Link round-up for 5 April 2025

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

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Enjoy some bad art from the Middle Ages.

Behold the works of stupid people.

Being a baseball pitcher can be dangerous, apparently.

Don't fall asleep on the job (link from SickoRicko).

This cat is just being an asshole.

Here's how to identify a rural church.

Hey!  Are you a paying passenger?

When trying to stick to exercising, having inspiration helps.

Prepare the artillery -- and fire!

Ready, aim -- and fire!

It's a motorbike schoolbus.

These cartoons are for the birds.

She's very good at handling balls.

Is this what they mean by Apple TV?

Be careful around treadmills, especially if you are an idiot (link from SickoRicko).

A few narrow escapes here.

He put a new skill to use.

This bird must have been a man in a previous life.

He apparently takes passengers.

Zelda lets you know what she wants.

Do you see it now?

It might be impossible to exorcise an atheist ghost.

Just remember to dig up your stuff when you leave.

It's not easy to find your spare keys in the house when all you can see is the inside of the car (this is a bit creepy).

Some unusual interior decorating here.  And this is over-the-top.

Space-related bead art here.

Cas d'intérêt gets some well-deserved recognition.

Kanzi the bonobo, who expanded our understanding of ape intelligence and language ability, has died.  He was 44.

Wild bonobo calls seem to have some features in common with human language.

Infant mortality continues to decline dramatically.  Even in the least-developed countries it's now less than a third of what it was in 1990.

The places where people tend to live the longest have something in common.

US life expectancy lags far behind that of other advanced countries.  Even rich Americans have life expectancies comparable with poor western Europeans.

Good example here of the gulf between "AI" trash and real art.

Interesting Cybertruck fact here.

Windows 11 will soon force you to create an account in order to install it, and will otherwise boss you around more.

Apparently uBlock Origin has stopped working on YouTube for some people.  It still works fine for me, but if you're having a problem, here's a claimed solution.

Here's how to permanently disable and remove all the "AI" features in Firefox.

Don't outsource your mind.

Here are some internet jackasses -- don't be like them (please note:  this blogger prefers not to get political comments).

It was a small gesture of humanity.

The shit just keeps getting shittier.

Public rejection of "AI" is starting to influence corporate behavior.

Flu deaths are on the rise as anti-vax idiocy spreads.  New government policies will make it worse.

Here stands a monument to some brave men.

Links here about how to protect your rights while at a protest.

"It's perfectly normal woman behavior."

French cartoonists take on the mess unfolding in the US.

Since Trump took over the Kennedy center, more and more performers are refusing to appear there.

Only 16% of self-identified Christians in the US believe in the Trinity, a core Christian doctrine.  Only 53% of them believe "that God exists and affects people's lives".  So 47% of Americans who claim to be Christian either don't believe in God or don't believe he affects people's lives?  Recall this link two weeks ago, revealing that 70% of self-identified Catholics in the US support same-sex marriage and 59% support abortion rights.  About two-thirds of Americans claim to be Christian, but are many of them actually Christian in any meaningful sense?

Here's more on the Tesla Day of Action last Saturday, from The Verge and Daily Kos.  See also reports from Rockville MD and Camarillo CA.  Someone set this up at a protest in London.  Tesla stock dropped again after the Day of Action.  Keep up the pressure.

Far-right "militias" such as the Proud Boys turned out to oppose a few of the Tesla protests -- which won't do much for the brand's image.

Tesla's first-quarter sales figures are out, and they're terrible.

Annie Asks You blog assesses Cory Booker's speech.

Idaho has instituted the death penalty for pedos.  It will be interesting to see if there's a sudden exodus of Catholic priests from the state.

83% of Americans, including 78% of Republicans, agree that Trump must obey Supreme Court rulings.  70% oppose impeaching judges for ruling against him.

It's no wonder people are losing respect for their congresscritters and senators when they react to voter concerns by changing the subject and spouting clichés.

Last month, over half of the hate crimes in New York city targeted just one group.

Get back to work, you lazy büngwads.  One vote goes against the boss and everybody just takes the rest of the week off?  No private-sector workforce could get away with this.  If the rules require it, change the rules.  This is ridiculous.

Being a jackass in a public restroom won't accomplish anything.

Could Trump legally finagle a third term?  It's not as clear-cut as you'd think.

Even collaborators will be betrayed.

See normal people react to billionaire Trumpazoid Howard Lutnick's disgusting bullshit about Social Security.  Lutnick is now trying to backpedal.

There is no innate right to trample on everyone else's rights.

Today is the day of the planned "Hands Off" nationwide protests.  Blogger Rade organized a protest in Rhode Island, only to see some participants back out due to fear of retaliation (but see my comment there on why such fears are probably unjustified).

A federal judge has ruled that Alabama can't prosecute people for helping women travel out of state for abortions.

The Trumpified CDC is hiding information about the measles outbreak and fudging the truth about vaccines.

Don't fly American Airlines until they fix their attitude about women passengers.

