Video of the day -- oh, my!

A Wizard of Oz remix.  Found via Miss Cellanea.

Link round-up for 29 November 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 supportive comment on that post as well as (or instead of) here.  That way you can be sure the blogger will see it.

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The cat scores!

Ikea has the perfect gift for your favorite junkie.

These cats have things their own way.

When this happens, you know it's too cold.

Don't try this at home.  Or anywhere.

He's a non-conformist.

You may like this zany battle on planet Insomnia.

Even the trains in Canada are cooler than here.

Fear the wrath of mommy cat.

This is the Inca city of Machu Picchu in Perú (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

Eating more fruits and vegetables will help you sleep better.

Drinking three to four cups of coffee per day can slow down aging.

How do you justify relying on science?

Bird flu is killing seals.  I wonder if there's a seal flu that can kill birds.

Language and intelligence are not the same, which is why the "AI" we have now is not a step toward actual artificial intelligence.

Doctors at a London hospital worked with car racing pit-stop teams to improve their procedures.

Don't try to turn your passion into a job.

How popular is Harry Potter?

Some companies are now using "AI" in video games, resulting in games so bad that customers are demanding refunds.

At last, we've found a use for birds.

"I wasn't born under a star named rage."

Work, work, work.....

Don't get scammed on health insurance.

Keep your money in an actual bank or credit union, not in some "app" or retailer-sponsored system.

There was a side of Elizabeth Taylor you may not know.

Don't trust quotations you find on the internet unless you fact-check them.  They are often inaccurate.  And as always, especially fact-check things that you want to believe are true.

There is now a support group for people suffering mental breakdowns from using chatbots, and their family members.

Let's look at the lives of oppressed people.

The "Trump Mobile" phone was supposed to be released this August.  There's still no sign of it.

You can get good results from "AI" -- by not actually using "AI".

Do not give your kid this teddy bear.

This is a story of colonization and decolonization.

The border patrol is spying on American drivers and stopping and even arresting those whose driving patterns it deems suspicious.

South Korea carried out a huge experiment with "AI"-generated school textbooks.  The result was an abject failure.

Plain honest language will set you free.

The expensive hardware in all those "AI" data centers is degrading very rapidly from overuse and becoming obsolete.

A bizarre cult is teaching women to give birth with no medical help.  It's very dangerous -- the medical knowledge and technology we have now was developed for solid reasons.  Before that, childbirth was a leading cause of death for women.

Our country is addicted to a dangerous sport.

"We will remember who opened the door."

A now-fired safety engineer is suing the robotics company at which he formerly worked, alleging serious negligence of safety issues.

Christian theology is an incoherent mess.

Microsoft is turning Windows 11 into an "AI"-infested nightmare.  Most users appear to be unhappy.

A thousand-year-old letter shows how history repeats familiar themes.

Women are being legally punished for challenging men.

Changes in Trump's speech patterns from 2015 to 2024 show signs of serious mental deterioration.

Public resistance has stopped construction of a data center in northern Michigan.

Asshole bosses can make a company sound and operate like a cult.

Several states are acting to protect our right to pay in cash at stores.

Trump thinks he can speed up scientific progress using "AI".

A Russian priest preaches female subjugation.  Note that the Bible does indeed say "let the woman learn in silence with all subjection" and "for the husband is the head of the wife".  The evil here is the Bible itself -- this is not some specifically Russian aberration.

Yeesh, that brain worm really messed him up.

This data center in Louisiana is already wreaking havoc on local people, and it isn't even fully built yet.

Everyone is susceptible to propaganda, but.....

Some Oregon cities are turning off their traffic cameras to make sure they can't be used by ICE to help abduct people.

Meta's track record on child safety is appalling.

You can't trust the media.

Many private schools in Alabama push junk education.

US customers are unhappier than ever before, as customer service degenerates into a shithole of automation and chatbots in which it's getting harder and harder to reach an actual person.

The biggest rental-housing company in the US has been fined seven million dollars for using an anti-competitive price-fixing algorithm.  It's better than nothing, but I'm not sure a fine that size means much to such a huge company.

An Ohio journalist contrasts his state with Singapore.

"They present themselves as friends to the Arabs but in reality they're just enemies to the Jews."

Break free from mind control.  Interrupt the loop.  Anything that stops the endless scroll is a win.

Elon Musk's "AI" supercomputer presents a national-security risk -- and similar risks may extend to our whole power grid.

63% of Americans support Medicare for all.

Large-scale software projects routinely fail disastrously as management repeats the same mistakes over and over.  Some of these failures have led to people being falsely accused of crimes, even punished for things that never happened.

Rand Paul is warning Trump that invading Venezuela would turn the MAGA movement against him.  This actually seems plausible -- many of Trump's supporters voted for him because he promised to keep the US out of foreign military involvements.  70% of Americans oppose an attack on Venezuela.

