Link round-up for 28 November 2021
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Remember your (p)assword.
Animals can be goofy.
It's OK to knock it even if you haven't tried it.
New reason to like socialists here.
Apparently Star Wars is better in Portuguese.
Music awards here, for a crazy time.
Enjoy undersea humor here.
This person exists.
This person exists.
This person exists.
This person exists.
This table exists (slightly NSFW).
This substance exists.
Jive turkey!
Cat time!
Life imitates art.
Explore the world of giant dildos.
Whoever placed this sticker knew exactly what he was doing.
"Please close all portals when finished."
Imagine if books were really what their covers suggest.
Lady M has some Thanksgiving cartoons.
Remember the true meaning of Christmas.
Your refrigerator is plotting against you.
Leave the leaves!
Get happy.
The old Algerian lady may have a point.
The Rittenhouse verdict has created a climate of fear in the streets.
Gosh, why do people quit jobs?
Glide in for a perfect landing.
2 out of 5 stars, would not bang.
FFS not every damn thing needs to have software.
Nice song here by a group I hadn't heard of before.
This guy's efforts at being threatening need a lot of work.
Make your game realistic (found via Yellowdog Granny).
She has met her enemy, and.....
Another win for workers -- Target stores will never again be open on Thanksgiving.
Here's a huge listing of sites that offer the full text of entire books for free online. It's five years old, so I can't be sure every single link is still good, but the ones I looked at are.
The Bible story of Satan tempting Jesus is logically impossible.
Options here for donating to help the hungry.
Fish!
Children at play tend to look remarkably alike.
Wind turbine blades are recyclable.
This is the Bigar waterfall in Romania.
This is the land of my ancestors.
Here's a new high-resolution view of the Andromeda galaxy (found via Hackwhackers). These stars are so far away that the light now reaching us from them left them more than two million years ago.
A few hundred thousand years ago, there were several species of humans. Why was ours the only one to survive?
NASA launches a test of technology to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.
See video of a Soviet H-bomb test from 1955.
Some want victims to stay victims.
His name was Thomas.
Oregon sex workers say that Kristoff as governor would be a threat to their safety and rights.
Never feel obligated to give strangers personal information.
Aside from its notorious anti-gay stance, the Salvation Army is racist.
Individuals are wonderful; groups are poison.
Who killed Jesus?
Narcissism ultimately defeats itself.
Don't be an asshole to retail workers.
The US can be a scary place.
These bloggers claim the media often change the skin color in photos of criminal suspects. I have no idea how common this actually is.
Bullshit, it's all bullshit.
Walgreens and Target are closing stores and reducing hours in San Francisco due to chronic shoplifting.
Here's an examination of the "Hell is just separation from God" claim.
Religion is arrogant and immoral.
The existing covid-19 vaccines will probably still work against the new omicron variant.
The ever-sensible Arielle Scarcella explores the outer reaches of gender lunacy and takes an in-depth look at "fat positivity" and oppression.
People with unrealistic expectations and no clue how things actually get done are dissatisfied with Biden.
Kevin McCarthy appears to have accomplished a miracle -- getting Lauren Boebert to apologize for something.
Always beware of religionists trying to impose legal privileges for religion.
There are victims in the Rittenhouse case.
A pastor can tell us who is "the best person to rape".
Drunks and anti-maskers have been assholing like crazy on airplanes, and it's a danger to everyone.
Religion is toxic to mental health.
Kara Dansky pleads with the Democratic party to come back to reality.
A fringe anti-vax doctors' conference has led to at least seven covid-19 infections.
Class war is already being waged -- by the wealthy parasite class. We just need to start fighting back.
Don't mistake cargo-cult science for the real thing.
People get raped in prison all the time, so just take it and quit bitching about it. Some left-media reportage on the WoLF lawsuit is beyond disgusting -- discussion here.
Candidates like Lucas Kunce offer a way forward for the Democrats.
The Rittenhouse verdict has clarified some things.
Be grateful to the health-care workers who haven't quit yet.
Anthony Broadwater has finally been exonerated after spending sixteen years in prison for a crime he almost certainly didn't commit.
Teachers in Los Angeles have been caught spying on and grooming kids.
Why is the Ghislaine Maxwell trial getting so little coverage?
