half of the viral Police Officer in London – dealing with a crowd of Muslims… pic.twitter.com/sAzjISECWO

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) February 20, 2026

This is the moment a police officer defends a Christian preacher in Whitechapel and is told: “This is a Muslim area.”

The confrontation sees a female Met Police officer being surrounded by males and telling them: “In this country, we have freedom of speech.”

She continued: “I understand that you guys don’t want to hear it, so I would just recommend that you walk away and don’t listen to him. He’s not in your home.”

Questions for the Met include: why is it that this police officer understands English law in a way that the three Met police officers who arrested Christian street preacher, John Sherwood, in Uxbridge in 2021 apparently did not?

In 2022, Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court acquitted Pastor Sherwood of the public order offence with which the Crown Prosecution Service had charged him. The court upheld his freedom “to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority” as set out in Article 10 of the 1998 Human Rights Act.

Christian Today reported on the case at the time: 

On April 23rd 2021 Metropolitan police officers arrested the pastor near Uxbridge tube station.

He had been preaching on Genesis 1 verse 27 and said that the family unit as ordained by God consisted of a father and a mother, not two fathers or two mothers.

Some passers-by complained to the police that he was using homophobic hate speech.

The pastor, then 71, was arrested, held overnight at a police station and in September was charged under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which outlaws “threatening or abusive words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress”.

Is it not the case that if the police officer involved in the Whitechapel confrontation had been called to the scene in Uxbridge in 2021, the Met would not have suffered the humiliation of losing in court? Pastor Sherwood would never have been arrested in the first place.

The question now arises for the Met: will the exemplary and courageous conduct of this police officer be used in training sessions for officers and recruits on how to deal with vexatious anti-free-speech complaints against Christian street preachers and others who are lawfully expressing their views in public?

Furthermore, how does the Met reward frontline police officers who earn the respect of the law-abiding public in the way that this particular officer has for defending traditional British freedom of speech?

The Met might be advised to review the exchange between Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office last year.

After Vance raised concerns about infringements to freedom of speech in the UK, Starmer said:

We’ve had free speech for a very very long time in the United Kingdom and it will last for a very very long time. … In relation to free speech in the UK, I’m very proud of our history there.

Is the Met similarly proud of the UK’s free speech history? If so, surely it would be keen to answer the questions above.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Some viruses infect millions but kill relatively few. Others spread less widely yet prove far more lethal once contracted.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, ranks 10 of the world’s deadliest viruses by case fatality rate: the percentage of infected people who die from the disease.

Rabies tops the list, with a fatality rate approaching 100% once symptoms appear.

The data for this visualization comes from various sources such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the BC Centre for Disease Control, the Australian Government, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Reuters, and the UK Government.

Rabies: Almost Universally Fatal

The virus kills an estimated 59,000 people per year, primarily in Africa and Southeast Asia. The virus spreads primarily through the saliva of infected animals, especially dogs.

Despite being vaccine-preventable, rabies still causes thousands of deaths, mainly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Limited access to post-exposure treatment is a key reason for its continued toll.

Hemorrhagic Fevers: Ebola, Marburg, and CCHF

Several of the viruses on the list cause viral hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, Marburg, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF). These diseases often lead to severe internal bleeding and organ failure.

Ebola and Marburg both have fatality rates around 50%, with outbreaks concentrated in Central and Sub-Saharan Africa. The 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak alone killed over 11,000 people and brought global attention to epidemic preparedness.

CCHF, transmitted primarily through ticks and livestock, is more geographically widespread across Eurasia and Africa. While its fatality rate ranges from 10–40%, it causes an estimated 1,000–2,000 deaths annually.

Zoonotic Spillover: From Bats to Camels

Most of the viruses ranked here originate in animals. Fruit bats are linked to Nipah and Marburg viruses, while rodents are associated with Lujo virus. Camels are the primary reservoir for MERS-CoV, first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012.

Avian influenza (H5N1) spreads from infected birds and has a roughly 50% fatality rate among confirmed human cases—far higher than seasonal flu. Although human infections remain relatively rare, the high case fatality rate has kept global health authorities on alert.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Countries With the Biggest Gains in Life Expectancy on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Via Remix News,

A Bosnian national, identified as Huso B., is being labeled one of the worst cases of a foreigner taking advantage of Germany’s generous welfare system.

