Link round-up for 14 January 2024

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

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Cat chase!

Stupid people are stupid.

It's a thrilling ride..... oops.

This is perhaps not the best method for getting a tire off the rim.

Women can goof up too.

Cats rule!

If you go round that curve too fast, you'll lose your pants.

Open the door to the dildo dimension.

This new car design still needs a lot of work.

His driver gets him to the destination fast.

When using fireworks, it's best to not be a complete idiot.

Picture The Lord of the Rings from the ring's point of view.

Does your IT specialist dress this well?

By the end, you can almost taste it through the screen.

In a small Australian town, Lady M finds a touch of homey Halloween.

Blogger Rosa Rubicondior, to whom I link here occasionally, has put several books out, mostly about religion and science (only available on Amazon, unfortunately see comment from Rosa below).

Lots of info and pictures on peacocks here.

Some tips here on memorizing vocabulary when learning a language.

Waves carry a lot of power.

Stone-age people were as intelligent as we are, and could well have used methods like these to build massive structures -- no "ancient aliens" nonsense required.

2023 was the hottest year on record, by a substantial margin.

These galaxies are much farther apart than they look.

The Peregrine One Lunar-landing mission has been abandoned due to a fuel leak.

One fundamental difference between science and religion is how they resolve disagreements.

Here's some more selective Bible quoting.

Luckily, this one example of art desecration can safely be ignored.

Building a snowman can involve a lot of hassles.

Blogger Donna posts a collection of words used by snotty people on the internet.

Tolkien got a lot of geography wrong, but he had reasons.

Despite a hard life, Van Gogh was a philosophical thinker.

The "colonizing" of words is totalitarian manipulation and bullying, not natural language evolution.

Here's an idea for reducing the risk posed by nuclear weapons, without the far greater dangers of getting rid of them entirely.

Here's more on the Chrome browser's escalating war against privacy.

Some ding-dongs on Fox News think that Taylor Swift is part of an evil Pentagon conspiracy to make people register to vote.

Here's a whole movie about stuff in the Bible you probably didn't know about.

This post features Boeing, magnets, sperm, locusts, and some stupid politicians.

Netflix removed a film from its platform because some religious bullies claimed it "offended" them.

Medical quackery is very dangerous.

Here are some more scams to watch out for, targeting the elderly.

Bloggers, always remember you are not obligated to post about current events.

For a lot of religious people, church is basically a place to socialize.  Now some non-religious are creating their own equivalents.

Maybe the US could have avoided the Civil War by negotiation -- but that wouldn't necessarily have been a good thing.

That Alaska Airlines 737 that suffered a blowout had shown pressure warning lights on several previous flights.  Another airline has found loose bolts in some of its 737s.  We have a broader problem of failing to hold corporate executives accountable.

Anti-vaccine idiocy is putting the US at risk of new outbreaks of several diseases.

What is cancel culture?

Taylor Swift is fed up with people claiming she might be gay.

Children can escape indoctrination if they're given a decent chance.

Humor has always been a good weapon against rigid, authoritarian mentalities.

A Christian explains why he stopped going to church.

House Republicans have evaded opportunities to improve border security, preferring to use the issue for empty political point-scoring.

There is no empathy for women here.

More than two hundred thousand US workers are owed a total of $163 million in back pay.  Includes a link to a site where you can find out whether you're one of them.

Adam Schiff has some good solid ideas for strengthening American democracy.  About abolishing the Electoral College, though, until somebody can come up with a credible plan to get two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and the legislatures of thirty-eight states to support this, it's not worth talking about.

Thousands of years of persecution have left profound psychological scars on Jewish culture.

Under-regulated capitalism now serves only the wealthy parasite class, not the people.

Younger people are making errors that make it difficult to get jobs.

Universities need to abandon DEI and stifling dogma to achieve real diversity and academic freedom.

People like this don't want religious freedom for all, they want special privileges for Christianity.

Here is a new website documenting the Hamas atrocities of October 7 (disturbing imagery (obviously)).

Since 2021, new laws make it harder for renegades in Congress to sabotage an election result.

Jewish students at Harvard are fighting back against the university's flagrant anti-Semitism.

The Ohio House has overridden governor DeWine's veto of a bill to protect minors from surgical and hormonal transing and protect girls' sports teams in schools from male would-be participants.  The state Senate is expected to follow suit.

