Link round-up for 16 July 2023

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

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Back off, you pest.

He runs to the rescue..... oops.

Suddenly I feel like having some toast.

This scary gang of tough thieves took his phone and won't let him have it back.

Who let the dogs pigs out?

These are signs of the times.

Sometimes robbing a house is difficult.

Be careful running on an icy road.

Impressive, but I'm not sure I see the point of it.

Time for some more cats.

Time for some cattle.

Here's how you qualify to be a philosopher (and yes, Socrates was kind of annoying sometimes).

This marriage proposal evoked a little too much enthusiasm from its third participant.

Uh, maybe I don't want a banana after all.

I don't think you're supposed to set off fireworks inside a garage.

Make your photographs more interesting.

You're never to young to start a dance career.

Bring back the pockets!

Sometimes the rejects can become heroes.

Rain can stimulate bioluminescence.

Don't fear black holes.

A Canadian researcher argues that the universe is twice as old as the current estimate.

This week India launched its Chandrayaan-3 mission to land a rover on the Moon.

Interesting design, but I don't trust it.  The slightest synchronization error and you're dead.

Nobody knows what these things are.

See an elaborate botanical garden display (open each pic in a new tab and re-click for full size).

If you don't want your Lego bricks any more, don't throw them away.

This monstrosity exists.

Here's another blogger who hates the heat and humidity and bugs of summer.

If you're in the Las Vegas area, avoid this guy.

Silverapplequeen is done with arguing with people.

Pan Am Flight 914 is typical of tales of the supernatural.

If you used Facebook in the last sixteen years, you may be eligible for a payout.

A wingnut press event erupts in insults and farting.

Shitty public behavior is being normalized.  Push back.

Thou shalt not gaze upon the Holy Schlong of the Lord.

This person's property has been set on fire three times by idiots with illegal fireworks.

Attendance at Disney World is in a slump, apparently because of Florida's unnerving political derangement, though the relentless megaturkeyhood of Disney's recent movies suggests declining public interest anyway.

Hollywood is on strike, with the threat of "AI" replacing writers and even actors being a major issue.

All year film critics have been cheering on dud movies that flopped with audiences.  Now that there's a real hit in the theaters, they're ignoring it.  (Many critics also panned the hugely-popular Super Mario Bros -- they're totally out of touch with audiences.)

Without modern medicine, you probably wouldn't exist.

The Titan sub had really, really crap engineering.

He'll think twice before stealing again.

"AI"-generated fake photos which have gone viral depict Hobby Lobby as a hotbed of Satanism.  Amusing, but this might be legally actionable if it costs them substantial business.

You can tell a lot about a movement from the character of its leaders.

Here's a website you can use to report sites which post imagery of child sexual abuse.  It's based in the UK but operates globally.

What's the point of "success" if you have no life?

More bullshit from the New York Times -- now they're lionizing long-debunked con man Uri Geller.

Airlines have apparently come up with a new horror to inflict on passengers.

Religious nutballs insist on pushing their superstitions on the rest of us.

"The first sign that someone is off the rails and is going to engage in a terrorist act or killing is usually deep hate or bigotry against the female sex (women) that increases publicly over time."

Workers understand very well why bosses are trying to kill work-from-home.  Here's YepperyYepstein's original post, which has more insight in four short paragraphs than any ten Marxist screeds or cowardly poll-tested Democratic party snivelings.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has stood as a bulwark against Christian persecution and harassment of non-Christians in the military.  House Republicans have now passed an amendment to the current defense funding bill that bans members of the military from communicating with the MRFF.  There's still time to take action.

Natural gas is as big a threat to the climate as coal is, due to inevitable methane leakage.

Here's how gender inclusivity works.

Not even Republicans are immature enough to embrace ideological libertarianism.

In today's workplace, hard work is seldom rewarded or even noticed.

Facebook betrayed these women.  Since there was a search warrant, perhaps it had no choice.  The lesson is that in a forced-birth state, don't entrust any message about getting an abortion to any form of electronic communication, unless you know for sure that it's encrypted in such a way that not even the platform can get it and hand it over.

Before you get off Facebook, here's how to scramble all the data it has on you into nonsense so it can't be harvested and sold.