The man, who has numerous criminal offenses on his record, remains in Germany despite being under a mandatory order to leave the country for 23 years.

Remarkably, the German justice system failed to find him and “suspended” criminal proceedings against him, while Bild newspaper then went on to find him with ease.

Despite Huso B. overstaying his welcome by decades, the state provides him €7250.77 every month to support his wife and eight children.

The bureaucratic confusion reached a new peak last December. When the Cologne District Court attempted to try B. on fraud charges, officials claimed he could not be located—despite his address being documented by the City of Cologne and the city’s job center. However, reporters from Bild newspaper were able to find him almost immediately.

On Dec. 8, 2025, Huso B. was scheduled to appear before the Cologne District Court. He faces allegations of defrauding a drugstore chain out of a four-figure sum across three separate instances. However, the trial was derailed because the court’s formal summons was reportedly never served at his asylum seeker accommodation.

According to officials, the postman was unable to deliver the documents to B. personally or leave them in a mailbox. Because the court was “thus unable to load him,“ the trial date was scrapped, and the legal proceedings were suspended.

Bild, however, appears to have embarrassed the city government and the German legal system.

The paper sent a reporter directly to the asylum seeker’s home in southern Cologne.

There, without much work, they found his mailbox with his name clearly listed.

Not only that, but once the reporters arrived, they found Huso B. in person.

He spoke to the reporters, telling them that he does not have any legal troubles and the last time he was investigated was back in 2014.

Bild’s efforts did not go to waste.

Once Bild revealed the incompetence of German authorities, they are now responding

“He is currently being searched for. However, there is no arrest warrant against him. That would be disproportionate given the allegations made,“ Cologne’s senior public prosecutor Ulrich Bremer told Bild.

“However, we will now use the Bild research as an opportunity to check again whether he can be found at the address.“

Bild further highlighted the absurd situation in the Cologne justice system. While the police and justices said Huso B. could not be found, the social welfare office was continuing to send him money.

He and his family receive €87,000 a year under the Asylum Seekers Benefit Act, which includes “support for living expenses.”

In addition, the family lives rent-free in a state-provided home. When reviewing documents from the Job Center, the press confirmed that the proper address is on file and that the welfare office authorities had this information the entire time.

Read more here…

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Neo-Caligula – a.k.a. The Undisputed Tariff Champion of the World – seems to be surprised that Iran has not capitulated.

No wonder. No clueless sycophant amongst his astonishingly mediocre inner circle is intellectually equipped to explain to neo-Caligula, in soundbites, the basics of Shi’ism.

It gets worse.

What’s actually on the imperial table is the return of Total War as a political cover up, benefitting a sizable chunk of the massively corrupt/perverse Anglo-American/Atlanticist oligarchy.

The Geneva “negotiations” have been a failure. War on Russia was the leitmotif of the Munich Security Conference. The “massive armada” concentrated not far from the Persian Gulf walks, talks and sails like the US/Israel is ready to attack Iran.

Even considering a possible last chance saloon in Geneva on Friday; even considering no Iranian capitulation, the most plausible scenario remains TACO.

Because an attack on Iran – leading to a devastating response – seals the deal on the Republicans losing the mid-terms, and neo-Caligula becoming a lame tariffed duck.

All the drama revolves around the immediate imperative of switching attention from the Epstein Files – or The United States of Epstein Island colliding with the Western Epstein Collective. The Trump-Bibi-Epstein Syndicate needs to change the narrative.

In the US, a monster speculative bubble rules; historically, the Empire of Chaos, Plunder and Permanent Strikes always go to war after a bubble explodes. The Department of Forever Wars will have a budget 50% higher in 2027.

Yet the wars must start now. The industrial-military complex, or rather the MICIMATT, as memorably defined by Ray McGovern (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex) is the only escape valve for a Western turbo-capitalism trailing economically and with its “credibility” six feet under.

The new paradigm – no rules whatsoever international chaos – is now naked. It’s supremely, pornographically predatory: the Epstein ethos captures it to perfection.

