Link round-up for 15 February 2025

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

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Behold the works of not-very-smart people.

Automatically-generated e-mail addresses can be a bad idea.

Fight back against the oppressor.

This frog is not very good at frogging.

He was able to climb the fence, but that doesn't mean he should have.

See some cats -- or, rather, don't see them.

This is what happens when you don't pay attention to what you're doing.

Here are some -- actually, a hell of a lot of -- comics for smart people.

I guess nobody told this turtle that turtles are supposed to be slow.

I'm not sure he's only scratching (NSFW).

Your birthplace can make a difference.

Have some puppies.  And this baby capybara.

The cat wants to go out.

If we all stand together, we can defeat even the most fearsome enemy.

Here's our local zoo's newest elephant.

Don't forget people like me.

You think you know cold?  This is cold.

Some odd animal facts here.

Animals have existed for almost a billion years, much longer than we previously thought.

The measles outbreak among unvaccinated people in Gaines county TX is spreading rapidly, with nine people now hospitalized.

The foreign-aid freeze has stopped clinical trials of two promising HIV vaccines.

Blogger Carol Seidl's personal story illustrates the value of the NIH, whose work is now under threat from Elon Musk's ignorant mania to destroy government.

Far Corner Café has a few items in honor of Darwin Day.

Improve your marriage with Biblical sex.

Two-factor authentication works.  Use it.

The Emilia Pérez Oscars fiasco has become a popcorn-worthy feast of woketardia, probably more entertaining than the actual movie.

North Dakota Republicans are pushing a law requiring teachers to lie to students about biology.

Read more old stuff.

Google ran an ad for its "AI" program during the Super Bowl, but the "AI" made a ridiculous error right in the midst of the ad.

Driving too fast is a bad idea.

If you have a pet with an RFID chip, read this.

If you eat canned tuna, read this.

If you have a Google account, read this.

Even some cars now pester you with pop-up ads.

Using "AI" to create images is not art, no matter how good the final result looks.

A new analysis suggests that the Cybertruck has a fire risk seventeen times that of the old Ford Pinto.

Just another asshole CEO.

Apparently Elon Musk's pet hackers are crap at website building and understanding systems.

Technology shouldn't be such a pain in the ass.

A line of ridiculous pro-"AI" ads expresses bosses' disdain for workers.

Apparently Google's search results are now crap, but there are plenty of other search engines.

"Because if they've always existed....."

Trump is threatening to deny the Associated Press access to the Oval Office unless it calls the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Beware of preference-falsification bubbles.

There sure are a lot of these guys.

There must be no "kingship" in the United States.

Don't wallow in scary news.  The bad guys want you miserable and despairing.

Americans are adapting to the post-Dobbs world, with the number of abortions actually up since the ruling.  State governments that claim their states have zero abortions are lying.

Trump's policies are already harming US farmers in a wide range of ways.

Several media companies are suing an "AI" start-up for stealing their articles.

Some Alabama Republicans are considering a law to force Christian prayers on schoolchildren.

The oligarchical parasite class are the new robber barons.  Jeff Bezos makes three times as much money per hour as the average college-educated American does in a lifetime.

The BBC analyzed "AI" responses to questions about the news and found a huge rate of distorted or wrong information.

A fifteen-year-old girl at a South Carolina high school was assaulted by a teacher for ignoring the Pledge of Allegiance.  Now her family has won $75,000 in a lawsuit.

This is gaslighting.

Mass deportation is already encountering logistical obstacles.

Reliance on "AI" led to an innocent man being jailed for seventeen months.

A right-wing blogger encounters the bureaucratic nightmare of private health insurance.  Follow-up here.

Congressional Republicans are being deluged with phone calls from their constituents angry about Elon Musk buggering up the federal government, and some of them are starting to respond.  Contacting your Congresscritter really does have an effect.

You can accomplish more by working with as many allies as possible, even if they don't all agree with you about everything.

Male athletes have now participated in over eighteen thousand sports competitions that were supposed to be female-only, claiming over two million dollars in prize money meant for female competitors.  This is not a small-scale problem.

Trump has halted the defunding of the CFPB until a pending lawsuit on the matter is resolved.  Legal action works.

"We've watched as, regardless of politics, a murderous regime that destroyed two-thirds of European Jewry -- over six million people, one and half million of them five years old or younger -- has been used as nothing more than a rhetorical weapon."

Here are some links and other help on accessing the information which has been removed from government websites by the Trump gang.  In some cases people have been actively working to preserve the erased resources.

