Link round-up for 10 October 2026

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

Three weeks to Halloween!

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Wheee!  A swing!

Sic semper predatoris.

This attempt at exercise didn't turn out well.

Learn about butlers, dinosaur hairstyles, and an audacious stomach.

In times past, the lower-case "s" was often written elongated, so that it looked like an "f".

Cats sit in boxes, dogs sit in.....

Today's weather:  clear with a chance of barf.

What if George Lucas had made 2001:  A Space Odyssey?

You can't expect younger people today to get eighties pop-culture references.

Cats are demonic.

On Halloween, a man encounters a scary presence.

New Witch blog celebrates the arrival of spooky season.

Get hand-made Halloween items here (this is the daughter of blogger Mary Kirkland).

More pictures here from Salem MA.

Things are looking Halloweenish over at Bohemian Valhalla blog.

I liked this evocative tribute to autumn.

The Grim Reaper is having a frustrating time.  See part two here.

This driver noticed a wolf stalking a cyclist and took action to scare it away.

The Aldabra giant tortoise is now thriving and is no longer an endangered species.

There is literally nothing we could do to the planet Earth that would make it even close to as uninhabitable as Mars is.  The idea of colonizing Mars as an escape if conditions on Earth deteriorate is breathtakingly stupid.

This tool claims it can get rid of all the "AI" in the Mac operating system, thus freeing up to 12 gigabytes of space.

Do not phub.

Your Instagram photos can be looted to train "AI".  Here's how to opt out.

Amazon is building up profiles of its customers based on their purchases.  The link includes instructions for how to view what they have on you.

Here's why you shouldn't bother to read anything written with "AI".

"The point is not to win.  The point is to....."

Quackery promoters are using "AI" to create really gross, crappy ads.

The Incas buried animals alive as sacrifices to their gods (and also did the same to children).  Never forget that all religions are evil and stupid, not just the modern Western ones.

This book unmasks the gross cruelty and barbarity of the Hindu religion's caste system.

The new Musk documentary is long, but apparently full of laughs.

Meta's platforms are awash in stuff like "AI"-faked child abuse imagery, but it's censoring the accounts of gay bars.

We've forgotten what life was like before modern precautions and technology.

Globally, the overwhelming majority of gay and bi people are still "in the closet".  In almost all countries outside the West, it still isn't safe to be known as anything other than purely heterosexual.

Yet another hiker needed to be rescued after "AI" advice led him into a life-threatening situation.  I say if these idiots trust in "AI" after it's become so widely known how it gets things wrong, just leave them to die and save the money.  At this point it's natural selection in action.

This guy's "AI" agent posted his personal financial information on a website accessible to his co-workers.  Again, anybody who gives an "AI" bot access to such information kind of deserves whatever happens to them.

Amazon is trying to frighten communities into dropping their opposition to data centers.  The US might fall behind China in the vital fields of fake porn and wrong answers to silly questions.

This woman's flight turned into a nightmare and flight attendants did nothing.  I smell (phew!) a lawsuit.

This guy doesn't want any vaccines -- just cancer and probably impaired vision.

Almost two-thirds of Americans support a crackdown on "AI" and a federal wealth tax.  Even bigger majorities want to stop the abuses committed by health insurance companies.  As a cited pollster declares, "populism is a dominant ideology in both the Democratic and Republican voting blocs".  Politicians better start paying attention.

Jessica Valenti has mostly good news on abortion rights.

Naama Abu Rashed lived only fourteen hours.

"Every meaningful boundary excludes.  An age of consent excludes children from choices adults may make.  Professional licensing excludes the unqualified.  A women's sporting category excludes males.  Exclusion describes what a boundary does.  It tells us nothing about whether the boundary is just."

Even some Democrats are expressing disgust about Mamdani's loathsome October 7 statement.

53% of Americans support enlarging the Supreme Court.  And approval of the Court is declining over time, suggesting that support for enlargement will increase.

