Link round-up for 17 October 2026

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

Two weeks to Halloween!

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He sees..... a rival!

Cats wreak havoc.

Behold the works of teh stoopid.

This is not the correct way to ride an escalator.

A simple fight can become a work of art.

What a stupid place to put a swing.

What a stupid place to park a bicycle.

He tried to sneak under the barrier.

Don't eat it if you're not sure what it is.

She misread the sign.

Why did the salmon cross the road?

I have seen the future, and it looks silly (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

This baby armadillo wants his apple.

Was it just a nightmare?

Dogs get ready for Halloween.

Perceptive people prefer Polish pottery pumpkins.

New Witch blog is fully in tune with the season.

Few can match Scary Mary's house for elaborate Halloween displays.

The Manitou Springs CO Skeleton Craze is getting started again.  More pictures here.

Flashy colors aren't so desirable when it comes to clothes.  Also, a new and better word for "goose".

Some nice sunset photos here.

Morning Coffee blog has some entertaining memes.

If we ever end up in some nightmare dystopia where people get euthanized when they're too old to be useful any more, this is how I want to go out.

Cas d'intérêt blog is back with an entertaining story of a stressful arrival in Paris.

A century ago, these people made a motor home out of a single log (found via SickoRicko).

Find out what ants and onions have in common.

Here's video of the planet Pluto from the New Horizons probe.  Before that probe, we knew Pluto only as an indistinct reddish dot.

Spinal-cord implants made from the patient's own tissue show promise in restoring movement in paralyzed people.

This is how vaccines work (just one minute long, funny, and it's accurate).

Shigella, a bacterium which causes severe diarrhea, is spreading and becoming antibiotic resistant.  However, I would dispute the description "sexually transmitted" since no remotely sane person considers "contact between the mouth and the anus" (barf) to be anything to do with sex.

Libraries are holding workshops on how to get rid of "AI" from your devices, and demand is enthusiastic.

Here is what those Flock cameras are actually doing.

There will be No Kings rallies nationwide today, with an emphasis on getting out the vote.

Never trust "AI" for information -- on this question, it got every single detail wrong.

The FDA is considering a rule change that would increase the amounts of toxic chemicals allowed in food.

Walmart has spent billions to replace warehouse workers with robots, but the robots can't get the job done.  All throughout the economy, billionaires and their corporations are single-mindedly determined to destroy as many jobs as possible, replacing humans with tech gimmicks that can't really do what the humans did.

Using "AI" to "teach" small children teaches them wrong.

You can tell dogs are stupid by how easily Pavlov conditioned them.

A lot of Mac users are purging all the "AI" from their computers, using the program I linked to last week.  Meanwhile, Microslop is unveiling upcoming changes to Windows 11 -- that article is full of acronyms and gobbledygook, but it sounds like it will be even more "AI"-infested than it already is.

Two young men in Germany have been arrested for using a robot to indirectly grope women.  Video at the link shows exactly what they were doing.

"This one boy is causing stress for the entire team, coaches, and administration.  What a narcissist."

Flock is cutting jobs as the backlash against surveillance cameras grows.

"AI" users dehumanize themselves.

Learn about Navi Pillay, winner of the Nobel peace Prize.

There's one demographic group that loves "AI".

Here's a look at the fight for abortion rights around the country.

Reminder:  The US Civil War was about the South's desire to preserve slavery, and nothing else -- the Confederate states' own declarations of secession make it clear.

The people of Hazle Township PA are mobilizing to stop an Amazon data center even though Amazon is offering $10,000 to every resident if it's built.  They realize the payment wouldn't cover the loss to property values once the noisy, polluting data center is operating in their midst.  Note also that governor Josh Shapiro has issued an executive order to "fast track" data centers.  You cannot trust these fucking politicians, any of them -- the people themselves have to take the lead.

Americans all across the political spectrum support populist policies most of which are far removed from what the out-of-touch political parties focus on.