In 2024 I posted about the plan to re-introduce dangerous wolves into the ranching country of western Colorado, a move opposed by the local people but forced on them by voters in the urban parts of the state who would never have to suffer the consequences of it themselves.  Now, two years on, the program looks like a disaster, with the transplanted wolves dropping dead left and right and costs over budget by millions (what the hell are they doing, flying the damn things to Colorado first class and putting them up at the Ritz?).  The locals haven't even needed to shoot them.

The venture capitalists and CEOs who have the most to lose when the "AI" bubble collapses are desperately trying to convince us (and maybe themselves too) that it isn't a bubble and that there's a viable industry here.  In fact, the "industry" mostly consists of companies circulating the same money round and round among themselves so everybody can claim to be getting revenue.  "True end demand is ridiculously small.  Almost all customers are funded by their dealers."

And yes, when the bubble collapses, "AI" will mostly disappear from everyday life.  Good riddance.

Reminder:  it would be almost impossible to purge the Epstein files of incriminating material.

Santa Fe NM has passed a law linking future minimum wage increases to housing costs, not just to meaningless official inflation figures.

"These perverted men want to be in female spaces.  There's no euphoria boner to be had in the third category."

Elon Musk spreads neo-Nazi ideas online and supports the murderous tyrant who rules Saudi Arabia.  The post also has reports on what other billionaires are up to.  You really need to be reading this blog regularly.

ICE agents are apparently not trained to recognize tribal ID cards.

Insurers are trying to avoid covering "AI"-related damage, since "AI" technology's constant random errors and the associated costs are so unpredictable.

Orthodox churches on the US are attracting a lot of young men, but it's not actually a positive for those churches.

After wasting millions of dollars and pointlessly disrupting essential services, DOGE is finally gone.  The government is still trying to assess and repair the damage it did.

There are shortages of skilled workers everywhere, for some mysterious reason.

Canada's supreme court has re-affirmed the criminalization of most aspects of sex work, ignoring the pleas of sex workers and perpetuating a dangerous environment for them.

A new health-care law in Québec is driving doctors out of the province.

The British military is now testing a high-powered laser to shoot down drones, a far cheaper alternative to anti-drone missiles.

Germany is suffering a surge in violence against women.

Security forces in European countries, with the aid of the Mossad, have thwarted several jihadist terrorist plots.

Russia's youth counterculture opposes the regime and the Ukraine war.  It's hard to assess how much support this actually has among the broad mass of young people, though.  Since that post, Loginova has gotten out of jail and fled the country.

The number of Israeli citizens with gun licenses has more than doubled since the October 7 attack.  People want to be able to fight back if such a thing happens again.

Contrary to what the Western MSM report, Israel is becoming more valued by its Middle Eastern neighbors as a partner against jihadism and the Iranian theocracy.

Japan has placed medium-range missiles on a Japanese island less than seventy miles from Taiwan, to help deter a Chinese invasion of that nation.

Kim Jong Un has reportedly ordered North Korean soldiers in Russia to blow themselves up rather than surrender.

Air pollution in Delhi is becoming unendurable.  This will soon be the world's largest metro area.  India needs to make sure that it remains habitable.

Paternity tests are now all the rage in Uganda, often with disquieting results.

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

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and the dangers of our country's skyrocketing inequality.

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"That's part of what Democrats can do to win in the areas that have been slipping away.  Another is to start talking like normal human beings again.  We're not going to win the messaging battle if we say that Trump's policies make people 'food insecure.'  No, they make people hungry.  Kentucky was hit hard by the opioid epidemic.  I didn't lose a friends and acquaintances to 'substance use disorder'; I lost them to addiction."

Kentucky governor Andy Beshear

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"Ultimatums don't make people re-think their politics.  They make them re-think you."


In recent years millions of Chinese escaped dire poverty by migrating to cities, but now the crumbling economy is forcing them back:

The fork in the road

We Americans are a conquered people.  And we were conquered while barely firing a shot to defend ourselves.

The conquerors are not from overseas, not some alien race or ethnic group.  They mostly originated right here in the US, and they built up their power over us here, not from outside.

A tiny parasitic oligarchy has accumulated huge, obscene mountains of wealth that would make Louis XVI look poor by comparison, while year by year most people's situation gets harder and harder, in many cases desperate.  They did it mostly by driving down the pay and benefits of the workers at the enterprises they control, enabling them to skim off most of the value those workers' labor creates, and by various forms of financial manipulation.

The old cliché that you get ahead by hard work, and that poverty is usually the result of laziness, has become a sick joke.  People like Musk and Bezos do not work millions of times harder the average worker.  They don't produce anything at all.  Such people were mostly either born into wealth or had some opportunity to get into a position of financial power, and were ruthless enough to exploit a lucky break to the hilt and to start accumulating wealth on what eventually became a vast scale.  At the same time, millions upon millions of people work themselves half to death, work so hard that a typical oligarch forced to live their lives would literally drop dead from stress and exhaustion, and barely make enough money to survive -- because the system has been rigged to steal most of the value their work produces, pouring it into the pockets of the oligarchs.