This is the enemy.

Voter support for abortion rights is surprisingly strong in the deep South.

The US is lagging behind Ukraine in military innovation -- Ukraine has been pioneering modern drone warfare while Hegseth fusses over beards and testosterone levels.

October 7 exposed evil people in the West.

The Wall Street securities industry will make about ninety billion dollars in profits this year, setting the stage for record bonuses.

The FBI has prevented a planned mass shooting in Minnesota.

This man existed.  And he was no ordinary man.

My state's governor Tina Kotek, a Democrat, is pro-data-center.  She has the lowest popularity rating of all fifty governors and is actually polling slightly behind her Republican challenger, who is at least promising to "protect local communities from unwanted data center development".  Kotek could actually manage to be the only major Democrat to lose in a blue state in a blue wave year.

Economic-populist independents are challenging Republican dominance in areas of the country where a Democrat would have no chance.

Hungary will impose a wealth tax next year.  If they can do it, so can we.

Jon Stewart explains why the Democrats should forget about impeachments and focus on things that will actually help the public.

Members of Congress have an almost unlimited ability to abuse witnesses and even lie during hearings.  It needs to be reined in.

California has passed a law trying to limit the disruption caused by self-driving cars, but it's still ridiculously lax -- allowing half an hour to intervene when a self-driving car is blocking emergency responders?  This technology has been tried and has definitively failed.  Just ban the damn things.

Blogger Annie sees the election as a contest between fear and hope.

Besides spewing pollution and noise and wasting electricity and water, data centers are a tax dodge.

Kansas voters have noticed that their sitting senator is a scumbag.

"We are willing to accept some things going wrong to make sure that this is a widely held and used and democratic technology" -- meaning, to make sure I can make money selling this crap nobody wants.

The Republican candidate for California governor came up with a softcore lesbian political ad.

Bernie Sanders, AOC, and my state's Jeff Merkley are proposing a law to ban federal use of license plate surveillance cameras and cut off federal funds to state and local governments that use them.

Give Google credit for doing the right thing in this case -- they're changing their guidelines to penalize "AI" fakery in their search results.

Trump's delusional ranting is massively turning voters against Republicans (lots of interesting political stuff at that link).

If the Democrats win a big House majority, that majority will be ideologically diverse.  Well, obviously the kind of Democrat who can win in Kansas or Iowa is not going to be one of those woke pronoun-addled Israel-bashers.  Congresscritters are supposed to represent their constituents -- a willingness to stand up to the party leadership is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Washington state successfully protects voter data from federal intrusion.

On the third anniversary of October 7, Western leaders issue condemnations of the attack.  But note especially Geert Wilders's message -- deeds outweigh mere words.

It was insane that they ever let this guy out of prison in the first place.

Early release programs for violent criminals are an insult -- and a danger -- to their victims.  Quit hand-wringing and just guillotine the fuckers.

The UK is now in another Munich/appeasement phase, coddling a murderous totalitarian ideology and pressuring democratic Israel to give up territory to enemies who want to destroy it, just as it pressured democratic Czechoslovakia in 1938.

As expected, the nativist AfD party is forming a government in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt, with the help of the BSW (which is economically far-left and anti-immigration).  Some mainstream politicians also broke ranks to support the AfD.  They can see that change is needed -- and inevitable.

Appease the jihadists, and this is how they will reward you.

Activists in Poland have begun using a locker system to distribute abortion pills, as a work-around for the country's strict but oddly-worded forced-birth laws.

European countries are imposing a wide range of new sanctions on Russia.

Russians are so virtuous that Westerners get diarrhea from just thinking about it.

The Russian military is using fake videos and pictures to claim control of places they haven't actually captured.

See Ukrainian hits on various Russian targets.

The Russians have come up with a really stupid way to transport a helicopter.

Smoke rises after a Ukrainian attack on Belgorod.

