Link round-up for 7 April 2024
o o o o o
Wallace and Gromit enter the Matrix. This is very cool.
Balloons take to the air.
Spoiler alert!
This airplane even has a greeter.
Police discover evidence of a serial killer at work.
The cat has entered the room.
A moderate drinker has just one glass of wine.
The guy who trained this dog knew exactly what he was doing (NSFW).
He's lucky he didn't loiter out there. Here's the backstory.
It's a precision adjustment, but I'm not sure what purpose is served.
How many guys does it take to change a light bulb?
You can play a mean trick with a melon full of mud (or whatever that stuff is).
Don't drive your car in the water. But a dog can handle it.
Houses don't need to be boring.
Even humble daffodils in bloom can brighten the day.
This is a strong -- and trusting -- dog.
Glimpse the interior of a shark as it swallows a camera (which is pulled back out).
This is probably what Homer meant by a "wine-dark sea".
What happens when mercury and aluminum come into contact?
Here's a detailed look at the risks of battery fires. The author is writing from a "prepper" viewpoint, but he does know the technology.
Listen to autists to create sensory-friendly environments (found via Johnny Profane, who is interviewed for the piece).
We're making a lot of progress in understanding long covid.
A Tesla cybertruck is very safe. The people inside, not so much.
Amazon is giving up its "just walk out" stores. The "AI" they used to track customers was actually an army of remote workers in India who were monitoring everything.
You can de-shittyize your internet search experience.
Discord is going to impose "minimally intrusive" ads. This crap always starts out being "minimally intrusive", and in no time you end up like YouTube. And as one commenter points out, ads lead to censorship because advertisers don't want their ads appearing near "offensive" content.
The only way to make Christianity humane is to cherry-pick parts of the Bible, give them interpretations that never occurred to anybody before modern times during centuries of serious religious study, and ignore the rest of it.
Who you are can never justify harassment or manipulation.
The son of Jack Kirby has a message for the January 6 insurrectionists.
Artists speak out against the dangers of "AI" plagiarism and fakery.
What is a spomenik?
There is such a thing as a global monkey torture network (warning: disturbing content (obviously)).
Reality is what it is, no matter how people feel about it.
The presidential candidates are not the same.
Baltimore blogger Bluzdude assesses the Key bridge collapse.
For inexpensive but livable housing, consider the humble polikatoikia.
The "zeer pot" is a cheap way to keep food cold without a refrigerator.
From its very beginnings, Christian nationalism has been hostile to democracy and to American institutions (found via SickoRicko). It's mostly fundamentalist, but the Catholic movement called "integralism" is also part of it.
The FCC will vote this month on protecting net neutrality.
Armed citizen patrols are reducing violent crime in Hartford CT. Ivory-tower jackasses, who don't have to live with the crime problem and have no realistic suggestions for what else to do about it, don't like this.
Work cannot give meaning to life, and Americans' obsessive dedication to it is pathological.
53% of US voters say that housing affordability will affect their choice of presidential candidate, and inflated rents and house prices play a huge role in why people have such negative views about the economy. Politicians are only beginning to grasp the importance of the issue. I doubt voters will be impressed by plans to increase construction that might bring prices down in two or three years -- they want action to make housing more affordable now.
A VA medical center in Texas is using decor to push Christianity. I don't think this is as bad as the forced participation in Christian events I've heard of happening elsewhere in the military, but yes, it's offensive and certainly doesn't belong in a government-funded institution.
Democrats will win big if they make 2024 the abortion-rights election.
Stay away from tech-sector jobs. Rising layoffs and a "do more with fewer people" mentality signal crap working conditions and an industry that will go the way of Boeing in a few years.
Portland's downtown office vacancy rate is among the highest in the country; businesses cite crime and public safety as major reasons for staying away. The people who claim our urban crime surge is not happening are scum with the IQ of styrofoam.
This November, Florida will hold referenda on restoring abortion rights and on legalizing marijuana. The resulting turnout boost could help Democrats flip a Senate seat and a few House seats, and maybe even enable Biden to carry the state in the Electoral College.
In Arizona, freedom advocates have far surpassed the number of signatures needed to put an abortion-rights initiative on the ballot -- three months before the deadline.
A new book aims to help parents of gender-confused children.
Carl Sagan's warning is still relevant today.
Phil Knight is spending millions to elect Republicans here in Oregon. Knight is by far the state's richest man.
Our society is caught in a struggle of individual conscience and rights vs the collectivist, conformist, authoritarian mentality promoted by ideology and religion.
By 60% to 31%, US voters reject the idea that schools should be allowed to keep student name or pronoun gender changes secret from parents.
Washington state has enacted job-safety protections for strippers.
A Christian nationalist pastor explains why women shouldn't have the right to vote.
Johnson is advancing a Ukraine aid bill at last, but it's full of political gimmicks which could cause further delay.
