Link round-up for 30 December 2018

Various interesting stuff I ran across on the net over the last week.

o o o o o

Vagabond Scholar has posted its annual round-up of the best (mostly political) blog posts of the year.

Looks like these dogs were having fun with this (found via Plowing through Life).

Heh.

It's mishaps in motion!

The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming.....

See the story of Christ's birth as kids recite it.

Now this is some bad Christmas design (found via Mock Paper Scissors).

Don't play the oppressors' game, rise up against them.

Now this would be an unusual ship.

It's a hole-in-one!

Let's hope Santa never needs to rely on his back-up reindeer team.

These glances do suggest a bit more than idle curiosity.

Could it be.....SATAN???

No, you'll get blasted awake by asshole fireworks.

Learn what "the dogpill" is (you may regret it).

If you're into pillar candles, get some inspirational ones for the year ahead.

Dumbledore wasn't such a good guy.

Talk dirty to me -- in Hittite.

Jordan Peele, director of the great Get Out, has a new film coming out in March.

The boss is disappointed (found via Scottie).

People are inconsistent about identifying with fictional characters.

The official Trump Christmas portrait provokes a bit of snark.

Uranus got pounded so hard it's permanently lopsided.

Don't glorify war.

"This is a picture of a lost and damaged soul."

Now they can even dance better than most of us can.

Here are some unusual photos.

Santa does it better (found via Scottie).

Professor Taboo has some thoughts on extramarital sex -- the comments are worth a look too.

Jerry Coyne receives an e-mail.  A dumb one.

This is Fougeres, France.

I've read nineteen of these.

Whether we emulate them or not, it's important to understand how Republicans cling to power (found via the Vagabond round-up).

These are modern-day Mongols, looting and destroying civilization.

Here's a policy that works.

If you want to know what people are angry about, ask them -- don't take the word of their opponents.

Religio-nutballs just can't debate honestly.

The GoFundMe for Trump's wall is halfway to its goal, sort of.  This sheriff has another idea to help.

Yes, this is a global criminal organization, period.

Darwinfish 2 debunks some more wingnut bullshit and hypocrisy.

Time to free ourselves from these mistaken beliefs.

Set the captives free.

Review the year in animal rights.  And this is a good point.  But bad news is coming.

Martina Navratilova has a staggering tolerance for assholes.  I would have blocked and permabanned this pest after about two sentences and never given it another thought.

The freedom to be yourself is the freedom conservatives hate.

The enemy seeks to divide us -- don't fall for their tactics.  And people like this Anon can go to Hell.

In some ways the US is like a Third World country.  Then there's this.

Migrants at the border are being held in horrific conditions.

Micah J. Murray looks at a familiar Bible story from a new viewpoint.

A Lunar astronaut assesses the idea of a manned Mars mission.

New genetic technology brings us a step closer to exterminating disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Germany's conservative government is foot-dragging on legal marijuana.

Thuggery is driving Russia's best people away.

African migrants encounter brutality in a country where just being black makes you a target.

Betrayed by Trump, Syria's Kurds turn to the Asad regime.  They may at least be able to keep some US-supplied weapons.

Women in Saudi Arabia protest the veil.

#MeToo is censored in China, but.....

Vagabond Scholar has a lot of cogent observations about the right wing.

Yes, Trump really is more isolated than ever before.  His 2018 is ending in a maelstrom of rage and chaos.  His political survival in 2019 will depend on Republican Senators who are getting tired of his incompetent blundering such as the Syria withdrawal.

Shower Cap reviews shutdown week.

Time to fight back against the bullshit.

Here are some interesting facts about this year's election.

Remember this next time someone promotes voting third-party.

This is how a government shutdown affects those on the receiving end of it.  Trump's base, too, will soon feel the pain.

Missouri Republicans attack democracy.

[710 days down, 752 days to go until the inauguration of a real President!] 

Obervation for the day -- the person is primary

Each human being, each individual human being, exists as a physical entity with self-awareness and thoughts and feelings.  A society or a nation is merely a reified abstraction, a belief within the minds of human individuals.  It exists for us, not we for it.

Holiday odds and ends

Always liked this one.  Liz Mitchell of Boney M sings Feliz Navidad.

Check out Christmas cartoons at Plowing through Life, I Should be Laughing, and Hackwhackers.

Pine for these Christmas gifts of decades past.

If your holidays have been like this, you're doing it wrong.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas with Broken Peach, who even eschewed their usual corpse make-up for the occasion.