Russia's land corridor to Crimea keeps getting hammered.

As participants at a Communist party rally in Moscow chanted "down with the tsar" (referring to Putin), police swarmed in and arrested about sixty people.

Russians enjoy an evening on the beach at Sochi, never mind the burning oil tanker just offshore.

Ukraine says it has now knocked out more than half of Russia's oil-refining capacity.

I really don't give a shit how many of these people die.

For many Israelis, the horrors of October 7 are still a living reality.

This report documents the systematic sexual violence committed by Hamas against hostages taken in the October 7 attack (link from commenter NickM).

More links at Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  an image round-up, the anniversary of the October 7 attack, and the importance of ballot initiatives.

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If being on the left means being on the same side with people who try to make a moral analogy between Hamas murdering, raping, torturing, and mutilating civilians (many of them children), and Israel killing mostly terrorists in a war which those terrorists started, then I'm done with the left.  This is completely insane.

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When the right loses an election, its activists say, "the left cheated and stole the election".  When the left loses an election, its activists say, "the voters are stupid and fell for right-wing talking points".  Both reactions are self-defeating since they distract the losing side from asking the questions it should be asking -- "Why are we so out of step with the voters?  How should we change to better reflect and serve what the masses want?"

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The importance of ballot initiatives

Voting for political candidates or parties is increasingly a weary exercise in choosing the lesser of two evils.  As I've discussed before, the Republicans started going nutzoid around the time of the Tea Party craze, and have been getting steadily worse ever since; in recent years the Democrats too have been sinking ever deeper into crackpottery.  Both have been thoroughly captured by the power of billionaire donors.  It's no wonder both parties have such low popularity ratings.  These days elections largely work by people becoming so horrified by the abuses, delusional thinking, and tone-deafness of one party (generally whichever one happens to be in power at the time) that they flock to vote for the other one out of desperation.

The situation feels comfortable only for those people who march completely in lockstep with the whole agenda of one side or the other, but I don't believe the majority of people are like that -- and such people are probably becoming rarer as each side's agenda gets more and more baroque under the influence of unhinged ideologists dwelling in their respective echo chambers.  There is also a sense that real solutions to the problems that most concern the average person are being put outside the realm of political debate because they are opposed by the billionaire oligarchs who dominate both parties.  In short, representative democracy is losing its effectiveness because people don't have the option of voting for politicians who represent most of what they really want.

However, democracy itself offers a way out.  Many US states have a ballot initiative process by which citizens can place single-issue proposals on the ballot for all voters to vote on.  This enables the people themselves to sideline the politicians and parties and their agendas.

Ballot initiatives allow voters to fine-tune policy on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to having to choose which one of two fixed, all-or-nothing menus is somewhat less unappetizing than the other.  For example, the Democrats are pro-choice on abortion but anti-choice on gun ownership, while the Republicans are the other way around -- since I'm pro-choice on both, which party do I vote for?  If policy on both issues were set by ballot initiative, I'd have the option of voting for the position I actually support in both cases.

The dominance of the two parties enables whichever party wins to claim a mandate for things that are actually wildly unpopular, when people voted for that party on the basis of other policies that they do like -- "we won because people want to protect Social Security, rein in ICE, and strengthen Obamacare, but that also means we have a mandate to re-impose DEI, let another million refugees into the country, and let men play in women's sports!"  The more people can vote separately on each individual issue on its own merits, the more this problem is minimized.

Initiatives also allow citizens to circumvent the fake billionaire-imposed bipartisan consensus on what can and cannot be done.  The best current example is California's union-backed billionaire wealth tax initiative.  The entrenched establishments of both of the billionaire-dominated parties oppose it, yet it still might pass.  The mass movement against data centers has similarly caught politicians from both parties off guard, bloated as they are with infusions of dollars from "AI" companies run by tech billionaires.  Many politicians have been reluctantly dragged onto the people's side by fear of getting voted out of office -- but for tough, decisive action against data centers, the initiative process may be the best option, in those states that allow it.

