Link round-up for 28 April 2024

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

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Cats are a type of hair-trigger kinetic weapon.

A rookie journalist conducts her first interview.

Smell the ass, face the consequences.

What if trees were just like us?

Ancient mummies don't understand modern technology.

The TV is getting a bit dusty -- time to clean it.

Cats do things their own way, and meet fearsome aliens.

This is not a job for a philosopher.

Being an alien with acid blood is sometimes very inconvenient.

Call the plumber -- there's a leak.

Lady M discovers some wallpapers for witches.

This short film looks like a bizarre drug trip, but a few bits will seem disturbingly familiar.

Behold the power of an American tornado.

This volcano and lake of lava are of interest mainly for where they are located.

The English of Shakespeare's time sounded much more different from the English of today than most people realize.

We're approaching the turning point on greenhouse-gas emissions.

NASA is once again getting data from Voyager 1 after remotely fixing some technical problems aboard.  The spacecraft, which is now four times as far away as Pluto, is forty-six years old and its technology is primitive by today's standards, adding to the challenges of keeping it working.

Intel seeks to make ever-smaller computer chips.  The tool it uses for this purpose weighs a hundred and fifty tons.

They keep finding ways to make Windows shittier.

Recycling plastic doesn't work -- and the present emphasis on recycling is mostly the result of a corporate campaign to dodge responsibility for pollution.

More Tesla Cybertruck problems continue to surface.  They can kill you even if you aren't riding in one.

Here's what happens when you try to replace artists with "AI".

It's not hard to identify the target of this new parody song.

Cas d'intérêt examines the awesome art of Victor Hugo, and ponders the internet-based distractions of modern life.

Has Kristi Noem been to this Florida beach recently?

Be respectful of the vitalistically challenged community.

The Toronto police are making fools of themselves.

Don't mess with the thing.

Performative self-righteous wokeness has imploded into a black hole of absurdity.

Car makers have been selling information about millions of drivers to insurance companies without the drivers' knowledge.

No sane man would join this religion.

A California IVF lab is accused of knowingly implanting dead embryos in women.

In most ways, Taiwan is now a better place to live than the US.

Seattle police engage in pest control.

Atheism is not a matter of choice.

A Daily Kos writer begs the "progressive" left not to embrace anti-Jewish hatred and violence, even though the many examples he himself cites show that it already, definitively has.

True-believing megatrumpazoids have been scammed out of millions by fraudsters selling fake Trump debit cards and other "financial" junk.  Neither Trump nor his campaign have anything to do with the scam, which is based in Macedonia, but con men know easy marks when they see them -- people who believe the stolen-election, anti-vax, etc bullshit are clearly easy to fool.

This Texas company fired a worker for using safety equipment that was obviously necessary.

Stop paying attention to the New York Times.  It may have been a great newspaper once, but it's junk now.  And FFS stop giving them money for subscriptions.

The "pro-Palestinian" movement in the US has an eliminationist, and de facto genocidal, stance (found via Hackwhackers).  To support them is quite literally to support a new Holocaust.

Gateway Pundit, one of the most toxic and scurrilous far-right "news" sites, has declared bankruptcy in the face of multiple defamation lawsuits.

This person exists -- and could become the vice president.

Woke ideology is gradually being defeated, but die-hard true believers entrenched in some institutions will continue to cause trouble for a while yet.

Some students accepted by Columbia University are deciding not to go after realizing it's infested with violent Jew-hatred.

In the recent series of alarming events on Boeing planes, nobody has been killed (yet), but experts are still worried.

51% of Americans, including 45% of Hispanics and 42% of Democrats, support mass deportation of illegal aliens.

A Pennsylvania high-school boy with known violent tendencies, who maintained a "hit list" of girls to attack, bludgeoned one of his targets with a heavy implement and sent her to the hospital.  The media's weirdly dishonest reporting offers clues to what's really going on.

Arizona stolen-election claims by Kari Lake and Mark Finchem have been rejected by every court that has heard them.  The US Supreme Court has now done the same.

Two men -- one liberal, one conservative, both pro-democracy -- have formed a partnership to fight the polarization of US politics.

