For Blasphemy Day

This is International Blasphemy Day -- a day for denigrating, mocking, and denouncing deeply-held spiritual beliefs of every kind!  The day is observed every September 30, commemorating the publication of the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2005.  It is our absolute right, as part of our freedom of expression, to criticize and undermine religion just like any other class of ideologies, in whatever way we choose.

[For the link round-up, click here.  For the Rapture videos, click here.]

Please see also my collection of posts on how Christianity destroyed the true Western civilization.

Islam is colonialism that destroys indigenous cultures.

One of the Middle East's greatest thinkers.  He was referring to Islam, the dominant religion of the region for the last fourteen centuries.

"In certain countries, birds in a cage believe that flying is a sickness."

You cannot tell me this isn't a mental illness.

Videos of the day -- the [C]Rapture

It was just an ordinary day, you ridiculous dumbasses.  If you gave away your property, quit your job, and burned your money (!) on the basis of faith, and now you're stuck with the mess you created, tough shit.  Stupidity has consequences.

Still, I have to hand it to the guy at 27:15-31:38 in the third video.  He's very close to actually getting it.

Link round-up for 27 September 2025

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

If you like a blog post I link to here, remember to leave a comment on that post as well as (or instead of) here.  That way you can be sure the blogger will see it.

o o o o o

Cats do their thing.

Why are these three men sitting in the back of a truck?

I guess this is what they call a flying squirrel.

Only in Texas.

This man personifies machismo.

Sometimes, assholing delivers its own justice.

Some signs of the times here.

I can't even think of anything to say about this one.

Giddy-up!

The passengers are aboard and the train is departing.

If you've got enough room, you can go big on Halloween decorations this year.  Or you could get one of these.

Here are some castles in Scotland.

See pictures from a visit to Notre Dame.

Here's why Tolkien made a small but critical change to the text of The Hobbit, years after publication.

See an octopus using high-speed transport.

The approach of this asteroid offers us an opportunity to test our planetary defense technologies.

New gene therapy dramatically slows the progress of Huntington's disease.

Contrary to common belief, the transition to non-fossil-fuel energy is happening remarkably fast.

Long covid does a wide range of apparently permanent damage.

This new rabies vaccine is a technological step forward in several ways.

If you suffer from bezoars, diet soda can help you.

Astrology is complete bullshit.  That's been experimentally verified.

Here are some dangerous animals that won't eat you.

If you use artificial spider webbing as a Halloween decoration, it's best to use it only indoors.

What do you do mentally to escape the barrage of Trump-related content on the internet?

Kids will read real books -- you just need to give them the right ones.

YouTube is introducing a "service" that will interrupt your music with "AI"-generated gabble.  It's opt-in, at least for now.

Cut-price deals are returning at fast-food restaurants.  I've noticed more and more items with special discounts at the grocery store too.  People just won't pay these ridiculous prices.

You can't use stylistic features to spot "AI"-generated writing because everything it does is plagiarized from actual human writers.  I myself use dashes and italics more than most people do.

Modern "smart TVs" contain spyware.  Here's how to turn it off in various brands of TV.

Apparently there is such a thing as an electronic safe, which hackers can easily open.  My own safe has no electronics at all, just a regular physical lock and key.  Like to see some hacker hack that.

It's actually not difficult to avoid Google's "AI" and its ID requirements.

Children's addiction to gadgetry is interfering disastrously with their psychological development.  I have a feeling that the future will belong to the countries that take the hardest line on keeping kids away from screens, while countries that allow the problem to continue will fall by the wayside.

Drug-sniffing dogs are far less accurate than is popularly believed.

Business Insider is going to start posting "AI"-generated fake articles, probably without identifying them as such.  Anything you see there should be assumed to be inaccurate unless it's verified from a valid source.

Religio-nutballs who believed this week's Rapture prediction are now embarrassed, especially those who got rid of their cars, jobs, etc in anticipation of being swept up to Heaven.  Time for some heavy-duty pointing and laughing.

"Amazing he thinks this helps his case."

These people apparently believe in witchcraft.

Twelve hundred entertainment-industry figures have signed a letter opposing a boycott of Israel.

This is supposed to be "PhD-level intelligence".  What a sick joke.

Americans, including young people, are migrating out of large cities to smaller cities and rural areas.  This portends an economic revival of the latter, along with a shift in their politics.

"Self-driving" Teslas keep ignoring barriers and driving into the path of oncoming trains.

