Link round-up for 13 September 2025

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

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Sometimes cats just go completely bonkers.

Nice trick, wrong place for it.

Appearances can be deceiving (NSFW).

This is not the best way to carry that thing.

So this is why Snickers bars are so popular (slightly NSFW).

Sometimes, you succeed by failing.

"I have an army."

Maybe philosophers aren't survivor types.

Now this is snake-handling.

To Hell with facial recognition technology.

Good idea, but Superman couldn't change in these.

With less than two months to go to Halloween, it's time to start getting decorations.  This year's options on offer are looking good.

Here's how JK Rowling pictured her Harry Potter characters.

William Shatner's performances as captain Kirk deserve a lot more credit than he's usually given.

Watch an iceberg tipping over near a coastal village.

This is what a baby bonobo looks like.

Taylor Swift's concerts actually create mini-earthquakes detectable up to sixty miles away.

Solar power is booming in Africa, especially in the Arabic-speaking north.

Early solar panels installed a third of a century ago are still working fine.

Some interesting research here on the use of gestures with speech.

Remember that we live on a tiny speck surrounded by the immense unknown.

This is sad.

"So many of the small indignities of daily life come from us being denied the ability to tell a rich man in a tech company to fuck off."

These episodes from the career of a fictional 19th-century scammer will seem very familiar to those of us aware of the modern "AI" industry.

Do not read this book.

Exposed!  The high-tech Democratic conspiracy to make Trump look bad.

Take a break from the depressing shit with some pandas.

Just six hours of instruction in basic fact-checking greatly empowers students to spot misinformation and propaganda.

Amazon wants to "restore" a classic Orson Welles movie with "AI" -- and never asked permission from Welles's estate or even informed them.

Here are some tips on spotting "AI"-generated images.

How about not getting your science news from a podcaster with no science background and the IQ of coleslaw.

These examples illustrate how "AI" is just like autocomplete at a higher level of complexity, and has nothing to do with intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

If you don't want your personal information made public on this very dodgy website, here's how you can remove it.

GPT-5 gives wrong information more than half the time.

Here are some tips on making wasps useful.

Researchers have developed an "AI" stethoscope with such good "AI" that it's wrong only two-thirds of the time.

Don't use the same username or password for different accounts.  (FFS are people really that stupid?)

Rabies shots are not as nasty as they used to be.  If you've encountered an animal that might have been rabid, get the shots.

The new $300 billion Oracle-OpenAI deal illustrates the fantasy-world nature of the "AI" business.

Here's a dissection of the latest anti-vaccine lie.

What a creepy guy.

Words mean things -- so stop misusing them.  There are different bad things in the world and there are different words for them.

Computer code produced using "AI" has vastly more security issues than that produced without it.

They murdered that baby.  They deserve a lot worse than thirty days.

Trump affirms the value of vaccines, repudiating the views of RFK Jr.  So why keep this ignorant quack on as health secretary?

Here are some rare photos of the evacuation of the North Tower during the September 11 attack.

Josh Hawley is becoming a voice of right-wing resistance to "AI".

A precinct election officer explains why vote fraud on any substantial scale is practically impossible.

"Is there a clinical term for an individual who has extreme thinness of skin when it comes to their own perceived hurts, coupled with a rhino-hide when it comes to the fear and suffering of others?"

74% of Americans want the government to make vaccines more easily available.  Only 4% want them to be less available.

This act of unspeakable evil deserves our attention -- and anger.  Don't let them minimize it or sweep it under the rug.

This is where we're headed if we start depending on "AI" to do things that are actually important.

The working-class voters the Democrats need to win back prefer an economic populist agenda, not the weird "abundance" program of Republican-style deregulation.

Teslas are death traps.  Why is a car this dangerous even legal to sell?

I can't imagine why anybody would not want this person around them.

A new volunteer group, Grandparents for Vaccines, aims to educate parents about what the world was like before modern vaccines -- so we don't end up like that again.

Here's what it means to be a Zionist.

For all but the wealthiest, inflation wiped out income gains last year.  Since official inflation rates far understate the actual price increases in the things like rent and groceries that most people spend most of their money on, it's likely that the non-wealthy actually lost ground.

