Link round-up for 12 May 2024

Bernard Hill (king Théoden of Rohan), 1944-2024

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See some really bad design work.

Have fun with Star Wars.

Go and take your pun-ishment.

She rides the roller coaster in complete safety.

It has escaped.

You're being a naughty bird.

Some drivers have a sense of humor.

Perhaps there's an easier way to solve this problem.

I think this time machine is defective.

The challenge -- get the money without touching the thing on top of it.

This is what juggling looks like from above.

Here's a novelty act you'll never see, though many people would love it.

Rodents -- and a few humans -- cut loose in this fast-paced and rather bewildering adventure.

Believers down in the depths receive a heavenly blessing.

The train is coming -- you all know what to do.

A Michigan home-owner caught this video of a tornado destroying all his trees.

If possible, avoid driving over any loose tires you see rolling down the road.

Find out why a museum in Australia is declaring itself to be a toilet.

Photos here from the recent aurora borealis.

Perhaps he appreciates the beauty?

These are blessings that any wise person would value.

It's rude and disrespectful to gawk at a smartphone while you are supposed to be working.

In Iceland, an industrial facility designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has just opened.  More and larger ones will be needed to have a major impact.

The brain is fearfully complex, but our understanding is improving.

New technology grows bone material to replace bone lost to injury or disease.  This has already been used successfully in human patients.

Some processed foods are more dangerous than others.  Basically, processed meats and foods containing a lot of refined sugar are the worst.

WordReference (link from Cas d'intérêt) is easily the best online language-translation site I've seen.  Rather than just a synonym, it provides extra information about each word, and there are even online forums where you can go deeper with people who know the relevant language well.

This horrible, depressing, ugly new ad (found via Hackwhackers) is provoking a lot of backlash, and rightly so.

See a Nebraska warehouse demolished by a tornado in a matter of seconds.  It's amazing that all the workers inside survived.

This prank was even stupider than most.

Price-gouging retailers are starting to realize they've gone too far.

Texas has two bumper stickers.

OpenAI is considering relaxing some restrictions on what its users can do with it.  In the long run the market should take care of this problem.  Users will opt for products that let them do what they want over those which impose limits on them.

Planet Fitness has suffered a substantial drop in new memberships since its policy of allowing men into its women's locker rooms came to light (wow, what a surprise).  Its response has been to jack up prices.

Here's why the New Testament has been a disaster for the West.

Apparently Windows 11 is even worse than Windows 10.

This is madness.

Paradoxical as it may seem, business schools are ruining business.

"It's all performative and self-absorbed, from top to bottom."

Fox News's anti-vax campaign during the covid pandemic probably killed a substantial number of its own viewers.  Meanwhile, Fox itself had a vaccine mandate for its own employees -- it was not willing to suffer the same danger it tricked its audience into suffering.

Today's adult toddlers live in a fantasy world and care only about themselves.

Use politicians' own fund-raising mailers to send them a message about the wrongs they do.

More here, including video, on the trashed library at Portland State University.

Annie Asks You blog explains a below-the-radar case now being argued at the Supreme Court, in which anti-abortion fanaticism descends into surreal horror.

The IRS is using its increased funding to launch a new wave of audits targeting the wealthy and large businesses.  There will be no increase in auditing of taxpayers making less than $400,000 per year.

Fareed Zakaria warns us against complacency about the election -- "I understand that polls are not always accurate, but in general they have tended to underestimate Trump's support, not overestimate it".

Religio-wingnuts are really, really upset about the new Antisemitism Awareness Act.

The FCC is closing a legal loophole which would have allowed ISPs to subvert net neutrality.

Spoiled-brat, elitist, anti-Israel thugs at Columbia held custodians and a security guard prisoner during their take-over of a building there.  The union which represents the custodians is now suing Columbia for failing to protect its members.

This effort to silence a brutally victimized woman is utterly despicable.

There are a lot of positives about our current situation, though one shouldn't ignore the negatives.

An innocuous-sounding Republican bill would enable the federal government to collect personal information on millions of pregnant women.

Boeing admits that employees falsified inspection records on some of its planes.

DeSantis has signed a law prohibiting Florida municipalities from doing anything to protect workers from extreme heat.

Some UNC professors are withholding final grades from all of their students in support of those punished for attendance at the recent anti-Israel Nazi rallies on campus.

