Link round-up for 19 July 2025

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

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You wouldn't want to depend on these people for anything.

Here, let me help carry that.

It's brazen highway robbery in broad daylight.

This must be the bird equivalent of bigfoot.

Is Monsterwortbildungsimitationsunfähigkeitsverzweiflungsgroll a problem for you?

Let's go for a spin.

Eat people, have lots of kids, live forever -- it's not a bad life.

Math annoys the enormous bug.

Here's what to do if somebody keeps gawking at their smartphone when they're eating with you.

Think of your life as this jar.

Parenting takes a lot of patience.

There are nice things in the world too.

Here's a history of the famous Hollywood sign (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

Take a walk in a peaceful place (this is in Scotland).

Tortoises have moods.

The largest wind-energy farm in the Middle East is now operational in Egypt, providing enough clean energy to power more than a million households.  It was built by French and Japanese companies with no US involvement.

Globally, most newly-built power generation capacity is renewable (even in the US it's 93%).  One gigawatt of solar-power infrastructure is installed every fifteen hours.

There's evidence that psilocybin shrooms can slow down some aspects of aging.

Geo-engineering methods, such as adding aerosols to the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, must be part of our toolbox to fight global warming.

69% of Americans now accept the reality of global warming while only 15% deny it.  60% recognize that it's caused by human activity.

This video addresses some of the anti-vaccine nonsense, although the people who most need to hear it are probably irredeemably cut off from reality at this point.

A court in India has ruled that an elephant's quality of life outweighs some stupid religion's desire to use it in their silly rituals.

"Clang clang Maxwell's in the slammer....."

Trump announces yet another tariff target (link from Chief Squirrel).

Tesla's robotaxis operate in only a small designated area of Austin, the shape of which reflects Elon Musk's level of maturity.

Hey, look, it's the "missing minute" from the Epstein prison video.

Doordash is using "AI" to produce food descriptions.

Blogger Rade casts a Serbian curse.

Your life should not be a museum.

Watch out for these trick questions in job interviews (I've often been asked the reliable-transportation one).

Be careful when sending pictures from your phone.  You're probably revealing more than you realize.

Some tips on avoiding ads here.

If you use Chrome or Edge, it's likely you're being spied on.

Don't fly Delta.  And watch out for other companies pulling this crap.

Here's an important tip for people attending protests.

Google is using "AI" summaries of search results to distract you from clicking on news sites that come up.  Don't fall for it.  The information on the actual news sites is far more reliable.

Don't post fake news about ICE (or anything else).  It's easily checked and just makes you look untrustworthy.

Reality is genuinely complicated and simplistic takes on it are usually wrong.  This applies in a lot of areas.

Authors of science papers are using simple tricks to control how "AI" bots review them.

A new tech company wants to make you pay to tour apartments you're considering renting.

Kroger stores are putting their digital discounts on paper flyers so that people without smartphones can use them.  These digital "coupons" have long been an annoyance to me -- you can get the checkout person to give you the discount, but it's a hassle.

A prominent venture capitalist seems to be publicly going insane from chatbot addiction.

California police are using drones to catch illegal-fireworks assholes.

A third of children between nine and seventeen think of chatbots as friends, with one in eight saying they have "no one else to talk to".  This is disastrously unhealthy.  A chatbot cannot be a friend or a person -- it's a program mechanically assembling sentences using an algorithm.  There is no self-aware mind there, as there is with a human or even a dog.

Rebuke and boycott CBS and its advertisers for the cowardly firing of Stephen Colbert.

"Tying your 'humanity' to others' compliance with your selfish, unreasonable demands is not a sign of good psychological health."

Some people are nervous about criticizing "AI".  They shouldn't be.

A man explains how his life is much better since he got off social media.

Robotaxis probably won't be profitable even if they eventually work properly.

It doesn't matter who's offended -- it only matters what's true.

Coders who use "AI" assistance are slower than those who don't.

