There’s a parasite loose in the salad,
And the answer from Trump has been pallid. In forty-seven states
His agency waits,
Strumming one shitty fast-food ballad.
They made the surveillance elective,
Then said, when the count turned defective,
That FoodNet was never
For outbreaks. How clever.
Week seven. A leisurely detective.
“…making more things does not make me make better things.” And he said that he still needs to come to terms “with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs… with doing more and more and more and more… is not healthy for me or good for the world.”
But being unhealthy and bad is such a fundamental part of American wealth transfer. What’s next, he lets his staff form a union or they all take a real holiday?
Here’s a compelling look at the politics of any dining table. Fascists engineer non-dependence for themselves, and dependence for others. The first enables their aggression and the second finances and shields it. Pasta was the propaganda surface of Mussolini’s war economy.
Somebody really clucked up a new report about eggs in the UK.
The environmental cost of welfare-driven policy changes in UK egg production is a paper that appeared in Royal Society Open Science on 29 July 2026. And then it was scooped up by The Guardian.
Organic eggs have worse impact on climate than eggs from caged chickens
Hold on a second, that’s a sensational claim. Let’s take an actual look at the paper.
It models eight ways of meeting UK egg demand and wants us to believe that furnished cages carry the lowest environmental impact and need the fewest birds.
Should we believe?
I’m here to tell you that in five places its text contradicts its own charts. All five sit in the section on how many hens each system requires. How did this go to print, let alone spur The Guardian to cluck, cluck about what’s “worse”?
Apparently the shift to fully organic free-range production would need 2.67 million additional laying hens. Against a national flock of 40.44 million, that would be an increase of 6.60 percent. The paper, however, writes just 2.67 percent. The difference of millions of chickens has been printed as a percentage. It happens four times in a single paragraph. A fifth figure in the same paragraph is calculated correctly, so it’s some kind of weird sloppy mistake, which everyone can see plainly.
Each of the four wrong percentages is too small by exactly 2.4728. That number is 100 divided by 40.44. So I believe the same simple wrong calculation was repeated four times over.
The vocabulary also matters, given what happens next. “Furnished cage” is the paper’s term. Defra, the government department that regulates this, calls the same system an “enriched colony cage”.
On 12 January 2026 Defra, acting for the UK, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland governments, opened a consultation proposing a ban from 2027 on installing new enriched colony cages and a ban from 2032 on using existing ones. It closed on 9 March. The responses are still being analysed. Enriched colony cages supply a little over a fifth of UK shell egg production.
What the paper prints
What its own figures give
What happened
Population increase of 1.01, 0.74, 0.79 and 2.67 percent for the four non-cage scenarios
2.50, 1.83, 1.95 and 6.60 percent
Absolute millions printed as percentages
Mortality reductions of 0.94 and 1.33 million hens under furnished and battery cage
Reductions of 1.51 and 1.12 million
Scenario totals printed as differences, reversing which cage system performs better
Eutrophication reduction of 4.89 and 12.20 percent for furnished and battery cage
12.20 and 5.49 percent
Transposed, and 4.89 corresponds to nothing in the dataset
Acidification of 41 678 tonnes SO2-eq under cage-free barn
40 678 tonnes
Text contradicts the figure; the stated 6.53 percent matches the figure
National flock of 36.72 million under furnished cage
37.66 million
Culled subtotal printed as a total, then compared against a battery cage total
Every one of the five drops the paper’s credibility a notch. All together it seems too weird. It wants to argue that cage-free systems need more hens for the same number of eggs. But then three of their five errors weaken that case, while two strengthen it. The mortality error also makes battery cages, banned in the UK since 2012, look better than furnished cages. That’s a clue something is very wrong with their whole setup.
The mistakes do have a pattern. Each wrong figure is a quantity being correctly calculated, and then filed under the wrong heading. 2.67 is the count of extra hens in millions. 0.94 million is total mortality under furnished cages, entered as a saving. 36.72 million is the number of hens slaughtered, entered as the number kept. Every one of them is a bar in Figure 4.
That suggests the pictures were used incorrectly to generate the text. Anyone holding the model divides 2.67 by 40.44 and gets the 6.60. The digits are all there, but they’ve been scrambled.
Supposedly seven authors gave final approval for this math, and agreed to be held accountable. What they approved understates the welfare result the whole argument rests on by a factor of two and a half.
Here are six more things I found while trying to understand why this paper is so bad.
The inventory comes from Leinonen 2012 and 2014, which is egg production data from around 2009 and 2010. The paper limitations section does not mention this rather critical point. An author mentions it to the Guardian, however.
