Link round-up for 8 September 2019

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

o o o o o

This is the future liberals want.

Have some reptile cartoons.

Jabba the Hutt wants to molest your car.

You know what's going to happen here.

Justine's Halloween is already shopping for decorations.

Well, that's an incentive.

Typo of the week.

"All artists are guilty of the horny."

Where'd it go?

This was Carrie Fisher's house.

Somebody is idiotizing five-dollar bills.

"Jesus lives in my heart....."

Here's a remarkably smart and attentive dog.

This is me, but in the mornings.

RO looks at murder mysteries, car thieves, spiders, underwear, Reno, and a bunch of other stuff.

Whoever programmed this system was an idiot -- read the replies too (found via Miss Cellania).

"Be a freak and love yourself for it."

Pence is the quintessential Republican.

Is shopping for women's clothes really this bad?

See the Northern Lights over Iceland.

There's nothing wrong with "sounding gay" (whatever that even means).

Nine lives.....

The Catholic Church obsessively disapproves of one of the most harmless of all human activities.

Debra She Who Seeks has some reminders for Labor Day.  Here's one more.  Padre Steve looks at history.

Summertime brings assholes.

"In place of the nothing there is me / And always was."  Seriously, read this.

The internet still can't replace libraries.

The ICE raids in Mississippi have had some ripple effects.

This is both-siderism in a nutshell.

Facebook makes you sick.  So does pessimism.

Dorian was God punishing the Bahamas.

The corporate types are starting to believe their own bullshit, apparently.

Trump is scamming his marks with sharpie-gate.  And he's inspiring others.

There's a rich history of freedom from religion among black Americans.

Besides Verizon and its stupid rules, Tumblr has a problem with toxic culture (see last parts of post).

According to Mozilla, the current version of Firefox blocks tracking cookies.

Mall-Wart makes things tougher for poorer gun owners.

This particular scam is hard to avoid.

The blogs I Should Be Laughing and Lo Imprescindible express opposing views on naming-and-shaming Trump donors.

Millions of people believe they're surrounded by warring legions of invisible spooks (read the comments too).

What if Hitler had been assassinated in 1930?

Moscow Mitch is a hypocrite.  But you knew that.  And here's why he hates his new moniker.

Even within the US, supporters of the Beijing regime behave like thugs.

Times have changed.

Trumpanzees fall disgracefully silent about Trump's latest attack on military families.

Keeping teens ignorant about sexuality can only do harm.

Private ISPs had their chance -- it's time to nationalize the internet.

"It's not 'future liberals want' it's 'people conservatives want to eradicate'."  Notice the swastika avatar among the "likes" on the original post.

Fox News tells the truth for once; Trump throws a hissy fit.  His aides are more and more worried about his mental stability.

A bad enough diet can have serious consequences.

Here's a report from that "straight pride parade" in Boston.  Charges against arrested counter-protesters are being upheld.

Professor Chaos reports on that Catholic school which banned Harry Potter because they think it's real witchcraft.  Yes, the Catholic Church still has exorcists and the ritual still exists; exorcists have been ranting against Harry Potter for some time, and He Who Zings Rats has agreed.

A flagrantly anti-Semitic judge cannot give a Jewish defendant a fair trial.

Abuse can happen to anyone.

Privileging religious bigotry against gays opens the door for racism too.  The venue's apology is kind of weird -- generations of slave-owners and segregationists had no difficulty finding justification for their views in the Bible.  I think this person just freaked out at the backlash and wanted a pretext to back down.

No, the Amazon is not "the lungs of the planet", and no, it does not produce 20% of the world's oxygen.  More here from an atmospheric scientist.  These fires are a real problem, but talking easily-refuted nonsense isn't helping anything.

India's lunar lander appears to have failed, though the orbiter part of the mission carries on.

Suicide is much more common in regions at high elevation.

Offshore wind farms are enhancing biodiversity.

Brain scans are helping us understand how dogs really think.

There's an art to taking naps.

A minor mystery about T-Rex skulls may have been solved.

The BAT can harvest wind energy from high in the sky.

In the UK, the enemies of democracy and independence have stopped a move to hold a new election.  A new election would likely produce an increased Conservative majority and thus ease the path to Brexit -- but the people must not be heard if they'd vote against what the pro-EU elites want.  Still, Johnson has some options.  His decisiveness after three years of fiddle-faddling around has probably improved the party's chances.  And May's Brexit deal may be back on the table.

At a tense political moment in the UK, a defector from the Conservative party proves toxic.

Iceland greets Pence.  More here.

Demographic changes are forcing Hezbollah to be more restrained.

In Beirut, stand-up comedy pushes the envelope.

Call this what it is -- Islamic barbarism.

To handle the Middle East, we need to deal with Iran.

The return of theocracy to Afghanistan would be a disaster for women.

Indian authorities harass journalists as part of their media black-out in Kashmir.

China exports dirty coal power technology that exacerbates global warming.

The Indonesian government is blocking the internet as it tries to crush the independence movement in western Papua.

Days of mob violence and looting against foreigners in South Africa have led to reprisals against South Africans in Nigeria and a widening breach in relations between the two countries.

There are more fires raging in Africa right now than in the Amazon.

Joni Ernst doesn't understand democracy.  I wouldn't trust her with Social Security either.

Trump is the party, the party is Trump.

Here's an overview of Senate races where we have a shot.

Republicans are especially afraid of losing state legislatures next year.

O'Rourke and Abrams need to put ego aside and do the right thing.

Don't be misled by crowd sizes.

Marianne Williamson joins the right-wing "pray away hurricanes" crackpottery.  She deleted that tweet, but has also blamed mass shootings on entertainment media and video games.  Why doesn't this nutjob just run as a Republican?

Trump's response to the slowing economy is to bash the media and Democrats, perhaps laying the groundwork for a Dolchstoßlegende in case he loses next year.

Texas Republicans worry about their grip on the state.  The issue isn't so much Latinos, it's immigration of more liberal voters from other parts of the US.

Tribal leaders are determined to protect the vote in North Carolina next week.

In a milestone, the Democratic party explicitly embraces non-religious Americans.  I guess there are finally too many of us to ignore.

Here's Republican policy, summed up.

Inslee won't be President, but Warren has adopted his climate plan.

More links here.