If you hunger for the political even today, Crooks and Liars is accepting nominations for the 2018 Crookie Awards.  Only one person is ineligible to be nominated.

Finally, a reminder of what Christmas is, and isn't, really about.

Link round-up for 23 December 2018

I note with annoyance the disappearance of Alle Tanzten mit dem Tod, a Tumblr blog focusing on net neutrality which was formerly on my blogroll -- I've deleted the link since it no longer goes anywhere.  I don't know if it was a victim of Tumblrgeddon (it certainly wasn't sexually-oriented) or if the blogger just quit in disgust.

o o o o o

Technology makes life better -- and more glittery.

I imagine they were all adopted pretty fast.

The Finnish language has some interesting expressions.

Only a true Grinch could dislike this dragon nativity scene.

Unto us a savior is come (found via Scottie).

Help identify this mysterious drug.

Remember the dawn.

If Santa came to your home, could he even get in?

This isn't only Finnish people.

Behold the awesome power of shungite.

Calvin posts a collection of Trump images (don't miss the Republican chain of command).

This actually makes masturbation sound more exciting.

When shopping at Target, be careful how you dress.

"Measles parties" are a good idea, but there may be a better one.

Help them buy ladders.

This is the government now (found via Scottie).

Why do people hang out around blogs they don't even like?

Interesting discussion here about Shakespeare's women characters.

Remember this charming Christmas story.

Trump's bitching about SNL epitomizes hypocrisy (found via Shaw Kenawe).  Other Republicans are hypocrites too (found via Scottie).

Don't accept a terrible present just because of the wrapping.

Tumblr is dead and the community it nurtured is being destroyed.  Management's efforts to explain itself are not impressing the users -- perhaps because they've lied about the policy changes and are blocking bloggers' efforts to archive and thus preserve their material.  Tumblr's automated "adult content" flagger is so bad that it's flagging the management's own examples of what remains acceptable.  The app is back in the Apple store, to a chorus of derision.  Censorship must always be opposed, no matter what is being censored.  In the long run only the user-owned model can save internet culture from the corporate touch of death.

I've often observed that no one foresaw the importance of the internet before it existed, but apparently one person did.

If Heaven exists, where is it?

A majority of US Muslims now support gay marriage -- only one demographic remains opposed.

Theocrats scheme to impose their agenda.

Your free will doesn't count if you do things I disapprove of.

Calvin has some reminders for Trumpanzees.

The Catholic Church in Illinois admits to "only" 185 child molesters in its ranks, but there are hundreds more.

Younger and non-religious Americans -- two groups who represent the wave of the future -- are the most supportive of including abortion in health-care coverage.

Trump dances to Fox's tune.

This must have been a complex relationship.

As religion declines, it loses its ability to revive.

This is what Republicans stand for.

"Survivor bias" can lead to misunderstanding of reality.

Michael Flynn is a very, very bad person.

A map of racial distribution in the US reveals something of interest.

If he talks like a gangster, he probably thinks like one.

"We" didn't get this wrong, the both-siderists did.

This is faith in action.

This Texas town would be divided by Trump's wall.  Green Eagle has a suggestion about the wall (though I think my idea would be simpler).

There are reasons why modern cars are built the way they are.

"Intelligent design" is a nonsensical idea.

This is what bionic technology is doing now.

Plant-based meat substitutes may help wean humans off of eating real corpse parts.

InSight takes its first selfie, and things look good.

The departure of Mattis makes the world a more dangerous place.  The top US envoy to the anti-Dâ'ish coalition has also quit in disgust.

The Katowice conference, ignoring Trump, has reached consensus on implementing the Paris climate agreement.

Our blue wave election last month is echoed by state-level liberal wins in India against that country's ruling religio-authoritarian party.

There's a new category of refugees.

This is what life is like in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan.

China's gangster regime offers cash rewards to turn in writers of "disapproved" material.

Trump's US opposed a UN resolution condemning the execution of gay people (I'm actually far more surprised about Japan).

How things change -- Republicans who spent years trying to destroy the ACA now try to distance themselves from the recent ruling against it.

Trump isn't all that popular with the military (found via Electoral-Vote).

This guy is a complete asshole.

Russian interference in the 2016 election was massive.  Meet one of Putin's useful idiots in the US.

The shrinking Evangelical vote poses a problem for Republicans.

Sheldon Whitehouse wants us to win more (found via Hecate Demeter).