We are told that we are the richest country in the world, and I'm sure someone can point to a bunch of statistics according to which this is technically true.  It's also meaningless, when a few hundred people hold such a huge fraction of the country's wealth.  A waitress making sub-minimum wage plus irregular tips, or a warehouse worker earning a pittance for back-breaking labor under degrading supervision and rules more suited to the life of a slave, do not benefit from Elon Musk's four hundred billion dollars pushing up the national average wealth.

Socialist European countries now have more social mobility than the US does, in the sense that a person born poor has a better chance of rising to a comfortable life there than here.  We're the only developed country that can't even manage universal health insurance coverage.

This increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny number of parasites has been going on for half a century and shows no sign of slowing down.  Lately they have used their wealth to buy control of the mainstream media as well as a dominant influence over both political parties.  They use that power to fend off any suggestion that wealth be redistributed or even that their taxes be restored to reasonable levels as they were in the fifties and sixties.

I cannot stress strongly enough -- cannot shout it from the rooftops loudly enough -- that voting one party out of power and the other party in cannot solve this problem.  We have been voting one party out and the other party in, back and forth, for the whole half-century that the situation has been getting worse, and it has availed us nothing.  The oligarchy just kept on siphoning off more and more of the wealth the workers produced, uninterruptedly, regardless of who was in power.  The Republicans have nothing to offer except even more tax cuts for the rich and more erosion of what is already the most threadbare social safety net in the developed world, while the Democrats offer only some minor tinkering around the edges.  The nearest thing to a serious proposal for change that I know of is California's wealth tax initiative, which would claw back a piddling five percent of their loot from the billionaires in that state, and the Democrats are against it.  Wholesale expropriation of the parasites' stolen wealth, to be returned to those whose labor produced it, is not even under consideration, anywhere -- even though polling regularly shows that drastic measures to curb inequality and billionaire power have majority support.  Change must come from the people themselves, acting through unions, the ballot initiative process in states that have it, and whatever other levers of power are available.  The political parties are useless.

We are at a dangerous fork in the road.

Consider what an objective outside observer would conclude, looking at this country.  Unimaginable concentration of ever more wealth in the hands of a few.  A middle class that mostly knows it cannot hope for the kind of rising standard of living that every previous generation took for granted, while a growing fraction of the country is struggling for bare survival.  Government assistance being cut and cut and cut to fund yet more tax cuts for the oligarchy.  The Epstein files will soon reveal that many of this privileged caste are so arrogant as to feel entitled to use the children of ordinary people as sexual playthings.  The inequality of wealth in our country is now far worse than it was in France in 1789.  And Americans as a whole are the most heavily-armed population on Earth.  What the hell would that outside observer expect is eventually going to happen here, if things go on like this?

It's true that the majority of the guns are in the hands of the more right-leaning half of the population, who have been carefully taught to blame anyone but the ultra-wealthy for their problems -- but events last year suggested that many of them have been breaking free from the indoctrination.  The impending cuts to ACA subsidies and SNAP will disproportionately affect rural, white recipients.  The great majority of our population is not highly ideological and is open-minded enough to see what is going on when it becomes obvious enough.  Every ruling class in history has had a propaganda arm striving to bamboozle the masses into accepting its power as legitimate.  And it worked.  Until eventually it didn't.

The West mostly avoided the kind of violent revolutions that happened in places like Russia and China because its leaders had enough sense to enact some degree of socialist policy to mitigate inequality.  Our own oligarchy had damn well better learn that lesson too, and fast.  Only redistribution -- real redistribution, not just some five-percent wealth tax -- can prevent a disaster which would risk sweeping away not only the parasite class but the whole Constitutional system on which our freedom and democracy and our very identity as a nation depends.

JFK once said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.  We need a peaceful revolution.

Truths and inspirations for 24 November 2025

If something's hard to see or read, click for full size.

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

Not always true, but often true.

Why do people do this to themselves?  It's nauseating.

If the pro-kink types are regularly engaging in acts that cause brain damage, that could actually explain a great deal.

Made by Pliny.  Never forget that, as horrific as Epstein and his clients were, the Catholic hierarchy remains primus inter pedos.

Look at this fucking thing.  This is an actual Congressional district in Texas -- and it's from the old map, before the super-gerrymander the Republicans there are now trying to impose.  Gerrymandering rigs elections to the point of making them meaningless.

I vote we put this guy in charge of handling Epstein's clients after they're exposed.

Found this one on a right-wing blog.

Use plain honest language, not Orwellian gobbledygook.

She is referring to Elon Musk, of course.