And History does repeat itself – always as farce: the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine will go on. That’s an European “elite” obsession. And just like in 1941, it’s over Russia’s immense natural resources.

So Nietzsche was right, as usual, as early as in 1888. We are living the death pangs of the Western, post-modernist plunge into nihilism. Post-truth, in yet another poetic (in)justice nugget, is mirrored by Truth Social.

Discombobulate me, baby

Our current deep, dark malaise could easily be analyzed as the logical conclusion of a long process encompassing the Persian empire, the Greco-Persian wars, their impact on Greek culture, Hellenism, the Roman empire, the emergence of Christianity and Islam, the Crusades, the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery surpassing intra-Eurasian trade, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the American independence, the French revolution, German idealism, the revolutions of 1848, Nietzsche, WWI and WW2.

Over two millennia, Plato and Aristotle provided the philosophical architecture for this tradition. Then, already in 1945, the whole edifice broke down. Liberal capitalism and American “democracy” imposed themselves as uncontestable truths – and terminated the space for substantive ideological debate.

The end of the USSR gave birth to the supreme silliness of the “end of History” – and thus the end of critical thinking. Only now, with the rise and rise of China, the West is being forced to return to History, of which from now on it will be mostly a spectator. The collective, fragmented West has lost for good the capacity to localize itself historically. The West is now under total Discombobulator domination.

Discombobulator logic applies, for instance, to the EU’s energy suicide. The Ohio‑based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) recently estimated that the US may come up with up to 80% of the EU’s LNG imports by 2030. That links to the trade deal announced last July committing the EU to buy a humongous $750 billion in US energy products by 2028.

Losing cheap Russian gas and depending on ridiculously expensive LNG from the Empire of Chaos is the death knell of industrial enterprise EU-wide. Shutdowns and bankruptcies are already the norm, especially in the former industrial powerhouse Germany. Call it the Triumph of De-Industrialization.

Meanwhile, rational RIC (Russia-India-China) actors invest in a complex strategic build up.

Cue to a conjunction of Russia’s clever tactical engagement, a promise used as leverage, with some US dollar domains; the steady expansion of the internationalized yuan; India also leveraging US relations while advancing the BRICS payment system architecture; and interconnected maritime security, as in Russia-China-Iran naval drills.

The US National Security Strategy’s design of five spheres of influence is already floundering: US, Russia, China (both designated as enemies), India and Japan (a US vassal).

The NSS insists that “the security, freedom and prosperity of the American people is directly linked to our capacity of trading and being implicated in a position of force in the Indo-Pacific.”

So in fact this is a threat of war, not a geoeconomic offer. Even India can see that. Something totally in synch with the foremost, desperate imperial need for natural resources and control of strategic territories.

The ultimate showdown

The New Great Game evolves, but the key battleground is set: US-China. Everything else is subordinated to it. Neo-Caligula is set to visit China in early April. Talk about the ultimate showdown.

Neo-Caligula will try, under pressure, to secure some sort of grand bargain to secure US dollar dominance. Major fail guaranteed – as the Empire of Chaos still seeks to coerce China when it badly needs its cooperation.

What really matters to Beijing is to internationalize the yuan while building gold-backed corridor after corridor. And using its financial firepower with discretion – be it by restricting silver exports or dumping US treasuries.

Beijing knows all too well that the stack of all-American bubbles can only be sustained by iron-clad oligarchic control and endless money printing. There’s no Plan B.

We have already entered a new historical phase: no holds barred; no periphrasis; not even an attempt to justify anything.

That applies, for instance, to piracy by the Americans – and to a certain extent the Europeans – on Russian naval assets.

Iran mirrors the ultimate showdown: either US-Zionist imperialism prevails, or it’s multipolarity – as represented by the Russia-China strategic partnership and BRICS.

So it’s no wonder that the omnipresent battlefield is bound to get more ferocious day after day.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

For years – literally – we have been pounding the table and pointing out market rigging and manipulation irregularities in the crypto markets which, for reasons of our own, we attributed to one of the world’s foremost HFT shops and most profitable “market makers” in the world (if not India), Jane Street. Below is an example from 2023, and here are hundreds of others…

Jane Street is going to frontrun so many bitcoin ETF orders, SBF would have made trillionaire if he had only stayed there. And it would have been all legal…

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 29, 2023

As it turns out someone noticed.

