Link round-up for 17 November 2024

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

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This cat is a unique personality.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is branching out.

Of course, this cashier works in Japan.

SickoRicko brings us some more dubious past visions of the "future" (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

See an "honest trailer" for The Wizard of Oz.

Pigeons are picking up our bad habits.

The Roman poet Catullus epitomized the dignity and elegance of great literature.

Nothing unusual here, it's just a car traveling down the road.

Imagine if the characters in a movie could hear the voice narration (NSFW, found via Miss Cellania).

One exercises, the other doesn't.

Appearances can be deceiving.

He tries to remember the long-extinct humans.

Here are some things you can't see (found via Miss Cellania).

This outfit, by contrast, is a bit too visible.

This is a water gun, but it will scare the shit out of people.

You don't want this lady mad at you.

It's best to not make your explanations too complicated.

In this supernatural story, a remorseful assassin sentences himself to a daunting but fitting atonement.  This was quite a find.  I've used Pliny's artwork here, but I had no idea he can also write like this.

This is an icebreaker in action.

Bubble meets cactus.

Cool glass decorations here.

See bullets collide in slow motion.

The white whale is not a mere fictional concept.

Learn about Lake Karachay, the most poisoned place on Earth (found via Miss Cellania).

Fear the squid.  In fact, fear everything that moves.

The UK is committing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 81% by 2035, relative to 1990 levels.

"Safe sex" no longer has to mean condoms.

Anti-vaccine lies are spreading, mostly among Republicans but to some extent among Democrats too.  Some issues are a matter of opinion or personal values, but science is not; anti-vaxers, whether right or left, are merely stupid, ignorant, and wrong.

Glass sponges are a primitive but fascinating life form (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

AutisticAF reviews mistreatment of autistic people by the police, in education, and elsewhere.

Israel has vaccinated more than a million Gaza children against polio, periodically pausing the ongoing retaliatory military operation to do so.

Experimental stem-cell treatments are proving effective at repairing corneal damage.

In Germany, wild wolves are a growing threat to livestock, but farmers' options are limited because wolves are government-protected (I posted about this type of problem here).

We'll soon have flu and covid vaccines that can be inhaled rather than injected.

Two US Navy destroyers faced a massive and sophisticated Houthi missile attack and came through unscathed.

There's a new tool for Facebook users called "Unfollow Everything 2.0", but its creator is in a legal fight with Meta to be able to release it legally.

Here are a couple of good questions for God.

Greg Hildebrandt has died.

At last, there's some justice for the California goat girl.

If you eat Swiss chocolate, read this.

Interesting posts here on racial attitudes in France and the World-War-II-era UK.

Why do people do so much traveling to countries that they don't even respect?

Here's one easy thing you can do to oppose Trump and Musk.  Swifties are leading the way.

Bluesky is emerging as a popular alternative to Twitter, for those who no longer wish to support Elon Musk.  It gained over a million users in the week following the election.  More options here.

The Guardian, one of the UK's top left-leaning newspapers, is leaving Twitter.  More and more US journalists are doing the same.

Too late, dumbasses, you should have paid attention the first time.

Four hundred years ago, engraver Jacques Callot called attention to the miseries of war.

"TikTok challenges" are becoming literally difficult to distinguish from suicide attempts.  We need a total ban on all access to social media by minors, just as they're banned from accessing cigarettes or alcohol.

I've been seeing claims that Harris's campaign ended up in debt despite massive fund-raising.  It's not true.

Janelle Bynum has won my state's most-watched House race, flipping one seat from Republican to Democrat.  Just across the river, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has fended off a Trumpazoidal challenger to hold Washington state's third House district.

The fervently anti-gay Catholic archbishop of Minneapolis got caught with -- I don't even need to finish that sentence, do I?

The cryptocurrencytardosphere is happy about Trump's win, but not about Elizabeth Warren's increasing power on the Senate banking committee.