Always remember the importance of down-ballot voting.  It's not all just about the presidency.

Banks in the US and UK are closing or locking customer accounts without warning or explanation, in some cases apparently because they disapprove of the customer's political views.

Meet Portland's professional child genital mutilator.

One moron senator is sabotaging the US military's chain of command as part of the wingnut crusade against abortion.  House Republicans are behaving just as badly.

The Belgian Waffle Ride, a major cycling event, lets men participate -- but not in the women's races.

TSA employees have been caught stealing from travelers.  Be cautious.

"Nobody wants to work any more" because there's no point in it.  Employers have only themselves to blame.

Dehumanizing language is dangerous and should be avoided.  The comments (well, some of them) are also worth reading.

Rising wages and falling inflation are good news for workers.

It used to be possible for Americans to have ideological disagreements without descending into personal hatred and demonization (link from commenter NickM).

The Satanic Temple uses religion to fight religion.

This asshole boss is going to lose a lot of his best employees.  If you're good enough to be confident you could get a job somewhere better, why would you stay with him?

Kowtowing to gender ideology fuels anti-Asian racism.

Iowa Republicans have enacted a draconian forced-birth law.  61% of Iowans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Our drug policies are torturing people with unnecessary pain and it needs to stop.

Chris Christie wants to cut Social Security and raise the retirement age rather than reverse half a century of tax cuts for the wealthy.

30% of Harvard admissions are in categories like legacies, athletes, and donors which are as contrary to a merit system as affirmative action was.  These, too, need to go.

California is passing a law to toughen prison sentences for child sex traffickers, after an earlier move to block it provoked a public backlash.

Washington state's murder rate is now the highest in forty years, and other violent crimes are increasing rapidly.

A federal appeals court offers hope, however slim, of stopping the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

If you're fatalistic about climate change, you're part of the problem.

Georgia wingnuts who claim to have evidence of election fraud are finally being told to put up or shut up.

A young conservative explains why he feels abandoned by today's Republican party (in response to the claim that "nobody can define what 'woke' is", here's what it means).

Every incident like this awakens a few hundred more people to the reality of gender ideology.

A new museum in Scotland remembers the witchcraft persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  It was specifically Christianity that fueled the atrocities.

In Australia, as here, people are rejecting identity politics -- and its proponents' resort to name-calling is just turning people off faster.

Friday was Bastille Day, commemorating the French Revolution, a milestone in the long struggle against autocracy.  This year, the world's largest democracy was the guest of honor at the celebrations.  See also Mark Twain on the French Revolution here.

People booed Macron during the festivities.  His vicious betrayal of the people by raising the retirement age against overwhelming public disapproval hasn't been forgotten.

People overseas see Biden more clearly.

Russia's schools increasingly focus on militaristic indoctrination (found via Reaganite Independent).

One day after Turkey stopped blocking Sweden's NATO membership, the US agreed to send F-16s to Turkey.  I had a feeling there was some pressure being put on Erdoğan behind the scenes.

Don't forget the sex slaves of World War II.

As the Ukraine war weakens Russia and pulls its military resources away from its eastern borders, China may feel tempted to act on its historical claims to 400,000 square miles of land in Russia (an area one and a half times the size of Texas).

More links at WAHF (Burr Deming at Fair and Unbalanced is ill with covid and won't be posting for a while).

My own posts this week:  YouTube's ad-blocker ban, some truths and inspirations, and summer as the alien season.

To suggest an item for inclusion in the next link round-up, you can use the e-mail address on the left in my profile, or if you don't want to use e-mail, leave it in a comment to the previous link round-up.

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Is there something about being super-rich that cuts your IQ by thirty points?  It's sure starting to look that way these days.

Bodily autonomy is the most important freedom.  If you don't own yourself absolutely, you own nothing.

Too many politicians believe that their role is to rule the people or guide their thinking, rather than to humbly serve and listen to and represent them.

Yesterday I was in a local Fred Meyer (supermarket / variety store) and saw a display advertising a $15 rebate on $24.99 packs of Budweiser.  Even in the liberal Portland area, they're struggling to sell it.