Link round-up for 11 June 2023

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

o o o o o

It's an epic battle -- Star Trek vs Star Wars.

There's something fishy here.

Never before has a cat pwned himself so effectively.

Lord of the Rings heroes grapple with a pronunciation issue.

Sometimes religion can be useful.

It's a machine.  It can't be reasoned with.  It can't be bargained with.  It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear.  And it absolutely will not stop.....

This is not the correct way to tow a car.

It's the first taste of a new treat.

Doggie time!

FFS you had one job.

She really seems to be enjoying that.

Yes, it is possible to train a cat.

This Mexican street is too steep.

Here's a novel idea for finding available women.

He fought the law, and the laws of physics won.

You can spend twenty million dollars to buy a pair of uncomfortable-looking shoes.

See how large an Irish wolfhound is.

You will believe a cat can fly.

The flood went through the building.

Being a bus driver shouldn't be this exciting.

Even when Halloween is over, you can repurpose your giant skeleton.

Artist Camille Fourcade imagines the planets as girls.

Here's the website of Saphira the friendly velociraptor, mentioned in last Sunday's round-up, and an interview (link from New Witch).

This is a hotel in Vietnam.

Somebody destroyed this house.

Read the life story of a cat, and visit some artists online.

If dinosaurs still existed, which ones would taste best?

Masturbation is an evolved natural behavior common to all primates, and even contributes to male reproductive success.

Science is not a secret society -- it's a competitive sport.

Under the right conditions, fire can destroy a building with terrifying speed.

Take a close look at a cigarette (disgusting imagery).

After the Titanic sank, could anyone still have been alive inside it?  And what happened to the corpses?

These creatures once lived, right here on Earth.

Ideological people are toxic to be around.  Things were better in the 1990s.

Forget Medium as a blogging platform -- they censor.

Keep your DVDs -- streaming services can't be trusted, especially with older stuff.

Reddit is about to self-destruct, apparently.

They shouldn't have messed with Hannah Duston.

The current wave of hype for fake AI recalls the similar early hype for such fads as cryptocurrencies and "the blockchain".  Oh, and "terminal enshittification" is an inspired term for the effects on the job market.

In Japan, fake-AI "art" will soon be subject to copyright law, likely limiting its spread.

The Pride flag no longer makes sense.  It has come to stand for just the opposite of what it once did, with actual gay activists feeling driven out.

China is now the second-largest market for movies, but its traditional racial attitudes -- and government censorship -- pose a challenge for American movies there.

John Cleese is refusing to censor The Life of Brian to kowtow to the modern performatively-offended crybabies.

Just what we need, yet another tired %$#@! movie franchise to wring a last few dollars out of a classic, instead of something new and original.

Many younger people in the US are dropping out of the unwinnable rat-race as much as possible, somewhat parallel to the "lying flat" phenomenon in China.

Fear of name-calling gives your enemies power over you.

See the Trump presidential library.

"Vacation denied."  "Well, I'm going anyway."

This person once knew a complete jackass.

Blogger Mary Kirkland recounts a horrific childhood experience (disturbing).

Some people seem to have a fetish for being naked in public.

"The group that latched onto us has left us with damage that will be there even after we get rid of them."

Preachy activists' personal behavior doesn't match their proclaimed values.

Lawyer-on-lawyer warfare brings out some ugly stuff.

Andrew Tate is an asshole.

In parched Arizona, one company is being allowed to use unlimited water to grow alfalfa -- for Saudi Arabia.

Our deranged county government spent over half a million dollars to temporarily house four homeless families.  The Devil knows what actually solving the homeless problem here would cost.

The way to beat cancel culture is not to cringe and slink away, but to fight back as noisily as possible.

Every age group below 50 has shifted to the right since 2012, measured by presidential voting patterns.

Intellectual integrity means accepting reality even if you don't like it.

Green Eagle blog dissects yet another deranged wingnut website.

At least twenty state attorneys general have launched investigations into the Catholic Church for clerical child molestation.  Diocese after diocese is declaring bankruptcy due to lawsuits.

Health-insurance CEO pay is skyrocketing even as US healthcare deteriorates.

Feminism now consists of men lecturing women about how patriarchy works.  Yeah, right.

Republican leaders reacted to the Trump indictment as they've reacted to everything about him since 2016 -- with abject cowardice.  Fox News resorted to whataboutism.  Here's a look at Trump's claims about the classified documents.  And don't worry too much about Aileen Cannon.

Here's a key point:  "Having seen how cavalier Trump was with highly sensitive information provided to the US by the intelligence agencies of our allies, those allies have NO reason to ever trust us with sensitive information again.  That's especially true if Trump isn't held accountable for this." (found via Voenix Rising (NSFW)).