Police in Phoenix AZ have prevented a threatened mass shooting at a gay bar there.

Amazon and several tech companies used "AI" as an excuse to lay off tens of thousands of American workers, then hired H-1B workers to replace them.  A bipartisan team of senators is investigating.

Here's why billionaires are stupid, and tend to get stupider over time.

Missouri voters are working to force a referendum to block the new gerrymandered map which their legislators just imposed.

Always look beyond the mere headlines.

Here's some info on the public pushback against ABC's removal of Jimmy Kimmel, and on the next No Kings protest on October 18.

This censoring of history is outrageous.  Slavery was part of the reality of US history and needs to be taught and remembered as it truly was.  The same with more recent history.  A true picture must include both the good and the bad, as they really happened.

Oregon's senator Merkley is pushing for US recognition of a Palestinian state which would act as a base for future attacks on Israel, along with a ceasefire in Gaza to allow Hamas to survive and recover so it can kill more Jews in the future.  I always liked Merkley, but now I can't even consider voting for him again next year.  I doubt the Republicans will nominate anyone acceptable either.  I'd hate to simply not vote, but that may be my only option.

Greta Thunberg's latest aid-and-comfort-to-terrorism project is roiled by conflict as Muslim participants vehemently object to the presence of gays.

Why is this person still here?

South Korean investment projects in the US are de facto on hold until the government can provide assurances that their workers are safe here.

A group of Disney shareholders is preparing to sue the company for suspending Kimmel.

Republican voters, especially women and young people, are becoming substantially more pessimistic about the direction of the country.

As harvest time approaches, trade wars and tariffs are pushing many US farmers to the brink.

A British blogger addresses his government's fatuous "recognition" of a non-existent Palestinian state.

Calls for violence in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder have now reached the UK.

The prime minister of Albania was pelted with trash in the legislature after appointing an "AI" program as a cabinet member.  Ironically, the whole thing was fake -- the "AI" was played by an actress.

Here's a report on the barbaric abuses rampant in the Russian army.

Ukrainian attacks on the Russian fuel industry are having a serious logistical impact.

Here's an example of the fakery behind claims of "genocide" in Gaza.

Gay Palestinians in the West Bank are saved by Jewish settlers from being killed by their own people.

Trump says he "won't allow" Israel to annex the West Bank.  Well, until recently he was pretty hostile to Ukrainian self-defense too, but he has come around on that and there's grounds to hope he'll come around on this as well.

Here's why the Iranian theocracy promotes trans ideology.

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

My posts this week:  a video on nutzoid assassins, an image round-up, and an eventful week.

[Image at top:  Ateret, Samaria, Israel]

o o o o o

More and more blogs are reporting being hit by "AI" crawler bots, leading to absurdly inflated page view numbers, often from implausible countries.  When this started happening on my own blog, quite a long time ago, most of the fake views showed as being from Singapore or Hong Kong, which is how I knew they were fake -- obviously I didn't have several times as many readers in Singapore as in the whole US.  Later they shifted to Brazil and France, and now most show as being from the US.  Evidently the companies sending the bots can disguise where they're coming from.

This is not actually a danger to your blog.  They are just absorbing text for later plagiarism, which is annoying but not damaging nor, at least for now, preventable.  The greater irritant is that the numbers in my stat counter are now utterly meaningless -- I have no way of knowing whether my actual readership is growing, shrinking, or what.  One can just hope that once the "AI" bubble pops and most of these companies go out of business, things will get back to normal.

o o o o o

During the Biden administration I recall some bloggers on the left supporting the idea that government should have the power to curtail misinformation on social media.  I pointed out at the time that giving government the authority to decide what is and isn't "misinformation" and censor it would be far more dangerous than such misinformation itself could ever be, and would eventually result in someone like Trump having the power to claim anything he didn't like was "misinformation" and censor it.  The attempt to censor Kimmel is exactly what inevitably happens when government exerts such power.  No one can be trusted with it.

o o o o o

We appear to be heading for a government shutdown again.  The last such threat was in March, but Schumer stood up to Elon Musk and the progs and refused to give Musk the shutdown he said he wanted in order to speed up his dismantling of the federal government.  But now Musk is gone from politics, Schumer got pilloried by the nutcase fringe for not giving Musk his shutdown, and we're back to just these insular, inside-the-beltway legislators all focusing on how to outdo each other in yet another dick-measuring contest of brinkmanship, and how to make sure the "other side" (from whichever viewpoint) gets blamed for whatever damage ensues.  Nobody is focused on what's good or bad for the ordinary citizens.  This time, a shutdown is probably inevitable.

o o o o o

A liberated land:


A rotted-out, dehumanized culture:

o o o o o

An eventful week

A lot has happened in the last few days -- so I thought I'd do a quick overview.

