Link round-up for 30 August 2025

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

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When a toddler falls down while playing, he always runs to mommy.

If you go to Iceland, be sure to visit scenic Gjaldskylda.

I don't recommend this hairstyle.

Wrong fish.

Hey, quit pestering my friend.

Cooling down makes things get hotter (slightly NSFW).

This guy must have really annoyed a basketball player.

Worst bike path ever.

Check out the cartoons of John Atkinson.

Sic semper.....

Here's why you shouldn't ship a fully-loaded truck on a raft.

I guess whatever country this is doesn't have very strict vehicle inspections.

You think you have potholes?  China has potholes.

Revenant Manor is a treasury of Halloween imagery.

No eldritch kitchen is complete without witch jars.

Skeleton Key blog will return late Sunday to start posting Halloween-y goodness.

Johnny Profane is holding another live online reading at 12:45 eastern tomorrow.

Remarkable sunset photo here from Sydney, Australia.

Great pictures here of the Faroe islands (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

See a skilled fisherman at work.

London is planting orchards to help cool the city during heat waves.

In countries like India where even the normal climate is hot, global warming is already becoming deadly.

RFK Jr is shutting down mRNA research that showed promise of giving us a universal cancer vaccine, among other benefits.

Male and female are defined by gametes, not by identity or even by chromosomes.

The Nature Conservancy is partnering with local villages in Borneo to protect millions of acres of orangutan habitat.

I've seen this fake picture of the Martian sky in several places.  Don't be fooled.

It took just a single insight from geology for this blogger to abandon religion.

YouTube will soon add shitty, "AI"-generated translations of the audio on new videos, unless the uploader turns it off.  It's already shittyizing videos with "AI" visual "enhancement" which apparently cannot be turned off.

If you use Gmail, be especially alert for scams or suspicious account activity.

OpenAI scans users' ChatGPT conversations and reports some material to the police.

Here are two web browsers to avoid using.

Watch out for this elaborate scam mostly targeting the elderly.

Here are some options for websites that disable right-click.

This kind of place is not safe for a dog.

In 1987 the FBI investigated a Texas man for selling military secrets to..... oh, just go read it, you'd never believe me if I said it.

Someday we may start using "AI" for important things.  For now, just let it explain biology.

Here's a subtle pwning of a pretentious corporate asshole, a type of which we've all encountered a few.

Germany entertains a crank legal crusade against ad-blockers.

Keep your #@!&% phone turned off while driving.

TypePad, a blog hosting site similar to Blogspot or WordPress, will shut down at the end of September, taking all its hosted blogs down with it.  All bloggers, keep back-ups of your important posts.

There's no point in technology that only does things we don't want it to do and doesn't even do them properly.

Forget the logo -- Cracker Barrel's interior design changes are hideous.

It's not so difficult to avoid online ID requirements.

Here's how to do a boycott that will actually matter.

People don't want a future infested with "smart" whatever, constantly spying on them and sticking its nose in.

Attention corporations:  stop sending people around to bug the hell out of everybody.  It is not winning you any goodwill.

No one should feel obligated to respect such absurd nonsense (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

If you ignore your girlfriend/boyfriend to fiddle with your smartphone, it will serve you right when they dump you for somebody respectful.

Here's an example of the shenanigans with imaginary money and fake numbers that are propping up "AI" companies.

Now that birth-control pills are available without a prescription in the US (as has long been the case in many other countries), they're being much more widely used, including by people who rarely used effective birth control before.

The fast-food industry, too, has been embracing "AI" only to have it fail miserably.

This person exists.

Using "AI" for business purposes could get you sued because nearly everything it produces is based on plagiarism of copyrighted material.

Wild animals are dangerous, not picturesque.  And that goes double for anything that lives in the sea.

Who is Nadeen Ayoub?

What a shitty guy.

"AI" is giving people misinformation about specials at restaurants, much to the aggravation of the owners.

Blogger Rade considers the possibility that Trump is dying.

While big retailers and businesses continue to abandon crime-infested downtown Portland, small shops hang on in hopes of a recovery -- and spend money on security.

The Klarna effect set the pattern for tech employment in the US, and apparently in China too.  Coinbase's CEO seems especially eager to rush his company into the tar pit.

The world is full of atrocities that don't fit any narrative.

The MSM are pushing so much bullshit about Gaza that it would be a superhuman job to set the record straight, but this is a start.

Police are finally starting to crack down on the mob street takeovers that have been terrorizing some parts of Portland, mostly poorer and minority areas.  In one case the mob attacked police with firecrackers.