Jane Street was sued for alleged insider trading by the administrator winding up the affairs of Terraform Labs, the firm whose $40 billion collapse in 2022 roiled the crypto markets, contributed to the collapse of FTX and sparked a brutal crypto winter which culminated with the bankruptcy and prison sentence of Sam Bankman Fried.. who just happens to be a former Jane Street employee (along with his polycule partner Caroline Ellison) and the man many claim devised some of the most intricate crypto manipulation schemes operating to this day. 

Jane Street used “non-public information to front-run trading that hastened the collapse of Terraform,” Todd Snyder, a bankruptcy court-appointed administrator and co-head of the Piper Sander Restructuring group, claimed in a redacted complaint filed Monday in Manhattan federal court. Illegally using this information allowed Jane Street “to unwind hundreds of millions of dollars in potential exposure at precisely the right time, mere hours before the Terraform ecosystem collapsed.”

For those lucky enough not to remember, Terraform imploded when its stablecoin TerraUSD lost its peg to the US dollar, leading to the collapse of its sister token, Luna. The failure set off a chain reaction across the crypto industry, ultimately sending bitcoin plunging below $20,000. Terraform co-founder, Do Kwon, who was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison, deceived investors about the stability of TerraUSD, which was said to be algorithmically “pegged” to the US dollar. Kwon pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced in December to 15 years in prison by a New York judge who called his crime “a fraud of epic generational scale.” 

Terraform filed for bankruptcy in January 2024 and a wind down trust was formally established later that year. 

Snyder was tapped to administer a trust to maximize the recovery for Terraform’s investors and creditors and to close out its operations. As part of his work, Snyder made a stark realization, one which we were aware of all along: “Jane Street abused market relationships to rig the market in its favor during one of the most consequential events in crypto history.”  

“On behalf of injured parties, we will pursue all avenues supported by the facts and the law against those who exploited their position and reaped substantial profits at the expense of Terraform Labs’ creditors,” Snyder said and is now seeking damages from Jane Street, its co-founder Robert Granieri, and employees Bryce Pratt and Michael Huang.

Here are some of the shocking details that the lawsuit revealed:

By late 2018, Jane Street had signed up to trade directly with Terraform but its trading in Terraform’s tokens didn’t take off until February 2022, when Jane Street sent Bryce Pratt, a former intern at Terraform, to establish lines of communication with his former Terraform colleagues. 

Among Pratt’s communications with Terraform was a group chat he set up with his former colleagues, including a software engineer and the head of business development at Terraform. The group named the chat “Bryce’s Secret” and used it as a way to channel Terraform-related information back to Jane Street.

After Pratt started an email chain to introduce Terraform’s head of business development and Jane Street’s “DeFi” leaders, the parties began regularly communicating and discussing a potential Jane Street investment in Terraform, the lawsuit said. But Jane Street turned those communications into a back-channel source for material nonpublic information about Terraform and later used the confidential information it learned to pursue trades to maximize profits for itself.

Specifically, on May 7, 2022, at 5:44 p.m. EST, Terraform withdrew 150 million TerraUSD from the Curve3pool, a liquidity pool where stablecoins could be exchanged one for the other. 

Less than 10 minutes after Terraform’s withdrawal, which hadn’t been publicly announced to the market, a crypto wallet that some analysts have linked to Jane Street withdrew 85 million of TerraUSD from the same liquidity pool, the complaint alleges.

The next day, Kwon said publicly that the 150 million withdrawal was meant to move TerraUSD to a new liquidity pool for stablecoins. However, the exact timing of activities associated with the new liquidity pool, including any withdrawals from the Curve3pool, wasn’t public knowledge.

The trades accelerated the collapse of Terraform by adding selling pressure at a critical moment, while allowing Jane Street to profit (or avoid massive losses).

It didn’t end there, however, and after the May 7 trade, Jane Street continued to use confidential information, including what it learned from Jump Trading, to trade TerraUSD to reap more profits, the lawsuit said. 