Bill Hill seems a bit like an Alaskan version of Dan Osborn -- a working fisherman running for the state's sole House seat as an independent, on an anti-billionaire platform.  He's trailing the Republican incumbent in the polls, but they're worried enough to send both Vance and Trump to Alaska to campaign.

The Character.AI bankruptcy is a microcosm of where the whole "AI" industry is headed -- customers simply won't pay for "AI" at the prices needed to cover the costs of providing it.

Jewish voters in New York have shifted strongly toward the Republicans since Mamdani was elected.

Trump's $90 payments to people on Medicare don't seem to be impressing voters.

Republicans' perceived support for data centers is alienating the rural voters they depend on.

A Tesla factory in a residential area in California is applying to massively increase the amount of toxic chemical pollution that it discharges (I used to live near that area and the city is called "Fremont" -- the article misspells it).

Republicans are now facing a backlash from workers who lost their jobs due to Trump's stupid tariffs.

One of the last chestnut tree groves in the US could be destroyed to make way for a data center.  That data center will be decaying junk in a year or two, after the "AI" bubble collapses, but the grove will be lost forever.

Jews aren't the only demographic group in Michigan who are suspicious of El-Sayed.

The ten richest men in the world (all of them Americans) got three hundred billion dollars richer in just the month of September.

Like Abbott in Texas, Oregon's governor Kotek -- formerly an advocate for data centers -- has suddenly turned against them as she realizes she could actually lose re-election over this.  And as with Texas, I hope voters won't be fooled.  This is just a pause in issuing permits until July, so Kotek could easily allow construction of the damn things to resume once the election is safely past.

It sounds like Troy Jackson wiped the floor with Susan Collins in their debate this week.

This seems like a textbook case of a citizen using a gun in self-defense against violent crime.

Hold everybody to the same standard.

Don't be afraid to hold political parties accountable for the vile positions they take.

The UK's prime minister has ruled out any coalition with the Green party after its "Zionism is racism" declaration.

The British commander who led the liberation of the Falkland Islands after the Argentine invasion of 1982 speaks out about another invasion.

In France, you can get a prison sentence for telling the truth.

Poland and Slovakia suffer far less than western Europe from street violence and sex crimes -- and the reason isn't difficult to see.

Here's an oil terminal at Rostov after a Ukrainian attack last weekend.

A Ukrainian robot tricked two Russian units into shooting at each other for half a day.

Russia's ultra-centralized digital economy makes it vulnerable to Ukraine's data center attacks.  Ukraine is more decentralized and thus more robust.

Drone attacks have massively disrupted air travel in Russia -- and the Ukrainians are only getting started.

NATO estimates that Russia suffered 50,000 casualties in Ukraine last month, including 28,000 killed.  For comparison, 28,000 is half the total number of deaths suffered by US forces in the entire Vietnam war.

One of the Putin regime's biggest fears is a pro-Western Iranian government.

This is claimed to be Iranian surveillance video of an oil tanker hitting an Iranian mine in the Strait of Hormuz.  The strait is not "open" or safe.

The Iranian regime is trying to rally support by glorifying Iran's pre-Islamic history, which it had previously disparaged.  This reminds me of how Stalin, in World War II, rallied the Russian people by emphasizing that the fight was for the Russian nation and homeland rather than for communism.  National and ethnic identity is far more important to most people than ideology.

The US is apparently considering renewed military attacks on Iran's energy infrastructure and nuclear sites (that is, not aimed at regime change), potentially including the use of MOABs, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal.  This seems like exactly the kind of action that would result in the retaliatory destruction of the Saudi oil industry, sending gasoline and diesel prices sky-high forever.  At this point almost anything the US does will be counterproductive as long as the Iranian regime remains in power.

I definitely don't give a shit about these people.

Houthi missiles have struck the headquarters of Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company.

Anti-immigrant protests in South Africa are turning violent, with foreign-owned cars and shops being attacked.  Again, since the woketards assure us that anti-immigration sentiment is always rooted in racism, I wonder how that works here, where both the protesters and the immigrants are black.

