Link round-up for 28 March 2026

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

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Mattresses have declared war on humanity.

These people have their own takes on things.

Here's a very ordinary car race.

Yes, there was life before the internet.

He's got places to go, but he just doesn't want to get out of bed.

This is interior decorating that both humans and cats will like.

This is St Paul's Cathedral in London.  It's well worth opening the photo to view it at full size.

All four of the bases of DNA have been found in an asteroid, confirming that the basic building blocks of life form naturally even in what seem like very unfavorable conditions.

Repeated cloning of an animal eventually leads to lethal genetic abnormalities.

Here's how Israel and the US are waging a new kind of war in Iran.

Direct messaging on Instagram is no longer secure (if it ever really was).

Giving false answers is inherent in the very nature of "AI".  This can never change, and in fact the problem is getting worse, not better, in successive models.

Do you belong to a self-isolating cult?  Not all cults are religious!  From experience I'd say political activists are like this way more than they realize.

Some countries and institutions try to block VPNs.  Advice about work-arounds here and here.  I don't use a VPN (yet), so I haven't tried any of these.

Here's a reason why riding in a Waymo isn't safe.  What a political jackass can do, a mugger or a rapist could also do.

An E coli outbreak linked to unpasteurized cheese and milk has sickened nine people (that we know of), three of whom had to be hospitalized.

More than two-thirds of women who get involved in BDSM or kink are subjected to violent or degrading acts they didn't consent to.  And that's just those who were willing to say so in a survey.  As one commenter observes, "'safe sane and consensual' my ass".  If your guy starts trying to get you into that shit, dump him.  Such people are disturbed freaks and cannot be trusted.

Excuse-makers for such behavior have been known to claim that it's therapeutic for the victim.  This is dangerous nonsense, and it's often just a pretext for sadism.

If "AI"-generated fake porn or nudes of you have been posted on the internet, this site claims it can get them taken down, at least in many places.

Today is the day of the No Kings rallies.  If you can't attend but want to support, there are other options.

After a strong user backlash, Microslop is backing off a little from saturating Windows 11 with unwanted "AI".  But only a little.

One airline actually has plans to make flying more comfortable.

Testosterone can have terrible effects on women -- there are links to documentation at the end of the post.

NPR has been interviewing Iranians leaving Iran.  Most of them support the Israeli-US military campaign to remove the theocracy.

Who are the real activists?

Must-read of the week:  Bridget Phetasy pays tribute to the sane women.

Here's an entertaining video of the "Canadian Resistance Army" (found via Anvilcloud).

Check out the work of artist "Redkatherine" (actually a Russian, real name not publicly known) -- and the disturbing story of her disappearance.

This weird habit from decades ago is less and less common today.

"We're not even seen as human here."

A former DHS official finds the anti-ICE resistance's tactics to be disturbingly effective.  This is a Fox News report, which makes the acknowledgement all the more striking.

In a time of rising anti-Semitism, there's a case to be made that Jews should have guns.

Ruy Teixeira is closing down his blog The Liberal Patriot.  His reasons will make uncomfortable reading for anyone who cares about the future of the Democratic party beyond 2026.

Here's a look at why politicians tend to adopt radical positions that most voters don't want (the article specifies Democrats, but this actually applies to politicians of either party).

In Colorado, an initiative to keep boys off of girls' sports teams in schools has qualified and will appear on the November ballot.

The city council of a suburb in Oklahoma approved a data center nearby.  Now voters are trying to get an initiative on the ballot to recall all of them, plus the mayor for good measure.

The great majority of the data centers the "AI" industry claims to be building are not, in fact, being built and probably never will be.  See also the last part of the post, starting with the headline "The end of software engineering", where he explains how "AI" is destroying the tech industry and flooding the country with junk software.

The trans fad seems to be winding down, at least as far as minors are concerned.

Here are the popularity scores of a couple dozen major political figures.  It looks like Beshear or Shapiro are the Democrats' best options for a presidential candidate -- not Newsom or Harris.

Trump paid a French energy company a billion dollars to cancel two wind farm projects off the US east coast.  The very next day, the US's biggest offshore wind farm went online.

The clean energy industry is fighting back against Republican efforts to undermine it.

There are things worse than war.

In the end, he revealed his true self.

What was the role of Christianity in Nazi ideology?

