Link round-up for 9 April 2023

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

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Thing falls on cat, cat freaks out.

Cat falls on thing, all cats freak out.

She either has terrible taste in clothes, or is being devoured by some hideous abomination from outer space.

Be careful when you are doing things.

See a dramatic bank robbery and car chase.

Cats and firecrackers don't mix, even at a distance.

I guess these are signs of the times.

They don't build houses like they used to, and that staircase should never have been built at all.

While its captors are distracted, a TV set makes its run for freedom.

Now this is the way to order some food.

Do not try to spank him.

Fear the horse menace.

There's more than one way to make a print-out of your computer screen.

She built a cardboard city.

This looks like fun.  I wonder if animals ever get in the way.

Exercise is good, but there's such a thing as overdoing it.

This "teacher of the year" award was well deserved.

He doesn't need a skateboarding park.

Here are some trees with personality.

This method supposedly can stop the itching from mosquito bites.  I haven't tried it.

Beware the exploding car.

A popular Russian cartoon calls out Putin.

This driver thwarted a carjacking.

Why are so many flop shows that nobody watches described as "in demand" in the media?  This is a long video but it makes its basic point in the first seven minutes.

Only 37% of people who started watching Amazon's The Rings of Power even bothered to finish it.

Colorful pictures here from a wedding in India.

Nice-looking street.  If anybody recognizes the piece of music that's playing on this, please let me know what it's called.

Beautiful mountain photo here (open image in new tab and click for full size).

This is Angel Falls in Venezuela, the world's highest uninterrupted waterfall at 979 meters (over half a mile).

Digitizing a book is labor-intensive.

Martha of Plowing through Life blog explains why she left organized religion.

Links and a video here on how manual creativity benefits mental health.

That dinosaur skeleton you're looking at is probably missing a few parts.

We can now use certain viruses to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but there are bureaucratic obstacles to widespread implementation.

The human immune system is quite effective at getting rid of ingested microplastics.

Annual peak sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk by an area larger than Egypt.

The Kissimmee wetlands in Florida, damaged by artificial channels in the 1960s, are successfully being restored.

Don't let today's problems blind you to the vastly more significant progress made over the last couple of centuries.

Workplace and university "diversity training" fails spectacularly, often strengthening the very attitudes it claims to oppose.

AI-generated fake writing is poised to metastasize across the internet, even though it usually consists of misinformation and its citations, if any, are fake.

These people exist.

Having an imaginary friend is one thing, but imaginary cannibalism?

Politics is depressing.

This boss demanded that an employee work on his day off.

Find out why bars across the US are boycotting Anheuser-Busch.

Ken Ham invokes William Shatner to push the same tired old crap.

If you have a Tesla, everything you do in it is being filmed and spread around among Tesla employees.

Maybe young people understand the world of work better than their elders do.

Twitter is a mess.

The non-religious are by far the fastest-growing category of the US population, and deserve recognition.

The "Hogwarts Legacy" game is a huge success, as is almost everything from or linked to JK Rowling.  The Rowling-haters are a tiny cult of out-of-touch freaks; Twitter and Reddit are not the real world.

Starbucks continues to fire union organizers.

Deep down, even most religious people know that prayer doesn't work.

School authorities are trying to bully parents into not teaching their own children aspects of history the school judges to be inappropriate.

From the boss:  "No one can request days off anymore".

The Nashville shooter inspires blogger Ute Heggen to post a brief but comprehensive manifesto.

FBI agents on a training exercise broke into the wrong hotel room and interrogated a baffled civilian rather than the role-player meant for them.

This nine-year-old will never forget how these county officials revealed their true nature.

The Kansas legislature has just passed a Women's Bill of Rights with bipartisan support, but the governor is likely to veto it.

Remember what liberalism is, and why it's worth defending.

Snark and insults won't win converts.

"I will never vote Democrat again."

The hospital charged this man four thousand dollars to hold his own newborn baby.

Blogger M Bouffant is apparently being censored.  Yes, what he said was disgusting, but all bloggers must support content-neutral freedom of speech for the sake of their own rights.

A claim is circulating on the internet that DeSantis had a thirteen-year-old boy arrested in retaliation for posting an anti-police image and because his mother is a covid whistleblower.  Apparently there's a lot more to the story.  DeSantis has done enough genuine bad things without people making shit up.

Police have thwarted a planned school shooting in Colorado.

There was very little protest in response to Trump's arrest.  On the right-wing blogs I read, there was surprisingly little mention of the arrest, despite "news" sites like Gateway Pundit playing up the story and trying to whip up outrage.  Well, Trump is a pretty exhausting person even if you're on his side.  Maybe even a lot of his followers are more tired of him than they're telling the pollsters.  Wingnut efforts to target the judge's daughter have been widely condemned.

Interesting psychological analysis of Trump here.

All religions must be criticized -- no exceptions.

This author stood up against "woke" vandalization of the film version of her novel.

