Link round-up for 28 May 2023
o o o o o
Behold the destroyer.
He found a new way to lock the gate.
Some people deserve to be in Hell.
Nice comfy mattress..... WTF?
Playing pool is better with a cat.
She used a small rock to keep herself dry.
Severe pun-ishment here.
I guess this is what they call the shallow end of the gene pool (found via Hackwhackers).
Eventually, the cat gets fed up with your bullshit.
This sign is open to a lot of interpretation (see comments).
Catch a fish, get something extra.
This is not the correct way to park a car.
Ha ha, you're funny-looking.
They cut him down in his prime, but he got his revenge (found via Hackwhackers).
Water this plant, and you'll get a drink yourself.
Even from prison, he strikes back at his captors.
Quit blocking the road..... OK, never mind.
The angels watch from on high.
Knowing foreign languages can be fun.
With the right connections, you can have a mobile home on the cheap.
Here are your options for crashing into a rock.
See right through him, or see yourself in him.
Guillermo del Toro says that he once saw an alien spaceship -- a really crappy one.
As the formerly clean and simple classic gay rainbow flag fills up with extraneous clutter, we might as well face the inevitable.
People today are still being stupid about Plato's metaphor.
Turtles are nice.
See flowers up close after rain.
Here's a weird little quirk of the English language.
What is the appeal of the alien romance genre?
She can open a secured door, so long as nobody inside is trying to stop her.
Small-town life just doesn't have that good old Satanic vibe.
Ancient Roman kitchenware had a surprisingly modern look.
If you have stories on AO3, you need to protect them from being used to "train" AI bots.
This is where the pyramids are.
Cynicism leads to a miserable life.
For some, the dead return in dreams.
Suggested responses here to rude comments aimed at childless people. Mine would be "none of your damn business". Raising children well is one of the greatest contributions a person can make to the world, but not everyone is cut out to do it.
The total number of tyrannosauri that ever lived was only 1.7 billion, not 2.5 billion as previously estimated.
No, there is not a species of sparrow with four sexes.
Ohio researchers are working on a vaccine against arthritis. For those of us already damaged by arthritis, eating properly can still help.
Yes, there are innate behavioral differences between the sexes.
An electronic link from brain to spine allows a paralyzed man to walk.
See an erupting volcano from above.
Actual evidence doesn't support the use of "gender medicine".
A basic mental ability, on which the capacity for empathy depends, may go back as far as the dinosaurs.
Since elephants have bigger brains than we do, why aren't they smarter than we are?
The Ukraine war highlights advantages of solar power over nuclear.
Orcas join the class war, waging a campaign against yachts.
Don't depend on Kickstarter to support your project if it deviates at all from the current Mandatory Correct Thought.
Blogspot has a censorship problem, apparently.
This party exists.
WordPress is abandoning the auto-sharing of posts to Twitter because Twitter wanted to charge too much for it (link from Daal). Sounds like another Musk screw-up.
Therapy can't work when it becomes contaminated with ideology.
"Anyone who tells you that your enemies are inhuman monsters is using you."
Bud Light sales continue to fall, and it's not just conservatives who are boycotting. Discussion here.
This Republican official in Georgia is a literal flat-Earther who believes globes are a conspiracy to brainwash people.
The "Citi Bike Karen" case illustrates why people shouldn't rush to judgment just because something seems to fit their preferred narrative.
Amanda Gorman responds to a Florida school banning her poem.
If you find an old grenade in your house, don't fiddle around with it.
A data leak in Germany reveals thousands of weird safety incidents with Teslas.
This "fact check" about Target is seriously misleading because it addresses only swimsuits. Even if Target wasn't selling trans-themed swimsuits for children, there were a lot of other trans-themed items aimed at children. Nobody who is defending Target is addressing the real issue -- inappropriate, sexualized clothing aimed at children.
Target says it's getting bomb threats -- from the pro-trans side.
Electric school buses bring an unexpected benefit.
Imagine how gullible you'd have to be to fall for the "Trump Bucks" scam. The conspiracy-theory mentality is not harmless.
Global-warming-denialist nutcases are harassing and threatening meteorologists.
Unlike some Christian ones, Jewish charities won't try to convert you.
How well did DeSantis handle covid? It's a complex question, but basically, not very well.
A clear majority of Americans oppose trans ideology (though they also oppose discrimination against trans people), and the numbers would be even higher if the questions were phrased honestly.
