Link round-up for 3 November 2024

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

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Socrates had no reason to fear death.

Do not abuse the power of the hole.

If Jesus were in the modern world, he'd encounter certain problems.

Here are a couple of justifiably short horror movies.

From the first moment, you know what's going to happen.

Don't these trucks carry fire extinguishers?

This is 1961, before we got scared of colors and made everything beige and off-white.

Have some French cartoons and plays on words to take your mind off election worries.

Which country has the best drivers?

Test your knowledge of spooky words.

Best to respect this guy and stay off his turf.

See the impressive Château de Chambord in France (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

A Texas Halloweenist visits some of the more Autumnal parts of the country.  Some of the video has a very pagan feel to it.  Back home, she's doing an open house on video.

Lady M engages in some guerrilla pumpkining.  The project celebrates "our religion, our holiday, our time".

Bohemian Valhalla has an abundance of spooky items on display.

This guy's costume is next-level.

I could easily imagine seeing this in Portland.  And these ladies would fit in well here.

This impressive Halloween display celebrates Haxan.

You can get jewelry made from actual cobwebs.

This is Día de los Muertos in Mexico.

It can be difficult to judge the relative sizes of things.

See an air show from a pilot's viewpoint.

Worst apartment-cleaning job ever.  Just imagine the stench.

Cut it open and see what it is.

A new technique makes the removal of large brain tumors far less traumatic.

Autistic blogger Johnny Knapp describes struggles and strategies for survival.

Gangster-state engineering:  a 180-foot literal geyser of shit erupts in Moscow, drenching buildings and public spaces for several minutes.  Videos here.

If you use GMail, beware of this scam.

Here's the right way to deal with a thug.

This is a street in Valencia, Spain, after the recent flooding.

Ladies, if your guy is this much of a scumbag, maybe you need to trade up.

Be cautious if your dentist recommends implants.

Trump says it's raining.

An "AI" tool for transcribing speech adds in things the speaker didn't say, in 80% of cases.

If you worry about being mugged, consider a drop wallet.

The Sphere in Las Vegas is now showing Harris ads.

My "blue wave" prediction post has been reposted at Angry Bear and Annie Asks You, extensively excerpted at You Might Notice a Trend, linked from Crooks and Liars and Red State Blues and indirectly from Michael Seidel, and even translated into Chinese on a site in China.  If I'm wrong about this, everybody's gonna know about it (but if I'm right, same thing).

Fortune and LifeSite News are predicting a big win for Trump and the Republicans.  I'm seeing the same on right-wing websites and blogs generally.  None of them mention the shift toward Democrats in post-Dobbs elections, nor the early-voter surveys strongly suggesting a high Republican vote for Harris.  I think they're in for a shock next week.

Stormy Daniels is receiving an unusual honor this year.

Theodore Roosevelt understood that the president is simply one bureaucrat among many, not the exalted and almost king-like figure our modern (and profoundly un-American and anti-Constitution) sensibilities have made him.

Those who were home-schooled tend to be smart but ignorant.

Darwinfish 2 runs through some final arguments against Trump.

Never hesitate to tell the plain truth.

Red State Blues posts a brief history of a Constitutional right.

These people exist.

A Republican official in Indiana exposed actual ballot fraud -- that he himself had committed.

One district in Idaho is so swamped with anti-vax nonsense that all its public clinics have stopped offering covid vaccines.  At this rate our red states will soon be sinking toward Third World levels of ignorance and superstition and disease.

Trump has become too boring to inspire another insurrection.

In Oakland CA, a Jewish man was harassed and kicked out of a café for wearing a hat with a star of David on it.

Ann Selzer, historically one of the most accurate pollsters, has Harris three points ahead of Trump in Iowa.

Political parties will ignore people who are absurd and unreasonable.

Nowadays, it's the behavior of Christians themselves that makes more and more people feel repulsed by Christianity (found via Red State Blues).

Thanks to a new Biden administration rule, airlines now must refund your money automatically if your flight is substantially delayed.

According to some observers, Trump's inner circle knows he's going to lose.

People are getting sick of identity politics (actually, we always were -- it's just that lately we've stopped being afraid to say so).

The incendiary attacks on ballot boxes here in the Portland area were apparently linked to jihadism.

Here's an attempt to estimate how many early-voting Republicans are voting for Harris in various states.  I didn't follow all the math, but the numbers are clearly substantial.

"This is what turning the page looks like."

A society that locks women in enclosed spaces with rapists is a sick society indeed.

The gender gap among young voters is huge, with Harris leading by thirty points among young women but only by ten points among young men.  The early vote is trending very strongly female.

To alleviate the inflation of housing prices, radical steps are needed to increase supply.