A New Mexico police officer committed a horrific abuse of power.

The sane are finally starting to take the country back from the lunatics.  It's going to be a big job.

Trumpanzees hope to sabotage Trump's hush-money trial, but they're probably too dumb to succeed.

Several members of Congress are behaving like Putinist collaborators.  Maybe they are.

Trump's dementia is rapidly getting worse.  It should be a major issue in the presidential race.

The labor movement contemplates organizing a general strike in 2028.

After passing the House by 311 to 112, the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid package passed the Senate by 79 to 18.  Something is seriously broken when a bill with such massive bipartisan support could be delayed for months by partisan games-playing.  Infuriatingly, one of the very few Democrats to vote no was my own state's senator Jeff Merkley, because he opposes Israel's war to eradicate Hamas.  I used to quite like him, but I can never vote for him again after this.  You have to draw the line somewhere.

They stand with our country's enemies.  McConnell calls his party's isolationists to account.

A rabbi at Columbia university urges Jewish students to leave -- Jews are now being regularly terrorized and assaulted there.  At Yale, too, Jews are being violently attacked amid annihilationist taunts.  The left would not tolerate such persecution if it targeted any other group than Jews.  Our universities have turned into encampments of actual literal Nazis eagerly following the example of their German predecessors.  The masks are off.  It is disgusting that the media refer to these orgies of hatred as "protests".  By that standard, a KKK rally or a lynch mob is a "protest".

They don't really care about Palestinians.  They just hate Jews.

It's happening again, right here, right now.

In Canada, too, the new Nazis openly celebrate the mass torture, rape, and slaughter of Jews.

This British doctor is pushing religion on his patients.  The hospital authorities need to be doing something about this.

More here on the British police who stopped a man from approaching a "pro-Palestine" thug rally because his being "openly Jewish" would be "antagonistic" to them (from commenter NickM) -- at least one of the participants was already shouting "scum" at the man.  Police also told a woman at another such rally that swastikas being displayed there were not necessarily anti-Semitic.  There is clearly a problem.

The UK is sending more military aid to Ukraine.

British hospitals are turning away from trans ideology and back to reality.

Spain will force the Catholic Church to pay compensation to victims of sexual abuse.  The number of victims is estimated at 440,000, which is about one in every hundred people in Spain.

The delay in US aid caused Ukraine serious harm.

Ukraine is successfully hitting back against Russia's oil industry.

The pier being built by US forces in Gaza to help aid reach civilians has been attacked by jihadists with artillery.

An Iranian rap singer has been sentenced to death by the regime for criticizing the government.

The regime is also cracking down on women's assertions of freedom, though it still seems a bit nervous about public resistance.

More links at WAHF and Fair and Unbalanced.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and why the NPVIC isn't the right solution to the Electoral College.

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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This one is a must-watch:

The NPVIC is not the answer

The Electoral College is a chronic flaw in American democracy.  In 2000 and 2016 -- that is, two of the last six presidential elections -- it awarded the presidency to the candidate who lost the popular vote, thwarting the actual will of the voters.  It induces candidates to focus their campaigns on a few "swing states" which could go either way and thus will decide the election, whereas if elections went purely by the popular vote, every individual's vote would be worth exactly as much as every other, whether cast in Michigan, California, or Wyoming.  Fairly consistently, polling has shown that a majority of Americans want to get rid of the Electoral College.  However, since it is established by the Constitution, abolishing it would require a Constitutional amendment, which means the assent of two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and the legislatures of three-quarters of the states.  In today's political climate, that's effectively impossible.

A much-touted proposed solution to this problem is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC).  This is a kind of treaty between states, under which each state which has agreed to it would award its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, rather than to the winner of the popular vote within that state as is currently done.  The compact states that it takes effect once it has been adopted by states whose combined electoral votes are more than half of the total electoral votes available -- that is, enough states to decide a presidential election in the Electoral College.  If and when the NPVIC reaches that threshold, every future election's national popular-vote winner will be guaranteed the electoral votes of all the NPVIC states, so that he or she will win the Electoral College.  Problem solved.

