Link round-up for 19 May 2024

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

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Do not try to fight that which is beyond your understanding.

The Death Star's trash compactor doesn't make sense (found via Miss Cellania).

It's lunchtime, climb up there.

The lady on the right is a skilled practitioner of capitalism.

Cats don't understand structural engineering.

Brief video here of Trump in court.

When will we be free?

This man is concerned about pickpockets, but not about rain (mute the sound, it's really annoying).

View yet another unholy abomination of the deep.

Blogger Annie listens to an early-morning chorus.

Orcas continue their class-war solidarity, sinking yet another yacht near Morocco.

This is beautiful, and has probably made a lot of people throw up.

The old CRT TVs were weird, but not as weird as people today think.

"The person who is kind all his life / Is no fool, the fool is he / Who does not know the value of kindness."

A true artist -- but we'll never know his or her name.

Alice Freeman Palmer was an early pioneer of higher education for women.

Brains, numbers, and cooperation beat size and ferocity.  I imagine primordial humans dealt with predators similarly.

Yes, we can divert asteroids from collision with Earth.  Right now we'd still need a lot of warning time.

NASA will assist the ESA in placing a new rover on Mars to look for traces of life below the surface.

Did neanderthals have language?  The evidence is tantalizing but still inconclusive.

We know that ancient primitive societies were far more violent than modern societies, even when major wars are factored into the modern statistics.  But were some regions of the primitive world even more violent than others?

An mRNA vaccine against glioblastoma shows promise of being highly effective.

Genetic therapy is helping children born deaf to hear.

Psychedelics offer hope of treating chronic pain, but it will take years for scientific testing to verify this, never mind federal approval.  State-level decriminalization can help.

The different handling of electric cars causes motion sickness in some people.  Some carmakers are now building their EVs with fake gas-car engine and gear sounds to help people adjust.

Programs like Glaze and Nightshade can help protect your art against "AI" "scraping", but this is going to be a long and complex battle.

Keep your melatonin gummies away from children, who will easily mistake them for candy.

Be aware that the Daily Kos apparently tracks people who read it.  The anti-tracking DuckDuckGo browser he mentions can be downloaded here for various operating systems (scroll down), and of course always use DuckDuckGo for searches -- it's the only search engine I use.

"AI" systems are based on language and images, not physical reality -- meaning they are not grounded in the latter and thus "hallucinate".

AutisticAF blog has migrated to Substack.

Sometimes, internet bullshittery is easy to spot.

Sports audiences know a cheater when they see one.

"AI" "art" does have its uses.

What a flaming idiot.

Men should learn to drive like women.

YouTube grovels before the gangsters of Beijing, collaborating with censorship.

Thank goodness they caught this guy before he did something even worse.

At close range, machetes are very effective weapons.

Like anti-vaxism, this idiocy is best viewed as natural selection in action.

Gruesome animal-torture videos are being allowed to proliferate on Facebook.

Jennifer Pace easily won her Republican primary in Indiana, but she may not be able to campaign very well.

This homeless woman showed more resourcefulness than most of us would.  Hopefully her situation will improve.

In Florida, the right to free use of the roads is protected.

Autistic co-workers may have different needs than you expect (full post requires Substack login).

This "Project 2025" religio-authoritarian wants a ban on porn.  Yes, porn has lots of nasty effects, but so does alcohol, and I would expect banning porn to work about as well as banning alcohol did a century ago.

The man who attacked Paul Pelosi faces, not real justice, but at least a substantial prison sentence.

Don't listen to anti-voting propaganda.

The US is now almost alone among developed countries in still clinging to the debunked "gender-affirming" model of treatment for gender-confused children (full post requires Substack login).

With both presidential candidates already chosen, turnout is low in my state's primary.  I did vote, of course -- the ballot includes some local offices, the primary for the Democratic candidate for Congress for our district, and an initiative to pay for upgrades to the Oregon Zoo ("Vote for the giraffes!"), as well as a few other things.

Young Americans are rejecting a grossly unequal society which offers them only meager opportunities, by minimizing their engagement with the economy and refusing to have children.  This is what happens when a tiny parasitic oligarchy steals most of the wealth the workers produce.