Will Wisconsin Republicans use their legislative supermajority to impeach newly-elected state supreme court judge Protasiewicz?  It seems unlikely.

Her boss wanted her to work twenty hours of unpaid overtime a week.

Émile Zola knew the mind-set of authoritarians like DeSantis.

The Texas state senate education committee is considering a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.

A report on clergy sex abuse of children identified over 150 abuser Catholic priests and 600 victims in the archdiocese of Baltimore alone.

Abortion rights are the major winning issue for Democrats right now, and should be emphasized in every election where they're relevant.  Dobbs was a game-changer, and this time it's Republicans who don't realize they're driving voters away.

US life expectancy is falling further and further behind Europe, but in fact, the reddest states account for most of the difference, with life expectancy in the bluest states being similar to Europe, due to policy differences and right-wingers' rejection of vaccines.

A mass murderer is just like Jesus.

The Republicans have a cunning scheme to elect Trump in 2024.  It involves Joe Manchin.

Stormy Daniels has been getting death threats.

Annie Asks You blog has good news from four states.

The proportion of Americans raised in a religion who stay with that religion as adults is dropping over time -- more and more people are abandoning their childhood religion as they get older.  However, the proportion of those raised non-religious who stay non-religious is increasing.  We are winning this war.

Detailed discussion here of how railroad management corner-cutting and ever-longer trains are making derailments more likely and more dangerous -- there are a lot more derailments happening than you probably realize.  Better regulation is urgent.

Idaho has now criminalized helping pregnant minor girls to leave the state for an abortion.

She got a double mastectomy and testosterone at sixteen.  Now she's stuck with regret and a ruined body for the rest of her life.

As the US becomes more secular, fundies move further and further from the mainstream -- and are becoming more militant.

DeSantis is escalating his (so far) losing war against Disney.

The rejection of objective truth and objective science is dangerous.  We must fight against this mentality with everything we have.

Tesla still hasn't delivered working self-driving capability, and owners who paid for it are suing for a refund.

Not all trans people believe in the ideology.

In their first hundred days, the House Republicans haven't gotten much done.

Generation Z is much less religious than even five years ago.  49% are atheist, agnostic, or "none", while only 35% are Protestant or Catholic.

Even most older age groups become less religious as they age.

After biological males took all three top spots in an Olympic women's race, a coach and a female runner complained.  Both received threats in response.

Social Security can be strengthened and expanded, not cut, just by ceasing to exempt the rich from making the same contributions as everyone else makes.

Here's a summary of the numerous times Trump violated US national security.

Shell Oil knew as far back as the 1970s that continued large-scale use of fossil fuels would damage the global climate, but hid the science and deliberately confused the issue -- as today's global-warming-denialist propaganda continues to do.

Millions of people are about to lose their health coverage as covid-era Medicaid rules come to an end.

A Canadian woman who had her breasts and uterus removed after self-diagnosing as trans is suing the doctors who "treated" her (found via Aunt Polly).

Only my feelings matter, not anybody else's.

In the UK, a man who celebrated the murder of French teacher Samuel Paty and called for more such murders has been convicted of inciting terrorism.  (I posted about the original murder here.)

As the tide turns against trans ideology, the violence against women gets worse.  Watch Hyde Park today.

In Australia, thousands of soccer fans and others have filed complaints as a male player dominates a women's league, injuring female players.

In Europe, the number of private jet flights has tripled since 2019, with their greenhouse-gas emissions quadrupling.

In France, a symposium in support of Afghan and Iranian women has been canceled due to terrorist threats.

Russian officers in Ukraine are using their own female medics as sex slaves.

Never forget Bucha, and the horrors it has come to represent.

The Putin regime is trying to subvert Georgia, a warning for other countries as well.

Israel has enacted a bizarre law enforcing Jewish dietary taboos on hospital patients -- even patients who are not religiously observant or not Jewish.

Kevin McCarthy finally shows a spine about something -- Taiwan.  The tinpot dictatorship in Beijing is throwing the usual tantrums.

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

My own posts this week: a video on Chinese electric cars, some truths and inspirations, and standing on principle on free speech.

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If you're on a date and the other person gets out their smartphone and starts texting or checking messages, just end it right there.  If their behavior on a date is like that, it will never get any better.

Irrational belief systems are inherently hostile to free speech.  They don't dare allow criticism since that would expose the irrationality.  So when you see people calling for "no debate" and the silencing of their opponents, that usually means that their belief system is nonsensical, and that deep down they know it.

No group of people is homogenous, even a movement for evil.  They will always differ in their degree of dedication to their cause, in their reachability by logic, in their personal character and histories.  Any strategy or argument you employ against them will affect some of them more or differently than others.

I've created an archived version of my "Resources on trans ideology" page, as a precaution in case censorious types get the original taken down.  Archived versions of posts don't change when the original post is updated, so I'll probably need to re-archive it periodically as new links are added to the original.