Now that Goldman Sachs has confirmed that "AI" is contributing nothing to US economic growth at all, the tech companies..... are planning to dump even more hundreds of billions of dollars down the same rat hole.

Markwayne Mullin's effusive apologies during confirmation were an acknowledgement of how badly ICE's horrifically abusive and unconstitutional tactics have alienated mainstream Americans.

Meet a modern-day slave-holder.

The much-touted claims of a religious revival in the UK are based on a survey which was full of erroneous data.  In reality, church attendance there is still declining.

While some US aid to Ukraine is being redirected to the Iran war, the UK has committed an immediate £100 million to Ukrainian air defense.  The UK regularly gives Ukraine £3 billion in military aid per year.

Ukraine has utterly routed an attempted major Russian offensive.

See video of the Ukrainian attack on the Primorsk oil terminal near St Petersburg.  Here's the damage as seen from space.

The Putin regime plans to colonize occupied Ukrainian territory with Russians.  But if this is going to take until 2045, it's unlikely that Russian rule there will last long enough to implement it.

UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba warns the US not to relent on the military campaign against the Iranian theocracy until the threat is truly neutralized.  The worst possible outcome would be one in which the theocracy remains in power.

The US media are following their usual script on the Iran war, but the war itself isn't.  It's actually going much better than the media would have us believe.

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

My posts this week:  a video on extreme shepherding, an image round-up, a few news and commentary updates, and a discussion on poisonous politics.

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I know these round-ups have been getting shorter lately.  I've been so fixated on the news from Iran that a lot of my other internetting has fallen by the wayside.

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The Iran war is a potential opportunity to get the more rational conservatives on board with clean energy.  The less dependent the US is on fossil fuels, the less dependent it is on the Middle East.  Surely any self-declared patriot would prefer that.

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Be very cautious in dealing with ideological people, even if you think you know them fairly well.  If you express a belief (or cite a fact) that sets them off -- and it can be surprisingly difficult to anticipate exactly what might do that -- all the normal standards of behavior go out the window and they will feel free to treat you unethically and unfairly.  It happened to me this week, with one of the people involved being someone I had thought I could trust.  Even my demands for an explanation of why they were behaving unethically were treated as an intolerable offense.  That's all I'm going to say about this incident.  But be wary around that kind of person.  Especially if it's online, you don't really know people as well as you think you do.

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Poisonous politics

The blog Dead Wild Roses, written by a Canadian blogger calling herself The Arbourist, regularly posts worthwhile insights into politics and modern social issues.  One recent post in particular, "Friend-enemy politics is the operating system of political decay", perfectly assesses the toxic polarization bedeviling our politics today.  As the opening has it:

One of the most destructive temptations in politics is the urge to turn disagreement into moralized tribal war..... Friends and enemies.  Allies and traitors.  The pure and the contaminated.  Once that frame takes hold, politics stops being about order, restraint, and judgment.  It becomes a loyalty machine.

One sees this again and again in the political blogosphere.  Those with different views are not merely mistaken but depraved, vile creatures to whom no courtesy or fairness is due.  Arguments for a position contrary to one's own are not opportunities to test the validity of one's own beliefs and spot possible errors -- they're a source of, yes, contamination, to be avoided lest they sully one's ideological purity.

As The Arbourist points out, this type of politics can (and does) manifest itself in any ideological camp:

The vocabulary changes.  The mechanism does not.  A public enemy is named, and then a moral test is imposed:  how fully will you align against him?

Typically the true hard-core ideologist's hatred is not only for the opposing camp -- it's focused equally (or even more) against those in his own camp who don't hate the opposing camp enough.

You either join the mobilization or you are suspected of serving the enemy's cause.  Hesitation becomes complicity.  Refusal becomes betrayal.  Moderation becomes guilt.  That is how political movements become purge machines.

The purity/purge mentality leads to ludicrous exercises in making the tent smaller.  Compromises which are necessary to win actual elections in the real world are denounced as heresy and betrayal in the ideological echo chamber.  Voters whose opinions, or even priorities, differ from those of the zealot fringe are denounced as fools or enemies -- never mind that the political party favored by the zealots themselves may need their votes.  And of course any suggestion that the political party should cater to the voters and reflect their wishes -- an integral part of how representative democracy is supposed to work -- becomes anathema when the party is no longer viewed as a mechanism for expressing the voters' will but rather as a temple charged with safeguarding and promulgating immutable holy writ.

