Link round-up for 29 May 2022

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

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Aliens leave insulting graffiti.

These apartments have balconies with a magnificent view.

Hard to get a snack when your friends are total dimwits.

Everywhere, there are faces.

It's a tale of answered prayers and a flying kitten.

Some foods shouldn't be foods.

My taxi ride was a little slow.

Compare some options for home defense (made by Far Corner Café).

The Tour de France was delayed.

ZOMG, Hell really exists -- there's even a photo.

His pronouns are woof / woof.

Looks like nobody told this train about staying on the tracks.

The modern world made their jobs obsolete.

Some tips here on how to annoy people (trolls need not click -- they're already experts).

Keep your flags up to date.

It's hard to interpret an arcane symbol from the distant past.

I guess this church worships clams?

See some examples of gambiarra, the Brazilian art of creative problem-solving.

Beware of this e-mail scam -- it will seem to come from someone you know.

He was just meant to be a fireman.  Also, some relatives are assholes.

Use city-buster weapons to destroy the enemy.

Learn why this frog is lighting up.

A short student film satirizes the real zombie apocalypse.

Apparently I'm not alone in lacking any interest in spectator sports.

Now this is target shooting.

Here's how some old-style movie special effects worked.

Blogger Paul W reports from the Orlando MegaCon, which he hopefully survived.

Dammit, I thought I cleaned off that mark when I moved out.

Nice little outbuilding here.

These starfish exist.

Take the same train ride in 1902 and 2015.

Some birds are smart enough to figure out motion sensors.

Evolution happens faster than we thought.  Human-caused changes in the environment may be speeding it up.

There's more to Florida than Disney.

Some interesting stuff here on the history of cameras, plus various videos.

This is the abandoned Aniva lighthouse on Sakhalin island, Russia.

This is Mont Saint-Michel in France.

Alain Passard is considered one of the world's leading chefs, but is his reputation deserved?

The male-female pay gap is real.

It's the perfect Republican campaign slogan.

All the bad guys agree.

Earth-Bound Misfit has observations and links on the Southern Baptist Convention sexual abuse scandal.

Go die in a fire Tesla.

This cigarette brand exists (based on the writing, I'd guess this is from Pakistan).

What's your favorite Bible story?

Golf courses could be useful.

Friday nights have improved.

Recognize the value of the treasures you have.

Republican politicians' abortion-banning fervor exemplifies the risk of empowering fanatics -- they end up taking over.

Some good George Carlin quotes here.

Overworking workers hurts everybody.

Guidance here for the media on reporting about shootings.

The church wants money, but.....

Companies are cutting back on mandatory fake-fun office events.  But in a situation where "employees that are ordered back..... are likely to simply quit", talking about how to "entice" people back to the office instead of just adapting to the new work-from-home reality still seems pretty clueless.

Commercialization pushes the internet toward becoming a dreary wasteland.

On abortion, Pete Buttigieg pretty much speaks for me.  It's not about right or wrong, it's about who gets to decide.

He's too dumb to be guilty of insurrection.

What percentage of households in your state own guns?  I was rather surprised Oregon was so high, at almost 50%.

Bruce Gerencser is far from surprised at the Southern Baptist sex-abuse scandal.

Here in Oregon, the moderate Democrat currently representing the fifth congressional district (which has only a slight Democratic lean) was successfully primaried by a more left-wing challenger -- giving Republicans a real chance to pick up the seat.

Moline Skeptics dissects the wingnut myth of a wave of suspicious fires at food-processing plants.

A conspiracy to distribute sexualized materials to children as young as five unravels after being exposed by a whistleblower.

Not everyone who disagrees with your political views is an idiot.  Or malevolent.

The behavior of the police at Uvalde suggests that they're not the best option for dealing with mass shootings.  More here.

This is how you do it -- a quick-acting armed civilian stopped a mass shooting, with no casualties except the would-be murderer.  If this had happened in a "gun-free zone", that civilian would not have been armed and we'd be talking about yet another massacre with perhaps dozens of victims.

It's just a waste of time trying to reason with Noam Chomsky (read the comments too, especially #6).

A pro-choice liberal politician in Louisiana explains why she's running as a Republican.

Agriculture produces over one-third of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, and the majority of that is from meat production.  Each kilogram of beef means 70 kilograms of emissions.  Discussion here.

"Unskilled" jobs are a classist myth used to justify poverty wages.

Victims have no obligation to help their attackers feel better.

Most non-trans people prefer not to date trans people.  Discussion here.

Theological difference:  the Catholic clergy rape boys, the Protestant ones rape girls.

Dragging employees back to the office costs them a lot of money.

Marjorie Taylor Greene voted against a bill to help Americans being held prisoner in Russia.  Also, the "Jewish space lasers" thing really was that bad.

This is an oligarchy.

Cancel culture is real and oppressive -- here's yet another example.

Food shortages tend to sort themselves out, when human ingenuity is free to work.

Republicans' election chances face a major threat:  Donald Trump.

Green Eagle and Earth-Bound Misfit weigh in on Kissinger's disgusting support for appeasing Putin.

An incarcerated woman in New Jersey speaks out on the nightmare of sharing a prison with male inmates.

This book truly is hate speech (but it still shouldn't be banned).

George P Bush's primary defeat marks the possible end of a political dynasty -- and a win for Trumpian extremism.

Gun control?  How about idiot control?

Lesbianism is now the same as apartheid, apparently.  More here.  (If you don't know what "the cotton ceiling" means, read this.)

Whether Elon Musk saves Twitter or not, he's basically just another boring billionaire asshole.

Oddly enough, Sweden doesn't have many mass shootings.

Very few countries fail to mandate paid maternal leave.

The Arbourist's red pen of justice takes on the Canadian Green party's lurch into lunacy.

New money, old money, same sleaze.

Australia's biggest newspaper calls out New Zealand's insane plan to incorporate superstition into science classes.

This is what happens when there's no First Amendment.  Any blogger should find the prospect terrifying.

On Ukraine, don't listen to the elitist defeatists.

A Canadian blogger based in Ukraine describes his escape from the country.

Why is Europe more open to Ukrainian refugees than to those from Islamic countries?

The Russian Orthodox Church is still firmly supporting Putin's war.

Male journalists in Afghanistan show solidarity with female colleagues subject to increased Taliban repression.

It's only May and India is suffering from horrific heat waves.  Animal rescuers are seeing more and more birds near death from dehydration.

The covid outbreak in North Korea is a serious matter.

Interview here on the nightmare of covid quarantine in Shanghai.

More links at Fair and Unbalanced and Miss Cellania.

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My own posts this week:  an image round-up, a Lone Animator video on the end of the world, and a short poem by Emily Dickinson.

During Prohibition, the government banned alcohol.  This did not stop people from obtaining or drinking alcohol.  It merely drove an entire industry underground, made it unnecessarily dangerous and sleazy, and created a huge new revenue stream for organized crime.

Today the government bans drugs and sex work.  This does not stop people from obtaining or using drugs, or from going to (or becoming) sex workers.  Again, it just drives those things underground, makes them more dangerous and sleazy, and diverts money to criminals.

It baffles me that some people believe the effects of abortion bans or gun bans would be any different.

[Image at top found via Bruce Gerencser]