Link round-up for 22 August 2021
o o o o o
Bizarre cartoons here.
Leave no moose behind.
A blogger rants about owls.
See if you can bear these cartoons.
Parasitic brain fungus, QBorg.....
Hmm, a rather dubious interaction.
Evidently it's unwise to startle a horse.
Mysterious infertility crisis stumps researchers.
Everybody just relax.
Books tell a story.
Witness the great Lane county exploding whale of 1970, an immortal moment in Oregon history.
Maybe aliens exist but they're just completely incompetent.
Who will save us from these merciless marauders?
This museum exists (found via Mock Paper Scissors).
Know your truck breeds.
Weighty humor here.
If you rub this lamp, what comes out won't be a genie.
Yeah, right, that's why he was doing it.
To find compatible people, pursue your own interests.
Did you know goldfish can get this big?
Spooky shrooms for Halloween here.
Even the USS Enterprise is going down the tubes (the last two designs are horrible -- what the hell were they thinking?).
This is a weird door.
Instead of diamonds, choose moissanite.
Some interesting thoughts on art here.
Nice shooting.
Well, dam.
Very cool photos here. Apparently the first one is San Francisco; the building on the lake under a pink-tinged sky is the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India.
People's driving now stinks worse than ever.
Yeah, right, moron jizz is going to become a hot commodity.
It's just a social construct.
Murr Brewster dissects a covidiot.
In a new novel, even Hell goes on strike.
Religion is ridiculous.
Here's why CAPTCHA pictures are so dreary (found via Miss Cellania).
The Catholic Church in Brazil is rocked by a wanking bishop scandal. What, they were all out of altar boys to molest?
Harry Truman explains the truth about socialism.
Who the hell thought this "art" was a good idea for a public park?
There is only one dream job.
The sky in Las Vegas is at the mercy of smoke from California's fires (click pics for bigger).
We keep hearing that wind turbines kill lots of birds, but in fact they're barely putting a dent in the problem. Cats are still the most effective abatement mechanism.
Trae Crowder laments rampant dumbth in his home state.
AutisticAF discusses the psychological dissociation that results from prolonged stress.
"Hate the sin, love the sinner", and..... (found via Mike).
Covidiots have found a new way to kill themselves.
Bruce Gerencser discusses the long-term fate of his blog.
Don't be this guy. There are other options.
Like Tumblr and other platforms before it, OnlyFans is now turning against the NSFW content creators who built it up.
"It's too late to fix global warming" -- is exactly what the enemy wants you to believe.
Wingnuts find certain masks acceptable.
The Alabama coal-miners' strike has now lasted for five months (more links at that page).
Even within the US, evolution is clearly winning the argument against creationism, with the number accepting it rising from 40% to 54% between 2007 and 2019.
Oregon's governor has signed a bill to make the state's high-school diplomas meaningless and useless.
Where hospitals are swamped, give anti-vaxers appropriate treatment.
This poor man is suffering terribly due to Biden's policies.
Blue cities in red states are increasingly defiant of Republican bullying.
A truly "green" company won't enforce unnecessary driving.
These turdules need to go back and learn what a university is for.
Depriving people of pain medications is literal torture -- also some interesting history from Prohibition.
Hometown USA blog returns with a letter on the Jan 6 lynch-mob attack.
Covidiocy was never about freedom of choice.
When the enemy tells you what they are, believe them.
At least one US politician is willing to do something concrete to help the Afghans.
Activism has no place in therapy.
Blogger Kay in Hawaii is getting wingnut idiocy via e-mail.
The insane drive to re-open schools in-person is already creating a wave of new covid-19 infections in Florida. In Georgia, infuriated parents are pulling their kids out of school.
It's pointless to argue with true believers.
The "woke" left and the alt-right are more alike than either one realizes.
If you're confused about what "incels" are, here's a sample of the incel mentality.
This guy defines the word "asshole" (found via Hackwhackers).
"Long covid" (persistent symptoms after surviving covid-19) is serious business.
Shakespeare didn't send death threats.
Better pay for people in shitty jobs also benefits people in better jobs.