Of course, genuine evil does exist in politics.  Nazis qualify -- real ones, not in the fatuous modern "everything I don't like is Hitler" sense in which, for example, anyone who votes Republican is denounced as a Nazi.  I have asserted here, and I stand by it, that opposing the current military campaign to overthrow the Iranian theocracy is evil, given the immense evil of that regime's ideology and actions, and the bravery with which the Iranian people have repeatedly rebelled against it.  But I've also made it clear that this issue is a very unusual case in that way.  And even with this one, I know well that most Americans know very little about Iran and are probably not consciously aware of the depth of the evil they are working to preserve by taking such a stance.

The zealot fringe offers no such courtesy or nuance.  Several of my posts about Iran have gotten comments consisting purely of insults -- not arguments or questions, but just name-calling and denunciation, because I'm not marching in lockstep with what the ideological left quickly and mindlessly established as its party line on this issue.  Readers don't see those comments because of the comment moderation.  If right-wing trolls don't do the same here, it's because most of them don't know I exist -- and those that do, don't perceive me as "one of theirs" who keeps straying off of the plantation.  When I've occasionally gotten drawn into arguments in the comment threads on right-wing zealot blogs, the fervor and crackpottery I've run into there has been, if anything, even worse.

I'm now actively trying to neutralize any perception that my blog is a political one, partly because I'm genuinely fed up with the subject, but also because I'm tired of being perceived as a leftist who keeps venturing into heresy and needs to be scolded back into line.  I agree with the left on far more issues than with the right, but in our current hyper-polarized and ideological-purist climate, being identified with either political "side" is not only miserable and exhausting but inconsistent with my intellectual integrity.  It's two fringe groups of paranoid fanatics screaming "fascist!" and "communist!" at each other over the heads of the increasingly exasperated and turned-off mainstream majority.  My only possible place is with that majority.  I do mean what my Blogspot profile says, "I speak only for myself and not for any ideology, movement, or party."

As The Arbourist concludes, "A civilized society cannot survive on those terms."  I strongly recommend you read her whole post.

A few news and commentary updates

The media have been in something of a tizzy over Trump's recent bizarre claim that he's negotiating with some important figure in the Iranian theocracy, while the theocracy itself flat-out denies that any such talks are happening.  The obvious explanation is that this claim gives Trump a pretext to back off from his idiotic threat to destroy Iran's energy infrastructure, but the main reason is probably something more important and more subtle -- sowing mutual suspicion and mistrust among leaders of the regime.  And it seems to be working, even though some in Iran have apparently figured out the scheme.

While Trump has been all over the place about the goals of the war, even absurdly claiming that "regime change" has already happened, Israel remains focused, continuing to systematically destroy facilities of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, the theocracy's main instruments for repressing uprisings.  Israel assesses that it will only be a few more weeks before the system is degraded enough for a new rebellion to succeed.  The collapse of tyranny is a process, not an instantaneous event, and in Iran that process is already underway.

Westerners, too, need to stay focused.  Whether you like or dislike Trump or Netanyahu -- even if it's with good reason -- that doesn't make the Iranian people any less deserving of liberation, and recent events have shown that that liberation is not achievable without some external force intervening to wreck the apparatus of repression.  Those in the West who oppose the current military campaign to do so are de facto collaborating with the continued rule of a monstrous evil over tens of millions of people.  Their motives are wholly irrelevant.  The same applies to the media, whose preferred spin is rooted mostly in petty domestic political considerations.  Similarly, it doesn't really matter what motivated Trump or Netanyahu to launch the campaign.  Only the eventual actual results on the ground are important.

As the old Balkan saying has it:  The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Image round-up for 24 March 2026

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

[For the link round-up, click here.  For the "extreme shepherding" video, click here.]

"We're we!  Here fuck!  We're shit!  Queer up!"

Gdańsk (formerly Danzig), Poland

Milan, Italy

What it would look like if Neptune were as close to Earth as the Moon is -- of course in this scenario Earth would be orbiting Neptune, not vice versa

This moth is actually called an owl moth due to its remarkable mimicry

A sea anema ameno anmena abomination