Unless one or both parties shifts in a more economic-populist direction and jettisons the crank stuff so beloved of the insular ideologists, I suspect we'll see steadily greater use of the initiative process going forward.  We the people are not sheep whose only choice is between two competing shepherds.  We are the boss here, and it is our will that should be done.

October 7

Today marks three years since the largest single massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.  The monsters of Hamas swarmed across the border into Israel, attacking towns and a music festival -- killing, raping, mutilating, burning people alive, committing every atrocity their imaginations could dredge up from Hell, and doing it with a demonic glee that not even the German Nazis in their day had shown.  They filmed and recorded their own monstrous crimes, uploading and broadcasting them in real time, actually proud and boastful about what they were doing.  Having murdered twelve hundred people, they dragged hundreds more back to their own rat holes beneath the Gaza Strip, to months and years of captivity and further horrors.  (This site is dedicated to documenting what happened.)

Almost immediately -- before Israel had begun to retaliate in Gaza, before it had responded in any way -- the streets of the US and Europe erupted with pro-jihadist and radical-leftist marches in solidarity with the murderers.  I discussed the implications of this here.  Indeed, during the three years since, hate crimes against Jews (yes, against Jews, not only Zionists or Israelis) -- up to and including murder -- have exploded across the Western world.  If the original Nazi Holocaust shamed the anti-Semitism that had infested the West for centuries into relative silence for decades, October 7 seemed to have the opposite effect, emboldening the ancient mentality of pogroms and blood libels to re-emerge into the open.

Even after such a monstrous provocation, Israel in its retaliatory campaign against Hamas in Gaza has continued to take the same kind of extreme, almost absurd measures to minimize harm to enemy civilians as it has always done in the past -- measures no other country has ever taken, certainly not under such extreme circumstances.  There has probably never been a major military campaign in a populated area which resulted in so few civilian deaths relative to the number of enemy combatants killed.  The blood libel of "genocide" in Gaza is defamation escalated to the level of the surreal.

I have extensively discussed the implications of the October 7 attack in this post and this post, but one point deserves strong reiteration.  The attack has permanently eliminated the concept of a "Palestinian state" from serious consideration as part of an eventual settlement of the overall conflict.  Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in 2005, dismantling all of the Jewish settlements there -- from that point on, the Strip was an independent Palestinian state in miniature.  The October 7 attack was the result.  There's no longer any room for debate about what a Palestinian state would mean.  We already know.

The attack made clear that if the jihadists had had the power to kill as many Jews as the Nazis did, they would have done so.  Their determination to annihilate the world's only Jewish state is reiterated incessantly.  Jihadism is at least the equal of the Nazi German regime in its innate and intractable murderousness and malignancy -- and as we've seen with September 11 and its other innumerable atrocities in Europe, India, and even within the Middle East, its bloodlust is not limited to Jews, even if they are the people it hates the most.  Its apologists and sympathizers within the West, the lunatics who shriek with rage at Israel's every effort to defend itself against the ravening monsters who openly aspire to finish the job Hitler started, the sniveling yes-butters and on-the-other-handers, are the Nazi collaborators of our time.  In practical terms it matters little where they fall along the spectrum from evil to naïve.

The October 7 attack was a lesson about the harsh reality of what we are up against.  Most Israelis didn't need that lesson.  The rest of us had damn well better learn it.

Image round-up for 6 October 2026

More pictures from my collection -- to see any image at full size, right-click and open the link in a new tab.

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

I wouldn't make it past the tea lady

Art by Antonio Matas

Anker Palace, Budapest, Hungary

The planet Neptune with its moon Triton in the foreground

The Baltic Sea and neighboring areas seen from space

Florence, Italy

Tunisia

Earth's geography two hundred and fifty million years in the future, assuming that continental drift continues as in the past