Among a sample of the idiots chanting "from the river to the sea" at Nazi rallies since October 7, two-thirds repudiated the slogan when they found out what it means.  Learn to get your basic facts straight, dumbasses.

The Supreme Court must decide whether ignorant, medieval-minded politicians can interfere in women's medical treatment and kill them.

A new poll shows older voters supporting Biden over Trump by 60% to 37%, startling given that these voters usually lean Republican.  Here is the poll -- note that it is of Pennsylvania, not the entire country, which the Raw Story post does not make clear.  That specific result is here -- scroll down slightly to "age in yrs".  I note also that Fetterman's strong support for Israel and for tougher border control have both gained him far more support than they have cost him.

A whistleblower speaks out on library censorship and bullying.

Many Christian denominations are splitting over gay rights, with a consistent pattern -- pro-gay congregations mostly in the West, hostile ones mostly in Africa and Asia.

The jihadists and their Western fellow-travelers need to face reality about Israel.

FBI agent Nikki Badolato has been fighting child sexual abuse for more than two decades, with around a thousand convictions to her credit -- the scale of this horror is huge (link from Lady M).

A new analysis confirms that dragging workers back to offices doesn't improve productivity or profits -- it merely panders to the narcissism and control-freakery of bosses.

Annie Asks You blog assesses Biden's recent speech.

Where are the gay elders?

"Racial caucusing" is the latest desperate (and illegal) scam to preserve racial segregation on campus.

This judge is out of patience with election-denialist bullshit.

The IRS is having some success going after rich tax cheats, although $360 million collected must be a drop in the bucket compared with what they owe.

Feminist groups who refuse to unequivocally condemn Hamas's mass rape, torture and murder of women no longer deserve to be called "feminist" at all.

Even the European Union wants Taylor Swift to help get out the vote.

A woman in Scotland took a plea deal on a crime she didn't commit because she was afraid of going back to a prison with male inmates.

A new BBC movie honoring a World-War-II-era hero makes a strange omission.

A Chinese-made self-driving car in Scotland malfunctioned and could not be slowed down or turned off, effectively "kidnapping" the driver.

UK national policy now allows male police officers pretending to be women to search women suspects.  Women who object to this may be accused of a "hate crime".

"Allow us to educate."

Scandinavian unions are standing firm against Elon Musk's bullying, and he's not happy about it.

Banning a party supported by 23% of the voters would be a massive attack on democracy.  Listen to your voters to find out why they are deserting you and flocking to "extremists".  Maybe they're getting sick of this kind of bullshit.

It seems Ukraine's heroic "nice girls" will live to fight another day.

Early in the invasion of Ukraine, Russia said that Europe would freeze in the winter because Russia would cut off its energy.  Now it's Russia itself that is freezing.

A massive fire largely destroyed a twenty-five-acre warehouse in St Petersburg.  Arson is suspected, perpetrators and motive unknown so far.  Russia has recently suffered about fifty large warehouse fires.  Update:  There's a lot more going on here.

Unrest over the regime's brutal treatment of conscripts is rising.

Biden supports having the option to seize frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine.

Russia's population is likely to decline by about 10% over the next two decades.

This is what Islamist thugs do to women who don't submit to their taboos (disturbing picture).  And this is an Islamic government.

The full extent of Hamas's sexual atrocities may never be known.

US intelligence confirms that the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza was being used by Hamas and other jihadists as a military HQ -- making it a legitimate military target.

Taiwanese voters have elected Lai Ching-te as president.  As the vice president to term-limited incumbent Tsai Ing-wen, Lai's win means a third term in power for the Democratic Progressive party, which stands for closer ties with other democracies, and for defiance of the Chinese gangster-state's efforts to dominate Taiwan.

According to World Bank estimates, China's economy is now just two-thirds the size of ours, down from three-quarters in 2021.

Investigations in China have found nuclear missile silos with incorrect lids which would have prevented the missiles from launching properly, and other missiles filled with water instead of fuel.  I wouldn't bet on the rest of their military equipment being any less crap.

More links at WAHF, Angry Bear, and Fair and Unbalanced.

My own posts this week:  an image round-up, and Gaza "solutions" that have already been tried and failed.

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.

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He is facing two and a half years in prison for performing this song.