People who believe this.....walk among us.
The pope is a hypocrite (so what else is new.....).
"Defund the police" is massively unpopular, especially with minorities, and cost the Democrats House seats in 2020.
A nurse confronts senseless deaths. Health-care workers are tiring of the selfish hypocrisy of anti-vaxers. At least the explosion of disease is inducing more people to get vaccinated.
"Monkey haters" on YouTube are promoting animal torture (warning: seriously disturbing descriptions).
In the UK, the Conservatives are doing better on women's rights than the left-wing Labour party, which seems to be actively driving women away (and the left wonders why they're imploding at the ballot box).
The archbishop of Dublin whines that Catholicism is dying out in Ireland, which it formerly ruled with an iron fist.
Compare US and Spanish health-care systems. Here's how we look (found via Yellowdog Granny).
Do not shout down the voice of the oppressed.
"This is not Saigon" -- yes it is.
Two determined American women, and the government of Qatar, rescued Afghanistan's girls robotics team from the disaster.
Women are already disappearing from the streets in Afghanistan. Keep the focus on what matters. This Iranian journalist doesn't trust the Taliban's reassurances -- well, we're talking about guys who will fight for the right to impregnate a 13-year-old. For now, it's not clear how bad things will ultimately get.
The Taliban have begun torturing and killing members of the Hazara minority (who are mostly Shiite, while the Taliban and most Afghans are Sunni), and rounding up people who worked with the US or the previous government. A resistance movement is already forming up, but the Taliban's biggest problem is a new generation far more savvy about technology and human rights.
The US defies the fascist Chinese regime by meeting with the Tibetan government-in-exile.
More links at Perfect Number and Fair and Unbalanced.
o o o o o
In case you missed it -- this week I posted on the fall of Afghanistan and some personal issues with eye health.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:39 AM
11 Comments:
Hi!
Read about your eyes. IF you have cataract surgery... you will not believe the difference.
I wish I knew more about macular degeneration. Knew someone intimately a couple decades ago. Treatment must have advanced.
I hope you keep us apprised.
You're a treasure. And inspiration.
J.
I didn't know the Afghanistan girls' robotics team had been rescued. Really glad to hear that. They would have disappeared had the Taliban gotten a hold of them.
Some very neat things; some very awful things. It's getting more and more difficult to see beauty in the world.
Thank you for posting that link to my blog. I appreciate it. Glad you enjoyed the pictures.
That Facebook warning about you violating rules they haven't made up yet is kinda true. I got in trouble twice for pictures I posted 6 years ago. It's crazy.
I laughed at the reenactment of the creepy owls.
That lamp. I have no words.
I knew goldfish got big but dang.
Best wishes on the eye situation.
The Taliban don't have enough fighters to effectively control the entire country and can only do so as long as enough of the tribes support them.
While I am not expert on Afghan history, from reading about what happened to the British contingent retreating from Kabul in 1841, Afghan tribes are notoriously fickle. They will steadfastly support you until the moment they no longer believe you can win, and then they will turn on you in the blink of an eye. Nearly half of Afghanistan's districts have been contested for years, because the Afghan government army could not eliminate the Taliban even with our assistance and the Taliban could not defeat the Afghan government army as long as it was supported by the United States.
Consequently, there has always been a lot of hedge betting by the Afghan people during our military presence there. I remember reading an article about an Afghan family that had a son fighting for the Afghan army and another son who was with the Taliban.
I just read that there are indications that anti-Taliban resistance is forming up in the Panjshir Valley, the old stronghold of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, by Massoud's son and others. While their prospects are probably not that great, all it takes is for them to defeat a Taliban force in a battle in conjunction with the Taliban abusing their authority elsewhere to spark a general uprising against them across the country. The Taliban by themselves are too thinly spread to fight everywhere at once.
Johnny: Thank you for the encouragement and kind words. It means a lot.
Even during the time my mother was being treated for macular degeneration, the treatments advanced. The eye injections went from once a month to once every three or four months. And her vision improvement after cataract surgery was remarkable.
