Link round-up for 5 March 2023

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

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These cats are acting up.

Some unusual photos here, some a tad Halloween-y.

Don't challenge these prickly parents.

Pompeii teaches us about the Romans.

Don't stand so close to the gate.

Early Europeans discover the skunk.

Go away, I'm on the phone.

Best weapon name ever.

Always defrost your birds.

It's a unique washing machine.

Crash!

Greek mythology meets modernity.

In an emergency, do not do this.

Jackasses everywhere will welcome this interactive TV.

Sometimes witchcraft would come in handy.

Fate approaches.

As he becomes less, his achievement becomes more.

We don't know why the ancient Egyptians made these special bowls (found via Roberta X).

A formerly-useless building becomes a colorful skate park.

This is the highest bridge in Washington state.

A long time ago, he won a fight.

Nope, nope, nope, absolutely not.

This is merely a list of mental problems, word games, and irritating personality traits (link from commenter NickM).

Learn who Robert Smalls was.

This is Socotra island.

Cas d'intérêt has a round-up of items from France.

Pictures and commentary here from a visit to Jordan, mainly Petra.

Blogger Mary Kirkland recounts a disturbing childhood experience.

Autism produces wild fluctuations in mental function (and makes it hard to make a living).

Traveling to India takes a lot of preparation.

Tips here on memorizing vocabulary in a foreign language.

The world is awesome.

Eating whales is hard.

Sometimes seeing a rat is good news.

Trigger warnings don't work.

A study claiming that second covid infections are more dangerous than the original infection has serious flaws.

A fungus expert explains why the human cordyceps pandemic depicted in The Last of Us could not actually happen.

Under tsars, communists, and Putin, vodka has kept Russia miserable and servile.

Space industries will create new opportunities to treat workers like crap.

Bullying people into unnatural pronoun usage wastes mental energy and enables narcissists.

This dildo saleswoman has a far less respectable second job (found via Hackwhackers).

Movie theaters charge more and more for an increasingly crummy experience.

Following the massive backlash against Roald Dahl's UK publisher vandalizing his stories, the publisher now says it will also re-issue intact versions.  There are now similar plans to vandalize the James Bond novels.

The "sensitivity readers" hired to vandalize Dahl's works included small children and nutcases.

E-books of Dahl's stories are being changed to the vandalized versions without the owners' consent.  Buy real books, not e-books.

The cultural vandals started with "lowbrow" pop culture and worked their way "up".

A trans person speaks out on gender ideology.

Bernie Sanders explains why Social Security shouldn't invest in Wall Street.

Conservative bloggers react to the Florida proposal on registering political blogs (see comments).

Rep Jamie Raskin pwns the ignorant wingnut practice of calling the Democratic party "the Democrat party".

To achieve affordable housing, we need to break the culture of treating housing primarily as an investment.

The future's history documentaries about our time will be..... rather interesting.

The MRFF has squelched a plan for religious indoctrination in the military.  (Since when was Jesus a "military leader"?  Don't these people read their own Bible?)

Violence in response to "offensive" opinion is an absolute evil, and there must be no appeasement of, or compromise with, its apologists.

Twitter's revenues fell 40% in December (found via Hackwhackers).

What do you think of AI-generated "writing"?

Queer, queer, queer!

Religion isn't always just about controlling women -- sometimes it's about torturing them.

Why don't people want to work any more?  Because they no longer see any point in it.

Over the last twenty years the rail industry has spent more than $700 million on lobbying against improved safety standards.

March 12 is Detrans Awareness Day.  Detransitioners will speak out at a live webinar in the UK.

Here's exactly what Scott Adams got wrong.

No, trauma is not the main reason why people leave Christianity.

East Palestine was a warning -- railway practices are so dangerous that urgent regulatory action is needed.

Gender ideology depends on lies and distortions.

Giving workers pay cuts is a mistake.  Even if they can't quit, you'll have an organization full of resentful people.

"You can't direct 'hate' at something that doesn't exist."

It's claimed that one wingnut judge in Texas could ban mifepristone nationwide (read the update at the end of the post, though).  If this happens, misoprostol is a safe alternative.  A woman in South Carolina has already been arrested for using abortion pills.

Why are black Americans increasingly moving to red states?

"Unisex toilets" aren't such a good idea in practice.

Incompetent record-keeping at the Oregon DMV has resulted in people being mistakenly arrested and imprisoned.  Everybody in management there needs to be sued into oblivion.

