The Daily Schtick: Shutdowns, Showdowns & Surveillance Chat – 17 February 2026 Edition

The empire hits Tuesday juggling a mini–government shutdown, nuclear brink‑talks, and a chat app that wants to card your soul.

DHS shutdown: government by hostage note

Homeland Security is partially shut after Trump and Democrats blew the deadline on a funding deal. This time the fight is officially about “oversight” of ICE and CBP after agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, but the work of ICE, TSA, and Border Patrol mostly grinds on thanks to baked‑in funding from Trump’s 2025 tax‑and‑spend law. It’s the perfect late‑stage compromise: accountability is closed, enforcement stays open.

Trump, Iran and the B‑2 flex

While DHS staggers, Trump is in full tough‑guy mode over Iran, bragging that the U.S. “had to send the B‑2s” and warning of “consequences” if Tehran doesn’t swallow a nuclear deal on Washington’s terms. U.S. and Iranian officials are shuttling through Geneva for a second round of talks that are equal parts diplomacy and hostage negotiation, with Ukraine shoved into the same meeting rooms for a bonus proxy‑war tie‑in.

Discord: “teen‑by‑default” or panopticon‑by‑design?

Discord is pushing ahead with global age verification and teen‑by‑default settings, selling it as safety while quietly normalizing biometric checkpoints for everyday speech.
Key points:

• All users get a teen‑appropriate experience unless Discord decides—or you prove—that you’re an adult.
• To unlock adult space, users may have to submit a video selfie for AI age estimation or upload a photo of government ID, which is then checked by a third‑party verifier rather than Discord itself.
• Discord is also rolling out an age‑inference model that guesses your age group based on “signals” like account tenure and activity, meaning your behavior is being profiled even if you never send in an ID scan.

On paper, the company swears document images are deleted “promptly” after verification and content of messages isn’t used—just metadata and usage patterns. In practice, they’ve built a system where access to entire categories of conversation is gated by machine learning, external ID brokers, and trust‑us‑bro policies that can change with the next PR crisis.

Navalny, frog poison and European nerves

In Europe, leaders spent the day pointing at the Kremlin after Western intelligence sources said Alexei Navalny was likely killed with a toxin derived from poison dart frogs. It’s the kind of villain‑origin detail you’d reject in a script for being too on the nose, but it lands alongside calls for higher defense spending and warnings that Europe should “prepare yourself” for a long confrontation with Russia.

Today’s Schtick

So February 17 brings a DHS shutdown that shuts everything except the parts people are protesting, a president waving stealth bombers at Iran while diplomats race the clock, a major chat platform turning ID checks and AI profiling into the default gateway for speech, and Europe absorbing the kind of assassination plot twist you normally only see in bad prestige TV.

The Daily Schtick: World News, Our Style—because if they’re going to treat governance like a dystopian crossover episode, someone has to recap it.

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