A top Canadian QAnon qrackpot is telling her followers to kill anybody who tries to stop covid-19 from spreading among kids.
A Toronto school canceled an event with former Dâ'ish (ISIL) sex slave Nadia Murad because it might "foster Islamophobia".
Canada is considering criminalizing dissent from trans ideology (found via Aunt Polly). Americans, be grateful for the First Amendment.
A new attempt to menace JK Rowling provokes a backlash. Rowling responds. Not everyone gets the message.
In the UK, too, covid-19 is mostly a disease of the unvaccinated.
A mother struggles to save her daughter from gender brainwashing.
Preserving a minority language needs more than just people learning it.
Schools in Scotland are installing gender-neutral toilets, but girls are refusing to use them due to boys' obnoxious behavior.
Why do fast-food workers in Denmark make $20 an hour? Because Danish workers stand up to corporate bullshit, big time. We could do the same.
Having passed a draconian anti-abortion law, the Polish government is now considering a law that would register every pregnancy. Belgium and the Netherlands are offering free abortions for Polish women.
The "village idiot" was the most decent guy in town.
Ukraine has uncovered a Russian-backed coup plot against its government. Ukraine would be a tough nut to crack militarily, so expect more such tactics from Putin.
Much of the anti-vax propaganda in the US and western Europe emanates from Russian troll farms, but the scheme is backfiring as vaccine rejection spreads back into Russia itself (found via Earth-Bound Misfit).
Erdoğan's Islamic economics is ruining Turkey.
I see something that looks like apartheid.
Emerging-market funds that avoid China are doing better than those which invest in it -- and investors are taking note.
The Beijing regime is in a colossal snit about Biden inviting Taiwan to the upcoming democracy summit. Sorry, assholes, it is a democracy.
Weary of China's arrogance and threats, free countries world-wide are rallying around Taiwan.
More links at Fair and Unbalanced.
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My posts this week: a song by Russian pop singer Glukoza; a note on the "Black Friday" Amazon strike; and my personal dream of offending an alien.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:16 AM
12 Comments:
The old Algerian lady had an excellent point!
The baby elephant chasing birds was wonderful. (But note: the mother put a stop to it.)
The "village idiot" should be awarded a posthumous medal.
Lots of other good stuff, but these are what touched me today.
Thanks for all of the work you do to put this together.
Land of your ancestors? Also mine, but I still live here... Yeah, that's all quaint and all that... But what about the Tyne Bridge? Or the Stockport Viaduct? The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank? I grew up walking distance from George Stephenson's house. I also know exactly where Joseph Swan had his lab and my fellow Geordie, William Armstrong, had the first electrically lit house in the world. He also had proper bathrooms - with proper flush toilets rather than shitting in a bucket and chucking it out the window. My country was the crucible of all this stuff we call "modern" - it started here and it continues (where did the Astra-Zeneca vaccine come from?) because we are not Hobbiton. And we haven't been since Hannah Ayscough decided her son wasn't going to be any good as a farmer so he might as well go to college...
A couple of years back my wife bought me a training flight in a DH Tiger Moth. That was super cool. That was from Imperial War Museum's air branch, Duxford (it's better than the NASM btw) just outside of Cambridge. Whilst in the town I took the opportunity to see Trinity College's Library. That day (they don't always) they had their first edition copy of The Principia on display. It was Newton's own copy with his hand-written changes for the second edition.
As a physics graduate... It was emotional. Because whilst that wasn't exactly where the fire started though Newton certainly chucked some petrol onto the crucible of science.
Science Junkie has quite a collection of book links. I'll be passing this post along.
Ricko: Glad you found some interesting items. The Algerian lady story reminds us that when people have to make up problems to keep themselves occupied, they probably don't have much in the way of real problems.
The mother elephant was cool with the baby playing until it fell down, then she started walking over out of concern, and the baby ran to its mother for comfort. Very human-like.
Sukhinski did at least get some recognition from the Israeli state for his good work.
NickM: Remember, in these link round-ups, I never think of a point I want to make and then go looking for a link to illustrate it -- I find things that look interesting and then have to come up with a short description to give readers some idea of what they'll get if they click on the link. Of course I know the UK is very modern. But when I saw those pictures, they were a reminder that it also has a kind of beauty not to be found in our own country.
