Link round-up for 18 June 2023

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

o o o o o

Who needs poltergeists when we have cats?

Getting dressed in the nineteenth century was absurdly complicated.

This "AI"-generated "commercial" looks like a horror film.

Be careful where you sit down.

Cats rule!

That wasn't exactly his ass.

I bet somebody will report this as a UFO.

Watch the precision training of this formidable combat force.

Did he order coffee or cake?

I'm waiting for my Uber ride -- oh, here it is.

The kids brought a friend over to play.

When a critical resource is in short supply, war may result.

It's gonna take a while to paint over that.

I can't see how he did this -- can you?

If the drawer is stuck, get an expert to fix it.

Suffer your way through the world of work.

Stupid people exist.

He swam out to greet his fans.

How do you verb DuckDuckGo?

Blogger Donna assembles a menagerie of obscure words.  But some of these words may be more familiar.

What if Jesus came back today?

There is such a thing as World Crocodile Day.

Cool your home with a moving fan.

Here's a cheap alternative to expensive air filters.

The orca war on yachts wins some class-based support on land.

Here is a work of art whose own subject could never imagine it.

This book was not printed but woven on a loom.  Controlled by computer punch cards.  In 1888.

Fantasy writing is real writing.

Our culture needs the errand hang.

Check out the "light art" of Claudia Bueno.

Ceremonial Welsh Eisteddfod chairs here, old and recent.

A little-noticed quirk in The Shining makes it all the creepier.

Two thousand years ago, an emperor and a poet championed opposing moral visions for Roman civilization (found via Silverapplequeen).  The poet died in exile, but his values prevailed.

There's a problem with time travel that most movies overlook.

Using ChatGPT to cheat is easy to catch.

Some snakes can climb trees.

See mushrooms releasing their spores into the breeze.

Three million years ago, "Lucy" walked upright just as we do.

Those orcas attacking yachts are rapidly improving their tactics and organization.  Well, Orcas are mammals, and all mammals are able to learn and think to some degree.

Crazy Eddie's Motie News observes World Wind Day with a short history video.  Wind power has been extensively used since Classical times, especially in the Middle East.

Eukaryotic cells -- the highly complex cells of animals, plants, fungi, and protozoa, as opposed to the much simpler cells of bacteria and archaea -- evolved fairly late in Earth's history, perhaps just 1.6 billion years ago.

Photos circulating on the net, which claim to show "borders" between oceans, are actually of completely different phenomena.

Real artificial intelligence hasn't been invented yet.  Not even close.

After a life in captivity, he couldn't survive freedom.

Evil doesn't have heroes.

There are places where humans were simply not meant to go.

Finally, some justice for Blake Allen.

Religion wastes money.

"Careers" are dead because the rewards are no longer worth the work.

This was probably the most idiotic blunder in The Rings of Power.

Bud Light has lost its position as the top-selling beer in the US.  In some areas it's being sold with discounts and rebates that make it effectively free.

Reddit's management seems to be declaring war on its own user base.

In the seventh week of the writers' strike, morale remains high.

Religion makes people immoral.

Rhode Island takes a step toward legalizing teh shrooms.

Gay pride month has morphed into its opposite.

US literacy is declining because schools rely on a long-debunked idea about how reading works.

Modernity and religion are irreconcilable -- which means religion can't come back from its decline.

The rejection of individualism is a form of fatalism, the most pathetic error the human mind is capable of.

Even kids know what's inappropriate for kids.

Students in Massachusetts rebel against indoctrination, although it sounds like the school administrators are slow learners.  Discussion here.  Ideologists, including religious ones, need to be kept away from control over schools.

A (somewhat) conservative blogger addresses Trump die-hards (read the comments too).  Another explains why he voted for Biden.

"We should all start coming out as things; apparently it's very important and moving."

Cancel culture is motivated by sadism -- the smug self-righteousness is just a veneer.

The company is not your friend.

Academic freedom stimulates innovation, but it's in decline globally.  Some college require new hires to sign oaths of ideological conformity.

This girl was saved.

Progressive activists are one of the least racially diverse ideological tribes in the US.

Those weird new fees in restaurants, that you think are going to the server as quasi-tips, probably aren't.

Keep fighting to unionize -- the bosses are running scared.

Banning books?  They're now doing it with movies too.

One House Democrat is calling attention to the housing affordability crisis, something which affects more people more severely than most of the things politicians prefer to focus on.

69% of Americans agree that athletes should play only on teams that match their actual biological sex, up from 62% two years ago.  55% also say that "changing gender" is morally wrong, up from 51% two years ago.  Among younger Americans, the percentage agreeing that there are only two genders has risen by 14 points over the same period (source).  The media are way out of touch on the issue.

