30 April 2023

Link round-up for 30 April 2023

Best wishes for Walpurgisnacht to all who observe.

o o o o o

Badminton is more fun with cats.

This headline could have been phrased better.

Evidently it's an acquired taste.

He left the kittens alone for ten minutes.....

Maybe men and women aren't so different.

Cats aren't helpful, the elevator is full, and even Superman gets no respect.

There exist horrors that no chef can endure.

Dogs party hard, offer sacrifices, and even claim royalty.

Your Uber is here and the driver will take you to your destination.

DeSantis has lost the plot.

Idiot.

What exactly was the point of doing this?

It's important to teach kids basic skills.

On the other hand, some animals are just dumb.

Check out these Japanese video billboards.

Appearances can be deceiving.

Their dinner has been delivered, but they're just playing with their food.

Stores in Portland need to adapt to reality.

Nice train.

Nice floor.

There are Americans in Lord of the Rings (this actually makes a lot of sense).

Svalbard gets no sunlight in the winter.

The US is full of Hellish places.

If you feed them, they will come -- but then how do you get rid of them?

Sometimes what looks bad actually is not.

Yeah, he's tough, but next time wear a seat belt.

They took on the enemy face-to-face, and won.

This is the Tian Shan "bridge" in Shanxi province, China.

Saved by a spider.

It's not good design -- because it's not design at all.

Goats can do magic.

ChatGPT isn't good at being right, it's just good at sounding right.  And don't expect it to improve much.

Several animal species can distinguish between men and women using various cues.

Crocodilians are smarter than you think.

Germany is stupider than you think.

Glioblastoma is one of the deadliest and least-treatable brain cancers, but a new treatment destroys 100% of glioblastoma tumors -- in mice (found via Miss Cellania).  Tests on humans are a while away yet.

The "block the blue" campaign on Twitter is a backlash against Elon Musk's bungling of the blue-check system.  Speaking of which, check this out.

After annoying audiences by race-swapping fictional characters, film-makers are now race-swapping real people from history.  A petition by Egyptians against this has been deleted from the internet.

I've been seeing claims like this about the proposed TikTok ban on quite a few blogs.  If true, it's seriously alarming.

Once you start banning books that "trigger" people.....

Don't make assumptions about people in wheelchairs.

ChatGPT is designed to coddle one specific religion.

We finally have some hard numbers on the effectiveness of the Bud Light boycott.  Sales for the week ending April 15 were down by 17% relative to the same week last year.  Rival brands are seeing sales surge as people switch.  Distributors are "sticking by" Bud Light in hopes that the boycott will peter out, but from what I'm seeing online, it doesn't feel like that's going to happen.  Compare:  the woketard "boycott" of Hogwarts Legacy was not only a failure but undetectable, as it's become one of the top-selling computer games ever; whereas the Bud Light boycott has cost the brand one-sixth of its US sales (so far), a situation serious enough that Anheuser-Busch has dumped two marketing VPs (so far).  Like it or not, the culture has spoken.

YouTube is censoring criticism of Dylan Mulvaney.  I've seen several videos that reference this.  But apparently Megyn Kelly is a big enough name to be exempt.

One meter, fourteen centuries, one asshole.

Workers at Powell's Books in Portland are fighting for better pay.

When "subjectivity trumps objectivity", we get a war against reality itself.

He had a full-blown fever and his boss still demanded he come to work instead of taking sick time.

Only a garbage "newspaper" would do this.

This bitcointard fiasco suggests what Musk's Mars colony would be like.

Examine your hospital bill carefully.

This guy raped one woman and stabbed and robbed another, but he's apparently owed "unity and kindness".

US urban real estate is plummeting in value due to high crime and employees working from home instead of coming to offices.

Christians in Boston threaten to "ambush" a rival religion, mostly by mumbling to themselves.

If you're still on Twitter, read this.

Be aware of your rights as an independent contractor.

Must-read:  the enemies of free speech are misusing the "paradox of tolerance" concept (found via Dead Wild Roses).

Learn about "No Labels", the "bipartisan" group aiming to have a big impact on next year's election.

Democracy is under attack from a new force of dogma, rage, and intolerance.