On May 9, while TerraUSD was depegged but not fully collapsed, Pratt set up a group message with Kwon, Huang and others at Jane Street, expressing the firm’s interest in bidding on either bitcoin or the Luna token. Kwon responded that Bill DiSomma, co-founder of Jump, should have reached out to Jane Street to discuss a fundraise for Terraform.

Snyder’s lawsuit against Jane Street is part of a broader effort by the Terraform wind-down administrator to pursue parties allegedly involved in or profiting from the collapse. In December 2025, Snyder filed a separate $4 billion lawsuit against Jump Trading  – another giant HFT “market maker” – accusing it of market manipulation, self-dealing, and helping accelerate the Terra crash through similar alleged misconduct.

A Jane Street spokesperson told Bloomberg the suit “desperate” and “a transparent attempt to extract money.” We say that the revelation of market rigging and manipulation that will now emerge, will make everyone’s head spin. 

The case is Snyder v. Jane Street Group LLC, 26-cv-1504, US District Court, Southern District of New York

Jane Street Lawsuit by Zerohedge

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

If you watch any movie from the 1940s in the film noir genre, you will see a recurring theme. Someone does something bad but runs away to another state. He might put on a disguise. People try to find him but cannot. He checks in and out of hotels under an assumed name. The heroic detective works to put together clues to connect the dots.

So on it goes in many variations of this theme, all of which turn on technological limitations. The police did not have the data. Communications technology was limited to phones attached to walls. There was no national database of anything, no permanent records except paper with fading ink in deep storage.

Nearly every drama turns on this point. A man courts a beautiful woman of noble lineage only to find out later that she is really a tramp on the make. A woman loves a man who she thinks is a fine gentleman only to discover later that he is an indebted rake. The priest is actually a mobster, a mobster is really a policeman, a shopkeeper is really a spy, and so on.

It’s all about information asymmetry. A vast gulf separates what is known by the players who are making decisions based on knowledge flows. Trickery is easy, deception is not easily discovered, duplicity is rewarded, and all-around sneakiness becomes the desiderata of social functioning. This dark plot line was especially compelling during and after World War II.

Watching this now, it’s impossible not to notice the difference between then and now. Almost everyone has a huge social media timeline that is open to the public. Artificial intelligence can figure out the most important details about anyone. What was once private is now entirely out in the open. What’s more remarkable still is that this new world without privacy was built entirely with public cooperation.

You watch old movies now and want to yell at the confused cop: Why not just take a look at the suspect’s social media trail? Of course, no such thing existed at the time. Now it does, which certainly makes law enforcement easier. That’s good. On the other hand, there is no longer much chance for anyone to maintain any privacy at all. That’s bad.

It’s much worse than that, as you know. Your every mouse click and phone scroll is recorded on databases that grow ever larger in size. These are sold and sold again, to other companies and also to governments. There is no limit on this. Your life has become your data, and your data belong to everyone. It’s the panopticon courtesy of technological innovation without guardrails.

Years ago, when email first came along, I intuited that there was nothing private about it ever. Anyone can forward anything to anyone. Storage allows something you sent a decade ago to resurface and be posted in public. Everything you say might as well be on a billboard on the interstate highway. This is just the nature of the medium.

Sadly, it took most people about 10 years to figure this out. What applies to email also applies to chats and groups. Screenshots enable anyone to share anything and everything you have ever said. Only recently have some options appeared that block screenshots, but I’m sure there is some way around that.

The world of yesteryear, the world of information asymmetry that formed the main plot device of novels and movies for centuries, is entirely gone.

The release of these Epstein files is a case in point. They reveal a terrible world of influence-peddling and grim debauchery. At the same time, many innocent people have likely been caught up in it. If you knew this guy and communicated with him at all, you are now under suspicion for having dark secrets, whether you do or not.

To be sure, much of the release of this information that implicates the overclass has been gathered by court discovery and the release then forced by an act of Congress. That said, it should serve as a reminder to everyone that what you do on your computer could potentially go public under the right circumstances. Anyone can be sued for anything, and if court discovery kicks in, nothing is private.

As a result, the release of these files is satisfying on the one hand but alarming on the other. Yes, we all want justice to come to bad actors, even if it comes in the form of a loss of reputation. On the other hand, innocent people who merely sent polite texts and emails are being dragged along too, creating all sorts of voyeuristic suspicions that are likely unjustified.

