Link round-up for 6 August 2023

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

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There are two kinds of dogs.

Ouch!

All cats cause chaos -- this one is better at it than most.

Cool outfit -- not many places you could wear it, though.

Faces, faces everywhere!

I don't think this coffee date would have been much fun anyway.

An artist creates a masterpiece which "AI" could never match.

Little projects around the house are easier with a good assistant.

This would serve Congress right if it happened, which it won't.  Just quit wasting our money on nonsense.

A petty thief can strike anywhere.

Pooch pwns leopard.

This simple device is sure to help you lose weight.

Occultists drink for free.

Catch the cobra.

Being a good parent requires patience.

It's a precision surface-to-air attack.

A woman can behave like a man (NSFW).

Art imitates art imitating life.

Happiness between Tails blog reviews a fantasy novel and re-posts a couple of my "meditation" pieces.

Apparently it's safe to touch whatever the hell this is, but I still wouldn't.

She really shouldn't have touched this.

Here are some of the reasons for doing an anti-religion blog.

Insects in Colorado are being hammered by abnormally-frequent hailstorms.

Worry is usually pointless self-torture.

For those interested in Germanic paganism, here are some tips for spotting alt-right groups lurking within the community.

Looking for new blogs to read?  Here's a directory of almost two thousand, grouped by topic.

Here's why "AI" "art" is getting worse over time.

Francis Ford Coppola believes American movies are heading for a revival.  Disney's ongoing summer of megaturkeys suggests that the woke colossus won't be part of it.

Greta Gerwig does not want to turn her huge hit Barbie into just another tired, money-grubbing "franchise".  But Hollywood bosses can't seem to break free from the old ways of thinking.

How black can black be?

How white can white be?

How large can a PDF be?

See the true sky.

Interesting photos of the microscopic here.

The Earth has built-in natural systems that stabilize its climate -- but that doesn't let humanity off the hook for dealing with global warming, because those systems on their own would take hundreds of thousands of years to undo the damage.

Pregnancy has drastic and lasting effects on women's brains.

It's a perfect demonstration of Newtonian physics.

NASA has restored communications with the Voyager 2 space probe after an earlier glitch.  Now forty-six years old and four times as far away as Pluto, the probe continues to function well and send data back to Earth.

Check out the innovative design of the Rajkumari Ratnavati girls' school in India.

Gardens of mutually-supporting plants thrive where ordinary lawns die off.

This is considerate truck design.

Disney is plotting to phase out physical media to force us to rely on shitty "streaming" platforms.  Expect a rise in pirate DVD sellers.

Guys, quit being assholes at the movies.  You're just showing insecurity and confirming the worst stereotypes of yourselves.

Never entrust any personal matters to Twitter DMs (or to social media generally).

From 2019 -- technology is helping internet users win the war on ads.

Fans are furious as Warner and Disney learn the wrong lessons from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.  But solidarity appears strong.

Taylor Swift shows the shitty media-company bosses how it should be done, handing out $100,000 bonuses to all the workers on her current tour.

Don't trust Etsy.

Elon Musk dissing Richard Feynman is like a baboon declaring that Beethoven wasn't a very good composer.  The moron is so far out of his depth it isn't even funny.

Napoleon understood the function of religion.

When someone shows you who he is, believe him.

What can parents do about an adult child's self-destructive behavior?

The new flashing "X" sign atop Twitter HQ has already been removed just a few days after being put up, after complaints from the dazzled residents in the apartment building across the street.

Black support for Republicans has been rising, from 8% of the black vote in the 2018 midterm to 14% in 2022.  If DeSantis's disgusting "personal benefit" claims about slavery reverse that trend, it could be his most important effect on US politics.

Cory Doctorow wrote a book on how to "disenshittify" the internet -- and Amazon enshittified it.

Yes, this is class warfare against the non-wealthy.  The politicians responsible must be voted out.

This November, Maine will vote on a referendum to create a state-owned power company replacing the existing private ones.  Those private companies are spending big trying to defeat the initiative.

A reporter in a San Francisco Walgreens witnessed three thefts in thirty minutes.  It's no wonder businesses are fleeing cities overrun with petty crime.

Faced with a labor shortage, US bosses desperately struggle to avoid wage increases by importing foreign workers (note -- the article is from a whiny pro-boss viewpoint).

Tesla's self-driving cars are too dangerous to be allowed on the roads.

Each woman who speaks out makes things that much easier for the next.

People are trusting that they'll get paid by a company that can't even pay its office rent consistently.