Twitter features animal torture videos.
Raising taxes on the rich turns out to be good policy.
Younger Americans are growing up less religious because they didn't get the same kind of early indoctrination that previous generations did.
Good explanation here on why TQ+ is fundamentally opposite to LGB.
In practice, the "exceptions" in anti-abortion laws are meaningless.
Interesting discussion here on the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
These are not books for children.
This is perverted child abuse (warning -- disgusting).
Thirty tons of ammonium nitrate (the same stuff used as an explosive in the 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist attack) have vanished from a train in California. Authorities suspect it was just a leak in the rail car, and I hope they're right. Stealing thirty tons of anything would be a pretty impressive accomplishment, and the last thing we need in this country is a competent terrorist group.
A chip-on-the-shoulder customer tried to bully fast-food workers. It backfired.
The Southern Baptist Convention faces an accelerating decline in membership.
The problem with DeSantis's war against Disney is that even if he wins, he loses.
Loneliness and isolation are a major problem in American society.
The emerging debt-ceiling deal is a craven surrender to the wingnuts and will hurt poor people.
Work is no longer rewarding, and employers are doing nothing to earn the loyalty they demand (the article frames this as a generational issue, but that's just static -- workers of all ages are realizing these things).
SheWon's listing of female athletes who lost places to male competitors in female sports has been updated with new data, and is now sortable by year.
An investigation reveals at least four hundred and fifty clerical child sex abusers in the Catholic Church -- in Illinois alone. Then there's this guy (found via Hackwhackers).
School children in Portland OR are being subjected to a proselytizing bus driver, and the school authorities are foot-dragging about fixing the problem (found via New Witch).
"Safe and inclusive" now means the opposite.
The MSM are not telling us the truth about the "No Labels" scam.
Here are ten ways US culture is becoming toxic.
"There would be no gay people left."
Republican internal polling shows ongoing damage from the abortion issue.
New York city has a plan to "fight" shoplifting -- by coddling criminals as they have never been coddled before. If I were a store owner there, I'd take one look at this and relocate to Nebraska.
To revive the US, we'll need to fight and defeat entrenched wealth.
The ACLU has turned homophobic.
Kari Lake has lost her final court case.
The decline of religion in the US is the real demographic change that favors Democrats.
Threats and bullying against women who criticize gender ideology have become such a problem that the UN is getting concerned.
Are Canadian parents reaching the breaking point?
This person exists.
The new puritans must be stopped.
The British Starbucks manager fired for throwing a violent tantrum at two customers is now desperately trying to paint himself as a victim. Discussion here.
The UK's top classical-music station is facing a shrinking audience as it abandons its traditional fans to pursue being trendy. Why do so many companies these days seem so intent on alienating their customers?
Oxford university is in the grip of a culture of fear and conformity.
Filthy, disgusting weirdos dump gallons of urine in and around a London office building.
The EU has fined Meta (Facebook) €1.2 billion for sending users' personal data to the US. Europe generally has better privacy protections than we do.
Clean energy in Finland is so abundant that it's driving electricity prices into negative territory.
This is what gets called "transphobic".
Before-and-after pictures show the devastation of Bakhmut.
Putin is threatening to invade Belarus if its people revolt against his puppet ruler Lukashenko.
In Mexico, prosecutors have withdrawn the case against a woman who got six years in prison for killing her rapist in self-defense.
The Iranian theocracy has executed three protesters for "waging war against God".
Today's election run-off is the Turkish people's chance to dump the incumbent religio-authoritarian Erdoğan in favor of pro-Western Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. (I hope they succeed even though it means I'll need to learn to spell "Kılıçdaroğlu".)
While lunatics in the US scream that state laws against cutting off teenagers' breasts constitute "genocide", Uganda has actually passed a law punishing homosexuality with long prison sentences or even the death penalty.
More links at Fair and Unbalanced and WAHF.
My own posts this week: baby ape videos, an image round-up, and harm reduction on a social level.
o o o o o
Visionaries show us dreams of a better world. And such visionaries can appear from the most unexpected directions.
Casual, emotionally-empty sex with a stranger isn't really sex in the truest sense. It's just using another person as a masturbation device.
Any discussion of how the Constitution should be changed is pointless unless you have a specific plan for getting two-thirds of each house of Congress plus the legislatures of thirty-eight states to support it.
Using laws to stop a technology whose time has come has the same effect as using a cobweb to stop an express train.