Robert Vella thinks the real Trump crisis is rapidly approaching.

Shower Cap reviews Stephen Miller's hair and the shutdown.

Happy holidays!

[Image at top by The Friendly Pigeon; image at end found via Politics Plus]

Quotes for the day -- waking up

[Last three items found via Scottie]

The skeptical introvert

Like most people, I'm concerned about protecting privacy.  Just as happens in politics, those who hope to profit from invading privacy seek to undermine our morale and paralyze us by convincing us that it's already a lost cause.  I recently read this essay, which is a good example of the "they've already won so you might as well give up" school of defeatism-mongering.

It asserts that Google already knows a terrifying amount of personal information about me, and that there's nothing I can do about it.  I'm highly skeptical on both counts.  According to the essay, Google's "citizen profile" on me includes (among other things) the following:

Every ad you've ever seen or clicked on

How would it know that?  Every ad I've ever seen?  Given how ad-clogged most of the net is these days, I must have seen millions of them.  What would even be the use of knowing such a thing?

Every e-mail you've ever sent

How would it have access to that information?  I have several e-mail accounts for different purposes, and only one (which I rarely use) is a Gmail account.  Does Google somehow have access to e-mails on live.com?

Every image you've ever saved

How?  How is that possible?  I tend to grab any image I see anywhere that looks at all interesting, and I've got tens of thousands of them saved by now.  Saving an image doesn't involve using Google-anything -- you just right-click and choose "save".  And Google somehow knows about every single time I've done that and what the image was?

The main reason I'm skeptical about all this is that supposedly the main reason Google does this is to allow it to target ads to the interests of an individual, and I see no sign that this is being done in my case.  Any system that actually did have access to all my e-mails, every image I've ever saved, every website I visit, etc. would have a vast amount of information about my interests and would be able to target ads accordingly.  Yet I see no sign at all of such targeting in the cacophony of ads that assault me all over the net.  They seem pretty much random.

I can see that it would work if you use Google as a search engine.  For example, I'm considering moving in a few months, and a couple of days ago, when I was on a computer not my own, I used Google to do a bit of research on apartments.  Ever since then, on that computer, I've been bombarded with ads related to apartment-hunting.  But on my own computer, where I don't use Google for searches, I've done the same kind of research and have not seen any ads related to the subject.

Similarly, the linked essay puts a lot of emphasis on monitoring people via their cell phones.  I do have a cell phone, but it's mostly just for emergencies (if I have a car breakdown, for example), and most of the time I don't even have it switched on.  I never use it to connect to the internet, and I don't think it even can do that.  So I don't see how anyone could use it to collect much information about me.

I've heard that Windows 10 collects information on users' browsing (and is generally a terrible system anyway), so I just keep on getting my old Windows 7 computer fixed whenever something goes wrong with it, instead of buying a new one.

I do use Google's Blogger platform for this blog.  It's what I started with, I'm used to it, it's easy and simple to use, and in over twelve years I've never seen any sign that it's gathering information about me.  The sole condition for using it is that I have to keep that "I power Blogger" button in the sidebar.  I don't mind bending my ad-free blog policy to that trivial extent.

Using a search engine other than Google, or the other precautions I've taken for privacy's sake, certainly don't qualify as extreme measures.  They're not even moderately difficult.  I'm considering getting a VPN, but even without one, I've seen no real evidence that anyone can see my internet activity to any useful degree.  Certainly not insofar as I see any sign of anyone using such information to try to sell me things.

If preserving privacy is as easy as using a different search engine and not constantly staring at some hand-held gadget while being oblivious to your surroundings, then it is far from time to give up.

What about the farm animals?

I've posted before about the immorality of eating the flesh of other self-aware animals.  Yesterday blogger Arkenaten put up a post on this issue, and a couple of comments by Nan (of Nan's Notebook) raised a question about it which doesn't get discussed much:

If ALL who currently eat meat were to cease this "horrible" habit, what do you think would happen to the population of the animals currently used for food?.....Consider that ALL animals currently used for food would be allowed to graze unfettered.  They would most obviously take up "ground space.".....Also, many say the methane produced by livestock is contributing to global warming.  What if there were an even greater population of these animals?

