Link round-up for 11 February 2024

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

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Animals make fools of themselves.

Clean your display screen.

Let's go out and walk the dog.

Everyone will assume people are shagging in your car.

Cats deal with life.  They seem to startle easily.

The path of true love never runs smooth.

If the shoe fits.....

Which dog is the real winner?

They made a daring escape in broad daylight.

And remember that when you clear the snow away, the snow also clears you away.

I feel that these posters subtly misrepresent the Barbie movie (found via Miss Cellania).

Avoid writing important letters in a language you aren't fluent in.

A demon that feeds on human suffering could actually be quite useful.

This is a true ice boat.

Keep teaching your kid and eventually he'll learn.

Don't run red lights.

Somehow, this was way cooler than the modern stuff.

Will he know the difference?

Good reminder here for bloggers about personal information.

Let it be known to all that, on 8 February 1404, king Taejong fell off his horse.

This is New Orleans.

Déjà vu can feel uncanny.

See the final resting place of Ingenuity.

He knows what is, and is not, a valid reason for believing something.

Would you travel to Mars in a spaceship masterminded by the man responsible for this?

Our national parks are an important venue for natural selection.

JFC is TV really this bad these days?

She's a star, he's an embarrassment (found via Hackwhackers).

Don't mistake soulless cash grabs for art.

Some people are able to learn and change.

Take a stand against the lunacy threatening women, children, and gays.  Even New York Times readers are turning rebellious.

Even many megatrumpazoids are not buying the new Taylor Swift conspiracy theory (but note that the article relies on anecdotes about individuals, with no data from actual surveys backing it up).

The town of Granbury TX exemplifies the miseries inflicted by arrogant cryptocurrency "miners".

How do you spend so much money and achieve a 100% failure rate?

The FCC has banned deceptive "AI"-generated voices in robocalls.

Why are we suddenly hearing so much about Taylor Swift's jet?

"Navigators" help women in forced-birth states travel for abortions.

A climate scientist has won his defamation case against two global-warming-denialist agitators.

America -- leave it or love it.

Social media are practicing a bizarre form of censorship.  Problems can't be dealt with if they can't be talked about.

Violent, paranoid, chronically-angry nutcases easily turn against each other.  Can you imagine the people in the first video planning and carrying out any kind of serious, organized rebellion?

Americans' trust in clergy is at an all-time low, though they are still trusted more than business and political figures.  Interesting that of the six most-trusted professions, five are medical.  The only group that has seen any increase in trust since 2019 is labor union leaders.

Never agree to be a witness in a federal prosecution of some big shot -- no matter what they promise, the system will not protect you.

The House is now considering a bill to keep men out of women's sports nationally.  Hard to judge its chances of passing, though.

The FTC wants to ban non-compete agreements which Wall Street uses to restrict employees' freedom of action.

One of the most powerful politicians in the US wallows in medieval superstition.

In DC, the urban crime explosion (the murder rate is triple that of 2012 and the highest in a quarter-century) is even affecting the insulated and arrogant political class that usually sits in its safe gated communities telling us peons there is no crime explosion and we're just imagining things -- and they're demanding action.

This post makes the case for Biden to drop out.  I don't know whether the situation is as bad as he says, but if the goal is to prevent Trump from getting back in, it needs to be honestly considered.  However, don't take the scurrilous Hur report slurs as evidence for anything.

An Oklahoma legislator has launched a frontal attack on the First Amendment.

The sale of US Steel to a foreign company is moving forward.  The workers who made US Steel successful now just have to hope Nippon Steel keeps its promises of no layoffs.  Fetterman spoke out strongly against this, but a single senator has little power to actually prevent such a move.  Where was the Democratic party? Where was Biden?

This Maine librarian stood up to the would-be book banners, and eventually prevailed.

A proposed law would end the taxation of Social Security benefits, while eliminating the income cap on Social Security taxes that now protects the rich from paying into the program on the same basis as everyone else.

"Dominionists" and other militant fundamentalists are starting their big push for Trump.

This post illustrates how identity politics trivializes governance.  There are no specifics about the candidate's stances on any issues, only what identity pigeonhole he fits in.

Missouri Republicans affirm the state's laws forcing women and girls to carry unwanted pregnancies to term -- with no exception for rape.

Here's why Biden will probably win.

Fetterman remains the conscience of the US on the Israel-Hamas issue.

Alberta is leading Canada back to gender sanity, and the crazies are not happy about it.

Québec is escalating its harassment of businesses over the usage of language on signs.

Even in the extremely secular UK, religious fanatics wield dangerous influence over the schools.  Then there's this.

There's no honor in acknowledging the truth about gender ideology only after so many people have been hurt that you're left with no choice.

Like other European countries, Ireland is seeing a surge of rebellion against elitist, pro-mass-immigration politicians.

Haters and bigots all across Europe are threatening to boycott the Eurovision Song Contest because Israel is participating.  By that logic, it should also exclude Ukraine, which is also defending itself against an attack by maniacs intent on genocide.

Sex-selective abortion in Albania is leading to a shortage of girls.  Albania is historically Muslim; religion was suppressed during the decades of communist rule, but its mentality still pollutes the culture.

Even in wartime, there are heartwarming moments.  But he should never have had to leave.

The Russians shelled Kharkiv recently.

Russia continues to lose huge amounts of equipment, much of it to drone attacks.

India's religio-nationalist Modi government openly attacks secularism, marginalizing non-Hindus.

China's housing-sector collapse is far bigger and more serious than what the US endured in 2008.  Deflation and shrinking exports are pushing many small companies to the brink of collapse.  The West still hardly grasps that China's economy always was a house of cards.

Malaysia's top court has ruled that the country's states can no longer enforce medieval religious laws when they conflict with national laws.

More links at Fair and Unbalanced and WAHF.

My posts this week:  a personal note, and an image round-up.

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 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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The computer is working fine for now.  Dunno what was up Monday morning when I could hardly do anything with it.  As for the job, it is, I guess, survivable.