Link round-up for 9 July 2023

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

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It's time for fireworks!

A horny dog can serve as a car alarm.

He took a brief break from driving.

I meant to do that.

Find the dogs.

He's cultured and sophisticated enough to prefer tea.

Next time, just wait.

Cosplayer pwns cosplayer.

Make your own water, feed the sharks (at least for me, Blogspot is no longer requiring a login to view this blog -- if it requires you to do so, please let me know).

One form of natural selection is when stupidity makes an organism less likely to reproduce.

Ouch!

They play the game with great enthusiasm.

Where can a purist Christian go to get a manicure?

I'm guessing he flunked.

Strive for maximum inconvenience.

This peacock must have some dragon ancestry.

Use one Supreme Court ruling against another.

Neighborhood idiot gets pwned by rainstorm.

She's giving him mixed messages here.

I think whoever designed this garden knew exactly what he was doing.

Under the circumstances, this is a remarkably placid dog.

Settle down, mama needs a nap.

He knows how to play his role in the game.

They deployed a terrifying anti-personnel weapon.

She was rescued from the flood.

Behold the coming of the green dragon.

It takes work to become a philosopher.

Here's how to make a traditional Chinese bracelet.

I want to get a watch with these features.

Get cooking tips from the recipe graves.

Colorful kippers here.

Remarkably accurate shooting here.

Nope nope nope nope nope.....

Too windy.

Golf is evil.

Martha at Plowing through Life has been cutting out toxic social media, toxic people, and stress-inducing news media.  You might want to think about doing the same.

Blogger Susan Kane has a "not to do" list.

When you create a fictional world for a story, don't infodump.

Think back upon these ancient artifacts.

It's a smart bridge design from generations ago.

This would have been a Roman Barbie.

Five years in jail hardly seems like enough.  Can't they feed him to the lions or something?

The Library Bill of Rights, formally adopted by the American Library Association in 1939, shows a robust commitment to safeguarding free access to information without discrimination against viewpoints or persons.  Recent interpretations generally reflect the same principles.

A wingnut pastor in Tennessee has put a curse on the new Barbie movie, despite knowing practically nothing about it.

With streaming services making some shows unavailable, piracy may be the the only way of preserving them.

YouTube is now threatening to block people who use ad-blockers.  This could be a serious problem since YouTube is now so clogged up with intrusive ads that it's unwatchable without an ad-blocker.  Based on the comments on that article, people are not happy.  I assume that work-arounds will eventually be developed (here's one already, but only for users of uBlock Origin), but YouTube creators may want to also post their videos on Odysee or Vimeo, since their views on YouTube are likely to decrease.

Republicans -- and the Vietnamese regime -- are attacking the Barbie movie because of a dotted line on a briefly-glimpsed map.  This is completely idiotic.  The map is barely recognizable as the real world and the dotted line could be anything.  More here.

After months of declines, Bud Light sales show no sign of recovering.  In some places it's now selling cheaper than water.  This isn't really a boycott any more -- people have simply abandoned the brand and moved on.

Cars are deteriorating in quality as car makers skimp on basic features to add pointless high-tech.

The "Metaverse" is just another failed all-hype-no-substance bullshit billionaire project.

Joe Biden did not make this video.  But maybe he wishes he had.

There are plenty of people who find fireworks traumatic.

Taking naps helps keep your brain young.

Good post here on the anatomy of tolerance.

Imagine the mighty, fallen.

Here's how to pwn an asshole vandal.

You don't need an abusive relationship with Jesus.

Semi-conservative blogger Sixbears hopes that some of those driven from Florida by DeSantis's anti-migrant crusade will move to his state.

The Christian Heaven would be a North-Korea-like nightmare.

Ideological interference is always damaging to science.

Blogger Mary Kirkland recounts another horrific episode from her childhood.

Postal Service robbery is a growing problem -- some advice.

San Francisco residents have found a simple method to neutralize glitchy, traffic-clogging "autonomous vehicles".

Here's a good example of how laws like FOSTA/SESTA make life harder for sex workers.

This professor should simply have been fired.  What she's doing is indoctrination, not teaching.

Freedom of religion doesn't include a right to impose one's own taboos on others.

"Loud quitting" is now a thing, and bosses are running scared.  Hardly surprising when management so often is so determinedly shitty.

The latest Wells Fargo scandal involves discrimination against Latino customers.

A network of pilots with private planes is helping women and girls in forced-birth states get to states where abortion is available.

Learn about Oregon's castration robot, if you dare.

Biden is bringing back manufacturing to the US, creating jobs and moving us away from dependence on fragile supply chains across oceans from unstable gangster-states.

If you've never been homeless, you don't know what it's really like.

Nowadays, you get called names just for not wanting to be squashed.

Being a teacher is just not worth the hassle any more.