RFK Jr is hard at work buggering up the Department of Health and Human Services.

Politico is reporting that Elon Musk will soon leave his role in the government.  The Trump administration has denied the report, but Musk himself has recently suggested the same.

Red-district voters express their fury at no-show congresscritters in "empty chair" town halls across the country.

Interesting analysis here of what Trump is doing.  In the long run it's not even in the interest of the super-rich; he may get them some more tax breaks, but he's also trying to destroy the structure of predictable government policy and the rule of law on which capitalism depends.  "If you want to chuckle ruefully to yourself, think about all of the corporate executives who were mad at Joe Biden because he wanted mildly higher taxes and the right of unions to exist and therefore supported Donald Trump, who is busy replacing the world's most sophisticated corporate legal regime with a system in which you must grovel at his toes in a ridiculous red hat in order to get anything done."  Trump isn't playing 3D chess; he's not carrying out some master plan to turn the US into Nazi Germany.  He's just what he appears to be -- a petty little bully obsessed with vendettas against perceived enemies, probably suffering from dementia, and perhaps literally insane.

Paul Krugman basically concurs.

Free speech must be protected, even for the vilest opinions.

Trump's tariffs are very likely to cause a depression.  They're based on absolutely illogical nonsense.  Here's a scathing assessment by The Economist magazine in the UK.  Congress needs to act -- some Senate Republicans are trying to do so, but there's no sign of movement in the House yet.

Here are some basics on how trade actually works, and why the tariffs make no sense.

A right-wing group is suing to stop the tariffs.

Canada is responding with an ad campaign in US swing states.

California is trying to work around the tariffs and negotiate separate trade deals on its own.

This may be why the tariffs target some uninhabited islands.

Portland's mayor is trying to force work-from-home employees back to the office, provoking a huge backlash.  The previous mayor tried the same thing.  These asshole politicians seem determined to prove that they're no friends of the workers.

A Republican proposal to abolish Oregon's vote-by-mail system is provoking heavily negative public comment.  It has no chance of passing anyway, given the large Democratic majorities in our state legislature.

Interesting and disturbing info here on leaving Mormonism.

The new chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus wants the Democratic party to re-connect with working-class concerns and emphasize economic populism.

Here's what it's like aboard ICE's charter deportation flights.

Voters in Louisiana rejected four Republican-backed amendments to the state constitution, by large margins.

Trump's blundering, bullying, and failures are ruining his "strong man" image.

West Virginia farmers are feeling the impact of Trumpist spending cuts.

JK Rowling has worked hard to bring Britain back to sanity, and it's becoming clear that she's won the fight.

More Jew-hatred in Amsterdam, with little sign of pushback.  These people are sick.

Greenlanders would lose big if they traded Danish rule for American.

Sweden has committed to a new $1.6 billion military aid package for Ukraine.  The country has donated $8 billion in total so far.

For the first time since World War II, Germany is deploying troops near Russia's border, to bolster the defense of Lithuania.

In France, unlike here, leaders who commit crimes receive penalties.

For now, American-made munitions are still being put to good use by Ukraine.

US and Israeli airstrikes have destroyed most of the Houthi jihadists' missile arsenal.

More links at Red State Blues, WAHF, and Chop Wood Carry Water.

My posts this week:  The Tesla Day of Action, an image round-up, a video on tariffs, a brief note on Crawford's win, and some tips on frequently-confused words.

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Much thanks to those who leave supportive comments on my posts or link to them from your own blogs.  You're a big part of what keeps me going here.

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His mind is going.  He sounds like a toddler throwing tantrums.

Frequently-confused words

A few years ago, I wrote this post in an effort to help fellow bloggers with words which I often see confused with each other on the internet.  Many people nowadays rely on spell checkers, not realizing that spell checkers are useless for catching this type of error -- all they do is flag strings of letters which are not real words.  If you use an incorrect word which nevertheless is a real word that would be correct in a different context -- for example, saying "reign in" to mean restraining someone's behavior, instead of the correct "rein in" -- a spell checker will not catch this.  Such mistakes are, at least, usually funnier than ordinary spelling errors, but it's still preferable to avoid them.

Here are a few more cases of often-confused or misused words.

censor / censure:  Censor means to edit or remove writing or art that someone dislikes; it can also mean a person who does this.  Censure means an official reprimand, or the act of imposing one.

click / clique:  A click is a type of sound; a clique is a tight-knit and exclusive group of people.  I have seen "click" used to mean "clique", but this is wrong.

diffuse / defuse:  Diffuse means vague or thinly-spread, and can (rarely) be a verb meaning to spread out thinly, as in "the gas diffused through the atmosphere".  Defuse is what you do to a bomb to stop it from exploding, and can also be used figuratively to mean calming down a tense situation, as in "the mediator defused the conflict before it escalated into war".

discreet / discrete:  Discreet is roughly "secretive" or "confidential", as in "you must handle this discreetly -- don't let anyone know what we're doing".  Discrete is a rare word meaning separate or distinct, as in "this process has several discrete steps".