It's a question that deserves an honest answer.  I don't think any vegetarian is so naïve as to believe that an end to meat-eating would mean that all the billions of farm animals alive at the present moment would wander off into the wild to live carefree full lives there.  There isn't enough "wild", and most farm animals are domesticated and probably couldn't survive on their own anyway.  If humans stopped eating meat, the animals that are now grown for food would cease to exist.  There's no way around that.  They're utterly dependent for survival on systems which humans would no longer have an incentive to maintain if the animals were no longer of any use to us.

But the horror of meat-eating lies in the fact that billions upon billions of animals, generation after generation of them, are constantly being produced solely to be killed, and in most cases to live stunted and miserable lives before being killed.  If humans stop eating meat, that global industrial-scale suffering ends.  If we continue, it goes on forever, generation upon generation.

In reality, of course, the end of meat-eating will not be a sudden event requiring a mass euthanasia of existing farm animals.  As awareness of the moral issue spreads, meat consumption will gradually decline, and in parallel, animal farming will gradually decrease and fewer farm animals will be bred each year as demand falls.  As meat consumption declines toward zero, the number of farm animals will do so as well.

I do not view this as a loss.  This huge population of mostly-tormented creatures would not exist in the first place if humans had not brought them into being purely in order to kill them later.  No sane human would think a life of suffering lived solely for a purpose imposed by others was worth living at all.  The moral course is to stop creating animals to live such lives.

Link round-up for 16 December 2018

Various interesting stuff I ran across on the net over the last week.

o o o o o

Learn the truth about the Freiburger Münster butt gargoyle.

I could really imagine Trump saying this.

It's Christmas at Boston Dynamics!

Most incompetent burglars ever (found via Calvin).

Some fear that laws will not change as fast as technology.

It's getting hard to tell reality from The Onion.

Check out these proposed Trump movie titles (found via Hackwhackers).

I liked this poem about the epic battle of cat vs. Christmas tree.

Bah!  Humbug!

Scandinavia's Sankta Lucia is yet another pagan deity stolen by Christianity.

Be who you are (found via Calvin).

NASA's plans usually work; this one may not.

Here's a little more on that lunatic with the wedding dress code I linked to last Sunday (scroll down).

Trump gets his own Christmas carols.

See the new members of Congress in emoji form.

Tumblr's review process fine-tunes its ban on NSFW content.

She's not sure whether this photo is of her.

Militant anti-masturbation fanatics come up with the nuttiest conspiracy theory yet.

If English is your native language, remember this.

Religion seems to promote stupid behavior.

One grave, two visitors (found via Scottie).

Here's a great Trump painting (found via Politics Plus).

The Bohemian Rhapsody film focuses on the positive.

I can believe this -- it's the biggest negative about my current job.

A reader who writes for Elder Spark recommended these links to help understand Medicare.

Legislators don't know jack about how the internet works, and you can't explain it to them.

Here's a good discussion of communism and revolution (scroll down to Sviatovid).

Tax harassment of prostitutes probably isn't effective, but it's still nasty.

Kaveh Mousavi answers eleven stupid questions.

Artificial intelligence doesn't "get confused" -- it's much worse than that.

Mountains and con men are a dangerous combination.

The status of free expression at US universities is improving, though not great.

Tumblrgeddon* was partly triggered by SESTA.  Here are five groups that will be harmed.

Fundies fume at Boofy-Boy's betrayal.

Crazy Eddie reviews this year's Nobel prizes.

For those who will be staying off Tumblr tomorrow, here's something else to do.

Both-siderism requires warping of judgment (found via Driftglass).

This loon is an embarrassment even to Republicans.

For those seeking a new blogging platform, Pillowfort has some positives.

Save elephants from cruel abuse in circuses.

Seriously, are there really people who didn't know this?

In reality, anti-Zionism is almost always anti-Semitic.

Censorship has one consistent effect.

A nine-year-old girl was driven to suicide by racist bullying (found via Scottie).

Some student loan debt will soon be canceled (the headline is misleading, though, since DeVos fought against doing this).

Quantum mechanics isn't weird, we are.

Canada has repealed its blasphemy law.

Ireland's Parliament legalizes abortion, in accordance with the referendum earlier this year.

This cult leader claims to be above the law.

A photo exhibit in Rome is closed down after the Vatican bitches about it (so now people all over the world will post about it, you idiots).

Too little, too late -- the US stands up for the Kurds, at least in Syria.

Islam reasserts itself in Libya.

This is how Hamâs celebrates Hanukkah.

The US is coddling and arming the nastiest regime in the Middle East.  How do we get into these positions?