The FBI seeks pretexts to expand warrantless spying on the public.

California's policy of placing male inmates in women's prisons continues to produce its totally foreseeable results -- rapes and pregnancies.

The real goal of hard-line Christians is to force non-Christians to submit to their dominance.

West Virginia presents a depressing picture.

Sometimes evil people let the truth slip out.

Remember the American leaders who have saved our country's honor since October 7.

61% of Florida voters support the state's proposed abortion-rights amendment; 29% oppose it.  It will need 60% of the vote to pass.

We need to do more to hold police accountable, when their mistakes can have such terrifying results.

Biden speaks out strongly against anti-Semitism, and against efforts to downplay the atrocities of October 7.

A man in Texas is trying to get a court order to "investigate" a woman he had been dating who left the state to get an abortion.

A North Carolina university is "investigating" a woman student who challenged a man she caught using a women's washroom.

Synagogues and other Jewish institutions in New York City are being targeted with a series of bomb threats.

US backstabbing of our allies is endless.  For months we had a minority of House Republicans blocking aid to Ukraine; now Biden has cut off certain kinds of weapons to Israel for continuing its campaign against the rapists, torturers, mutilators, and mass murderers of October 7.  It's as if FDR had cut off certain kinds of weapons to Britain because its bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was doing too much damage (and try to imagine FDR sending US troops to build a pier in Germany to get aid into the country while the Nazis were still fighting).  One can only hope that the backlash will squelch this nonsense in less time than the months it took to squelch the wingnut embargo on Ukraine.

The betrayal of a fellow democracy in favor of the West's implacable enemies will have long-term effects on the US political scene.

Republicans are preparing organized gangs of thugs to harass voters during this year's election.

"Funny how when captured politicians mention 'participation and inclusion' it is almost always at the expense of females."

A new law in the UK will require sex-separated restrooms in all new buildings going forward.  Here's why it's important.

Even in Scotland, the epicenter of the trans lunacy, the public supports JK Rowling's criticisms of the ideology by 41% to 23%.

See spectacular video of a single US-made grenade totally destroying a Russian tank and putting another out of action.

In Russia, hackers cut into TV coverage of the Victory Day (May 9) parade and replaced it with video of the country's present-day reality.

See who Putin had with him at the parade.

Sanctions, and Europe's rejection of Russian gas imports, are hitting Russia's energy sector hard.

"Queers for Palestine", here is what you are supporting.  I understand Arabic well enough to tell that the translation is accurate.

Yesterday Hamas launched a rocket attack on Israel from Rafah, the very city Biden is trying to discourage Israel from clearing them out of.

The Saudi regime has sentenced a women's-rights activist to eleven years in prison for dressing in ways that almost every other country on Earth would consider normal, and for opposing the regime's grossly misogynistic laws.

An exiled Saudi officer says the regime approved the killing of civilians who got in the way of its preposterous linear "Neom" planned city.

Forcibly buggering your wife is apparently legal in India.

As India's national election proceeds, prime minister Modi escalates his Trump-like rhetoric against religious minorities, especially the Muslims.  But his message is falling flat in southern India, the most developed, educated, prosperous, and historically liberal part of the country (India's "blue states", perhaps).

China's regime has no way out of the economic dead end the country has trapped itself in.

In the west African country of Togo, the head of the de facto ruling dynasty has effectively abolished democracy.

More links at Elder of Ziyon (Burr Deming at Fair and Unbalanced is attending the trial of the thug who attacked him last year, and WAHF hasn't posted its usual weekly round-up).

My own posts this week:  truths and inspirations, and..... that was it.  This week fell victim to the temp job, various other demands on my time, and even worse sleep deprivation than usual.

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I just got my ballot in the mail for Oregon's Democratic primary.  Obviously I can't vote for Biden in the primary now, after the punitive cut-off of "certain" weapons to Israel in its hour of need.  He'll still win, but every primary vote he loses after doing this will, hopefully, send a message -- and if there are enough, perhaps even help inspire a course correction.  We have to call politicians to account when they do evil, even politicians we support.  (If you believe a certain politician can do no wrong, and insist on coming up with some justification for every bad thing he does no matter how bad it is, then you're just a cultist, not a supporter.)  Unfortunately the only other candidate on the ballot is Marianne Williamson, a crackpot who cannot be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.  I'll have to write somebody in.  Maybe John Fetterman.

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