Link round-up for 23 July 2023

Blogspot is still requiring a login to see blogs with any NSFW content, even for non-NSFW posts.  And Twitter is still mostly blocking people without Twitter accounts -- you can see individual tweets, but not the replies, and not people's Twitter home pages or whatever they call them.  Thus I still can't include links to items in those categories.

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This person seems odd.

Dogs are silly.

Gadgetry permeates everything.

Gotta plan this jump carefully..... never mind.

Me first!  Me first!..... never mind.

Punctuation and grammar go out for a drink.

This may not be the best gun for home defense.

Yikes, it's Barbie Yaga!

This cat seems totally unimpressed with this gadget.

Stop using foreign letters for aesthetic effect when you don't know how they're actually pronounced.

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century practice of writing "s" in a form similar to "f" produced some interesting results.

This week's signs of the times mostly involve beer.

He was trying to make coffee, but the cat distracted him.

Watch a daring rescue of a trapped victim.

This self-defense technique won't always work.

He makes the effort to recycle -- so can you!

She had to ward off some very determined invaders.

This old film set was put to good use.

It's not too early to start making Halloween decorations.

A couple of weeks ago commenter Daal mentioned "drone shows" as an alternative to fireworks.  I wasn't familiar with the concept of a drone show, but here's an example -- a dragon made from a pattern of drones, from a show in Shenzhen, China.

Check out William Delvoye's X-ray erotica (NSFW (duh)).

How can an author create a bond with readers?

Entertainment media bosses fear that the current strikes will unmask the "streaming" business model as non-viable.

Part of why audiences are rejecting so many current movies and TV shows is that the writing is so bad.

The evolution of Barbie dreamhouses tracks American culture, and sometimes got out a bit ahead of it.

When the same media that once supported Cuties and minimized Roman Polanski's crime are now spouting negativity about Sound of Freedom, that pretty much tells you where they're coming from.  (Speaking of which, when are the authorities going to start arresting Epstein and Maxwell's clients?  Why isn't the lack of action on this the scandal of the century?)

Sparta was the North Korea of the ancient Greek world.  Contrary to popular belief, its army wasn't even very good.

Incredibly, some idiots once thought "AI" would help artists.  They turned out to be way wrong.  It's also a threat even to big-name authors.

Dragonflies eat mosquitoes, so don't damage their habitat.

Modern technology enables us to defeat censorship from four hundred years ago.  Who knows, perhaps views "canceled" today will be heard again in the twenty-fifth century?

The Soviet Union also had a Moon rocket program in the 1960s.  Unfortunately its engineering was about as good as engineering in totalitarian states usually is.

We've now observed thousands of other solar systems, and none of them look at all like ours.  Our astronomical situation is a freak case and not remotely typical.

A virology professor in Texas struggles against the anti-vaccine lunacy which has already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and may yet kill even more.

Covering canals with solar panels both conserves water and generates clean energy.

The Titan sub's spirit of dumbass corner-cutting engineering by super-rich idiots lives on in Elon Musk's space program.

The "spiritual community" suffers from some of the same kind of toxic behavior as conventional religion.

One mark of a cult is bullying people to use only the kind of language the cult approves.  Push back against those who try to limit what words you can use.

If you insist on using social media, these three points seem like the non-negotiable bare minimum.

Roald Dahl was an asshole -- and that still doesn't justify vandalizing his works (if you don't know what this refers to, see here).

This is what happens when people gamble everything on what some jackass preacher says instead of demanding evidence for his claims.

Stop saying things like "bonus hole".  FFS do the people who come up with these ghastly insulting words even listen to themselves?

Some formerly-denialist House Republicans are starting to accept the reality of climate change, though they still aren't embracing the shift to non-fossil-fuel energy.  Well, one step at a time.

Some bosses are so clueless they treat quitting as a betrayal.

Darwinfish 2 can explain the cocaine in the White House.

Illegal crossings on the Mexican border are at their lowest level in over two years.

If you make fun of our delusions, you're a "fascist".  This kind of thing is why it's impossible to take most accusations of "fascism" seriously anymore.  These nutballs also think gibberish like "center anti-colonial, intersectional solidarity organizing as its opposition" is English, which suggests they're unqualified as "academic" anything.