The funniest item is something that didn't happen.  A passel of goofy religious nutballs on social media had worked themselves into a frenzy of anticipation that "the Rapture" was going to arrive on September 23 -- that is, yesterday.  As far as I can tell, it didn't -- there have been no news reports of intolerant, judgmental prigs ascending into the sky to pester God for the rest of eternity and leave the rest of us in peace down here.  Such matters are, in any case, open to interpretation:


The true Rapture, the only one worth celebrating, occurred in 1981, but we can still enjoy it today:


On to more serious matters.  Freedom of expression scored a major win this week when Jimmy Kimmel's show was restored on ABC.  I know little about Kimmel and have never seen his show, but there was a vital matter of principle at stake here.  Last week, the megatrumpazoidified FCC had pressured ABC to drop the show because the government didn't like something Kimmel had said.  What he said that they didn't like is completely irrelevant.  The point is that state power was used to deplatform a person for speech that politicians objected to.

This was a direct, frontal attack on the First Amendment, and it was widely recognized as such.  Several Republican senators, notably Ted Cruz, spoke out against the censorship, as did Tulsi Gabbard -- a rare case of Republican politicians explicitly opposing Trump's position.  It was not their statements that restored Kimmel's show, however, but public pressure.  As I noted on Saturday, after Kimmel was dumped, so many people went to cancel their subscriptions at Disney (ABC's parent company) that the cancellation page repeatedly crashed.  This win for free expression was achieved by people power.  The corporations have little respect for the Constitution or democracy, but they do respect our money.  Remember that for the future.

What may be the most important event of the week attracted relatively little notice in the US.  For several days, Russian drones had been flying into the airspace of Poland and Romania, and on Friday three Russian jets flew over Estonia for twelve minutes.  Clearly the Putin regime was testing NATO's resolve, and this week it got its answer.  Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, declared that Poland will shoot down Russian planes that violate its airspace.  Other NATO members soon backed up Poland -- even Trump agrees, at least for now -- and Poland's deputy prime minister told off Russia in blunt terms at the UN:

Your insane nationalism contains a lust for domination that will not cease until you realize that the age of empires is over and that your empire will not be rebuilt..... If another missile or aircraft enters our space without permission -- deliberately or 'by mistake' -- and gets shot down, and the wreckage falls on NATO territory, please don’t come here to whine about it.  You have been warned.

This is the proper way for democracies to talk to gangster regimes.  If you worry that this stance is dangerously aggressive, don't.  In 2015 another NATO country, Turkey, actually did shoot down a Russian warplane which briefly overflew its territory.  The Putin regime bitched and whined, but took no real action.  It's even less likely to do so now, after the disastrous Ukraine war has exposed the shitty quality of its military.  Most likely Putin will tell his pilots to keep the hell away from NATO's borders.

Finally, a staggering betrayal of democratic solidarity and Western principles.  The treacherous, craven, filthy "leaders" of the UK, Canada, Australia, and Portugal declared that they are rewarding the slaughter of October 7 by recognizing a Palestinian state, something that has never existed and never will (the French president did the same later in the week).  Hamas is celebrating.  The move is opposed by the leaders of the UK's two major opposition parties, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, and by overwhelming majorities of the British and French peoples.  As I have pointed out before, supporting a two-state solution at this point is like demanding an al-Qâ'idah state on the border of the US within two years after the September 11 attack.

Some good might come of this, if Israel carries out its threat to retaliate by annexing part or all of the West Bank and thus puts an end to this nonsense once and for all.  If anyone would have the guts to do it, it's Netanyahu.  But the vile act of these groveling bootlickers of jihadism has brought a stain of shame upon their countries, which will linger long after they have left office.

Image round-up for 23 September 2025

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

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

Challenge not accepted.  Gorillas have black hair -- the orange hair shows that this is an orangutan.  And those things can fart.

1969

Morning glory

Percé Rock, Québec, Canada

NGC 4594, the "Sombrero galaxy", about 31 million light years away

Ronda, Málaga, Spain

Agate

Norway

The home planet