This Tennessee doctor refused to provide care to a pregnant woman because the fact that she was unmarried transgressed the taboos of the vile Christian religion.  Tennessee already has the highest maternal mortality rate in the country.

Trump's executive order on green energy will have almost no effect except to highlight his ignorance on the subject.

It's better to be alive and hated than dead and slightly less hated.

Treating disagreement like betrayal is a profound sickness of modern discourse.

More than a decade after water contamination was discovered in Flint MI, most of the pipes have been replaced.

Women don't talk like this.

Always remember that Luigi Mangione has pleaded not guilty and is innocent until proven otherwise.

Despite all the chaos and abuses, there are still far fewer deportations per month under Trump than under Obama.

One college in New York is standing up to the rising threat of campus anti-Semitism.

In Oregon, people with serious health conditions are supposed to be eligible for rent assistance, but the program is so sluggish that many people get evicted while waiting for their money.

There is evidence of cell-phone surveillance technology being used to collect information on attendees at a July 4 anti-Trump protest near Seattle.  This would be illegal without a warrant, but nevertheless one should assume it may be happening at any protest event.

Support for trans ideology cost the Democrats a substantial number of votes in 2024, and the problem isn't going to go away, now that the Republicans know this is an effective issue for them.  But Democrats remain reluctant to get in step with the public.

Even before the 2024 election, Democratic state attorneys general were preparing for a Trump presidency.

Such is life in the "richest country in the world".

The Department of Homeland Security is urging the police to treat even the most innocuous activities at or near protests as a threat (found via Silverapplequeen).

This sticker in New York has a long history behind it.

Here's how Kerr county TX responded to help from Biden in 2021.

Detainees at "Alligator Alcatraz" describe nightmarish conditions.  Visiting legislators were not allowed to enter the areas where actual prisoners are held, but what they did see was bad enough.

One-quarter of Americans have an essentially Nazi mind-set.

Recent polling shows that the public is turning against Trump on immigration, formerly one of his strongest issues.

At Tuam in Ireland, the mass grave at the site of a former Catholic "institution" for unmarried mothers and their children is about to be excavated.  Hundreds died and the bodies were dumped in a disused sewage system.  It is yet another example of the utter moral depravity of the Church.

The UK will soon require that people reveal their real identities in order to use many websites, no doubt an effort to stimulate the VPN industry in that country.

The UK and France announce close cooperation on nuclear defense.  Germany, which has the technology to build nuclear weapons quickly, will need to be part of any such deal eventually.

Ukraine now has a three-foot-long river drone which can launch its own airborne drones to spy or attack.

See some of the work of Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine.

A drone flew in through the door of this Russian vehicle and blew it up from the inside.  Check out how high the roof flies.

To stop Russian missile and drone attacks on cities, Ukraine needs cheap interceptors that it can afford to produce in the huge quantities needed.  Its decentralized tech sector is solving the problem.

The Putin regime is testing large-scale internet shutdowns all across Russia.

Brazil is furious that Trump is trying to interfere with the prosecution of Bolsonaro.

Israel is open to sharing defense technology with Poland and other threatened democracies.

The new Syrian government's treatment of the Druze minority reveals it as far less tolerant than we hoped.

Taiwan is stepping up its preparations for defense against a Chinese invasion.

More links at Red State Blues, WAHF, and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  a video of Valles Marineris on Mars, an image round-up, and the Epstein scandal.

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A reader notified me that Tumblr posts I link to are only temporarily visible to readers who are not logged in to Tumblr.  After a couple of minutes of normal visibility, the post is blocked by a pop-up like this:

I think I've fixed the problem, for most links.  If anyone still sees this, please let me know and tell me which link it was on.

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The cult of ugliness may finally be going out of favor:

I set this up to start at 2:15 because the part before that isn't relevant.  6:10 through 8:00 is a skippable ad.  Be warned there is some seriously disturbing imagery in this video.