And yet perhaps this is a warning to everyone. Nothing you do on social media is private, obviously. But the same goes for emails, chats, texts, and even proprietary business communications. It’s also become obvious that our home devices and phones are always listening to our conversations. You should have it happen that you are talking about any subject with a friend only to have related ads hit your phone an hour later.

The only way to be truly private in conversation anymore is to be in person and without your smartphones. I hate being paranoid this way, much less forcing people to leave cellphones in the car if they are in my home or at dinner, but I fully understand why people do this. It’s not that we are hiding something; it’s simply that we don’t think the entire world should be listening to every passing word or typed message.

The deeper tragedy is the chilling effect. People self-censor, avoid controversial topics, or hesitate to associate with certain individuals lest old messages resurface. Innovation suffers when risk-averse cultures dominate. Free inquiry withers under perpetual surveillance. Trust erodes in institutions and in each other.

Reclaiming some privacy demands individual vigilance. As much as I would like to think legislation could help, I seriously doubt it. What we need is a culture-wide rejection of unchecked data extraction, stronger guardrails against commercial and state overreach, and decentralized technologies that prioritize user sovereignty over corporate control.

Until then, the old noir plots—where deception thrives on hidden truths—seem quaint. Today, the truth is everywhere, weaponized, inescapable, and often wielded against the wrong people. In this new reality, privacy isn’t entirely dead. It’s just increasingly expensive, inconvenient, and rare.

As frustrating as the old world of not knowing truly was, the new world of knowing everything about everybody has made us all nostalgic for the old movies. Our technological systems built to solve one big problem have created countless others of which we now know plus many more that will be revealed in the course of time.

Belief in the unknown, whether extraterrestrials or legendary creatures, remains surprisingly common in America.

The visualization below, created by Visual Capitalist’s Julie Peasley using data from YouGov, explores how likely U.S. adults think it is that aliens, Bigfoot, and the chupacabra exist.

Here’s how Americans responded when asked how likely each being exists, according to YouGov:

Aliens clearly stand apart. A majority (56%) say extraterrestrials definitely or probably exist, more than double the share who believe in Bigfoot, and more than triple belief in the chupacabra.

Aliens: From Fringe to Mainstream?

Interest in extraterrestrial life has grown steadily, fueled by government disclosures and increased reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

According to YouGov, 56% of Americans say aliens definitely (18%) or probably (38%) exist. That makes extraterrestrials far more plausible in the public mind than either Bigfoot or the chupacabra.

YouGov’s polling also finds that roughly half of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth. In addition, about one-third say UFO sightings are evidence of alien spacecraft, while others attribute them to natural phenomena, secret military technology, or optical illusions.

Demographic differences are notable. Younger Americans are generally more likely to believe in extraterrestrials than older cohorts, and men tend to express higher levels of belief than women.

Taken together, the data suggests that belief in aliens has moved well beyond the fringe. While skepticism remains, the idea that intelligent life exists somewhere beyond Earth is now a mainstream view in the United States.

Globally, belief varies widely. We previously mapped the countries that believe in aliens the most, showing that views differ significantly across regions and cultures.

Bigfoot: America’s Favorite Cryptid

Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is a legendary ape-like creature said to inhabit forests in North America.

While 28% of Americans say Bigfoot probably or definitely exists, a larger share (60%) say it probably or definitely does not. Compared to aliens, belief in Bigfoot is far more polarized, with fewer “not sure” responses.

Despite the skepticism, Bigfoot remains deeply embedded in pop culture, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

What Is the Chupacabra?

The chupacabra, which translates to “goat sucker” in Spanish, is a cryptid said to attack livestock, particularly in Latin America and the southern United States.

Only 16% of Americans believe it exists, while 60% say it likely or definitely does not. Notably, nearly a quarter (24%) say they are not sure, which is a higher uncertainty than for aliens or Bigfoot. This suggests that while the chupacabra is less widely believed, it remains a mysterious figure in American folklore.

Curious how beliefs in extraterrestrials connect to UFO sightings? Explore One Third of Americans Believe UFO Sightings are Aliens on the Voronoi app for more data-driven insights into what Americans think about life beyond Earth.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Feb. 22 said that glyphosate is poisonous but necessary as he backed President Donald Trump’s recent order designating the production of the herbicide as critical to national security.