The case of Allie Phillips in Tennessee illustrates the horrific cruelty of forced-birth laws.

Sometimes, male writing is easy to identify.

Northern Idaho is becoming a mecca for various flaming nutballs.

Darwinfish 2 assesses Marjoreene's "national divorce" idea.  She wants to break up states and counties too.

A Christian school banned these parents for not being anti-gay.

The Republican party of Lee county in Florida has passed a resolution to ban covid vaccines.

Walmart is pulling out of Portland because of intolerable levels of shoplifting and local government's failure to do anything about it.

More than a month after the East Palestine disaster, there is still no plan to relocate the residents out of danger.  This is starting to look like a bigger fuckup than the Soviets' handling of Chernobyl.

This November Ohio will hold a referendum to restore abortion rights.

Forms and instructions here for reporting churches to the IRS for violating the terms of their tax exemption.  Background here (both found via SickoRicko).

Kaiser Permanente started this girl on "gender-change" hormones and surgery at the age of thirteen.  Now eighteen, she's suing.

Amazon ex-managers say they were pressured to give bad evaluations to good employees so they could be fired to meet attrition quotas.

The private sector had its chance -- time to nationalize the railways.

DeSantis may have been involved with torture at Guantánamo.

Greed and price-gouging are ruining US healthcare.

The FBI has prevented a threatened anti-Jewish terrorist attack in Michigan.

Sherrod Brown working with JD Vance on railway-safety legislation illustrates my point that it's possible to find areas of useful cooperation even with people who are far away from you on other issues.

Among people who were started on "sex-change" hormones as minors, the detransition rate after just four years is far higher than activist groups claim.

If we can't stop this project in Alaska, it will generate nine million tons of greenhouse gases per year.

Walgreens will refuse to sell abortion pills in red states, even in those where doing so remains legal.  I suggest going elsewhere for all your drugstore needs.

Frequent job-hopping is one way to deal with management's disrespect and general bullshit.

New Jersey Republicans face the familiar problem of religio-extremist candidates.

The alt-right's planned anti-Jewish "day of hate" was a failure.

Crime was a major factor in Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot's defeat.  Democrats ignore or minimize this issue at their peril.

We've barely scratched the surface of the harm anti-abortion laws will do.

Yes, they are "transitioning" minors.  Note how several of these make specific mention of surgery and puberty blockers.

Trump made over a billion dollars while he was president, much of it from business activities involving conflicts of interest.  This article focuses on Indonesia, but no doubt similar activities took place in other countries too.

An NLRB judge holds Starbucks to account for its egregious union-busting.

"Final five voting" can help overcome the dangerous polarization of US politics.

Pretending to be the opposite sex means sinking in a desperate morass of self-deluding terminology.

DeSantis is trying to limit dissenting events at the Florida state capitol.

Support for abortion rights is surging massively across the US, notably in states which will be crucial in the 2024 election.

England will stop putting men convicted of violent crimes in women's prisons.

Can't afford food?  Just work more.

Here's an example of the campaign to destroy lesbian culture in the UK.

An Australian feminist suffers a violent misogynistic attack -- and police foot-dragging in charging the assailant.

This Tuesday will be a big day in France's campaign of resistance to Macron's attack on the pension system.

The Czech Republic is changing its name in English to the less-unwieldy "Czechia".

The Ukraine war has led Europe to a more realistic view of the world.

Exhumations in Izyum, Ukraine, show the scale of Russian atrocities in the area.

The West needs to commit to helping Ukraine win, not just survive.  Don't listen to the appeasement caucus.

Ukrainians are abandoning the Russian language, once pervasive in much of the country (found via Roberta X).

Putin's policies exacerbate Russia's demographic collapse.

In Russia, popular support for Putin's war is falling fast.  The Russian army is suffering from mass desertions.  Russia claims to be sending a "super-tank" to Ukraine, but this tank barely even exists.

Shady shipping companies are helping Russia evade oil sanctions.

Somebody is using poison gas to attack girls' schools in Iran.

India's religio-nationalist Modi government, which has points in common with the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations, is also kowtowing to Russia on the Ukraine war.

Why would anyone choose to have children in a miserable totalitarian state?

More links at Fair and Unbalanced, Angry Bear, and WAHF.

My own posts this week:  an image round-up, and attacks on free expression in Florida.

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Today marks ninety-four days since railway workers were robbed of their right to strike for paid sick leave.  Issue the executive order, Biden!