Trumpanzees are venting violent rhetoric on the internet, but there's little sign of them actually planning anything.  I've been seeing talk like this on right-wing blogs for years, but it always remains just talk.

In Pendleton in eastern Oregon, a man entered a women's locker room at a swimming pool and ogled little girls while they were undressing.  People are furious, but due to state laws, nothing can be done about him.  It's this kind of shit that drives people in those places to vote to join Idaho.

The overturning of Tennessee's drag show ban is a genuine victory for free expression, since the law was "vague and overbroad" and was not limited strictly to performances in the presence of children.

An Asian-American student speaks out against racist college admission policies.  Overall, Americans disapprove of such policies.

This guy won't be shooting any more cops.

Anti-Semitism is an ongoing and growing problem in US society.

Global warming is making parts of the US uninsurable.

There is no "right" to force everyone else to kowtow to your delusions.

Democrats are slightly more willing to violate the norms of democracy than Republicans are -- but both are much less willing to do so than their opponents believe.

In discussing religion, precision is your friend.

Major retailers are abandoning San Francisco in droves, mainly due to out-of-control crime.

This soldier's Christian commanding officer, known for reading the Bible aloud at people, ordered him to stop reading The Catcher in the Rye because he found it "offensive".

The ACLU is now attacking the rights and safety of women prison inmates.

After the Pulse nightclub shooting, Christian extremists harassed and taunted survivors.

Insurance-company employees are in an uproar after the management breaks a promise to let them work from home permanently.

In Colorado, an incumbent who supported racist "reparations" schemes was massively repudiated by voters.

Darwinfish 2 assesses the debt ceiling deal, finds some rather strange coffee packaging, and remembers Tina Turner.

Yet another women-owned business is being destroyed by our insane laws.

Vivek Ramaswamy is an appeaser.

The value of commercial real estate is dropping as employees continue to prefer working from home, but landlords don't want to believe it.

Blogger Donna is unimpressed with Mike Pence.

The Associated Press demands totalitarian ideological conformity that would make Stalin blush.

A lot of Republicans objected to Ted Cruz's condemnation of Uganda's new anti-gay law.

Anti-vaxxers said we'd all be dead by now.  In fact, as I've noted several times recently, the higher death rates in "red" areas of the US are partly due to lower vaccination rates in those areas.  But it was sad to learn that Dr Luc Montagnier, a distinguished scientist who led the discovery of the AIDS virus, apparently suffered some serious mental decline in his old age.

We need to learn the real history of slavery, not just slavery as it existed in the Americas.

"Obey us or they will get you" is a dishonest manipulation tactic.

Studying old religions helps you understand new ones.

Misogyny at Oxfam (the charity) is really bad.

Fewer than a third of British people believe that men who claim to be women should be allowed in women's sports or women-only spaces.  The numbers would probably have been even lower if the questions hadn't been confusingly worded.

Northern Ireland is beset with a fad for dangerous giant bonfires, and local government refuses to act.

Most Oxford students do support free speech -- when they get a chance to hear it.  Background here.

In France, a seven-thousand-year-old neolithic monument has been destroyed to build a store.

Good discussion here of the Kakhovka dam breach and its effects, with video of the wrecked dam.  Russia is shelling the center in Kherson where Ukraine is trying to evacuate residents.

"Rape culture" really exists -- in India.

Japan's government can't stop the birthrate from falling.  Japan doesn't have China's ghastly totalitarian state, but its cost of living is high, its housing is cramped, and marriage still brings traditional restrictions which women today shun.

In China, the story of Kong Yiji offers a metaphor for an economy of vanishing opportunities.

Large cracks have appeared in the deck of a Chinese aircraft carrier still under construction, suggesting that China's notorious problem with shoddy construction may extend even to military hardware.  (I don't normally consider the site "1945" a good source because it seems overly sensationalistic, but the information looks solid in this case.)

Indonesia is now planning to move its capital city because the current capital, Jakarta, is on the coast and under threat from rising sea levels and subsidence.

More links at Fair and Unbalanced and WAHF.

My own posts this week:  a Lone Animator video based on Lovecraft, an image round-up, and the Greater Idaho movement in eastern Oregon.

o o o o o

Looking back on your life, you'll find that what you regret most is not all the things you did that you shouldn't have done, but all the things you shouldn't have done that you didn't do.

By this point, being called "problematic" is a compliment.

Logically, free-speech protections must apply specifically to "offensive" speech.  Speech which no one finds offensive will never be the target of efforts to suppress it, therefore it needs no such protection.  It's only speech that somebody believes shouldn't be allowed that needs it.

Good riddance to Pat Robertson.  The world is a better place without him.