Any politician who is focusing on making sure the other side gets blamed if there's a default needs to be hounded from office and his career destroyed. Their job is to focus on preventing a default.
[Image at top made by Amanda]
posted by Infidel753 at 1:51 AM
10 Comments:
Hardly the most important thing you covered this week, but I would like to comment about the article on classical music and video games. I am a life long classical music listener, and I can tell you that the only things keeping classical music from being dead as a dormouse are movies and video games. Many of the top classical composers today work in these genres, which are the only place they can see any kind of decent return for their talented work, and they are the overwhelming conduit through which people younger than 40 ever hear classical music. In a way, this is the modern version of opera, which is, after all, setting plays to music, and which was far more popular among the middle and working class than symphonic music during its heyday.
lots of interesting stuff here - still smiling over altruistic turtles - who knew?
Green: Fortunately, movies and video games reach a pretty wide audience. I didn't know classical music is used in some video games -- if that's the case, perhaps the station could have featured some of that instead of displacing classic entirely, as they apparently did when focusing on video-game music.
Daal: I certainly didn't know turtles behave that way.
I am amused by your take on the new LGBTQXYZ++ flag*. I saw one in Manchester recently and if it wasn't on Canal Street (aka - "anal treet" - that is how the sign is always vandalised but then that's Mancs for ya) in the Gay Village I wouldn't have known what precisely it was. Which is a bit of a problem for a flag. It vaguely reminded me of the South African flag (possibly because post-apartheid the RSA tried a re-brand as "The Rainbow Nation"). Anyway, whatever you think of the +TQ+++ a rainbow flag covers all of the visible spectrum already. What next, IR and UV "genders"? Anyway, I'm now a microwave and demand the right to warm your taco! Absurd? Maybe? But no more than, "Suck My Trans Cock You TERF Cunt" flags.
*As maths advanced over the years the symbology ran out of Roman and Greek characters. Cantorian set theory uses Hebrew for example. Aleph-null is the cardinality of natural numbers. The maths of infinite sets has some pretty cool nomenclature which pass the "Doctorian Event Horizon"**. There are for example, "Ineffable Cardinals" (though the Vatican has generally moved them to obscure dioceses for... "reasons").
**That's anything in science or maths that if you heard The Doc (Tardis or DeLorean) utter you'd think, "That's utter bollocks!" but is actually a real concept and not just a fluctuation in the dekyon field of Applied Testicology.
Green Eagle,
Hardly surprising. Games are the defining art form of this century - so far, anyway. Just look up the numbers on sales...
And look up "Christopher Tin". He did Civ at the Proms.
Turns out you’re wrong about Citibike Karen. I use those bikes. The kid was right. He had been riding that bike and was “resetting it” as you have to every 45 minutes. USA Today wrong. This rings totally accurate to me as a NYer: https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/28/2171985/--Citi-Bike-Karen-wasn-t-a-Karen-She-was-worse
NickM: That flag serves terribly as a flag because (a) it's too complicated and (b) they keep changing it. Flags that people develop an attachment to stay the same for long periods of time, as the original rainbow one did. The updated one seems to have no fixed version at all. They just keep fiddling with it and adding more and more clutter based on how the fads of the moment evolve.
I would have assumed that "ineffable cardinals" are cardinals who cannot be effed. Such entities are probably never observed in reality, however.
Anon: Her lawyer has documentation. If you read Daily Kos as much as I do, you know that the posts there vary wildly in how authoritative they are -- some of what's posted there is barely-literate gibberish by people who obviously don't know what they're talking about. The one you linked consistently uses hateful and slanted language -- "weaponized her whiteness" and so forth -- and even some of the comments there point out that the writer's interpretation of the receipts doesn't make sense. It's hardly to be taken seriously.
If it does turn out that she was in the wrong, I'll mention on the blog that I was in error -- I have done so in the past, in cases where I was. I don't think this is going to turn out to be one of those cases.
Thank you for adding me to your list of links. I haven't been around much this week as I've been in bed sick with the stomach flu. I'm finally starting to feel better though.
Turtles are strange little creatures but loved that video.
The flowers with rain on them was so pretty.
Hope you feel better soon! You've already got so much to deal with. The genre fiction post was interesting.
Flowers are amazing to look at. Almost nothing else in nature has such colors. I think a lot of people miss out on looking at them close up these days.
Post a Comment
<< Home