More links at Red State Blues, Legal Mama Reviews, and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, the wars in Europe and the Middle East, and a warning about the election.

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The election -- a warning from an independent

As the election approaches, it's being greeted by an exuberant festival of unhatched-chicken-counting among Democrats.  Posts breathlessly celebrate polls showing likely wins in what are usually red districts or states.  There are, of course, solid reasons for them to be hopeful.  The party not holding the presidency normally gains House seats in midterms, and the Republicans are starting from a tiny majority.  With Trump massively unpopular, a failed war in the Middle East, voters infuriated about food and fuel prices, and the sour aftertaste (for those paying attention) of ICE's abuses and Trump's corruption, it's reasonable to expect a larger-than-typical gain in seats for Democrats.  Even the Senate is not immune to these influences, especially with local factors such as an unusually-bad Republican Senate candidate in Texas.

Yet I'm reminded of the period 2022-2024, after the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe and put abortion rights at risk nationwide.  For two years, we got story after story about Democrats doing startlingly well in special elections.  The national mood seemed to be turning strongly against Republicans.  This led many bloggers, including me, to anticipate a blue wave in 2024.  We all remember what actually happened.  It wasn't just Harris -- Democrats across-the-board underperformed expectations, which pretty much debunks the popular (among Democrats) claims that racism and sexism explain the result.  My own tentative conclusion is that the Democrats were doomed by voters' demographic concerns which come to the fore in a national election but not in local ones.  But whatever the reason, the outcome was much different from what the left blogosphere expected.

This time, it's mostly polls that are boosting the case for a blue wave.  Yet these days, changes in technology and in people's phone habits are making accurate polling ever more difficult.  Notably, polls during the primaries showed El-Sayed in Michigan and Hong in Wisconsin with huge leads, while the actual result in both cases was very close -- suggesting that such obsessive Israel-bashers do much less well in reality than in polls.  And overall the polling this year is looking pretty odd.  Here is yesterday's map of Senate race polling from Electoral-Vote:

According to this, Democratic candidates are doing better in Texas and Alaska than in Maine and Minnesota.  Republicans are barely ahead in Mississippi and Louisiana.  Kansas, which hasn't elected a Democratic senator since 1932, is leaning slightly Democratic.  All this while most other red states remain as solidly red as usual.  This may represent reality -- for example, the Democrats have unusually strong candidates in Texas and Alaska while the Texas Republican is unusually weak -- but I wouldn't count on it too strongly.

I think I can view the situation more objectively than the political bloggers can because, in a couple of senses, I don't have much of a dog in the partisan fight.  I've never been as fixated on politics as they are, and with the direction much of the left has taken over the last few years, I can no longer really identify with it.  I support whatever candidate or ballot initiative best fits my own position, regardless of party.  For this election, I stand by the priorities I listed last month.  Here in Oregon, I'll be voting for the Democrat for Congress and probably for the Republican for governor.  If the various elections here and across the country don't come out the way I hope, well, politics is far from being the most prominent thing in my life, and it will be a disappointment but not a huge one.  But if 2026 turns out to be another 2024, those who have fully invested themselves in the political fight will risk feeling shocked and devastated.  Again.

Based on historical precedent, the Democrats will almost certainly win the House majority.  Based on current political conditions, it's definitely possible that they'll win it by a large margin, and get the Senate majority too.  But in the interest of their own sanity, I'd strongly advise political bloggers to curb their expectations.  A pleasant surprise on election night is a lot more bearable than an unpleasant one.

The wars are continuing to heat up

The wars in Europe and the Middle East have always been somewhat parallel, with the democratic nations of Israel and Ukraine, both supported (somewhat shakily) by the West, facing off against the murderous ideologies of jihadism and Russian imperialism respectively, which seek to destroy them.  The Iranian and Russian regimes have also given each other direct military aid of various kinds.  Now there is another link -- the disruption of global energy markets and Trump's bumbling and corrupt efforts to deal with the issue, if only because of its effect on the upcoming US elections.

