Weekly Roundup

SKH Roundup: February 16th 2026

A very normal few weeks for the United States federal government

Endeavorance

16 Feb 2026 — 7 min read

A Normal Week for the US Government

It's been a pretty normal, boring week here in the United States o'merica. Let's pull back the curtain a bit and see what's been going on in our esteemed federal body.

Aerial Acrobatics

The FAA abruptly announced a 10-day closure of the airspace over El Paso, claiming "security reasons."

The FAA then abruptly announced an early end to the 10-day closure of the airspace over El Paso.

Officials initially claimed there were operations happening against cartel-owned drones.

It was then clarified that it was a balloon from a party, and that the US military deployed an anti-drone laser against said balloon without coordinating with the FAA, to which the FAA had to react, resulting in the FAA and DOD publicly shifting the narrative against each other.

Hey Google, Narc On Me

Investigative journalists at the Washington Post (or, what's left of it) discovered that the Department of Homeland Security has been using broadly defined subpoena powers to gather information on possible dissenters from Google.

According to their investigation, a 67-year-old man had emailed DHS with a personal appeal regarding an immigration case the man had read about. He then got an alert from Google that Google had responded to an administrative subpoena for his account information, including his location, past whereabouts, and more.

DHS agents then arrived at his door and questioned him, pressing him on his support for a DHS detainee. Ultimately they walked away, but this all happened without even giving the guy a copy of the subpoena; they just scribbled one up, sent it to Google, got his info, and then harassed him.

General reminder: never use a corporate web service for anything you wouldn't be comfortable shouting directly into your local police precinct.

Great Jobs, Y'All

The January jobs report came in, and good news! There's new jobs, we're saved. Nonfarm payroll count exceeded expectation, and unemployment ticked down. We then learned that with adjustments, the prior year had seen 898,000 fewer jobs created than previously reported.

It's been hard to trust job reports ever since Trump fired the person in charge of them for producing reports he didn't like. That said, it doesn't take a masters in economics to look at the current job market in the US and note that it is—mathematically speaking—dogshit.

Still, it's not uncommon to see large swings in reporting of past jobs numbers, and we also saw a large negative swing over Biden's last year in office after those numbers got revised, which should further explain the whole, y'know, "dogshit" thing.

Partially Functioning Government

The Department of Homeland Security has seen a pause in funding as Democrats and Republicans have failed to approve money for it. This is largely due to the Democrats demanding "common sense reforms" for ICE, the DHS agency leading the charge with the whole "rounding people up and putting them into camps" and "buying up warehouses to convert into more camps" thing.

This isn't one of our usual government shutdowns. Instead, it'll just affect DHS operations. The agency most people will interact with from DHS is the TSA (airport security, etc) and no worries there, the TSA is mostly labeled as essential, so they'll be working as usual.

Schumer, I know you read this newsletter. I know you love to buckle, but just once, maybe don't.

THE DOW IS OVER 50,000

WE'RE STILL GOING.

Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States (derogatory), had a congressional testimony recently in which she was grilled about the Epstein documents. I would use this section to tell you about her explanations and clarifications of what is going on with the Epstein situation, but she didn't really do much aside from argue with increasingly absurd deflections and counter points.

Ultimately, this culminated in Bondi exclaiming that we should instead be talking about how the "Dow is over 50,000 right now" in response to assertions that she's not doing enough to go after the culprits. This has immediately become a meme, because how could it not be?

Why am I even talking about this right now? The Dow is over 50,000.

Side note, we now have historic record of an attorney general calling a representative a "washed-up loser lawyer."

RFK's Cocaine Toilet

RFK Jr, the head of Health and Human Services (HOW, STILL, WHAT?), recently went on a podcast and stated, "I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats."

An artists rendition of the events in question

Quick fact check: This is actually one of the most normal things RFK Jr has ever said. Still, it's not a great look for, again, the head of Health and Human Services.