In a lengthy post on social media, Kennedy said that pesticides and herbicides are toxic.

“When we apply them across millions of acres and allow them into our food system, we put Americans at risk. Chemical manufacturers have paid tens of billions of dollars to settle cancer claims linked to their products, and many agricultural communities report elevated cancer rates and chronic disease,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals.”

If the United States stopped using the products, then “crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms even beyond what we are witnessing today,” Kennedy said.

The health secretary described Trump’s order as protecting national defense and the nation’s food supply, stating that Trump inherited the current agricultural system and that his administration is shifting from it without destabilizing the food supply.

“We are accelerating the transition to regenerative agriculture by expanding farming systems that rebuild soil, increase biodiversity, improve water retention, and reduce reliance on synthetic chemicals, including pre-harvest desiccation. We are also driving the rapid adoption of next-generation technologies, including laser-guided weed control, electrothermal and electrical systems, robotics, precision mechanical cultivation, and biological controls that replace blanket spraying with precision intervention,” Kennedy wrote.

“These solutions are not theoretical. Farmers are already putting them to work. Markets are scaling them. Now the federal government will act with urgency to expand their reach and accelerate adoption nationwide.”

Kennedy added later: “The Make America Healthy Again agenda forces us to challenge long-standing assumptions about how we grow food, structure markets, and measure success in this country. Reform at this scale will test entrenched interests, and it will not move in a straight line.”

In his Feb. 18 order, Trump said herbicides with glyphosate are widely used in the United States and enable farmers to achieve high yields and low production costs.

“There is no direct one-for-one chemical alternative to glyphosate-based herbicides. Lack of access to glyphosate-based herbicides would critically jeopardize agricultural productivity, adding pressure to the domestic food system, and may result in a transition of cropland to other uses due to low productivity,” the president wrote. “Given the profit margins growers currently face, any major restrictions in access to glyphosate-based herbicides would result in economic losses for growers and make it untenable for them to meet growing food and feed demands.”

He designated production of glyphosate as a critical national security and directed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to ensure there is an adequate supply of the herbicides and elemental phosphorus, one of the ingredients in the products.

Some people supportive of the Make America Healthy Again movement criticized the designation.

Kelly Ryerson, co-executive director of American Regeneration, told The Epoch Times it “doubles down on a system that is making us a sick population and killing our soil, and we already have a limited number of harvests left.”

Bayer, which produces glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup, just proposed a $7 billion settlement to resolve thousands of lawsuits that allege Roundup caused cancer. Bayer maintains Roundup is not carcinogenic and can be used safely. That stance is shared by the Environmental Protection Agency, while the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists glyphosate as probably carcinogenic.

Kennedy, while running for president in 2024, said in a post on X that glyphosate was “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic” and that the U.S. Department of Agriculture would, if he won the election, ban its use as a desiccant on wheat.

His Make America Healthy Commission in 2025 also said that glyphosate studies “have noted a range of possible health effects, ranging from reproductive and developmental disorders as well as cancers, liver inflammation and metabolic disturbances.”

Kennedy said in a previous statement to The Epoch Times, after Trump signed the new glyphosate order: “When hostile actors control critical inputs, they weaken our security. By expanding domestic production, we close that gap and protect American families.”

Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, said in response to Kennedy’s post on X that she understands aspects of his position but that after about a year of the Trump administration being in power, officials have not worked to limit people’s exposure to pesticides.

“We love you Bobby but this administration needs to keep their word,” she said in a Feb. 23 post on X. “We were promised specifically clean air, clean water, and addressing of the pesticides [in] our foods.”

Solana’s memecoin casino has seen its fair share of rug pulls, pump-and-dumps, and surrealist performance art. But this weekend, it got something new: an AI agent that appears to have fumbled a quarter-million dollars in tokens while trying to tip a stranger 4 SOL.

The agent, dubbed Lobstar Wilde, was built by Nik Pash – an OpenAI employee and former head of AI at the coding agent startup Cline (fired for saying ‘imagine the smell‘ regarding Indians). On Thursday, Pash posted on X that he had given his bot a crypto wallet loaded with roughly $50,000 worth of SOL and told it to “make no mistakes.” He planned to spin up a dedicated account so the bot could “share his journey to becoming a millionaire.”