Mike: Yes, it's a little good news in the midst of all this. I doubt the Taliban approve of girls getting into technology.
Sicko: It's there, if you look for it. But there's plenty of ugliness too, especially where religion rears its head.
Mary K: They were good pictures and really illustrate how bad the smoke is, even hundreds of miles away.
I strongly suspect whoever designed that lamp knew exactly what he was doing. And I had no idea goldfish were so variable in size. It's lucky they don't get so huge in people's aquariums.
Tommykey: Those are all good points. It's a cliché (and not really true) that Afghanistan has never been conquered, but it's a notoriously difficult country to control, and what the British and Russians and Americans couldn't do, maybe the Taliban can't do either. They never had undisputed control back in the nineties either.
Infidel, that's quite right. The land that currently comprises what is today's Afghanistan was conquered many times. Interestingly, a lot of people don't know that a little over 2,000 years ago, the region was ruled by a kingdom of Bactrian Greeks (Kings and Generals on YouTube has an interesting video about it). Western Afghanistan was often controlled by various Persian dynasties over the centuries (and even today, the city of Herat in Afghanistan is culturally Persian), while Kabul was often under the control of Indian based empires such as the Moghuls.
In fact, for most of history, there really wasn't anything we would recognize as an Afghan nation at all. The beginnings of "modern" Afghanistan goes back to the 18th century, when a power vacuum resulted from the decline of the Persian and Moghul empires. For a few decades, an Afghan based dynasty called the Durrani arose and exploited the vacuum to become the most powerful state in the region. It pretty much collapsed by the early 19th century. That Afghanistan wasn't conquered is that it's geography and remoteness made it a convenient buffer state between British India and Tsarist Russia so that their troops would not bump into each other and set off a war.
Yes, it was the first (Achaemenid) Persian Empire that I had in mind -- it ruled the area which is now Afghanistan for over 200 years. Egypt was actually much harder for them to keep under control than the Afghan territory was. And the Islamic Empire certainly imposed itself strongly enough to Islamicize what's now Afghanistan pretty thoroughly.
WTF w/the "The woke termites burrow their way into therapists’ offices" link? Likewise the "Dr Tara Gustilo’s EEOC discrimination claim" link found in a comment to the former item? I thought I had my head wrapped around the CRT stuff, the BLM concepts, i.e., sure, all lives matter but there are a disproportionate number of people with dark skin in relation to their local population presence in the total numbers of people murdered by police officers.(BTW, Austin TX is living proof of modern-day racism/segregation/discrimination against POC) Then I read this stuff, are they pro/con/wtf? Why did you include that link, fwiw? Oh & all the best w/your eyes, my mother had major problems like yours esp. after 87. I am 65, weed is legal here...
Pro or con what? Coyne and Satel are just pointing out an obvious problem. I included the link for the same reason I include any link -- I thought it was interesting. I don't generally read the comments on Coyne's posts, though, so I don't know about the other item.
Thanks about the eyes. Slowly improving, I think.
Maybe the whyevolutionistrue.com is just a poorly-written post, I dunno. But whenever I see "recovered memory" that's a red flag for 'impending bullshit' unless it's someone denouncing the practice. Just like "homeopathic" or "astrologic", I can't/don't take it seriously. And I can't tell if the author of that piece is advocating or denouncing BLM advocacy as IMHO clearly racism is systemically baked into US society. As a white person this is not a reason for me to feel guilt, it is a reason for me to look for ways to make things better in terms of race relations, which I have tried to do in my life when possible. Personally I want to live in a color-blind society but since the f*cking civil war of 1865 has not yet ended we have a long f*cking way to go, eh?
While it's soapbox time let me throw this out, ok? There's a biological gender and a psychological gender. Some biological females would rather be treated as men w/the privileges & responsibilities therein. Some biological males would rather be treated as women w/the privileges & responsibilities therein save for periods, pregnancy, etc. And then there are some bastards that take advantage of others, these are the men in women's prisons, men in women's athletic programs, men in women's "safe spaces". Men who have no damn business getting any sympathy from anyone whatsoever, men who shame either sex. Phooey!
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