Link round-up for 11 August 2024

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

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He'll regret this when that cat throws up.

What a pathetic incel doofus.  Just as well his genes won't be passed on.

Try gardening the New Witch way.  You may raise a good canine crop.

Yeah, he's bad.

Ever feel like no matter how fast you go, you're getting nowhere?

Appearances can be deceiving.

He rides in luxury with a chauffeur driving him.

FFS people need to go back to normal spelling (Tumblr login required).

The musician and vocalist rehearse together.

Keep your cat healthy by dyeing it yellow.

A mission at sea goes better when you have air support.

Unusual art piece here.

Release potential energy as kinetic, make a big mess.

Filmmakers did awesome things in the days before CGI.

This is Drachenburg castle in Germany, near the Rhine (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

See an eruption of the Mount Etna volcano in Sicily.

This is a spiny lobster larva riding a jellyfish.

Learn how Venice was built and how it works.

An Air Force B-57 observes a nuclear test in 1958.

SickoRicko brings us yet another abomination of the sea (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

"You'll love paying every month to use a computer mouse" -- are these people high or something?

The EU -- a combined economy larger than the US -- is now getting more electricity from solar and wind power than from fossil fuels.

We're on the verge of eradicating guinea worm, a very nasty parasitic disease.

You can greatly cut the risk of dementia (and many other problems) with one simple dietary change.

Vaccines and mask mandates probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the US during the covide pandemic.

One field of science far surpasses all others in the practical benefits it has brought.

The spread of anti-vax nonsense, especially among Republicans, makes the US more vulnerable to future disease outbreaks.

The latest "AI" image generator does better at text within images, but it still relies on "scraped" (stolen) imagery by real artists, it still gives that odd plastic-y sheen that so often gives away "AI" stuff, and contrary to the headline, it still can't consistently get hands right.

Don't jump to conclusions about people's motives.

Are you obligated to family just because they're family?

No, it's not true that "ugly" fruit and vegetables go to waste.

Disney is dead.

Apparently Instagram is now an ad-clogged, "feculent, toxic hellstew of brain-dead influencers, pathetic, validation-starved men showing their enormous bulges," and suchlike (NSFW blog).

This is what social media are doing to six-year-old kids.

Boeing's Starliner is a complete disaster -- hardly surprising when you look at how it's built.

Read how the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina beat the KKK in 1958.

"Conspiracy theories" aren't theories, and most have certain flaws in common that make them easy to see through (found via Fair and Unbalanced).

You can volunteer here to become a poll worker for the upcoming election.

Some good examples here of dealing with naïve pro-trans types.

The "AI" fad is collapsing just like the dot-com bubble, "augmented reality", NFTs, etc, etc, etc before it.  Customers are now so turned off by "AI" that seeing the term on a product makes them less likely to buy.

Here's a diagram summarizing the American political process (click to enlarge).

Teachers and school districts in Oklahoma are rebelling against state government orders to teach the Bible in classes (found via SickoRicko (NSFW blog)).

This man exists.  Ohmyfuckinggod, that picture.

Elon Musk has finally gone completely bonkers, suing companies for not advertising on Twitter.

The "AI" plague drove this blogger to quit blogging.

They were waving Hezbollah flags.  These are Jew-haters, plain and simple.

Bank credit conditions in the US look like an economy some time after the end of a recession, not heading into one.

A blogger tries to explain that weird "white guys for Harris" segregated online meeting.

The overall number of abortions in the US has risen slightly since Dobbs, despite dropping in the states with the worst forced-birth laws.

Both parties agree that federal land should be sold to build affordable housing, but the small scale of plans, and bickering about the details, make it unlikely that the idea will do much good.

The New York Times is still garbage.  So are the mainstream media generally.

Long associated with the right wing, gun ownership is now becoming popular among a much broader range of individuals.

Yet another major survey shows that return-to-office mandates are disastrous for employee satisfaction and retention.

He "stomped on police officers' heads. He swung poles at officers defending a tunnel, struck an officer in the head with a metal crutch and attacked police with pepper spray and broken pieces of furniture....."  Yes, a very "peaceful protester".

Kara Dansky addresses an open letter to Harris.

More than a year after the East Palestine disaster, residents are still being given the legal run-around and being ignored by the government.

How do you stop a young man from destroying his life?

Contrary to the narrative being push on some wingnut sites, Tim Walz is a solid supporter of Israel (and Ukraine) and outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism -- and highly critical of the Chinese gangster-regime.  He also has a strong record on clean energy.

Some managers are helping work-from-home employees avoid being dragged back to offices.

Boeing workers testify about the disastrous chaos in the factory.

"The world is not on your side, the world is on our side.  And once people realize that they don't have to bow down to you just because you scare them shitless, the jig is up.  We are on the right side of history, and you will go down as abusers, terrorists, and psychopaths."

It's time to bring back sex testing for sports.

Bosses will use last month's job-growth slowdown as a pretext to shit on their workers, but it will probably backfire.

Some local good news for a change:  Portland-area police successfully thwarted street-racers' efforts to seize control of streets last weekend.

The Democratic party takes another step away from evil, by refusing to re-nominate Cori Bush of the appalling, Israel-bashing "Squad".  With Jamaal Bowman, this makes two Squad members taken down.  Bush responded with bizarre threats against a Jewish PAC which supported her opponent; the White House is not impressed.

Some workers now prefer having multiple part-time jobs rather than one full-time one.

He "cackled with delight".

Interesting discussion here on why an attempted coup d'état in the US would almost certainly fail.

Here's a solid look at the reality of men in women's prisons.

Miserable hate-filled fanatics really hate anything to do with Taylor Swift, apparently.

I really think people like this have some kind of innate evil in the blood.

Cheating pays.  It even gets cheers.

The IOC is still trying to take down videos which reveal what's really happening in women's boxing.  Reality-denial is eventually going to kill somebody.  An Olympic veteran encourages the cheated to fight back.

At least two athletes have been hospitalized after swimming in the polluted Seine river.

Even the Olympic medals are crap, apparently.

If you live in Venezuela, here is a VPN you can use for free to beat local internet censorship.

Maduro plays the anti-Semitic card.

This is what the Russians are doing in Ukraine.  This, too.

Video here from the Ukrainian incursion across the Russian border.  More here -- the Russian military seems completely incompetent even to defend its own territory.  So, what's Ukraine up to?

Putin invaded Ukraine because he perceived the West as weak.  There is no way out of this mess except unequivocal victory; anything that allows Putin to save face will mean more war later on.

The Putin regime is apparently blocking Russians' access to YouTube.

What will happen after Russia loses the war?

The Iraqi government is considering lowering the minimum marriage age to nine.

More links at Perfect Number, WAHF, and Fair and Unbalanced.

My posts this week:  an image round-up, and a review of the Cormoran Strike novel series.

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Has Crooks & Liars discontinued its "Mike's blog round-up" feature?  It hasn't appeared even once this week.  Anyone know?

Can't help noticing that a lot of the same people who, a few weeks ago, were denouncing polls in general as worthless, wrong, flawed, etc are now breathlessly touting those same polls -- now that they're telling them what they want to hear.

Is anyone else having trouble editing Blogspot posts using Firefox?  I keep getting the "update failed" error message, even though there is no problem with the internet connection.  The problem is not happening using other browsers.

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