Trump's behavior has lately become surreal.  He demanded that Ukraine stop attacking Russia's oil refineries; Ukraine ignored this and continued the attacks.  Trump's cutbacks in US aid to Ukraine, largely replaced by European aid, have left him with no leverage over that country.  He announced a deal to import diesel from Russia, supposedly to ease prices here, although the amounts he cited would be too small compared with US diesel consumption to make much difference, and in any case Russia is so short of fuel (Ukraine said a week ago that it has knocked out half of Russia's refining capacity) that it now has to import it, so it cannot spare much to export to the US.  Then he declared an "energy ceasefire" between Russia and Ukraine, a ceasefire which both countries quickly confirmed did not exist -- it may have been an inept pressure tactic, or simply a hallucination of Trump's which he confused with reality due to his obvious dementia.

All this provoked a furious bipartisan backlash from the Senate, since Trump was cravenly trying to backstab Ukraine in the hope of bringing fuel prices down and thus mitigating the predicted blue wave in the election here.  He will likely keep announcing various random nonsense about Ukraine and Russia, but none of it will have any impact on real events in those countries.

In any case, the recent problems with fuel prices owe much more to the Middle East war than to the European one.  Direct fighting between the Israel-US alliance and Iran has mostly stopped for now, but oil exports are still threatened and obstructed, and the war continues in the form of a conflict between the Houthi rebels in Yemen (aided and influenced, though not really controlled, by the Iranian regime) and Saudi Arabia (aided and influenced, though not really controlled, by the US).  Please see my earlier post for background on the Houthi/Saudi conflict, the details of which I assume are not familiar to most Americans.  Over the last few days this fighting has escalated with two Houthi missile attacks on the international airport at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital city, each of which killed several people.  Here is some video footage of yesterday's attack:

Imagine if something like that were happening at the most important international airport in the US -- we would know we were in a real war.  The Saudi regime is sure to retaliate against the Houthis, but it's unclear how effectively it can do so without direct US help.  Trump has shown reluctance to get involved in the Houthi/Saudi war, perhaps having learned from the earlier Iran fighting that plunging into complex Middle Eastern conflicts he doesn't understand tends to bring bad results.  The Houthis have shown that they can hit important targets in Saudi Arabia at will and do not fear consequences for doing so -- and we already know the same is true of Iran.  This strikes me as a warning to Trump:  the whole Saudi oil industry is a sitting duck, and if that goes up in flames, then gasoline and diesel prices will shoot into the stratosphere and not come down again.  Ever.

There are no good guys here.  The Houthis are barbaric religious fanatics who engage in the usual Islamic-extremist abuses of women in the territory they control, and sentence people to death or prison for homosexuality.  The Saudi regime, of course, does the same, despite the veneer of fake modernity made possible by oil wealth.  Both the Houthis and the Saudis are vicious enemies of human rights and democracy.  The best outcome for the people of Arabia would be if both gangs destroyed each other.

Coping with the simultaneous European and Middle Eastern wars would pose a major challenge to even the most skilled American leadership, never mind to a bumbling narcissistic ignoramus who kowtows to the Russian gangster-regime and employs real-estate grifters to handle negotiations instead of real diplomats.  But there is a deeper lesson here -- climate change is not the only reason why we need to shift from fossil fuels to clean energy as fast as possible.  The reliability of fossil fuel supplies will always be heavily impacted by events in the Middle East, and the Middle East is doomed to a long period of turbulence as it works through the slow and messy transition from religious wars and autocratic rule to democracy that the West passed through generations ago.  The standard of living in Nebraska should not be held hostage to the squabbles of the murderous religious tyrants in Tehran and Riyadh.  Our technology is gradually solving this problem -- but we need to work faster.

Truths and inspirations for 12 October 2026

If an image is hard to see or read, right-click and open the link in a new tab for the full-size version.

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

Ten options offered -- just one of them got 86% of the votes.

Mandate-era "Palestinian" leader Haj Amin al-Husseini with his friend and mentor.