Link round-up for 2 June 2024

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

o o o o o

This wind just isn't helping.

You can't sit down -- the bench area is sealed off.

Stone-age people anticipate the future.

I will swallow you whole, puny human!

Those first few steps are the toughest.

It was his first time in New Orleans (mildly NSFW).

Hey, I found lunch..... oops.  But this guy did even worse.

They fought the cars, and the cars won.

Don't get your tools mixed up (mildly NSFW).

Rupert Murdoch will be punished in Hell.

Never go to a restaurant run by a philosopher.

A wise woman teaches the four paths to wealth.

Knot so fast, man!

It's always Halloween at this haunted house.

What made Alien so iconic?

Get advice on healthy living from "AI".

Readle this post.

This is a warehouse full of fireworks which caught fire in India.

He crossed the street to greet a friend (mute sound -- why do people ruin videos like this by adding irrelevant and intrusive music?).

Colored lights are cool.

See video of Paris and Lyon in 1896.

Some photos here from a visit to the town of Vitré in northwestern France.

Hadrian's Wall offers a lot of evidence about ancient Roman life.

What a tiny shroom (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

Mice forced to drink raw milk quickly developed H5N1 infections throughout their bodies.

Women who take testosterone develop "post-menopausal" medical problems in their late twenties.

A family in South Dakota became infected with brain worms after eating undercooked meat.

Tests of a new lung cancer drug show stunningly positive results.

A Chinese space probe has landed on the far side of the Moon, and will attempt to return samples of surface material to Earth.

If you use Google for searches, here's a way to turn off its "AI Overview" (since I don't use Google, I don't know what that is, but apparently it annoys people).

This is the very antithesis of science.

Perhaps a fake conspiracy theory can help expose the goofiness of the real ones (link from commenter NickM).

Here's the viewpoint of a Christian who has grasped the harm done by belligerent evangelism.

Teachers, please don't be assholes.

If you've ever been a customer of Ticketmaster, read this.

Ignore the moan-groan-doom-gloom crowd and recognize the good when it happens.

Some national park visitors in California are ignoring warning signs, potentially damaging the giant sequoia trees.

More and more stores are phasing out self-checkout to combat the epidemic of shoplifting.

Don't be a "touron".

Elder-care facilities are suffering severe staffing shortages -- what do they expect when the work is hard and unpleasant and the wages are rock-bottom?

Blogger Annie salutes the jurors in the Trump trial.  They're already being threatened by Trumpanzees.

Slowly, fumblingly, and with much embarrassment, the retreat from gender ideology begins.

Pro-forced-birth women fairly often seek abortions for themselves, and commit the most vicious hypocrisy while doing so.

A university librarian was harassed and almost fired for promoting the works of black writers.

54% of registered voters approve of the guilty verdict against Trump; 34% disapprove.

Some US religio-wingnuts are openly turning against Western values and democracy, even denouncing NATO as "Luciferian" because it promotes those things, and opposing support for Ukraine and Israel.

PowerLine vents right-wing rage at Trump's conviction, and indulges in some fantasies about what follows (see comments on both posts too).

After being exposed by Vox, OpenAI is backing off from imposing its draconian non-disparagement agreements on employees who quit.

When using Wikipedia, beware of bias and distortion.

Republicans are giving Democrats a long list of issues to run on.

The Supreme Court has unanimously delivered a major win for free speech against government restrictions.

Park rangers routinely have to deal with wingnuts pushing lies and distortions about US history.

Comedy is at its best when it attacks totalitarian ideology.

With work-from-home here to stay, Boston, like other cities, struggles to adapt to plummeting office-space prices.  Trying to drag employees back to offices will work about as well as trying to ban cars to save the buggy-whip industry.

More people are now leaving Florida than moving there, due to climate change and crap government policies.

Pastor Joel Webbon is at least honest about what becoming a Christian nation would really mean (found via Fair and Unbalanced).

The Texas Republican party's new platform calls for women who have abortions to be punished as murderers, which in Texas could mean the death penalty.

People in rural eastern Oregon are shooting and poisoning wolves that kill their livestock and pose a clear threat to humans, despite whining from "conservationists" who evidently expect them to just put up with the danger.  There have been few prosecutions and no convictions, due to "a code of silence in rural communities when it comes to killing wolves", meaning everybody who actually lives out there wants to get rid of the fucking things and supports efforts to do so.  (A while back I posted on similar situations in Colorado and Africa.)

Women are abandoning dating apps, and you can't blame them.

Harvard graduate John Fetterman repudiates his alma mater for failing to stand up to anti-Semitism.

Gary North, one of the Christian Right's most influential thinkers, advocated the gradual imposition of theocracy in the US, abandoning the Constitution in favor of an explicitly Christian state, which would  drag our country back into the Dark Ages and eventually render it irrelevant on the world stage.

We know how to protect gay kids.  It's just a matter of doing it.

Learn what a Gladue report is (this is in Canada).

Jewish schools in Canada are being shot at by persons unknown.

Who is Mridul Wadhwa?

Following the Cass report, the British government has issued an emergency ban on prescriptions of puberty blockers to minors.

You need to "be educated and attend training" until you learn to stop seeing the reality in front of your face and believe my lies instead.

This is the kind of thing that happens when all cultures are treated as being equal in worth.

Russian forces in Ukraine engage in grotesque and horrifying sexual violence and torture, a characteristic practice of puritanical, religious regimes.

Sweden's donation of high-tech aircraft to Ukraine should neutralize one of Russia's most effective weapons.

Estonia's government uses the internet to build trust.

Some thoughts here on the failure of the US-built aid pier in the Gaza Strip.  This blogger uses intemperate rhetoric, but his points are worth considering.

It's revealing that Israel reached second place in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Hamas endlessly tells lies and is still believed by the gullible.

Iranians continue their defiant rejoicing at the death of president Raisi.  What kind of man was he?

A Chinese attack on Taiwan would probably fail even harder than Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

More links at Fair and Unbalanced (yes, Burr's back!) and WAHF.

My own posts this week:  an image round-up, and brief encounters with kindred spirits.

o o o o o

The Trump conviction is reassuring for two reasons.  First, it affirms that the judicial branch is mostly still a solid bulwark against the cultism and general insanity that have engulfed the Republican party.  While most Republican politicians have cravenly kowtowed to Trump's stolen-election bullshit (and all his other bullshit), the courts have stood firmly against it.  Now the court in New York has done the same in a criminal case, not just a lawsuit.

Second, it upholds the principle that no one is above the law.  This jackass isn't the president any more; he should be treated no differently than any other guy off the street charged with comparable crimes.  We all know that in practice members of the parasitic oligarch class get breaks a bus driver or janitor wouldn't get, but they are still sometimes convicted of crimes -- as in this case.

For that matter, the sitting president shouldn't be, and presumably still isn't, above the law.  The president is not a king, he's a functionary in a bureaucracy who has certain specified powers and is subject to rules and laws that limit those powers, just like any other bureaucrat is.  Treating the president as some kind of exalted figure with quasi-royal privileges, towering above the masses and the rest of the state, as we do today, is a grotesque perversion of the Constitutional system.  And making a politician into a cult figure is one of the most un-American things I can think of.