The CDC has begun issuing the MMWR again, but apparently with censorship of discussion of infectious diseases.  The American Medical Association has a YouTube channel on which it is providing regular updates on disease outbreaks and other medical matters.

New York parents attended a school board meeting en masse after learning that a pornographic book was being shown in class to children as young as five.  Board members bleated technicalities, then fled.

State governments can fight inequality and support workers' power.

More than half of Jewish Americans are hiding the fact that they're Jewish in public, due to rising anti-Semitism.

I'm no fan of AOC but this is ridiculous.  It's not illegal to tell people what legal rights they have.

The Supreme Court clears the way for states to hold oil companies accountable.

It's "life-saving" treatment.

Musk and Trump can't destroy democracy unless we let them.

Yes, this is just what we need in the West.

This judge knows how to do his job properly.

"The truth is, many of us are very willing to work towards a goal with people different than us."

If anyone in the US should be called Nazis, it's people like this.

Some Senate Republicans are defending the courts' efforts to rein in Musk and Trump.

The uniquely dangerous character of the ideological US right wing derives from its roots in Calvinist theology.

"The solidarity of the corrupt transcends partisanship."

A liberal activist explains why now is not the time to push gun control.

Assholes need to confront the reality of what they support.

Don't fall prey to shock and awe -- Trump and his gang are far weaker than they appear.  Be aware of exactly what he can do and cannot do.

UnitedHealthcare just gets worse.  This doctor is now being targeted.

Stop linking together things that are antithetical to each other.

A Canadian former prime minister debunks Trump's bullshit.

Public opinion in the UK has shifted strongly against all aspects of trans ideology in just the last two years.

Doctors can't function if they're forced to pretend to believe nonsense.

The EU is ready to respond firmly to Trump's fight-picking on trade.

European countries are making plans to seize Russia's "shadow fleet" of tankers that bypass oil sanctions.

The six biggest countries in western Europe are fully committed to support Ukraine, no matter what Trump does.  Europe is preparing for a future without the US as a reliable ally.

Trump's stance on Ukraine bears the stench of appeasement.  Hegseth is already backing down on some of it due to European protests.

Cool videos here of Russian and North Korean weapons being blown up by Ukrainians.

In some Russian units, half the artillery is useless due to bad training and maintenance.

The Russian military uses magic spells to defend against drones.

The Putin regime is acting to silence Russian military bloggers who cover the Ukraine war.  These bloggers support the Russian war effort, but now apparently their reporting on Russia's defeats and military incompetence is becoming embarrassing.

Here's how the West can and should get tough with Russia, for real.

Don't be fooled -- the Palestinian Authority is not renouncing its vile program of offering financial rewards to people who murder Jews.

Israel needs to take the gloves off, setting an example for other societies plagued by jihadism.

Authorities in Libya are cracking down on indigenous rap music that they deem un-Islamic; they also don't like the way it denounces their violence and corruption.

More links at Red State Blues and WAHF.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and the economic reality that helped defeat the Democrats last year.

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Expect the voters to be more distrustful than ever toward political messaging, going forward.  We now know that some of the narratives most dogmatically pushed by the activist left -- crime is low, economic growth is improving everyone's standard of living, prices of everyday goods have stabilized -- were just as false as the right-wing narratives about the 2020 election being stolen or global warming being a hoax.  And their falsity was far more visible and obvious to the average person.  Most voters don't know a lot about climate science or the details of vote-counting, but they sure as hell can see businesses closing downtown because vandalism and robberies have reached intolerable levels, or see their own rent and the price of groceries rising year after year faster than their income can keep up.  They'd be fools to ever again trust the people who were lecturing them to ignore the evidence of their eyes and believe the official statistics.

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For those who are stressed out and depressed by reading about politics, but don't want to completely block it out and risk being uninformed, here's a tip:  Focus your reading on solutions, not problems.  Read only articles and posts about what is being done to solve the problems we face, or about what should be done about them -- about those who are fighting back against Trump's depredations in various ways, how you can help do so, how the Democrats need to change in order to win elections in the future, and suchlike.  Skip the ones that are basically just "here are all the latest terrible things that are happening" or "here's yet another example of how bad and awful and terrible Trump is".  You already know bad things are happening and you already know Trump is awful.  Wallowing in more of that will just depress you further while providing nothing positive.  Reading exclusively about resistance and positive action will keep you still informed but a lot less stressed out.

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