It has a real chance of being enacted.  So far seventeen states and DC, with a total of 209 electoral votes, have adopted it; and a further eight states with 79 electoral votes now have it under some degree of active consideration in their legislatures.  If enough of those eight to account for 61 electoral votes adopt it, the NPVIC will take effect.

Unfortunately, while the NPVIC would solve one major problem with our political system, I think it would almost certainly unleash others which might prove even more dangerous and intractable.

First, it sets a precedent that a state's electoral votes can be awarded in a way that completely ignores the popular vote within that state.  The Constitution does not prohibit this; Article II, section 1, paragraph 2 allows each state legislature to decide how that state's electors shall be chosen, and a legislature which adopts the NPVIC is simply making that decision.  It is really only tradition, and attachment to democratic principles, which have always dictated that a state's electoral votes are awarded based on its popular vote.  Once a precedent of abandoning that practice is set, the doors are flung open to a wide range of nasty possibilities.  If a state legislature can ignore the state's popular vote because the national popular vote is more important, it can equally well do so by deciding something else is more important -- say, contriving some pretext whereby one candidate is unqualified or unworthy to be president ("No candidate under whose previous administration illegal border crossings exceeded three million shall be awarded the electoral votes of.....").  A legislature could even give itself the power to appoint electors and then do so as it saw fit, with some claim of democratic legitimacy since legislatures are elected by the people of the state, while in practice gerrymandering means that in some states the legislature is dominated by one party while the state popular vote would go to the other party's presidential candidate.

But the real problem is the risk of elections getting bogged down in legal quagmires.  Imagine that the NPVIC is enacted by enough states to take effect and in the following election it results in one or more states awarding their electoral votes to the candidate who did not win the popular vote in that state.  The party of the other candidate, and groups of his or her voters in that state or states, would immediately file lawsuits challenging the NPVIC on various grounds.  How these would be resolved, and how long it would take, is difficult to guess.  The legal wrangling would be even more intense if the NPVIC resulted in a different candidate actually winning the presidency than under the old system.  It would be even worse than the mess in Florida in 2000.  Whichever side ultimately prevailed, the new president's perceived legitimacy would be diminished and perhaps openly challenged by state governments run by the opposite party, especially if the losing candidate refused to recognize the outcome.  We don't want a political system in which the actual voting is the mere starting gun for endless rounds of squabbling in court which would end up determining the outcome.  Trump and Kari Lake have already tried to force that upon us by legal attacks on the elections they lost, but their claims were rejected in every court because they had no substance or supporting evidence.  Legal challenges to the NPVIC would carry a lot more weight and would be taken seriously.

Whether this kind of mess would be worse than the present system, under which the real winner can "lose" due to a weird eighteenth-century anachronism, is a matter of opinion.  I think it actually might be.  At the very least, we'd be steering the country into unknown waters and possibly an unprecedented crisis of governmental legitimacy, at a time of serious internal polarization and danger overseas.  This is just not a time when the rest of the democratic world can afford to have the US preoccupied with prolonged internal legal squabbling and emerge with a weakened president.

There's another option.  As I've discussed here extensively, each of the two big parties has embraced some policies and ideologies which are extremist, radical, or just flat-out crazy, and which seriously turn off mainstream voters.  Whichever party is the first to comprehensively and convincingly repudiate such stuff will start winning elections by landslides -- including the presidency -- regardless of the Electoral College.  (As it is, the Republicans look increasingly likely to lose in a landslide this year because of doubling down on one of their worst radicalisms, forced-birthism.)  Listen to the voters and go where they are, rather than lecturing them and trying to drag them to where you are, and you will prevail despite the flaws in the system.

Truths and inspirations for 23 April 2024

If something's hard to see or read, click to enlarge.

(For the link round-up, click here.)

I found these two images together in an image round-up on a right-wing blog, exactly like this.  The way those people eat, they probably do face a serious risk of stroke as young as their forties.

What an irredeemably disgusting book.

The good that comes from capitalism comes via competition.  These ever-growing agglomerations undermine that, and should not be allowed.