Condo owners on the Florida coast are in deep shit.

If you put Christianity in the schools, you'll get this as well.

Biden's administration is relaxing the rules governing marijuana, phasing out an era of pointless and ridiculous persecution.

"That is a colonizer's privilege."

The Michigan Libertarian party displayed this on its Facebook page.

This man needed to die, hard, and fuck the ACLU on this one.

Louisiana forced-birthers are deadly serious about forcing raped little girls to carry the resulting pregnancies to term.

More totalitarianism -- North Carolina Republican legislators want to ban people from wearing masks for health reasons.

Atheists have a higher political participation rate than any religious group, even evangelicals.

Oregon now ranks as the eighth most dangerous state in the US, due to violent and property crime.

I don't understand the fuss over Harrison Butker's commencement speech (link includes full speech), as if he had committed some kind of transgression and needed to be punished.  I vehemently disagree with almost everything he said, but he was just expressing opinions, not trying to coerce anybody.  It's freedom of speech.  Anyway, the fuming is backfiring as it often does.

As we emerge from a period of lunacy, never forget just how crazy things got.

Here's a huge collection of info and links on the arrogant forced-birth ideology which is threatening women's freedom all across the US.

The Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina calls the theory of evolution "demonic", is an anti-vaxer and global-warming denialist, and wants to stop the teaching of science in elementary schools.

Driven by the menace of violent crime, even non-wealthy New Yorkers are installing panic rooms and bulletproof doors.

"He has no other weapons if he can't threaten and malign."

Gay people who defend Islam are out of their minds.

In November, remember the Supreme Court.

The governor of Alabama has signed a law to punish employers who voluntarily accept unions.

The authorities were scandalously slovenly about recovering the classified documents Trump stole.

A federal district court has ruled that California can continue to put male inmates in women's prisons.  The fight against this atrocity continues.  More here.

As Jew-hatred surges, volunteers are training to protect synagogues from mob violence.

American institutions should not be named after traitors who fought against the US and for slavery.

Public reactions to Trump's trial aren't looking too good for him.

People who terrorize small children are not "protesters".

State-level Republican parties are increasingly getting taken over by extremists more interested in ideological purity than winning elections.

A politics analyst explains why he thinks Biden will overwhelmingly defeat Trump.

This proposed Canadian law would destroy freedom of speech and allow a judge to lock you up if he believed you might be about to do something wrong.

It's not "bullying" to point out that 2+2=4, even if some people aren't happy about it.

You are hereby expelled for not being delusional.

A historic German church finds a way to get young people to come to services.  Striking that church attendance rates in Germany are just 4.3% among Catholics and 3% among Protestants.  How many so-called Catholics and Protestants really are in any meaningful sense?

Hate-speech laws are a scam designed to silence people who speak uncomfortable truths.

Two French authors are being threatened with censorship and violence -- but their book is a best-seller.

A Ukrainian drone flew across nine hundred miles of Russian territory undetected to hit an oil facility far to the east of Moscow, suggesting that Russia's air defenses are crap.  A massive drone attack on Russian oil and military installations near the Black Sea similarly met with little resistance.  Satellite images show serious damage to a Russian airbase in occupied Crimea.

Russia has mistakenly bombed one of its own cities again.

The Putin regime warns Russian women that men may return from the war with fucked-up, brutalized sexuality.

Putin's new minister of defense isn't a good sign for Russia.

Even the UN now admits that Hamas's numbers for casualties in Gaza, uncritically parroted by our MSM, are grossly exaggerated.

Female genital mutilation is increasing in Africa, driven by cultural conservatism and superstition.

More links at WAHF.

My own posts this week:  an image round-up, and some music worth keeping.

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I've had a policy here of not including any links to paywalled sites, or to sites that require a login, on the grounds that most readers wouldn't be able to see them.  However, one does miss out on some good stuff that way.  So if a link requires a login, I'll include it but add a note so that people who can't or won't log in there won't waste their time.  I'm still not going to link to anything paywalled.