What's the story on claims of Muslim-dominated "no-go zones" in French cities?

This prediction for the next four years sounds plausible.

This is fashionable child abuse.

Stop saying shit like "there will be no more elections".  All the moan-groan-doom-gloom stuff is just doing the bad guys' work for them.

A Muslim doctor offers some straight talk on jihadism.

A look at the real economy, as opposed to statistics spouted by talking heads, illustrates part of why Trumpism happened.

Wikipedia is working to protect itself against "AI".

Boebert seems to have gone completely bonkers.

In some cases (not all), you can fight evil with compassion.

Annie Asks You blog explores Indivisible as a resistance organization.

Bill Clinton speaks out on Israel.

This was apparently Trump's most effective ad.

One widely-circulated story, about workers losing Christmas bonuses because of tariffs, turns out to be untrue.

From Ocasio-Cortez, a small positive sign.

The most important distinction is not between the left and right, but between those who recognize objective reality and those who don't.

How accurate were the polls?  It's a mixed bag.

You don't need to have an opinion about everything.

Trump's win has brought a lot of the worst human garbage out of the woodwork.  Well, now at least we'll know which ones they are.  And the shitstains responsible for this racist harassment may actually get held accountable.

A man who used the internet to hound minors into "self-harm, sexually explicit acts, suicide, and other violence" has been sentenced to a mere thirty years in prison.  A pathetic travesty of justice.

No, the election wasn't rigged.  It was bad enough that so many right-wingers went down that ridiculous rat hole in 2021.  Let's not follow them.  Talking points are addressed here.

Yet another survey confirms that the Gaza issue ranks near the bottom among the concerns that led voters to reject Harris.  We did not lose because we offended the Jew-haters; we can do without them.

Neo-Nazi "protesters" in Michigan targeted a stage play about Anne Frank.

The election defeat is unleashing the usual misogyny.

Even the CEO of Exxon Mobil is urging Trump not to abandon the fight against anthropogenic climate change.

This story about the media astonished me.  I honestly did not realize anyone still believes that the New York Times and the Washington Post still matter.  Surely it should be obvious to everybody how much the media landscape has changed.

As I suggested last week, Trump actually got several million fewer white male votes this year than in 2020, offsetting his gains among Hispanics.  The post has some good data debunking the claim that racism or misogyny played a role in Harris's defeat.

State-level resistance is organizing against potential Trumpist attacks on freedom.

It's a class war.  It's always been a class war.

Even most liberals don't like "woke" stuff.  This liberal blogger believes the spell has been broken.

One of Trump's most dangerous initiatives is a plan to create special boards to review military promotions and even sitting senior officers for their political views, resulting in the gradual replacement of our professional generals and admirals with hacks and toadies chosen for loyalty to Trump.  Like Stalin's political purge of generals in 1940-1941, which crippled the Red Army's leadership and its ability to resist the Nazi invasion of 1941, such politicization would drastically weaken our own military.

As you get older, the problems with "Medicare Advantage" increase.

Congress, even in Republican hands, won't allow Trump to increase presidential power as much as he wants to.

Yet another woman, this time an 18-year-old, has died a horrific and totally preventable death due to Texas's evil, murderous, bloodthirsty forced-birth law.

The feminist discussion site Ovarit has a "megathread" on the election.

Trumpazoids are freaking out that Senate Republicans defied Trump by electing John Thune -- a strong supporter of Ukraine -- as majority leader.  More here.

Parents in Louisiana are fighting back against their state's flagrantly unconstitutional law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms.

This economic-populist program would probably help the Democrats win future elections by landslides, but the current leadership would be too chickenshit to adopt it.

Trump is already back to the same random-blundering mode as in his first term.

Darwinfish 2 has insights on why Muslim voters are going Republican.  Well, some of them are already having regrets.

Secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio is a solid Taiwan supporter and sees the Chinese gangster-state for what it is.