In an echo of our own elections last month, India's ruling Hindu-nationalist party has suffered defeats in state elections.

It's not just Google and China -- Facebook is helping another gangster regime silence dissenters.

Even in the twenty-first century, whole populations are still living without electricity.

Wonkette celebrates Pelosi's epic pwnage of Trump (found via Shaw Kenawe).

Crooks and Liars and Electoral-Vote have background on this week's anti-ACA ruling in Texas.

A Republican legislator can't stomach her party any more.  Neither could this judge.

Can House Democrats get Trump's tax returns?  It's a grey area.

Trump is not predicting an insurrection -- he's inciting one (found via Fair and Unbalanced).

Republicans in 2020 will again have a valuable ally -- left-wing ideological purists.

Anybody smart enough to do this job is smart enough to turn it down.

Trump and his gang respond to the death of Jakelin Caal Maquin with classic racism and callousness.

Where there's smock, there's firp.  And yeah, folks...shit remains decidedly cray.

[*Credit to Debra She Who Seeks for the term]

Video of the day -- Manning Street

People in sixteen houses coordinated to create this.  And presumably paid for the drone to film it.  Found via a comment by Ron at Nan's Notebook.

The madness

Second item (with church signs) found via Darwinfish 2; several others found via Scottie's Toy Box.

The touch of death

Last week I posted about Tumblr's sudden ban on sexually-oriented material and the tsunami of anger and ridicule with which Tumblr bloggers have responded.  So far there is no sign of Tumblr management backing down, as Google Blogger did in a somewhat similar situation in 2015.  So now Tumblr's inhabitants are focused more on finding a new refuge to which they can flee from their doomed homeworld.  It's a search in which I have an interest, because the vast Tumblr community produces a lot of interesting stuff -- just look how many of the links in my own weekly link round-ups go to their blogs.

The effects of the ban are already visible in the blogosphere.  Some Tumblr blogs I regularly read have stopped posting or drastically slowed down; one has been deleted entirely, and I hope the artist who posted it has back-ups of all her material.  Some are focusing on sharing methods of backing up endangered blogs, and at least one archiving site plans an all-out effort to save what Tumblr management is about to destroy.  Other bloggers have decided to go out with a bang, posting sarcastic memes about the doomed resistance, or irreverent videos like this one and this one.

The corporate grey men in grey suits, fixated on winning the advertising dollars controlled by other grey men in grey suits, never had any hope of understanding the vast and colorful culture to which their very touch is death.  To start with, the average age of Tumblr bloggers is 26 and they are 72% female.  There is a historical pattern of social media platforms being destroyed by corporate attempts to "monetize" them, because such attempts always mean limiting or censoring "undesirable" material or posters.  In the long run, corporate ownership is lethal to internet culture.

I previously mentioned AO3, a fan-owned site which covers expenses by soliciting money from users, to avoid the traps of corporate ownership and advertising.  AO3 is a fanfic archive, not a blogging platform -- but this is very valuable, since fanfic often explores NSFW themes and thus gets targeted by the bluenoses.  And its user-funded model could certainly work for a blogging platform.

At least two such platforms do exist -- Pillowfort and Dreamwidth, both of which have been swamped with inquiries from Tumblr bloggers about joining.  But Pillowfort is new and still in development, and could be overwhelmed by the refugee horde.  Dreamwidth is actively trying to make Tumblr's loss its own gain (thanks to Pinku-Sensei for the link), though with its active user base in the tens of thousands and its somewhat limited features, it would strain to accommodate even a fraction of Tumblr's hundreds of millions of bloggers.  Here's a "masterpost of Tumblr alternatives" geared toward various kinds of posting; some, such as DeviantArt, are already know to all, but others are new to me and I'll be giving them a look.

MSM stories about the ban often refer to "porn bloggers" or cite a percentage of Tumblr's traffic which is drawn there by erotica, as if there were a sort of sexually-explicit section of Tumblr, distinct and divisible from the rest of it.  But this false dichotomy is itself an imposition by the prudish and diseased mainstream culture upon a community to which it is largely foreign.  Bloggers post about their personal lives and desires or their fantasies about fictional characters; sometimes this involves sexually-explicit writing or art, sometimes it doesn't.  But the concept of a sharp dividing line exists mostly in the minds of outsiders.  Most of the Tumblr blogs I read rarely or never post NSFW material, but their solidarity with those who do has been exemplary.  It's all one culture.