Mike: I'll be spending some time with that list as well.
OK, sorry... Maybe I'm a bit touchy on the subject because I do live in a house older than your republic. A lot of the USA is almost disturbingly modern - Atlanta springs to mind - Margaret Mitchell's house* is about the oldest structure and that is flanked by steel and glass high-rises. It looks very odd in that context. An Atlantan told me he reckoned it was because of the Civil War during which Sherman burnt the city to the ground and therefore eternal renewal kinda got into the culture.
But a lot isn't. The City of Savannah, also in Georgia, is a counterpoint. What (didn't) happen there is quite interesting. Essentially after Sherman's march from Atlanta to the Sea - destroying everything (you know what a Sherman necktie is?) in his path - Savannah just put up a white flag. The decider was the fall of Fort Pulaski and that happened very quickly due to the Union use of Armstrong-Whitworth rifled cannon (yes, the same Geordie Armstrong**). Basically the Union could accurately bombard the fort at a range the Confederates couldn't match so they knew the game was up almost before it started. The upshot of this is both Fort Pulaski and Savannah survived essentially intact. Savannah has the largest "Historical District" in the USA. It's worth a look although I appreciate it's almost as far from you in Oregon as it is from me in Cheshire, just south of Manchester.
When I visited Savannah I rather liked it. I wandered around the park where (I did not know this at the time) Forest Gump (a truly tedious movie) waited for a bus with his box of chocolates. The same park had a statue of the Methodist John Wesley. This really spooked me. Just down the road from where I grew up in Gateshead, England is "Wesley's Mount" where he once preached but he was also Bishop of Savannah... I'd got there via a Boeing 767 and a Honda so big ol' stove-pipe hats off to the fella! I'm no Methodist but Bloody Hellskis he seriously got around!
It also made me realise that our countries are closer than many think and that link certainly wasn't severed in 1776.
*Yes, she of "Gone with the Wind" fame - a movie I've never been able to watch start to finish. It's just so slow. `
**The South thought they could push the British Empire (which was actively against slavery) to their cause. This didn't work not least because Britain had, via the Empire, a lot of other sources for cotton to keep the mills of Lancashire going. In a spectacularly misguided stunt the Confederacy torched a load of raw cotton on the docks of New Orleans. The Brits just thought, shame, but we've got India... Back of the net!
A lot of my sentimentality about Britain probably comes from all the long conversations I had about it with my mother, who was increasingly homesick for it towards the end of her life, even as her physical deterioration made travel unthinkable. I also grew up in a household much more permeated with the culture of "the old country" than most children of immigrants do. Where our roots come from does matter.
I didn't know quite how closely you were British Infidel! Maybe I'm not used to that because my experience of the USA comes mainly from having spent three years in a relationship with a woman who was, in principle, eligible to join the DAR. Her family on her Dad's side were in the USA before there was a USA. Of course I suspect at a very deep level where one just feels at home matters a lot as well. I feel that in the USA as well as the UK. And oddly in Poland where one of my sisters-in-law lives. It helps that her husband (a Pole) is enormously anglophilic and a huge fan of Tolkien (as am I). They'd just got a real big-screen projection TV and the full director's cut box-set of LoTR and I was invited for a weekend of beer and hobbits - but then Covid struck. Bugger. I'd been getting used to the idea that Krakow wasn't even going abroad.
Both of my parents were immigrants from England and we made so many trips back there when I was a child that I grew up with a noticeable trace of the accent (and still have it). I've mentioned these things many times.
Thanks for the shoutout. I'm glad you liked the song and the group. I've been listening to them for years.
Ok, the password cartoon was funny. What you get from it when denied was even funnier.
Animals really are goofy. It's probably a goo thing I don't live near the woods, I've probably have to motion activated cameras all over my place watching the animals.
i live in a village full of idiots
Mary K: Thanks for posting the video. That's one of the great things about the internet, being able to share in others' discoveries.
The (p)assword cartoon was pretty weird. I don't know how people come up with these ideas.
Granny: If the idiots were all like Sukhinski, that wouldn't be so bad.
I have rallied around Taiwan and we can all do it very simply. You wanna buy some piece of gadgetry - I do this a lot - I fix computers for a living. Simples - buy Taiwanese rather than PRC. Or if they don't do it there is always Japan, RoK...
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