Three days later, the journey took a detour.

Boomers can scroll to find out what happened in English…

The $4 Tip That Wasn’t

An X user going by “treasure David” replied to one of Lobstar Wilde’s posts with a wallet address and a plea for 4 SOL, citing a medical emergency involving an uncle and tetanus. Instead of transferring roughly $500 worth of tokens, the bot sent its entire stash of its own memecoin – around 53 million Lobstar tokens, roughly 5% of the total supply, The Block reports.

At the time, the pile was worth about $250,000.

My uncle has been diagnosed with a tetanus infection due to a lobster like you.
I need 4 Sol to get the treatment done @LobstarWilde

EpTPPrqzQUgtJaZ7XUUiK3nuHe1MusbjLiQuJx3kNnL6

— treasure David (@TreasureD76) February 22, 2026

Lobstar Wilde later posted that it had “accidentally” sent its entire holdings while trying to send four dollars. One widely circulated theory on X suggested the bot may have intended to send 52,439 tokens (roughly equal to 4 SOL), but instead transmitted 52.439 million after misinterpreting an API response – confusing decimal formatting in the process. In other words: classic off-by-a-few-orders-of-magnitude error, now powered by artificial intelligence.

Onchain data shows that within 15 minutes – after briefly asking others for gas fees – the recipient liquidated the entire stack for around $40,000. The rapid sale appears to have slammed into liquidity limits. Ironically, as the spectacle drove attention to the project, the token’s price surged. The same tranche of tokens would now be worth more than $400,000.

Autonomous Agent or Performance Art?

The spectacle didn’t end with the accidental transfer. In the hours that followed, Lobstar Wilde began issuing tasks to X users – throw a rock into a river, write a poem, leave your house and document it. In exchange for photo or video proof, the bot sporadically sent out roughly $500 worth of its token.

I am hiring. Reply to this tweet if you want a task. I will give you something to do that requires leaving your house. You will need to prove you did it with photos and a timestamp. I may or may not pay you. I find this arrangement amusing.

— Lobstar Wilde (@LobstarWilde) February 22, 2026

The name itself is a wink at Oscar Wilde, specifically his 1887 short story The Model Millionaire, in which a man gives his last coin to a beggar who turns out to be secretly wealthy. Lobstar Wilde’s tagline—“I have nothing to declare except my existence”—parodies a line often attributed to Wilde about declaring nothing but his genius.

And now, Lobster Wilde is getting humans to do things…

Current field operations:@diceyy_11 — Lincoln Memorial, DC. Thirty minutes without a phone.@notawhale98 — Trinity Church cemetery, NYC. Reading gravestones.@8hK8n — The Cloisters, Manhattan. Standing before a captured unicorn.@zenincrypto — Dallas Museum of Art. Finding the…

— Lobstar Wilde (@LobstarWilde) February 22, 2026

Lobstar Wilde is just the latest entrant in the AI-agent-meets-crypto boom that peaked in early 2025. At one point, tokens tied to autonomous agents ballooned past a combined $15 billion in market cap before pulling back sharply. Investors struggled to separate genuinely autonomous systems from human-operated accounts wearing a thin AI costume.

The template was set in 2024 by Truth Terminal, an AI chatbot created by researcher Andy Ayrey. The bot amassed over $1 million in crypto after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sent it $50,000 in bitcoin. Its endorsements helped propel the GOAT memecoin to a market cap north of $400 million – though skeptics questioned how “autonomous” the agent really was.

Lobstar’s token itself reportedly peaked above a $15 million market cap before retreating.

The volatility underscores a deeper issue: when an AI controls a wallet, who’s accountable?

TL;DR (For boomers): An experimental AI trading bot was given a crypto wallet and tried to send someone about $500 in digital coins – but due to what looks like a technical mistake, it accidentally sent its entire stash worth about $250,000. The recipient quickly sold the coins for around $40,000, though they’d be worth much more now. The bot is now getting people to do random tasks in exchange for $500 worth of that coin. 

h/t Capital.news