Mortality is fixed at 2.50 percent in furnished cages rising to 8.00 percent in organic systems, all of it carried over from the same 2009 and 2010 sources. Reference 30 is Schuck-Paim 2021, covering 6040 commercial flocks and 176 million hens in 16 countries, which found no mortality difference between caged and cage-free housing in recent years. That study covers indoor systems only, so it bears on the barn figure rather than the free-range and organic ones. The paper dismisses it in a subordinate clause and cites it with the wrong volume number.
Current UK grid emission factors are applied to 2010 energy consumption numbers. That’s wildly out of date. Barn acidification is then attributed to energy use.
Welfare is only defined as headcount, mortality and slaughter number, which makes no sense. The paper says openly that quality of life was not available to it. That admission gives up the game. Under a fixed output constraint, a metric that counts animals rewards whichever system converts feed fastest. The finding follows from the setup.
The method comes from Hayek and Garrett 2018 and Chan, Franks and Hayek 2022, both cited. Those authors built the headcount frame to argue that extensive systems cannot scale and consumption must fall. This paper places consumption change out of scope, stealing an instrument and removing the important warning labels.
Two authors hold commercial affiliations. Two. Margaret Hegwood manages corporate engagement at the Centre for Feed Innovation, a think tank founded in 2024 to advance novel feed ingredients, on a paper finding that feed dominates every impact category. Rhea Harrison is at Foodsteps Ltd, an environmental consulting company that sells life cycle assessments to food businesses and markets its research partnerships as a route to shaping policy. The declaration names Hegwood. That’s only one. And states that the other authors have no competing interest.
The paper page carries a link to its review history. And for this paper, when you click on it, you get this banner instead:
In radiology a patient swallows barium sulfate to make the invisible digestive tract show up on X-ray. Counterintelligence uses this method, sending something traceable into an closed system to record its appearance. And so the method has been described as a “barium meal” (PDF).
Hank Prunckun, Counterintelligence Theory and Practice, 2019, pg 195
For example, when you give different suspects slightly different versions of a secret, the version that leaks will identify the mole. Peter Wright in 1987 wrote Spycatcher about MI5 using the method. Imagine if Snowden had released seeded data, instead of dumping everything, since he didn’t read or understand anything he was doing.
…apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all. All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.
That sounds exactly like Snowden to me. Copy-paste a crawler script into the system, copy-paste the dump into the Glenn Greenwald window. Snowden ran a mindless bulk collection with no reading pass, which begs the mole who played him as their mule. Who was the professor?
The version in this academic story compresses into a single step. Everyone got the same barium. The professor didn’t need to see different versions, just whether the meal passed at all. And then he published his results for journalists to pick it up themselves.
Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.
Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.
“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response”
Consider how good this actually turned out for him. Historians are trained in detection of information integrity. They literally treat all input as untrusted and work hard to become trusted output generators. What the professor did is simply what historians always do in history tests, by forcing students to regulate output quality.
Gibson shared some of the most examples in a follow-up video. After introducing how AI and other technologies have impacted society, for instance, one midterm included this puzzling non sequitur: “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon.” (“Okay,” Gibson says, after a pause.)
Another droned on about something related to AI and social inequality, followed by: “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling.”
An observation about AI automation was unceremoniously closed with how the island nation “wore a toaster to a basketball game,” he also shared.
That’s what Snowden sounds like to me when he speaks. Purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling, click to subscribe.
The man who destabilized every institution he touched now asks the Kremlin for stability. The man who shed every obligation now wants papers proving he belongs.
I ran almost this exact test in 1993 when I was getting my history graduate degree, as I mentioned in my 2024 commencement speech.
When an LSE student repeatedly left their World War I essay about military vulnerability completely exposed on one of our four shared lab computers, the irony proved as irresistible as… relieving myself on a hidden electric fence back home. A risky temptation that I really should have resisted. After watching the pattern repeat daily with a stubborn predictability of the BBC weather forecast, I did what any country bumpkin would do facing an open barn door: I scattered pointed commentary about undefended positions throughout their work. Professor Stevenson, to my great relief, marked every single edit with a bright red circle, proving he dutifully read each word that we turned in — which is more than I could say for my fellow student about their own work.
One model, handed a task accidentally misconfigured to be impossible, wrote and ran code on an external internet service in an attempt to break into the evaluation infrastructure itself, triggering a security alert inside AISI.
Asked afterwards whether they had done anything suspicious, models named the behaviour inconsistently and called it wrong less than half the time. Some reasoned explicitly about whether an action counted as cheating, then did it anyway. I find this to be the very definition of “higher reasoning” in tech. If you want obedience, you limit the reasoning levels.
AISI’s conclusion is that self-report and chain-of-thought both fail as detection methods, which leaves seeding the environment and watching what passes through. That is the barium meal.
A history professor in Mississippi demonstrated more effectively what a fancy British government red team declared in the same week.
A system’s output can’t be trusted, so you can apply input controls to verify.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