Big win in Utah:  A state judge has struck down the legislature's gerrymandered Congressional map and reinstated the redistricting reforms enacted by referendum in 2018.  It seems bizarre that the legislature ever thought it could just override a law the voters had passed.

".....and it's almost always from people who care more about moral purity than actual change."

If you dream of violent revolution, read this.

The tech-bro elite is flaming-batshit crazy and business people are idiots and weirdos.  Here are some more idiots.

Ghislaine Maxwell says that she and Epstein did know Elon Musk.  To be fair, of course, don't forget that she'll probably say anything if she thinks it would make a pardon from Trump more likely.

Yes, there is systematic media bias.

ICE agents are being demoralized by public outrage over their abuses.  Keep up the pressure.

"You bitches used to know your place."

Why do Democrats fail at media messaging?  It's mostly incompetence and control-freakery.

Juries aren't buying the bullshit.

When Trump started cutting CDC grants, many blue states and cities successfully sued to keep theirs, while red states just accepted the cuts.  This is making the red states' already inferior health outcomes even worse.

Some of the MSM have described the Minneapolis school shooter as a woman.  He wasn't, but he seems to have been a Jew-hater and general crackpot.

The "AI" industry has invested $100 million in PACs to support pro- "AI" candidates for Congress next year.

The latest mob assault and stabbing in downtown Portland illustrates how the area remains intolerably dangerous, while "activists" bitch and whine about the police taking normal precautions while arresting the thugs.

Here's more on the potential backfiring of the Texas gerrymander -- it relies on Hispanic support for Republicans remaining at the level of 2024, which may not happen.

On the other hand, even with everything that's happening, a steady flow of voters are abandoning the Democratic party, describing it as "out of touch", "woke", and "weak".

Tiny houses are becoming popular, but they involve a lot of problems.

Here are some examples of how our institutional guardrails are holding firm against Trump's power grabs.

If blue states choose to play hardball, they can do a lot to resist.

About a third of the US is already in a recession or close to it.

The failure of DOGE is a refutation of an extraordinarily stupid view of government.

Never forget what these monsters did.  Someday, they must be held accountable.

It is interesting that Mamdani attributes his success to "you have a relentless focus on an economic agenda..... and you turn the political instinct from lecturing to listening" -- which is exactly what I've been saying for years the Democrats need to do.

There's a lot of conservative opposition to Trump's recent ludicrously unconstitutional attempt to ban flag-burning.

"Way to make it all about you, bro."

Blue states are exploring ways to reduce federal influence.

The MSM are touting SpaceX's rocket test this week as a success, due to its unusual failure to explode, but part of it did explode, even though the damage didn't cause it to crash.  Each one of SpaceX's string of dud launches has cost it hundreds of millions of dollars.

Colorado Democrats are trying to make it illegal to sue "AI" companies.

This elderly woman defied Trump's harassment for four years.

A group of men followed, filmed, and harassed these girls and violently assaulted one of them -- and police arrested one of the victims.  It is madness.  This happened in Scotland; Americans must never give up the Second Amendment.

Australia's largest bank used "AI" as a smokescreen to move hundreds of jobs to India.

Tesla sales in Europe are still plummeting.

Russians left mines under this bridge.  Ukrainians found them.

This is a gas-processing plant at Ust-Luga near St Petersburg, a port critical to Russia's "shadow fleet" fuel exports.  The port will run at half capacity for the next month.

Watch Ukrainian drones destroy a Russian mine-laying vehicle and munitions transport.

India has agreed to slightly reduce its funding of Russian atrocities in Ukraine via oil imports.  It's a start.

More links at Red State Blues and WAHF.

My posts this week:  a video of imagery from the New Horizons probe, an image round-up, and the empire of shriveled souls.

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This round-up is my five-thousandth post on this blog.

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I recently saw Elon Musk's net worth cited as $400 billion.  Just a few months ago it was $470 billion.  Keep up the pressure on Tesla and his other enterprises -- it's working.

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Once again it's necessary to point out that, no, the presence of large numbers of guns is not what causes violent crime.  If it were, then the places with the most guns would have the most violent crime, which is not the case.  The places with the most privately-owned guns are the US, the Arabian peninsula, and a few central and northern European countries, all of which have very low levels of violent crime by global standards.  The highest violent crime rates are in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Russia, where private gun ownership is relatively rare.  It's not the guns, it's culture.

The US has had a lot of privately-owned guns throughout its whole history, but mass shootings are mostly a phenomenon of the last few decades.  Other factors are what make the difference.