Union Pacific finds a way to be even shittier to employees who need time off sick.

64% of white evangelicals are adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalist ideology.  Large numbers of those want an authoritarian leader and would potentially support violence to get their way.

Cities are rushing to develop land reclaimed from the sea -- land which will be at high risk as sea levels rise.

Feminists debate presidential candidates.

The Biden administration has approved an LNG pipeline in West Virginia which is at risk for leaking methane, a greenhouse gas.  The intent may be to help Manchin get re-elected, but Manchin is still unhappy that Biden isn't doing even more to damage the climate.

Female students at the University of Wyoming are suing because their sorority was forced to accept a male member (who is a chronic ogler, apparently).

Some discussion here in response to my recent free-speech post (see comments).

Trump is in a snit at Bill Maher.

Religious "morality" is twisted and evil.

Forcing work requirements upon Medicaid recipients would create a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Sometimes even an abuser has difficulty recognizing abusive behavior.

Wingnuts are more outraged at Fox for firing Tucker Carlson than for lying to them about the 2020 election.

One evil religion kowtows to another.

Revisit Mother Teresa's chamber of horrors.  Christopher Hitchens wrote an entire book about this.

In Kansas, only one Democrat voted to keep female sports female-only.  One was enough.  Kansas has also enacted a women's bill of rights based on proposals by WoLF.

Stopped trains block roads at crossings for hours or even days, obstructing emergency vehicles -- and kids trying to get to school.

Despite what you probably think, the US is less racist than ever.

Republicans expect public anger at their attacks on abortion rights to fade over time, but they're almost certainly wrong.

The latest SpaceX explosion spread debris for miles, with the shock wave breaking windows in a town six miles from the launch site.  Debris from the smashed launch pad also hit this car.

The TikTok man I linked to last week, who was threatening to shoot women who object to him entering women's restrooms, is a "baby fetishist", a Confederate sympathizer, and a Trump supporter.

This Texas woman suffered a pregnancy problem making a miscarriage inevitable, but the state's barbaric forced-birth law prevented doctors from removing the fetus until complications had put her life in serious danger.  In Oklahoma, a woman with life-threatening pregnancy complications was turned away from three hospitals and eventually went to Kansas for an abortion.  Oklahoma's confusing laws reduce women to incubators.

Discussion here on the Disney lawsuit against DeSantis and his puppet oversight board, including a "different" take from Nikki Haley.

Comprehensive data here on attitudes toward abortion among various US demographic groups.

Minnesota is about to join the ranks of states with legal marijuana.

Eight hundred and thirty-two minors between 13 and 17 have been mutilated.

Forced-birth laws have failed in Nebraska and South Carolina despite Republican legislative majorities.  Republican women provided the crucial votes against them.

Only 24% of Americans still approve of Trumpism.  Even among Republicans, it's only 52%.

One of the biggest US health insurers allegedly routinely rejects claims without even looking at them.  If true, this would seem to be fraud -- it's not the service people pay insurance premiums for.

Republicans are getting more blatant in their efforts to limit voting.

The system you live under affects how long you live.

The writing is on the wall for trans ideology in the UK.

The feminist news site Reduxx is being censored in Australia on vague grounds (discussion here).  Myself, I've found Reduxx to be a valuable source of information.

Think the US is violent?  Check this out.

Russian propaganda is hilariously inept.  But some people seem to fall for it.

A successful Ukrainian counter-offensive will be decisive in the war.

More links at WAHF and Fair and Unbalanced.

My posts this week:  moral absolutes and uncomfortable questions, an image round-up, and a video on the de-dollarization scam.

o o o o o


Where did this "cis" thing come from, anyway?

28 April 2023

Video of the day -- de-dollarization


Debunking another "China is rising and we're declining" myth.

26 April 2023

Image round-up for 26 April 2023

More pictures, some slightly NSFW -- click for full size.

(If you're looking for the previous post, click here.)














Costume test image for The Wizard of Oz



I'm curious under what circumstances this skill was needed












The kea, a parrot species native to New Zealand


Roman bowl, probably second century CE


Opal




Morocco



Sicily



Collapsed bridge, Harbin, China