Again, people's money is vanishing at Wells Fargo.  Go elsewhere FFS, there are plenty of banks out there.

Giuliani is a childish, obnoxious weirdo.

Bosses claim that working from home hurts productivity, but the hard evidence shows the opposite.

Instacart just cut its shoppers' minimum pay by almost half, in an economy where workers are already in short supply.  The managers there must be idiots.

This company needs to be sued into oblivion for negligence.

My state's new governor has the lowest approval rating of any governor in the US.

"From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey."

A Catholic school in Missouri kicked out a star student because of his parents' views.  Keep on doing this stuff, religionists -- it just shows everybody what you really are.

OHSU dumped a seriously-ill woman patient because she complained about a trans flag in a clinic waiting room.  Would they spurn a black patient for complaining about a Confederate flag?

Learn about the wingnut mastermind behind the crusade to destroy the Constitution and turn the US into a theocracy.

Companies that force work-from-home employees back to the office are suffering from employee unrest, increased quitting, and difficulty in hiring.  More here.  There are signs that the workers are winning this battle, partly because many have realized life shouldn't revolve around a "career".

A notorious wingnut Catholic bishop wants Hillary Clinton silenced.

Americans pay far more for medicinal drugs than people in any other country, yet Big Pharma uses gimmicks to avoid paying US taxes on the resulting profits.

Even in the US, more and more doctors are speaking out against the horrors of "gender-affirming care".  Even the AAP now seems to be preparing to back down.

The US government's credit rating has just been downgraded because of Republicans' repeated brinkmanship over the debt ceiling.

California's war on math will exacerbate racial and class divides in education.

Kamala Harris gets it -- some claims don't deserve the respect that a debate would implicitly give them.

The heat in Arizona is so bad it's killing the cacti, and Phoenix just had the hottest month on record for any US city.  We many eventually have to concede that Arizona is becoming uninhabitable, and evacuate it.

The modern de-liberalized left is undermining the vast progress of the last few decades.

Indictments won't weaken evangelical support for Trump.

Harassing and threatening your neighbors has consequences.

Bloomberg is an asshole.  If government buildings are standing empty and unused, then sell off the buildings and save the government some money.

Brawling breaks out among confused megatrumpazoids in California.

Police and on-site security thwart an anti-Semitic terrorist attack in Memphis.

A victim of "gender-affirming care" explains how it happens.

After a Christian Marine officer's incessant preaching led to the injury of a subordinate, the MRFF stepped in and got official intervention to handle the situation.  This kind of thing is why the country needs the MRFF.

More Republican politicians now accept the reality of human-caused global warming, yet the party itself remains stuck in denial.

In 2012, Planned Parenthood held a workshop for men on "breaking down" and "overcoming" lesbians' resistance to having sex with them.

This apology needed a bit of amplification.

Rebellious anger is spreading among French police due to the recent riots and perceived unfair treatment from the legal system.

What does "persecution of Muslims" really amount to?

Ukraine is prepared for the possibility that Russia might manage to kill Zelensky.

Elon Musk is sabotaging the Ukrainian counter-offensive (found via Reaganite Independent).

Use these verified charities to help Ukraine.

Watch Ukrainian drone boat attacks on Russian ships.

People in Russia are firebombing military recruitment centers.  There are other signs of mass discontent with the war.  Putin is so desperate for soldiers that he's offering bribes to people in Kazakhstan to sign up.

Mexico has replaced China as the US's largest trading partner.  It's worth slightly higher prices to reduce dependence on fragile supply lines stretching to an unstable mafia-state on the other side of the world.

Much of South America is experiencing a heat wave up to 102°F -- and it's mid-winter there right now.

Thousands of Gazans have taken to the streets to protest Hamas rule.  Needless to say, they were quickly suppressed by the Islamist thugs.

So much for BRICS -- large majorities of people in India and Brazil have a negative view of China.

The city of Bengaluru leads India's economic boom.

Taiwan has a doomsday plan to destroy China if it invades.

China's dream of overtaking the US is dead -- the one-child policy killed it.  Now it faces demographic collapse and an unsustainable real-estate bubble beyond anything found elsewhere.

The Chinese regime is now desperately trying to revive the tech companies it previously attacked at a cost of over a trillion dollars.

More links at Fair and Unbalanced and WAHF.

My own posts this week:  a meditation on the night, an image round-up, and the roots of religious bullying.

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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Iraqi TV host Mahdi Jasim recites a text by the Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghut, very blunt words on how Islam has held the Middle East in stagnation.