The real reason bosses hate work-from-home is that they're a bunch of old guys with outdated macho attitudes.

Some Republican senators worry that the proliferation of crank beliefs in their party will drive away sane voters.

If UPS and the Teamsters can't reach a deal by July 31, the resulting strike will have a huge impact on the country.

Stop using motorized scooters.

A key to the success of the gay rights movement was that, early on, it thoroughly repudiated any association with pedophiles.  Now it faces a different, but in some ways analogous, crossroads.

The heat wave covering half the US is about to get worse.

Attorneys general in some forced-birth states are demanding access to the private medical records of women and girls in order to persecute those who go to other states for abortions.

The battle against government surveillance and censorship on the internet is never-ending.

Republicans just can't stop trying to destroy Social Security.

In the gender ideology "debate", all the violence and the incitement of it is coming from only one side.

This senator behaved despicably to promote claims he himself knew were false.

There is one lie that those who tell it can never acknowledge.

A new proposed law would fight corruption by banning members of Congress from trading stocks.

Here's a plan to save Social Security by changing how the trust fund is invested.  This would need to be approached very cautiously, though, and there's plenty of room for tax increases on the wealthy after decades of disastrous cuts.

Trump kept several ancient Israeli artifacts that were sent to the US during his presidency on what was meant to be a brief loan.

"When, unlike the playground, society has given you the power to actually carry out that threat, you're not 'marginalized,' you're the ruling class."

RFK Jr doesn't believe his own anti-vax bullshit.

Urban downtowns will never go back to how they were before covid.  Get busy converting all that useless office space into housing, or it will just sit empty forever.

Maybe Democrats shouldn't worry too much about a presidential third candidate next year.

Detransitioners need attention and help from the medical community which damaged them in the first place.  The proportion of young people who regret transitioning is far higher than the movement admits.

It's incredible that Americans tolerate living like this.

What's the appeal of Islamic extremism?

Texas's forced-birth laws have caused a large rise in infant mortality.

In a Republican party full of calculating cowards, there's still one man who can bring Trump down.

John McWhorter discusses his personal experiences with affirmative action.

Justice is still grinding forward for the January 6 thugs.

Some Republican county officials in Florida are going full Dark Ages on the covid vaccine.

Trump is talking like a mobster -- he doesn't get who he's dealing with.

In the US, the UK, and Canada, ethnic and religious minorities are increasingly joining the revolt against woketardia.

This is why you don't allow men in women-only spaces.

Environmental projects need to take local culture and history into account.

Tide turning at last -- the UK is removing male inmates from women's prisons.

The Wagner group reports 22,000 fighters killed and 40,000 wounded, out of 78,000 total who fought in Ukraine -- a casualty rate of 79%.

Afghanistan under theocracy has become a living Hell.

China's economic stagnation is killing the dream of someday catching up with the West and Japan.  It's dragging down European stocks that still have a strong connection to China.

More links at WAHF.

My own posts this week: a chimpanzee sees the sky for the first time, the worst costume design ever, an image round-up, and the coming of the true faith.

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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A common theme in the more wingnutty corners of the blogosphere these days is "our 'conspiracy theories' turned out to be true all along!"  Of course, what this actually means is that they still believe the same nutty things they believed a few years ago, so they look back at what they believed back then and still agree with it, and they think that means they were right.

Anybody who thinks slavery was beneficial to the slaves needs to spend a week being treated the way the slaves were.

I don't hold anything to be holy or sacred, because those concepts are religious and therefore meaningless to me.  The only thing I feel any reverence for is human achievement.

You learn more by listening than by talking.  If those around you are chatterboxes and you are reserved, you will know much about them, while they know little about you -- which works to your advantage.

Popular current movies show how badly ideologists are out of touch with real Americans.  The ideological left is trashing Sound of Freedom while the ideological right is trashing Barbie -- both of which actual audiences are flocking to.  Let this be a lesson to both ideological "sides" about how totally irrelevant they both are.