Not everyone on Tumblr has decided to leave -- many are planning a mass protest on December 17 in hopes of getting management to reverse the ban.  But history suggests that such efforts will fail.

Tumblr's eventual destruction was predicted by this blogger five years ago when Yahoo first bought it.  Such things have happened before.  It was LiveJournal's crackdown on sexually-oriented material in 2007 that led to the implosion of that platform and a mass migration to Tumblr, which set the latter on the road to becoming the blogging colossus it is today.  But those who know nothing of such history are doomed to repeat it.  And Tumblr is not alone -- Facebook is making similar policy changes, though more sneakily.  Some say it's Apple that is driving this.

We must see to it that the user-funded model represented by platforms like AO3 and Dreamwidth becomes the wave of the future.  Yes, I understand the appeal of free blogging, but nothing of value is truly free -- you are posting on a platform controlled by members of the 1% who neither understand you nor care about you, or which could be sold to such people at any time.  There are hundreds of millions of us.  Together we can support platforms on the scale we need to free the whole blogosphere from the strangling grasp of "the economy".

Link round-up for 9 December 2018

Various interesting stuff I ran across on the net over the last week.

o o o o o

How the hell does this "free sample" offer work?

Exercise is healthy, but don't overdo it.

Geraldo gets pwned.

There really is a war on Christmas.

Tariff Man is a superhero like no other.

This is why palm trees don't make good Christmas trees (found via Politics Plus).  But the college set gets creative.

Read a discussion on dragon evolution.

Here's how to understand Canadian temperatures.

That's a lot of data.

Enjoy some Christmas cartoons.  Then get the most evolved Christmas ornament ever.

Don't be this person.

Thanks goodness they were wrong about how people in the future would dress (found via Calvin).

This cat looks kind of startled (NSFW).

If Trump really wanted Hillary locked up.....

I pity the person who's marrying this lunatic.

What can we do to stop living in fear?

This looks kind of cool.

He's not even a good muppet.

Laura Loomer becomes tiresome.

What you see depends on who you are.

The best kind of sacrilege is the amusing kind.  Or the kind that freaks out the enemy.

We may need help to bring democracy to North Carolina (found via Fair and Unbalanced).

Trump seems a bit agitated lately, plus seals who snort eels, and other news.

There's only one conservative-approved route to success.

Your vacuum cleaner may be spying on you (found via Juanita Jean).

Twitter is banning "incorrect" thought.

There's a lot of truth in this, if you think about it.

"Baby, It's Cold Outside" isn't what you think; most radio listeners agree.

These fish are too big.

The Salvation Army is even worse than you thought.

Ross Douthat yearns for the rule of rich, Christian white males (isn't that basically the point of the Republican party anyway?)

I'm against laws banning hate speech, but in extreme cases maybe it should have warning labels.

Bluzdude debunks some superficially-plausible bullshit, and finds one nugget of solid truth.

If you're tired of all the stupidity, click here to listen to a smart guy for 20 minutes.

This is what happens when you treat all cultures as equal.

Professor Taboo looks at the holidays and (American) football.

The "real Americans" are us, not them.

It is necessary to debate uncomfortable questions.

Republicans may use the 25th Amendment to dodge responsibility for Trump.

Neil deGrasse Tyson responds to accusations of sexual impropriety (found via Fair and Unbalanced).

Don't expect me to believe in your religion when you can't even agree among yourselves about what it is.

Here is the kind of utter drivel the QAnon qrackpots think is meaningful.

Williams College displays cowardice on free expression.

Aww, how sad, nobody loves a hater.

This map of US life expectancy should surprise no one.

Sorry, Trump can't revive coal.

The lead author of the National Climate Assessment responds to wingnut morons claiming scientists are in it for the money.  Here's a discussion on the mentality behind denialism.  Global warming is becoming a "medical emergency".

Twitter enforces Pakistani censorship laws -- in Canada.

Denmark finds a bad place for bad people.

Disapprove of your neighbor's religion?  There's an app for that.

Ebola has spread to a major city, increasing the danger.

Yes, it was a blue tsunami, with the biggest Democratic House gain since 1974.  Respect the will of the voters.

The Pose Initiative will target anti-gay politicians.

Republicans' electoral strategy is simply thievery.

Betsy DeVos hasn't gotten much done.

Shower Cap reviews a hectic political week.

"There’s an expression about people in glass houses....."

Trump is cornered.  But he's leaving a godawful mess to clean up after he's gone.

[Image at top found via Calvin]