Bullies reap what they sow.

The US is rife with county-level secession movements, although they don't seem likely to prevail (link from Annie).

Some morgues and crematoria are selling parts of corpses without the knowledge or permission of next-of-kin.

A former military chaplain who used bullying tactics to recruit is being invited back as a featured speaker at an on-base event.  The MRFF is on the case.

Some intellectually-inclined right-wingers have been taking an interest in the writings of Patrick Deneen, who proposes a carefully-vague new system to replace liberal democracy as we know it.  Here at last is some straight talk on what he advocates -- a Christian dictatorship in which the opinions and prejudices of Deneen and people like him would be enforced by law.   Same old authoritarian crap, in other words.

"Trantifa" poses a rising threat of serious violence -- violence which some public figures seem ready to coddle.

Google workers are angry as management uses humiliating measures to enforce dragging them back to the office.  Managers don't seem to grasp that even if they win their war against working from home, they'll just end up with offices full of sullen and resentful workers -- hardly a formula for business success.

"News flash:  multiculturalism means different cultural values.  You know what that means?  Values you don't share, values you hate, values that are bad values."

Religionists don't have any answers.  They just believe they do.

The similarities between transgenderism and anorexia are becoming harder to ignore.

Workers share real-life experiences of in-office work.

"Far right" is yet another term so over-used that it's now becoming meaningless.

Twitter's office in Boulder CO is now being evicted because Musk isn't paying the rent.  Under these conditions, the leadership's aspirations verge on delusional.

"At long last, the republic strikes back."  61% of Americans, including 38% of Republicans, say the charges in the Trump indictment are serious.  It's time to hold Trump to his own standard.  A few more Republican leaders are finally speaking out.

Trump's abuse of classified documents has likely already endangered or even killed people who act as sources for US intelligence.

Responses here to some Republican talking points on the indictment.

The law gives the rich and powerful breaks which an ordinary person doesn't get.

Darwinfish 2 suggests penalties for Trump, and rebukes Saudi golf propaganda.

Make everybody think alike -- that's "diversity".

Younger workers don't care about the so-called drawbacks of working from home.

Under a proposed California law, parents who don't submit to gender ideology could lose custody of their children.

A right-wing blogger counsels his readers against anti-Semitism and xenophobia.  The comments thread is..... largely uninspiring, let's say.

For whom do you vote when all the options are bad?

Fanatical ideology won't go away on its own -- there is no "pendulum" to swing back.  It's necessary to fight it head-on.

Aside from improved productivity, working from home creates new opportunities for the disabled.

Her life was ruined because a clinic was careless.  Recently she has managed to find hope, but her life will never be what it should have been.

Half of this UK women's angling team quit after a man was assigned to the team, citing the unfairness to their opponents.

British academia now has a full-time defender of free speech who truly understands his job.

The arrest of former Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon is prompting some schadenfreude.  Here's what she did while she was in power.

The man who punched an elderly woman during the New Zealand Let Women Speak event will get no real punishment.  It's another example of coddling violence against women.

France needs to come clean about the Thiaroye massacre.

Poland erupts in protest after the country's forced-birth law results in a woman's death.

This is the face of the Ukraine war.

Money to rebuild post-war Ukraine will have to come from somewhere -- we should take it from Russia.

The Ukrainian counter-offensive is prompting hilariously inept Russian propaganda.

A Russian commander kept his troops standing in formation for hours waiting for him to make a speech -- allowing the Ukrainians to attack them with artillery.

This guy should not get out of prison early.  Or ever.

Erdoğan is trying to bully Sweden into infringing freedom of speech.

In India, Modi's religio-nationalist government is tightening control over the media.

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

My own posts this week:  real multiculturalism in Germany, truths and inspirations, and some improved word definitions.

o o o o o

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I feel a special horror at regimentation, at anything that subsumes the individual within the mindless mass.  The chanting of slogans, the singing of hymns or recital of creeds, marching in lockstep -- it reeks of yielding one's humanity to a deadened and dangerous subhumanity.

The stupidest argument of the global-warming denialists is that since carbon dioxide is necessary for life, it "cannot be a pollutant".  By this logic, since water is necessary for life, floods and tidal waves can't do any harm.

A multicultural society such as ours is less vulnerable to propaganda, fascist subversion, etc than a monocultural society is, for much the same reason that a genetically-varied population of organisms is less vulnerable to being wiped out by a single pathogen than a genetically-homogenous population is.  When a society is made up of many groups who won't all respond to the same kind of propaganda in the same way, it's far harder to design a campaign to sway the whole population in a common direction.

[Image at top:  statue of the Roman poet Ovid]