Dream world (7)

Oh, the visions some people entertain.....

[Previous "Dream world" post is here.]

Video of the day -- dynamite, shit, and stupidity.....

.....make a bad combination.  Jimmy Ferris, of the town of Spur in Texas, recounts an experience from his younger days.  Found (a while ago) via Miss Cellania.

Link round-up for 27 March 2022

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

o o o o o

Putin's death is foretold.

After doing the right thing, receive snacks.

Cat with mobile home here.

It would be so easy to just make atheists disappear.

Find the Ottoman Empire, grill some chicken, and more.

It's a Ukrainian yard sale.

Canadians find Spring something to celebrate.

Not everyone can succeed at playing cards.

Testing a taser on yourself turns out to be a bad idea.

Tough guy prefers to make his own drink.

What about five-sided triangles?

The laws of physics don't apply to cats.

Let me help you write that note.

Identify this bird.

This Catholic-themed restaurant exists.

Esme's Cloud ruminates on the scarried highs.

Costa Rica has huge balls.

Finland has this prime minister.

See the face of a woman who lived four thousand years ago.

This is Thor's Well in Oregon.

Watch teh shrooms grow.  #4 looks almost otherworldly.

This whatever-the-hell-it-is exists.

Learn about Olympe de Gouges, a woman ahead of her time.

This is the Kailasa temple in India.

Russian literature's depth rebukes the trite ideological rubbish that currently defiles Western academia (link from commenter NickM).

This goofy-looking animal once dominated the whole world (the post is slightly wrong in calling it "a species" -- there were at least four species of them).

Jenny_o has a cataract surgery update (sounds very familiar), a tip on a Blogger commenting glitch, and a few critter pics.  More here, plus dogs.

Daal is still celebrating the New Year, but has time for a catty moral tale.

How do you handle invitations to religious rituals?

This asshole exists.

Reminder:  keep the nuts away from the nukes.

Darwinfish 2 takes the ultimate lonely stand -- defending continuing to put our clocks an hour backward or forward twice a year.  Yes, it's a minor inconvenience, but completely unnecessary.  If starting school before sunrise is an issue, the schools can just move their schedule one hour for that part of the year.  It's better than making everyone change their clocks.

Dogs exist -- they just aren't wolves.

French street artists express the world's horror and fury at the Ukraine invasion.

What kind of people troll autists on the internet?

Learn to spot self-destructive "coping" strategies.

It's better to ridicule stupid ideas than to debate them.

The rich are different from you and me.

Von Däniken's bullshit did a lot of harm.

"Queer" is now a trendy fad.

Virginia students win a rare victory against the Israel-bashing mania infesting academia these days.

Learn the international "help me" sign.  You might save somebody someday.

I guess this is what Christian love looks like.

It's not only the bosses -- some customers treat Amazon employees like shit as well.

Ideology resembles fantasy fiction, an imaginary world where language creates reality.

Asshole asshole asshole asshole asshole asshole.....

Robots are less of a threat than they seem at first glance.

Don't trivialize covid-19 deaths just because the person had a "co-morbidity".

"Generation Z" is the least-religious US generation yet.  Increasing numbers are now simply growing up without religion, as I did, rather than being raised with a religion and then abandoning it.  And it's unlikely that many people who are now non-religious will ever join a religion.

Stop talking about your needs and safety, it upsets meeeeeee.

Jesus is just as shitty as the Old Testament God.

This manager exists, apparently.

Time to use the anti-maskers' own clichés against them.

Parents of swimmers weigh in on the Lia Thomas controversy.  So does Jane Clare Jones.

Tax the rich, without apology.

The Ukraine war opens up new vistas of wingnut lunacy, but there's still plenty of their old lunacy around as well.

Anti-vax convoy truckers are coming down with a mysterious disease.  A few of them are still on the road, pissing in their pants and getting flipped off by normal people (found via Hackwhackers).

Home Depot workers, you don't need to put up with this kind of shit from management.  There's a labor shortage; you can easily find a job at some place that isn't run by snotty, oblivious assholes.

Oregon is preparing to help victims of neighboring Idaho's draconian anti-abortion law.

Bruce Gerencser schools an arrogant troll.

The predominantly-black town of Mason TN got some good economic news -- and now the state is trying to take it over.

Detransitioners fight back against the quacks and ideologists who ruined their lives and health.

To avoid disaster this November, Democrats must face reality about what the electorate wants.

Atheists know a scam when we see one.

McConnell, like Pence, repudiates Putin supporters in the Republican party.

The American Bar Association's committee on the federal judiciary unanimously endorses Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court.  She has more public support than any other nominee in decades other than Roberts (found via Hackwhackers).

JK Rowling is not happy with Putin comparing himself to her.

This is what cancel culture means.

Six months ago, El Salvador bet big on bitcoin.  The result has been a predictable fiasco.

The Russian Orthodox Church offers fervent and groveling support for Putin's war against Ukraine.

Before the Russians, after the Russians.

The Russian army's practice of promising people safe passage and then massacring them goes back to at least 2014 (via Hackwhackers).

Russian generals are dropping like flies.  The latest one was evidently overconfident.

Astonishingly, Russian troops withdrew from one Ukrainian town after locals protested their presence.

In the 1990s Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the USSR in exchange for security guarantees.  We are seeing the results now.  If the Taiwanese are not seriously considering building their own nuclear deterrent, they are fools.

The Taliban have already broken their promise to re-open schools for girls.

More links at Fair and Unbalanced and The Honest Courtesan.

o o o o o

My own posts this week were a set of mood images and a look at Putin's failed invasion.

Putin's failed war

After one month of fighting, it's clear that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is an unmitigated disaster.  The Russian army is still bogged down and failing to advance, while around Kyiv, the Ukrainians have actually pushed the invaders back a substantial distance in some areas, and may even have surrounded Russian forces west of the city.  Up to 60% of Russian missiles are malfunctioning.  Stories abound of Russians with MREs and even medical supplies which expired years ago.  There have even been a few claims of Russian officers being killed by their own exasperated men.  The US estimates that the number of Russian troops killed ranges from seven to fifteen thousand, the latter figure being equal to the number the Soviets lost in Afghanistan in ten years, and more than a quarter of the US dead in the entire Vietnam war.  Russia is now reduced to bombarding cities in an effort to wreck a country it cannot conquer, committing mass murder of civilians which will stain its name for a generation.  Despite tightening repression, and harsh retaliation against dissenters, anti-war protests in Russia continue, with over fifty thousand arrested so far:

Ukrainian intelligence claims that some among the Russian elite are already contemplating removing Putin.  While he seeks scapegoats among them for the disaster, they blame him and his secretive, megalomaniacal regime:

It remains to be seen how much truth there is in such reports, or what the result would be if Putin were overthrown.  The Afghan fiasco was a contributing factor (though certainly not the only one) to the downfall and break-up of the USSR.

o o o o o

See photos here from the first month of the war.  As a reminder, the Kyiv Independent remains a very good source of news from Ukraine.

Verified charities here for helping Ukrainians.

In one incident, Russian vehicles apparently backed down before a crowd of unarmed civilians.

Putin's blunders are rooted in Russian nationalist history and in the common tendency of dictators to underestimate the resolve of democracies.

Even if Russia conquers Ukraine in some sense, the occupation will be worse than the war.

Here's general McCaffrey's latest assessment of the Russian military's floundering:

Moods

Several of these were found via SickoRicko and Voenix Rising, which often post such images (both also post some NSFW material, so be aware if you check them out).