Link round-up for 10 April 2022

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

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Nice literary crossovers here.

OK, there is such a thing as too much technology.

Read the perfect headline.

Eat the bread.

Learn from the wisdom of the old monk.

It works best if you use an electric eel.

Guide to swearing in Québécois dialect here.

In this case, lions are smarter than philosophers.

Oh, what a big mouse!

No gendered language, please.

Pwned, I think.

The escape key doesn't work.

Everybody wants a place on the catwalk.

A fierce mother protects her family from bad influences.

Christian signs are translated here.

For April fool's day, a YouTuber who specializes in shipwrecks posted this tribute to one of the greatest movies ever.

Nap time.

This scheme is the apotheosis of cryptocurrency.

She's a valid champion.

It's a better option.

Catch the wave.

Spectacular storm photo here.  Yes, it's real.

This building exists (it's in Macau).

This is Madrid.

See film of Paris in the 1920s (fullscreen recommended).

Believe it or not, these are clouds, not waves.

Claims which cannot be tested are meaningless.

See the haboob, a spectacular effect of storms in arid environments.

There's a story behind this old photograph.

It's a trap!

For a change, some cheerful videos from Ukraine.

If Sun Tzu sometimes belabored the obvious, it's because he was writing for idiots.

Dian Fossey's study of gorillas was boosted by the fact that she was bad at climbing trees.

Starbucks asked, she answered.

Show a little kindness, and you'll be remembered fondly for years.

Have some Persian food and people getting friendy with dangerous animals.

Cas d'intérêt looks at the French roots of a popular song of the 1950s.

"Where do you see yourself in five years?"

April in Nova Scotia looks like a really bad January where I live.

It's a true mobile home.

Some tips here on how to disappear from the internet (I haven't tried any of these).

This woman fell more than six miles and survived.

Fossils from dinosaurs killed by the actual Chicxulub meteor have been discovered (found via Miss Cellania).

Cambridge scientists have rejuvenated skin cells to make them thirty years younger biologically.

Avoid fear-mongering about autism.

Strange black fungi are growing in and around the Chernobyl reactor (found via Miss Cellania).  They may prove useful.

The internet is still awash in scams, but the NFT fad is already dying, thank goodness.

They have the pope's blessing.

Watch for these fallacies in trans ideology.

There's still only one good internet browser.

This is an insult to Sauron.

Yet another religionist shoots his mouth off about atheists while knowing almost nothing about us.

Schools are conditioning students to submit to a surveillance state (found via The Honest Courtesan).

The US will not prosper if its people keep turning away from science.

One congressman is pushing back against censorship of libraries.

Some tips here for women on dealing with harassment by men in the streets.

Far more people now die of cancer than in earlier centuries -- here's why that's a good thing.

As pills become the most common method of abortion in the US, Republican state legislators desperately try to crack down on them.

Is being straight boring?

Reading on a smartphone really does dumb you down.  I have no trouble reading entire actual books, but I'd never be able to read anything even one-tenth that long on any kind of screen.

When atheists stand up for ourselves in any way, some Christians accuse us of "sounding angry".

Amazon is now banning these words in internal communications, but workers will likely take it as a challenge (the ban may seem incredible, but it's been widely reported).

There are a wide range of reasons for detransitioning.

Holy $#!T -- thirty billion dollars in overdraft fees?

A pastor's fanaticism inflicts a ghastly trauma on his own son.  Bruce Gerencser reminds us that not all pastors are monsters.

Rejection of evolution strongly correlates with racism and other forms of intolerance.

Facebook fights against discrimination.

It was inevitable that sports would be the issue that broke the spell of trans ideology.

The first commandment is to love God.

The real purpose of censorship is to spread fear and self-censorship.

Those forced-birth fetishists with fetuses in their freezer are even creepier than you thought.

An Ohio appeals court has upheld the verdict in the Oberlin college vs Gibson's bakery case -- a solid win against woketard bullying tactics.

How do people actually react to robots?

A former Christian describes his deconversion.

To avoid a Republican landslide in the House this year, Democrats must rally around the "blue dogs".

Economics turns people into monsters.

An atheist legislator in Nebraska (!), who helped block an abortion ban, delivers a smackdown.

This kind of shit is intolerable.  Democrats need to take a stand against it if we don't want to lose millions of parents to the Republicans.

"Then Moses told his men....."

Amazon is fighting the historic unionization vote at its New York warehouse.

Wingnuts wallow in delusions about money, Ukraine, Jews, the North Pole, Disney, Jeffrey Epstein, etc, etc, etc.

Twitter has bizarre priorities.

The "end demand" model for policing sex work is a disaster.

The Republican extremist fringe is supporting Putin and dividing the party.

Here's what that "gender-affirming care" for minors actually refers to.

See how religious men react when women even pretend to think for themselves.

As the Supreme Court becomes more politicized, the states and lower courts are increasingly ignoring its rulings.  Many people don't realize this, but the Supreme Court's power to overturn laws is just a long-established tradition and has no basis in the Constitution.  The Court has no power to enforce its rulings, and depends on the respect and gravitas it has accumulated -- but is now squandering.

Tennessee Republicans back a law which would originally have made it legal to marry children (that part of it was finally changed, probably due to publicity).

All across the US, a multi-racial and bipartisan grassroots coalition is mobilizing to fight against critical race theory.

The fundamentalist version of American history is a pack of lies.

What kind of jackasses protest against a conference on violence against women?

Another day, another death threat.

Women in the UK are organizing to force politicians to take a clear stand on gender ideology.  "Please let this not fall apart by becoming a left v right issue with voters."  They seem to be getting results.

Scotland has formally apologized for the witch-burnings of centuries past.

The UK is done with "engaging with" Putin.

Businesswoman Sall Grover isn't knuckling under to the bullies.

A real victory -- Belgium becomes the first European country to fully decriminalize sex work.

Don't be surprised if Marine Le Pen does surprisingly well in France's presidential election today.  A rival nativist candidate, Eric Zemmour, had threatened to split the nativist vote, but has now torpedoed his own campaign by supporting Putin.  (Disregard the "far-right" mantra -- in Europe that label is slapped on any nativist politician.)  Note that Le Pen talks about the real concerns of the working class (including immigration), while Macron wants to raise the retirement age.  No one should be surprised if working-class people vote accordingly.

The liberation of Borodyanka, a town near Kyiv, reveals more Russian atrocities.  Here's an eyewitness report from occupied southeastern Ukraine.  Modern technology makes atrocities hard to hide.  Why are Russian troops doing these things?  There has also been a lot of petty looting.  Ukrainian war crimes seem to be rare, but obviously everyone must be held to the same standard.

Russia's atrocities make Ukrainians more determined not to give in or compromise -- so what should the West do?

The battle of Kyiv was a humiliating defeat for Russia, but the decisive phase of the war is still to come.

Russia complains about being "encircled" by NATO.  Maps show the reality.

Some Russian troops in Ukraine are refusing to fight.

Good summary here of how Russia bungled the invasion.

This is what happens in Russia when a person expresses an opinion.

The Russian people are noting the war's rising death toll, but largely still oblivious to the reality of what's happening in Ukraine.

The Kyiv Independent assesses the likelihood of a coup against Putin.  Dissident Ilya Ponomarev thinks he'll be gone soon.

In the long run, a China-Russia alliance is not viable.

China's brutal and incompetent zero-covid policies are triggering unrest (it's hard to tell how widespread this is, though).

More links at Fair and Unbalanced, Miss Cellania, and The Honest Courtesan.

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My own posts this week:  Faun's pagan folk music, Russia's atrocities in Ukraine, and the fight against global warming.