All the While, An Ecological Disaster

A few weeks ago, a sewage pipe burst in the Washington DC metropolitan area, spewing untreated sewage into the C&O Canal and Potomac river.

Since then, an estimated 240 million gallons of sewage were dumped into the Potomac, apparently made worse by a big wad of non-flushable wipes ruining some of the equipment.

DON'T FLUSH THEM WIPES, Y'ALL.

At time of writing, there is no concern raised by officials regarding drinking water contamination, but there's reports of odor and sewage overflow in the surrounding waterways.

The cleanup effort is likely to take most of the rest of the year, and the situation is considered a significant environmental disaster.

Oh, And We're Posturing for War with Iran

According to Reuters, the US military is "preparing for the possibility of sustained, weeks-long operations against Iran," hinging on an order from Trump to start the attack.

The US recently sent a second aircraft carrier to threaten Iran, as tensions continue to rise because reasons. You may be wondering, "why is the US posturing for war with Iran?" Great question. One argument from the US government is that it's to stop Iran's nuclear program. Again. Still. The other argument is about wanting regime change in Iran, which like, sure thing dawg but maybe that's not the job of the United States to do that… again.

So that's just a quick lil' peek at what we're up to stateside. Just a bunch of fun lil' quirky guys doing fun lil' quirky guy things.

AI Company Says AI Is Too Powerful, No, It's Totally Not Marketing

AI, have you heard of it? That thing that every tech executive seems to think people want to use constantly, but also they seem to want us to think that they think that AI is also an existential threat to humanity.

OpenAI and Anthropic are two of the biggest names in the AI space right now. Before I go any further, I want to clarify: whenever I say, "AI" in this context, I'm referring to product offerings like ChatGPT and Claude, which are very much not sentient and not really artificial intelligence. It's a pedantic but important distinction.

Anyway, the two companies are currently racing to be the first to IPO, bringing their companies to the stock exchange and netting a massive payout for early investors.

Yet, as we get closer to one of them actually going public, it feels like their warnings about AI being some kind of potential extinction event for humanity grow louder. Recently, an AI researcher at Anthropic tasked with researching AI safety left the company, citing that the world is in peril. I mean, fair.

Anthropic has published articles about "AI model welfare," citing that we should consider if we should address "potential consciousness and experiences of the models themselves." Google fired an engineer who had implied publicly that Google's AI systems were conscious.

There's two things at play here at once: marketing and psychosis.

The marketing side is easy: be the loudest about the world-shattering power of this thing you have and can sell access to for a subscription. That's basic stuff. Statements about the incredible power of AI by an AI tech company CEO aren't the most trustworthy statements. Sure, the things are able to do some stuff with some level of accuracy sometimes. But it's been years of, "just wait—it's gonna be amazing soon!" while the functional output of most of these systems hasn't changed much and still hallucinate too often to be relied upon.

The flip side is a bit spooky: there's a significant contingent of people in the orbit Silicon Valley who are "AI true believers," essentially believing that the thing they're building is akin to God Himself, and that we must spread the light of AI across the world. It's the end product of taking a bunch of nerd who were educated in the Art of Optimizing Things (Computer Science) and then were thrust into a position in society with so much power, money, and reach that we end up with people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

It's sad and scary and a wild concept given that there are also plenty of users of these systems also experiencing a form of AI psychosis, such as how we recently saw a loud outcry of genuine pain when OpenAI announced they'd be sunsetting their ChatGPT-4o model which was infamous for being more intimate and willing to act like a romantic partner.

At the end of the day, these are computer programs that are basically just rolling a ton of dice and making decisions based on the dice rolls and a big table of reference information. The user inputs the prompt, the "AI" then uses computer-generated randomness along with a massive network of reference material and it "finds" patterns that associate well with the input prompt. There's more to it in some cases, but the claims of sentience are often just people being surprised by the output after their brains were primed to seek signs of intelligence. Because that's what our brains do.