I'll never understand how a mother could destroy her son's life like this.

The Putin regime is meddling in our election again, using video fakery.  Here's another example, from Georgia.

Project 2025 would entirely ban porn and imprison the people who produce or distribute it (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).  The issue may work to sway some young male Trump supporters.

In the dark medieval world of forced-birth America, a woman spent three weeks in jail for having a miscarriage, charged with homicide when she hadn't even known she was pregnant.

A quarter million Washington Post subscribers have canceled since Bezos quashed the paper's Harris endorsement, about ten percent of all its digital subscribers.

Even in Kansas, it feels like we're not in Kansas any more.

What a bunch of assholes.

This slimy character learned an important lesson.

Chicago police have finally filed terrorism and hate-crime charges against the jihadist who murdered a Jewish man last weekend.  They had faced severe criticism for initially failing to do so, with Jewish leaders describing Chicago as an "openly hostile" environment.

This analyst predicts Harris will win big, partly due to her innovative approach to defending abortion rights.

The prog/Nazi fringe of the left isn't happy with Harris.  Tlaib even refused to endorse her.

In Texas, yet another woman has now died because of the filthy evil of forced-birth laws.  These laws are instruments of death, suffering, and pointless cruelty.

The oligarchs just want Trump to let them play with their toy rockets.

The head of the Heritage Foundation calls Harris the most "anti-faith" presidential candidate in history (I wish).  His predictions for what will happen if she wins are a morass of delusional thinking.

This journalist almost died because he was on Medicare Advantage instead of real Medicare.  Some insurers will automatically enroll you in their Medicare Advantage plans unless you opt out.

Here's how fast we knew the presidential result for each state in 2020.

Elon Musk fears being held accountable to the law if Trump loses.

Political must-read of the week:  Democrats often ask why so many working-class whites "vote against their own self-interest" by voting Republican.  They don't realize that, for many of those voters, cultural and social issues are more important than economic self-interest -- and on many of those issues, the left is basically off in orbit around Neptune somewhere.  The same applies to immigration, though the linked post doesn't mention it.  This is part of a broad re-alignment in which sex and education are of growing importance (women and the more-educated more Democratic, men and the less-educated more Republican), while older voters, traditionally Republican, are trending more Democratic due to Republican threats to Social Security.  The political world is evolving into something quite different from what we've been used to.

We need national protection for abortion rights so women don't need to travel ridiculous distances.

Election integrity is now far more robustly safeguarded than in 2020.

Where can nurses turn when their own union turns against them?

The UK's Women's Equality Party is closing down, and as it turns out, it's no loss.

Poland is fortifying its borders with Russia and Belarus.

Video here of the devastation at two Russian ethanol plants attacked by Ukrainian drones.

Israel is the front-line bulwark of the West against jihadism, just as Ukraine is against Russian imperialism.

Now that Israel has wiped out most of Hezbollah's leaders and crippled its fighting ability, the Lebanese themselves are starting to clean out its remaining thugs from their territory.

Israel may have a role to play in the liberation of Iran.

UNRWA confirms that a Hamas leader was its employee.  We need to stop deluding ourselves that the UN is something other than an evil jihadism-enabling criminal gang.

More links at Red State Blues and WAHF.

My posts this week:  Halloween imagery, the day's ancient roots, and some last political observations and images before the election.

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Only 362 days until Halloween!

So, we have to change the clocks again.  If there's one thing pretty much all Americans, left or right, agree on, it's that we all hate doing this twice a year.  So why can't Congress put a stop to it?  Can we get some action on this?  Results not excuses, please.

With recent talk on the right about a mass deportation of illegal aliens, and polling evidence that a large majority of Americans would support this, I've seen people on the left cite this article claiming that such a mass deportation would cost around half a trillion dollars and take several years.  The dollar figure is hugely inflated by including the cost of twenty years of post-expulsion border enforcement, which would need to be done anyway.  More broadly, the claim just makes no sense.  After the end of World War II, Poland expelled the ethnic German population of Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia, a total of fifteen million people (compare with eleven million illegals in the US). This operation took just a matter of months and didn’t involve unreasonable expense.  One can debate whether such a mass expulsion is advisable or moral, but it is not impossible or impractical.

People nowadays are so busy recording their experiences that they don't seem to actually experience their experiences.  If you visit the Parthenon and spend all your time there taking selfies in front of it, then years later when you look at those pictures (do they ever actually look at them later?), will you really have the same memories of being there as someone who just looked and absorbed the moment?  Then there are those people who go to live performances and record them on their smartphones.  If you want a video recording of a band, there are professional ones available, but the experience of simply seeing them perform live is unique.  Just watch, listen and be there.

[Image at top:  explanation here]

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