The tide is turning against gender ideology in the US, but it's still going to be a long fight.

People are working fewer hours, and in many cases, bosses are going along with it.

This arrogant billionaire believes even native-born US citizens should have to meet conditions made up by him to retain full citizenship, Fourteenth Amendment be damned.

Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, is in crisis as regulators close in and executives flee.

Meta's new app "Threads", a competitor for Twitter, has a successful start with thirty million users signing up on its first day.  Elon Musk's floundering Twitter is trying to squelch it with threats, but really, Musk has only himself to blame here.  Note, though, that Threads has been accused of having very bad privacy protection, and who knows if it will be as bad as Facebook.

Etsy is trying to make its users unknowingly sign away their right to participate in class-action lawsuits.

Here's yet another example of why you can't trust the New York Times.

1877 in the US was a year of racism and class warfare beyond anything we see today.

DeSantis's Florida now bans residents of addiction-recovery facilities from using marijuana even if certified by a doctor for medical use (found via Hackwhackers).

A writing teacher is suing over flagrantly racist practices at Penn State.

Globally, this week included the three hottest days since scientific record-keeping began.

State Farm has stopped taking on any new homeowners' insurance customers in California, because the risks posed by climate change are getting too large.  Watch for more of this from insurers around the world.

Josh Hawley self-pwns with an embarrassing fake Patrick Henry quote.

The Dead Wild Roses "Red Pen of Justice" dissects an emotionally-damaged ideological nutcase with a disturbing addiction to violent fantasies.

During the hot Texas summer, don't let anyone forget this ghastly law.

Some California police are sharing license-plate data with police in forced-birth states.

The traditional pro-freedom left is starting to push back against the extremists.

Republicans are starting to realize that their forced-birth laws are politically self-destructive.

74% of Americans are against allowing public colleges to use racial discrimination in admissions.  Even 60% of Democrats agree.  Now that the Supreme Court has struck it down, a new complaint is taking aim at the similarly non-merit-based "legacy" system.  Do sports scholarships next, please.

Despite a 2024 Senate election map very favorable to Republicans, their leaders are thinking small because they expect toxic extremist candidates to lose winnable races.

No matter how the law on student loans settles out, most of them will probably never be repaid.  It's a question of what wrecking so many ex-students' credit ratings will do to the overall economy.

Prosecutors working on the Trump classified-documents case are getting threats and harassment.

Why do the most sexist countries have the highest proportion of female STEM graduates?

In 2017 Vancouver in Canada implemented an interesting new idea to increase the availability of rental housing.

Canada has banned testing cosmetics on animals.

Deranged "activists" in the UK smashed up a restaurant because JK Rowling attended a Ukraine charity event there.

This is mean.

Teaching mythology as fact isn't education.

If you live in the UK, don't do any business with NatWest or Metro Bank -- they're not trustworthy.

Australia will soon start using essence of shroom (psilocybin) to treat depression.

France is cracking down after days of mob violence swept the country.

The EU will soon impose a dangerous thicket of censorship on many internet platforms, whose effects could extend beyond Europe.

Here's some of what Israeli troops found in Jenin.

Read Ukrainian president Zelensky's message to the US on our Independence Day.

A Russian propaganda photo supposedly showing recently-destroyed Ukrainian vehicles is actually of Russian equipment from battle more than a year ago.

Putin is cannibalizing the Russian economy to keep the invasion going.

The Wagner rebels destroyed an aircraft crucial to the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

The Superior Electoral Court in Brazil has banned Trump-like ex-president Bolsonaro from running for office again for eight years, as a penalty for his attacks on democracy.

Emerging economies are booming, beating their official growth forecasts -- largely because they're decoupling from stagnant China.

The US recently went all-out to avoid a government default, but the Chinese regime has been in default for years.

More links at Fair and Unbalanced and Naked Capitalism.

My own posts this week:  why fireworks are a bad thing, an image round-up, and how I quit an awful job.

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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Whether or not to have children is obviously purely an individual decision.  But it's worth considering -- if a society has two subcultures, and the people in one subculture typically have several children while those of the other typically have few or none, which subculture will be dominant fifty years later?

Sometimes the greatest form of bravery is that which gets the least respect.  To defend yourself or a weaker person from the mob takes courage, but to do so when that "mob" is most of the society you live in, enforcing its taboo system, and when you receive only contempt or ridicule for what you are doing -- how much more courage that takes!

Occasionally other blogs re-post my writings.  I'm generally OK with this, on one condition -- don't change anything.  Don't change the capitalization of words, punctuation, use of italics, or anything like that.  Don't omit any hyperlinks, videos, or pictures that I included in the post.  Everything is there for a reason.  I'd also appreciate being notified by e-mail when you re-post something of mine.  If you're not sure about something, e-mail and ask.

[Image at top:  Bakhmut, Ukraine]