disperse / disburse:  Disperse means to thin out or break up something, as in "the police dispersed the crowd", or sometimes to spread out, as in "the immigrants dispersed through the country instead of all settling in one place".  Disburse means to give out money.  The two words are often confused but are quite distinct.

elicit / illicit:  To elicit means to evoke, as in "the speech elicited strong feelings from the audience".  Illicit is an adjective meaning illegal or unethical, as in "a scandal erupted over the politician's illicit behavior".

etc:  This is short for the Latin et cetera, meaning "and so on in the same way".  Spelling it "ect" is incorrect.

faze / phase:  Faze is a verb and means to daunt or discourage, and is most often used in the negative -- "he was unfazed by their criticism".  Phase is a noun meaning a stage or period within a larger process; it is also sometimes used as a verb indicating some kind of transition, as in "the program was phased out".  I often see "unphased" used in place of "unfazed", but this doesn't mean anything, unless it means somebody has not been shot with a Star Trek phaser.

kudos:  This word is singular, not plural.  There is no such thing as "a kudo".

moral / morale:  Moral means roughly "ethical" and can also refer to ethical standards, as in "he has good morals".  Morale (stressed on the second syllable) means roughly "mood" or "spirit", usually of a group of people; "the soldiers' morale was high as they marched into battle".

pedal / peddle:  Pedal is what you do on a bicycle; to peddle is to try to sell something.  These are sometimes confused in the compound word "backpedal", meaning to retreat or back away, incorrectly written as "backpeddle", which doesn't exist but would presumably mean trying to sell something back to the person you bought it from.

replete / complete:  Replete with means "full of", with a strong implication of being overstuffed.  It isn't just a fancier version of "complete with" -- it doesn't mean the same thing and should not be used in place of "complete with".

tenant / tenet:  A tenant is a person who lives in rented housing; a tenet is an individual idea which is part of a belief system, for example, "the supremacy of the pope is one of the tenets of Catholicism".

Finally, I should mention the use of early modern English grammatical endings like -th and -st, and pronouns such as thee and thou, to make language sound old-fashioned.  These have standard usage and cannot just be thrown around willy-nilly.  The -th ending is just the older form of the -s which modern English attaches to verbs with a third person singular subject; he worketh, she hath seen it, his behavior annoyeth me, etc.  Saying, for example, "I hath" is ungrammatical; it's exactly the same as "I has".  The -st ending goes with the subject pronoun thou; thou workest, thou hast seen it, etc.  Unlike other personal endings, it is also applied to the past tense; thou didst do it, thou gavest it to me, etc.  This ending is only used with thou.

Thou is the old familiar/informal form of "you".  Thou is used for a grammatical subject, thee for an object, thy or thine for possessive, with the distinction being like "my" vs "mine".  Thus, thou art welcome here, I can see thee, I hear thy words, everything here is thine.  All of these are singular only and can never be used to refer to more than one individual, in contrast to the modern "you" which can be used for one person or several.

If you found this post helpful, please check out the earlier one as well, for more such cases.

Crawford wins!

Susan Crawford, a liberal candidate known for her support of abortion rights and net neutrality, has won a ten-year term on the Wisconsin supreme court, by a solid margin of 56%-to-44% with 66% of the vote counted.  The win preserves the narrow liberal majority on the court.  It's a stinging defeat for Elon Musk, who poured about twenty million dollars into defeating her.

Video of the day -- tariff time

Some of Peter Zeihan's analyses of issues get a bit too hyperbolic for my taste, but in this case he's just giving an unusually clear explanation of the plain facts.  Economically, the CUM countries (Canada-US-Mexico) are so tightly integrated that imposing harsh new tariffs between them would massively disrupt innumerable supply chains and cripple US manufacturing.  Combined with the decline in business and consumer spending due to uncertainty caused by all the random blundering in Washington, and reduction of government spending caused by DOGE, the tariffs would make a deep recession almost inevitable.

The stock market has been falling, which might yet make Trump delay or rescind most of the tariffs, as he has already done twice before.  But even the recurring threat to impose them is causing much uncertainty and economic damage.  And if he does stick with the tariffs, expect the nightmare of "stagflation" -- high inflation and a serious recession at the same time.

Trump is also expected to announce tariffs on other major economies.  Europe and East Asia are prepared to retaliate.  To anyone who knows about the generations-old hatreds in East Asia, the spectacle of Japan, China, and South Korea coming together on this issue (or any issue) is astonishing.  By picking fights with every other major economy at once, Trump is unifying most of the world against the US, in a pointless trade war he can't win.

Image round-up for 1 April 2025

More pictures from my collection -- click any image for full size.

[For the link round-up, click here.  For the Tesla Day of Action post, click here.]

Mars

Utrecht, Netherlands

Roman medallion depicting Alexander the Great

Paris, Montmartre area

Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter

The Meitan Tea Museum, China