Link round-up for 15 October 2023

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

o o o o o

Beware of superficially-plausible etymology.

Is this a race or a being-silly contest?

Time to get Satanized.

A zombie is a zombie.

Appearances can be deceiving.

He's feeling blue.

Quiet, please.

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Cats are not always what they seem.

Everybody loves a big pile of leaves.

Yuck, don't touch that.

Sometimes, you solve a problem by escalating.

Please enjoy this singing skull.

It's pretty awesome witchcraft.

This is not a good place to eat.

Some people can't ride scooters very well.

Well, that's one way of serving cake.

Move the bicycle out of the way..... oops.

Don't try this at home.  Or anywhere.

Get to work.

It's a daring highway robbery.

She can give her sister a ride.

This is Burano island in Italy, near Venice.

"The Sphere" in Las Vegas gets into the spirit of the season.

The skeletons of Manitou are starting to appear.  More skeletons here.

A statement can be stupid yet still true.

It's an inspiring rescue.

These lab rats have fun.

This is a bear.  And frankly a rather crazy one.

This is what's known as natural selection in action.

Some plants may have a primitive form of vision.

Schooling can really strangle education.

You can't tell whether somebody "really" needs a cane or not.

No amount of "mindfulness" will keep you sane when dealing with systems that seem deliberately designed to be as annoying as possible.

Does the human practice of burying corpses impact the environment?

Ophelia Benson dissects a stunning piece of arrogance.

More YouTube problems, plus a possible fix (I haven't tried this).

Elon Musk's Twitter has been censoring posts that document Hamas's atrocities.  The "mega" links in this tweet have also been censored.  The information needs to be re-uploaded somewhere where it won't get removed.  As with the Holocaust, the evidence must be preserved and widely publicized to thwart the inevitable people who will claim these horrors didn't happen or try to minimize the evil.

America's non-religious people are a diverse lot, but they've all seen through the scam of organized religion.

Part of why Islamists hate Israel is that it allows what they most fear -- freedom for women.  Their attacks show a pattern of targeting women.

Here's a humorous look at the mess in the US government.

Present-day academia is just the fossilized corpse of the revolutionary values of the 1960s.

Stop letting the bosses divide and conquer workers.

These people exist -- unfortunately.

Students who participate in hate groups may have difficulty getting jobs when the graduate.

A win!  Perkiomen school district in Pennsylvania reverses its earlier policy of allowing boys to use girls' bathrooms, after a massive student walkout protest.

This is what passes for "art" from anti-Semites.

Trump is being an asshole again.

An Ohio elementary school hosted an "ice cream Friday", but excluded children who had any "lunch debt" (the headline is garbled).

The Hamas attack has exposed a lot of old lies about Israel.

A congressman leaves the DSA after its hate-filled anti-Semitic rally in New York.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the rally but has not left the group.

Biden has done a lot better than the public gives him credit for.

Abject hypocrites are enabling religious genocide.

This is what "gender affirming care" looks like.

Chronic labor shortages are transforming the world of work in the US, but many bosses are slow on the uptake.

Here's the story of a doctor who performs late-term abortions.

The farthest right and farthest left are ultimately the same.

The wingnuts' efforts to blame Biden for the Hamas attack on Israel are complete bullshit.  Israelis know better -- see this too.

Voters in Colorado have approved an initiative to introduce wolves into the state.  The votes to do this came mostly from the more urban "Front Range" area, but the dangerous predators will be released in the largely ranching western part of Colorado, which strongly opposes the action.  I assume the people there have guns to protect themselves and their livestock; they're likely to need them.  If the wolves kill somebody, this idiocy may end up securing Boebert's re-election next year.

This is what pornification has done to sexuality.

Green Eagle blog dissects the despicable lies of Bernie Sanders.

"Keeping blacklists has historically been a popular tactic to target people and entities that are seen by the established power to be disruptive."

The West doesn't understand the rest of the world.

Rich Lowry rebukes Josh Hawley's bizarre claim that the attack on Israel means we should reduce aid to Ukraine.