Here's what it's like dealing with male inmates in a women's prison, from the viewpoint of a corrections officer.
Republican legislators in Maine have thwarted a Democratic effort to guarantee abortion rights. The voters will remember who supported personal freedom and who opposed it.
A creepy British man tweets out a fantasy of using a van to kidnap famous women.
JK Rowling has issued a defiant challenge to Scotland's draconian new censorship law. So far it looks like she's setting a valuable precedent.
In September, a fired bank manager won a resounding victory against woke speech restrictions.
The threat to Jews in London is a threat to democracy itself.
The West must fight boldly for freedom of expression, but academia is a cesspit of cowardice and betrayal.
Two Israeli survivors of the October 7 atrocities were allegedly detained and harassed by anti-Semitic British airport security personnel.
In Australia, women soccer players are leaving the sport rather than play against a "women's" team that includes five men. There has already been at least one serious injury.
Finland is indefinitely closing its border with Russia in response to the latter's weaponizing of mass migration.
NATO prepares for the possibility of a second Trump presidency.
Germany is a leader in solar and wind power, despite an environment less than ideal for those technologies.
A barrage of threats against a French cartoonist, from Islamists and others, opens yet another front in the war against free expression in the West.
France gives Ukraine a massive new supply of weapons, but some of them won't arrive until next year.
The Italian economy is booming compared with other major EU countries, largely due to government subsidies for construction.
In the small Spanish city of León, locals toast Holy Week with "matar Judíos", meaning "kill Jews". They seem a little too eager to insist that it's just a harmless local tradition and not anti-Semitic -- maybe they're trying to convince themselves? A nearby town was called Castrillo Matajudíos ("Fort Kill Jews") until it changed its name a few years ago.
We must stop letting Russian propaganda distort our understanding of the Ukraine war (found via Reaganite Independent).
The Putin regime ignored a US warning about the Crocus terrorist attack. The reasons highlight incompetence and paranoia in Russia's intelligence agencies.
The Islamotard rulers of Chechnya have placed bizarre restrictions on music.
The West must not try to pressure Israel into a ceasefire.
In Turkey, Erdoğan's ruling religio-nationalist party suffers sweeping defeats in local elections across the country.
Saudi Arabia is now heading the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which is a bit like putting apartheid South Africa in charge of promoting racial equality.
US businesses once flocked to China -- now they need to be persuaded to stay. The country's stagnant economy is dialing back Xi Jinping's global bullying.
Women living near cobalt mines in the Congo suffer shockingly high levels of reproductive disorders.
More links at WAHF and Fair and Unbalanced.
My own posts this week: an image round-up, a short spiritual horror film, and a clash of values over nature and wildlife.
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.
o o o o o
Two people will never agree on everything, unless one of them is doing all the thinking for both.
One minor problem with posting about politics is that it leads to dull visuals. If you've seen one politician in a dark suit and red tie, you've seen 'em all.
People need to stop talking about Israel as if it were some special oddity whose legitimacy is somehow provisional. Even if its original foundation was marred by religious foolishness (as most countries' origins have dubious aspects), Israel now is just a country like any other. It has existed for three-quarters of a century and most of the people who live there were born there. Its right to exist is just like the right of Ecuador or Latvia or Thailand to exist.
posted by Infidel753 at 5:22 AM
5 Comments:
I love seeing hot air balloons. I used to see them here early in the morning but I hardly ever see them here anymore. I don't know if they stopped doing here or they moved somewhere else or what but it was cool as the sun was rising to see all those hot air balloons in the sky.
Thanks for the explanation of the Spomenik structures. Thanks for the the vidoes, of which, I captured a few. Thanks for including a post of mine. And, last but not least, I hope the monkey torturers get tortured themselves, like having their nuts twisted off by a monkey.
Lots of good links. I could spend days going down lots of rabbit holes there.
Thanks much for also including the link to my site.
While we disagree on some major issues, we also agree strongly on other important ones.
I am heartened that we as people of different perspectives on God and on some aspects of politics can still find common ground, some mutual respect, and civility in this world. Seemingly this has become a rare thing these days, my friend! Cheers!
Alas, "You can de-shittyize your internet search experience." is behind a Tumblr wall ;-)
Mary K: That's too bad. I'm sure you could be getting some good sky photos of them.
Ricko: Those spomeniks are very odd-looking things, but I admire the originality at least.
That would be a fitting punishment for the monkey-torturers. How do people come up with these disgusting ideas? I don't even like animals but I hate the thought of them suffering.
Darrell: Thanks. I hope that exposure to a range of ideas will help promote tolerance. A pluralistic society really needs people to be able to accept that other people think differently, or it can't survive in the long run.
NickM: Drat. I guess they shittyized their anti-shittyization post. That's hard for me to detect since I'm pretty much always logged in while looking at Tumblr blogs.
Post a Comment
<< Home