Link round-up for 6 November 2022

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

o o o o o

This is the right way to crown a king.

These are some wrong ways to ride a bike.

You may find this sound effect useful in some situation.

A few last Halloween cartoons here.

Girls perform rocket experiments.

Bad puns here (see comments).

Take a strange and surreal flight.

Help him move to better housing.

New Witch has some good advice and bad potato chips.

Let the hunter become the hunted.

Awesome map.

These are the scariest pumpkins.

See winners and participants in the Emma Crawford coffin races.

Don't make a fuss about hair.

All of the current top ten songs in the US are by the same person.

In 1896 certain people in Texas did an extremely stupid thing.

Blogger Bluzdude remembers Halloweens past.

Take a quick tour of Paris on video.

Don't let gadgetry dominate life.

Water quality in Warsaw is protected by clams.

This is Jerusalem in 1897.

Macho dolts who identify with wild animals don't understand them very well.

Some good literary quotes here.

This suspension railway opened for business in 1901 -- and it's still in use.

Beavers have made a huge comeback in Europe.

Watch Earthrise as seen from the Moon (the Moon doesn't rotate relative to the Earth -- this was filmed from a spacecraft orbiting the Moon).

Being religious is like being a pumpkin.

But I thought it was a virtuous buy!

Keep your music and movies in physical form.

Don't let the puritans cancel Halloween.

There are worse things than zombies.

Republicans have no real solutions to the problems they're running on.

His experience with incarcerated criminals inspired a novel.

No matter what you do, you are never good enough.

Delta Airlines loses big in court over its despicable actions to silence a pilot who called attention to safety issues.

Left and right, what a choice!

This twerp is trying to Christianize Anne Frank.

The intellectual leader of a House Republican majority would be..... Marjorie Taylor Greene???  Here's what she says about Ukraine.

The ACLU makes the case that it's still a consistent defender of free speech.

Don't behave like an oblivious jackass in public places.

Law enforcement is taking action against threats to election workers.

The pandemic made Americans shittier drivers, and the situation isn't improving now.

A judge squelches voter intimidation in Arizona.

You need to set firm boundaries with friends who try to push their religion on you.

This report from a Georgia poll watcher is encouraging.

Fewer than one-half of all Americans are now members of a house of worship.  Christians will likely fall below 50% of the population in just two to four decades.

This election denialist got pwned in real time by a simple fact-check.  They really don't know what they're talking about.

The polling averages we're seeing are overloaded with Republican-leaning polls.  Here's a more encouraging view of what's going on.

Amazon has banned a book by the great atheist scholar Ibn Warraq from its website.  I reviewed an earlier, and very important, book of his here.

There's no Democrat running for Senate in Utah, but Evan McMullin would be a great improvement over Mike Lee.

Detransitioners can no longer be ignored.

Take a look at these live animal markets in New York and New Jersey.

A liberal answers some (rather dumb) questions from a right-wing blogger.

No one should be surprised that worker productivity is dropping.

Pollsters worry that they're still getting it wrong.

The Fed is determined to strangle the economy even though inflation is already trending down and it was caused by corporate price-gouging rather than wages.

People are losing patience with being harassed by assholes.

US election results have shifted to the right since 2008 (scroll down to the maps).

Twitter has serious cash-flow problems that Musk will not find easy to handle.  He's now gone into full tantrum mode as advertisers pull back.

My state's fifth Congressional district has been represented since 2008 by moderate Democrat Kurt Schrader.  This year, he was successfully primaried by a prog and now the district race is likely to be won by the Republican.  The progs pointlessly put a formerly-secure House seat at risk, in a year when every one may be vital.

A feminist rally in my city has had to be canceled because the police wouldn't provide security.  Given that two months ago they couldn't respond to violent mobs seizing control of streets and shooting people because they had too many other shootings to deal with, my guess is they simply weren't able to commit to providing security.

"They have guns in the US, they have guns."

As expected, red-state forced-birth laws are driving a surge in the use of abortion pills.

There's a slight chance Trump could cost Republicans a Senate seat even after the election.

House-pirating companies are putting more and more housing out of reach for ordinary people.

Right-wing terrorism has killed 122 people in the US over the last two decades.  63% of Republican voters agree that right-wing extremism is a problem.

Democrats are losing Hispanic voters because they've never bothered to understand them.

One expert expects that stocks will go up and housing will become more affordable, even as the Fed wrecks the economy.

Here's the latest mindless corporate algorithm turning US healthcare into a nightmare.

The world's democracies are uniting against global warming as well as against tyranny (found via Hackwhackers).

The British public is fed up with gender nonsense.

Poland is belatedly demolishing Soviet monuments on its territory (found via Reaganite Independent).

Partisan warfare is playing a role in the Ukrainian liberation struggle.

This Russian influencer went to Ukraine to fight the good fight.

Putin's war is exacerbating Russia's already-serious demographic problems.

Russia is now deploying special units behind its front lines to shoot deserters or those who retreat (Stalin did this with the Red Army in World War II).

Putin is conscripting violent criminals to fight in Ukraine.

The Iranian theocracy's tyranny is rooted in the insecurities of weak men.  The rebellion is now aiming at revolution, not mere reform.

India's sex ratio, long skewed by sex-selective abortion, is returning to normal.

Xi Jinping is dragging China backward into absolute totalitarianism.  Economic growth and science are beginning to stagnate.

If you don't have the money to pay your debts, you can pay with your daughter instead.

More links at Angry Bear, WAHF, and Perfect Number.

My own posts this week:  images for Halloween, the global struggle between democracy and tyranny, and some final thoughts on the election.

o o o o o

You can't win elections by exhorting the voters to care about the issues the party wants to talk about.  The party needs to talk about the issues the voters care about.

Regardless of who wins the election, can Congress please finally get rid of this bullshit whereby we have to put all the clocks forward and back every six months?  If there's one thing that almost all Americans, left and right, agree on, it's that we hate this.  It's long past time to fix it.