Readers rebel against the New York Times's disgusting, both-sidesy coverage of the war against Israel.

California's governor Newsom has vetoed a bill to prohibit caste discrimination.  India banned it more than seventy years ago.

Republican obstructionists and bunglers paralyze the government while crises rage.

Trans people discuss the reality of "bottom surgery".

A Palestinian human-rights activist rebukes the defenders of Hamas.  A Hamas ex-member testifies (this is probably from before last week's attack on Israel).

The Parental Rights Coalition is working to pull Canada back to sanity.

The British public overwhelmingly supports abortion rights.

This offhand display of hate happened in London.

Would-be book-banners resort to violence.

Australian voters have rejected a referendum proposal to grant special political rights based on race.  The "no" vote was at least 60%, probably part of the growing global backlash against woke-ism and identity politics; most MSM reporting on the result has been full of the usual whining and name-calling, oblivious to the fact that such arrogant scolding is just doubling down on what people are sick to death of.

In Germany, things have changed.

The epithet "Nazi" long ago became so over-used as to be meaningless, but here's one of the most ridiculous examples I've seen -- Russian officials call European countries' banning of Russian-registered cars "Naziism".

An unusual private campaign has raised about €800,000 for the Ukrainian war effort.

Russia's "breakthrough" tank is no more durable than the old ones.  And the big new Russian offensive is ending in disaster.

The Hamas attack means that the "two-state solution" for Israel and the Palestinians is no longer viable (it never really was).  The war recapitulates primordial memories of Jewish history.

This video purports to show a girl who was raped and then burned to death by Hamas (graphic/disturbing).

This clip of an obviously-abused hostage being taken away has been widely shown and is definitely authentic.

Here's what the Islamists left behind in Kibbutz Be'eri.

Israeli Arabs, too, were among the victims of the Islamists' barbarism.

This appears to be a family taken hostage.

Here are some of the bodies from the music festival massacre -- the total number killed there was much larger.

A responder describes what he saw after the attack.

The monsters filmed their murders using the victims' own phones and upload them to their social media, to further torment their families.

Allegedly, in this video you can hear a voice giving an order in Russian during the initial Hamas breakthrough into Israel (found via Reaganite Independent).  I can't hear anything that sounds like Russian to me, but my hearing is bad.  Perhaps others can verify.

Israeli public support for Netanyahu and his party is imploding, likely due to the staggering failure of Israeli intelligence-gathering that led to the country being taken by surprise so disastrously.

More links at Fair and Unbalanced, Elder of Ziyon, and WAHF.

My posts this week:  an image round-up, and the attack on Israel.

If any links in this round-up are paywalled or require a log-in to view, please let me know so I can avoid linking to that site in the future.

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.

o o o o o

I don't usually let the round-up be so dominated by one topic -- but let's face it, at the moment there is only one topic.

The confirmed number of people murdered in Hamas's invasion of Israel has now surpassed 1,300, or close to half the death toll of the September 11 attack in the US -- and Israel is a much smaller country.  The magnitude of the shock engendered by this attack is almost beyond comprehension.

As is often the case in wartime, a lot of misinformation is circulating.  Middle Eastern propagandists are especially notorious for recycling old pictures and claiming they are from some recent event.  I've left out a lot of links about Hamas atrocities because I didn't feel confident enough that they were authentic, although most of them probably are.

It's very easy for some Westerner to sit safe in an American or European city and pontificate about what Israel should refrain from doing in response to Hamas's ghastly atrocities, to avoid offending his delicate "moral" sensibilities.  Those in Jerusalem who must actually make decisions about what to do would no doubt dismiss such hand-wringing with the disdain it deserves.

The bottom line is that Hamas must be destroyed.  Israel should, and no doubt will, pursue this objective in a way that keeps Gazan civilian casualties (and its own, of course) to the lowest possible number, but Hamas must be destroyed.  No other considerations can be allowed to result in Hamas continuing to exist.  Any blood shed in Gaza is on the hands of those who used it as a launch pad for mass murder and then scuttled back to hide behind its civilians and use them as human shields.