The 2026 elections will offer Democrats a good chance of retaking the House and perhaps the Senate.

The growing ideological gap between young men and young women is emerging in many countries around the world, not just in the US.

Canada, too, puts men in women's prisons -- here's just one of many.

Police in the UK apparently have nothing better to do than bully and harass people who say things the government doesn't approve of.

The MSM are already trying to whitewash last week's jihadist pogrom in Amsterdam.

Ukraine is far from doomed, even with Trump in charge here.

Taiwan is already stepping up to help arm Ukraine.

The Russian offensive in Kursk oblast seems to be a flop.

Netanyahu offers a message of encouragement to the Iranians.

Israeli forces in Gaza have discovered a huge cache of videos of Hamas torturing Palestinians.  Don't expect the "free Palestine" shitheads in the West to care.  Anything that can't be used to bash the Jews, they aren't interested in.

Israel's October 26 counter-attack on Iran destroyed a critical part of the theocracy's nuclear-weapons program.

An Israeli airstrike has killed yet another major jihadist leader in Gaza.

The Iranian theocracy is opening a "treatment clinic" to "cure" women who resist its hijab laws.

Iraq is sinking into a dark age.

More links at Red State Blues and WAHF.

My posts this week:  an image round-up, and why the Democrats were doomed by demographics.

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Matt Gaetz as attorney general?  Tulsi Gabbard as national intelligence chief?  Kristi Noem for homeland security?  RFK Jr for health and human services?  Some Fox News talking head as secretary of defense?  This isn't a government, it's a Saturday Night Live sketch.  Good luck trying to turn the US into Putin-Russia 2.0 with this bunch of clowns.  Who's going to be the head of NASA, some guy from the Flat Earth Society?  Maybe Trump can pardon Ghislaine Maxwell and put her in charge of the school system.

To those who advocate letting the government censor "misinformation" on social media:  no amount of misinformation is even close to being as dangerous as empowering a government, any government, to dictate what is true and what is not.  If you had succeeded in giving the US government that power, consider what kind of people would soon be wielding it, and what they would do with it.

It's becoming apparent that quite a few Trump voters didn't know that Harris had a specific plan to drive down retail prices, didn't know that tariffs are a tax paid by Americans, didn't know that the planned mass deportation would apply to all illegals and not just to the "bad" ones.  How could that be?  Because we live in an age when too many people avoid and reject any source of information that isn't in lockstep with what they already believe.  Future Democratic candidates need to be doing regular appearances on Fox (as Buttigieg has been so successful doing) and similar outlets, and buying plenty of ads there to inform.  It doesn't matter that this means giving money to "bad" people.  Some conservative voters are reachable, but we have to reach them where they are.

Let this election teach at least one lesson:  when the public is unhappy and angry about something, such as crime or inflation, insisting that those things aren't actually so bad and that the problems people can see right in front of their eyes are not real is a fatal error.  All you're doing is convincing the voters you won't do anything to fix the problem -- so if they want it fixed, they better vote for your opponent.

The fact that trials for most of the serious charges against Trump have not been held yet almost four years after the fact (and now probably never will be), represents an abject failure of the justice system, and makes an utter mockery of the Constitution's guarantee of the right to a "speedy" trial.  Obviously, complex cases need preparation, but there's no excuse for fiddle-faddling around for four years, especially knowing that Trump might escape justice by winning the election.

The January 6 insurrection was an attempt to overthrow an election result, and effectively the government itself, by violence -- including explicit threats to murder the vice president, the speaker of the House, and other officials for simply performing their Constitutional duties.  Every person found guilty at trial of participating in it, or of playing a major role in inciting it, should have been executed.  The fact that most Americans would be too squeamish to endorse such a penalty shows how deeply our culture has been rotted and corrupted by Christianity, even among many who are not believers in the religion.  The Romans would have known how to handle the perpetrators of January 6.

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