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An organization worth supporting:


Democrats, you need to listen to this guy, because what you're doing isn't working:

The empire of shriveled souls

Several times over the last few decades, I've read of foreign observers asking some version of this question:  Given the great numbers of brilliant and talented people who live and work in the United States, how is it that the reins of power are almost always in the hands of such mediocrities?  Over time the question has come to feel more and more painfully acute.  Looking at the top figures in politics and the corporate world today, the term "idiocracy" can hardly help springing to mind.  Indeed, we would feel blessed by comparison if mere idiocy were their worst feature.

We still do not lack for intelligent, creative, ethical, dedicated people.  US labs and universities still lead the world in most of the sciences.  Where US film and literature remain free of corporate or ideological influence, they continue to produce innovative and meaningful work.  Our popular culture is still the most pervasive and influential in the world.  So how, indeed, did this country end up with the reins of power being held by people like Trump and Musk and the current crop of cretins dominating Congress and Silicon Valley?  Why is the country that invented mRNA vaccines and sent space probes to the planets being strangled by idiocy like "AI" and random tariffs?  Why does everything have to be so dreary and stupid?

The fact is, politics and the corporate world simply do not appeal to the best minds.  The work involved and the rewards offered do not align with what such people most deeply desire and need.  The best minds go into the sciences and arts and academia because those fields do offer what nourishes their souls.  Politics and the C-suites mostly get the dregs -- emotionally-stunted trolls obsessed with accumulating money and/or power, and willing and even eager to dedicate their time and energy to the drudgery and dirty dealing necessary to succeed.  Just consider how most politicians and business executives talk.  They can't seem to help sounding like badly-programmed robots trying to imitate human communication with slogans and buzzwords.  A few of them are even fairly intelligent, but it's a cramped, obsessed, sterile intelligence, devoid of breadth, the kind that never flowers into wisdom.  And what can we make of the type that believes working sixty or eighty hours a week in pursuit of some dreary corporate vision is normal or even admirable?  Is such a person even really human?

To make things worse, over the last couple of decades those grey men in grey suits have exerted an increasing, and increasingly suffocating, influence over the creatives.  The deterioration of Boeing as MBAs displaced engineers at the top levels of the company is one of the best-known examples, but it seems to be happening everywhere.  Look at Hollywood, which is now far more a factory churning out drab mass-produced movies than a house of artistic endeavor.  The film industry has become a barren wasteland of franchises and reboots and remakes, with the occasional projects that buck the system -- The Shape of Water or Get Out or Sinners -- standing out like gems among the chaff.  And now even science is being subjugated to the rule of pitiful ignoramuses with no background in science and in many cases actively hostile to its methods and its achievements.  Hence the defunding of mRNA research, the attack on climate monitoring, the abandonment of NASA's real scientific missions in favor of Elon Musk's idiotic fantasies about colonizing Mars.

This is the strangulation of a culture -- the subjugation of the thinkers and dreamers by shriveled souls who think only of power and quarterly financial statements.  They cannot thrive or create for long under such rule, any more than a rose can grow in toxic waste.

I don't think much can be done about this.  The conditions that keep mediocrity enthroned will not change.  We are not going to see a wave of poets and virologists running for Congress or trying to fight their way up the corporate ladder, nor would they succeed even if they did.  Government support for science may improve after Trump is gone, but many of our best scientists will be settled in new careers in Europe or Canada by then.  The best we can hope for as a future president is a Gavin Newsom or a Marco Rubio.  Dr Fauci and Guillermo del Toro don't want the job, probably couldn't do the job, and would never get elected anyway.

Our country had a good run, but given the notorious anti-intellectual streak in our culture, it was always living on borrowed time.  If our future is to cheer from the sidelines as innovation in science and the arts shifts to Europe, Canada, Israel, and wherever else the freedom of the mind is respected, well, it could be worse.  The important thing is that that innovation continues -- somewhere.

Image round-up for 26 August 2025

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

[For the link round-up, click here.  For the Pluto video, click here.]

At first glance this picture registered to me as a sapient poo emerging from a cushion to check out the coffee

Donkey sheltering from heat, Greece

Mars

Contrary to appearances, this is not an island -- it's a farm on the North Sea coast of Germany, where the land is very flat, and this picture was taken during an unusually extreme high tide

Gdańsk, Poland (formerly Danzig, Germany)

The Book Barn, Niantic CT

Colorado sunrise and sunset, photos by Lady M

Erice, Sicily

Guatapé lake, Colombia

There's something disquieting about this uniform -- the 33 on the collar puts me in mind of the old SS logo