Here's how Marjorie Taylor Greene could play a crucial role in bringing Epstein's clients to justice.

The endless coddling of violent criminals is costing innocent lives and will eventually provoke a massive backlash from the voting public.  Trump could be just the beginning.

A Minnesota man with multiple convictions for assaults on women was sent to a women's prison to serve his sentence -- where he promptly attacked a woman inmate.

Health insurers punish doctors who speak out against their abuses.

Usage of "AI" is already declining at large US companies.  Maybe they've already gotten burned enough times that they're starting to realize it doesn't work.

Chicago is creatively resisting ICE.  Then there's this.

This woman's life is ruined, but she's still trying to save others from the same fate.

The ICE raid on that Georgia Hyundai plant is scaring off the foreign investors Trump is supposedly trying to attract here.

This is what happens when ignorant mediocrities are given authority over actual scientists.

RFK Jr is America's Lysenko.

Here are some of the wealthy who supported Epstein, financially and otherwise.  Note that this is not the list of those who sexually abused children under his auspices, though there may well be a substantial overlap between the two lists (and some of these have been accused).  Found via this post at Silverapplequeen which is also worth reading.

Trump caves!  Trump backs down!  He won't be sending the National Guard into Chicago after all.

The government has cut off this 100-year-old woman's pension until she proves she isn't dead.

Missouri voters oppose plans to gerrymander the state, 48% to 37%.  Unfortunately the decision rests with the legislature and not the voters.

Google has abandoned its pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030 so it can waste more energy on "AI".

A Democratic bill proposed in Congress would end taxation of Social Security benefits and strengthen the program by taxing the rich more fairly.

Trump is buggering up US farmers' export markets again.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker is acting to protect the state's people from the mess created by anti-vaccine quackery on Washington DC.

Here's a look at what Middle East policy under a president Vance might be like.

Tens of thousands march in London to protest the surge of murderous anti-Semitism in the UK.

Raise the flag of resistance.

It's safer being a schoolgirl in Peru than in the UK.

The Russian state oil company's biggest refinery has been completely shut down by Ukrainian attacks.

Crap design makes the Russian BMD-4M vehicle explode easily when hit.

Ukraine retaliates against a Russian unit accused of war crimes, even though it's now stationed thousands of miles away at the far end of Russia.

Isabella Cêpa, the Brazilian woman threatened with a twenty-five-year prison sentence for insisting that 2+2=4, has had the case against her dropped by the court.

Brazil's Supreme Court has sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison for attempting a coup and trying to destroy Brazil's democracy.  If the US system had done this after the January 6 insurrection, instead of coddling the criminal, we wouldn't be in this mess we're in now.

The Western reactions to Gaza are rooted in a morass of lies, delusions, and ancient hatreds.  Those who know the truth have an obligation to speak out.

Israel's bold strike at Hamas in Qatar shows that the mass murderers of October 7 will be rooted out no matter where they hide.

Women in Afghanistan cannot escape Taliban barbarity even when dead or dying.

Tiger conservation in India threatens poor and marginalized people, but victims and their families are silenced and sometimes ostracized.

Burkina Faso is making homosexuality a crime.  In general, Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming steadily more hostile to homosexuality even as most other regions become more tolerant.

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

My posts this week:  a clip from one of the greatest films ever, an image round-up, and some miscellaneous observations.

[Image at top:  Iryna Zarutska]

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I don't think I had even heard of Charlie Kirk before he was shot on Wednesday.  From what I've read since then, he seems to have been an asshole in the mold of Ann Coulter, saying shocking and disgusting things to get attention and stir up controversy for the hell of it.  He did not deserve to be a target of violence for expressing opinions, no matter how ugly -- no one does.  But I'm not going to waste any sympathy on a Christian supremacist who would consider me a second-class citizen and supported the Biblical command to put gays to death.  Nor am I celebrating.  I simply don't much care one way or the other.  The real bottom line here is that Trump and his allies are having performative hysterics about Kirk's murder because it's one more opportunity to distract their base from the Epstein scandal.

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Our talented neighbors:


We need the police.  We don't need troops in the streets.


Why do so many gays support an ideology which proclaims they should be eradicated?