Link round-up for 21 March 2026

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

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Lookit me, I'm doing a wheelie..... oops.

You can tell where this dog is from.

Apparently this garage is haunted by the ghost of Rube Goldberg.

Asshole pranksters get pwned (and wet).

He wasn't letting the door close, so.....

Actual physics doesn't work like in the cartoons.

A search for missing property ends with a shocking discovery.

What are we growing this year?

Read a disquieting hypothesis about the Cars movies.

We Kant survive this kind of nonsense.

A quick-thinking citizen pwns a couple of robbers.

It's a small but cozy home.

When they say it's windy in Wyoming, they mean it.

If you like odd and creepy stuff, Brno in the Czech Republic may be the place for you.

On the other hand, there's plenty of weirdness in Ohio too.

This is Neptune Beach in Oregon.

Blogger Lady M has some pictures from Wales.

This is the New Forest in southern England, and the witchy town of Burley nearby (though "new" is something of a misnomer now since the New Forest was established by William the Conqueror nearly a thousand years ago).

For centuries Londoners celebrated "Frost Fairs" whenever the Thames river froze over.

He can see clearly for the first time.

See (and hear) US anti-missile defense protecting our embassy complex in Baghdad.  This looks like some kind of laser, but it's actually high-explosive projectiles designed to explode if they miss the target, to avoid damage on the ground from them falling.

Iran has lost the technological edge it once had, as more and more of its best scientific minds have emigrated rather than live under a repressive theocracy.  Israel, too, worries about a brain drain in the long term, and even the UK's cuts to spending on basic science threaten the country's progress.  I've already linked to reports on how growing numbers of US scientists are considering emigration because of funding cuts and Trump's authoritarianism.  The best minds will go where they can find an atmosphere of freedom and where their work is supported.

China's large-scale development of clean energy makes it less vulnerable to disruptions of oil supplies like those caused by the Iran war.  There's a lesson there for the US.  Europe is already acting on it.

Must-read of the week:  Ed Zitron, in his usual entertaining style, explains why there is absolutely zero possibility of "AI" companies ever coming anywhere close to profitability, and he dissects and debunks the various rationalizations and gobbledygook used by the hypesters.  Make no mistake -- this whole thing is a scam, everybody involved is up to their eyeballs in debt that can never be paid, and when the whole house of cards eventually collapses, it's going to take down a good chunk of the economy with it.

"The mice couldn't turn this off.  But you?  You can."

A self-driving Tesla nearly drove off a freeway overpass.  The owner is suing.  Stay away from these things unless you have a death wish.

Accurate translation matters.  Obviously machine "translation" would be hopeless at nuances like this.

What's next for "LGB without the T"?

Jesus was concerned about getting to the airport.

Google search is using "AI" to falsify some headlines in its search results.

This is what these people find amusing?  I could understand it if they were, like, eight, but teens and twenty-somethings?

Waymo still expects San Francisco's first responders to move its robotaxis when they malfunction and get stuck.  It's no wonder the city is now seeing a massive backlash against the maddening machines, with some people even setting them on fire.

Every time I think there's a limit to how arrogant and hypocritical and loathsome politicians can get, one of them proves me wrong.

Here's how debt has lately become a major tool for the billionaire parasite class to extract even more wealth from both workers and consumers.

"Kill all Jews", says graffiti at San Jose State University.  Then there was this.  We have a problem.

The University of Florida did take some serious action against anti-Semitism.

The next "No Kings" rallies will take place on Saturday, March 28.

What does "queer" really mean?

Attention Catholics:  You'd have a lot to lose if the "Christian nationalist" nutcases ever took over this country.  A preacher who has the ear of Pete Hegseth believes that Marian and Eucharistic processions should be banned as forms of "idolatry", and such views are not rare among militant Protestants, some of whom even regard Catholicism as Satanic.  The comments on this article similarly reveal a lot of Catholic intolerance toward Protestant "heretics".  Only fully secular government preserves freedom for everyone.

Oh, and here's an example of a Christian nationalist in politics.  Then there's this guy.  Such people would be seriously dangerous if they attained real power.

You can't improve understanding of a problem by lying about it.

Gamblers betting on the Iran war threatened a journalist, trying to force him to alter a news report so they would win money.

Voters in Ohio strongly support libraries.  There's no reason to think voters elsewhere don't.

The American people are rapidly reaching a bipartisan consensus on trans ideology.  It's time for politicians to fall in line.

The recent Temple Israel terrorist attack in Michigan could have been one of the worst mass killings in US history, if not for the vigilance of the temple's security officers.

Joe Kent is not worthy of admiration or support, no matter what you think about Trump.

83% of Republican likely voters support the military campaign to overthrow the Iranian theocracy.

More than sixty thousand Washington Post subscribers canceled in one week after Bezos fired almost half the paper's journalists.  Just wait until the remaining subscribers find out about his new algorithmic price-gouging plan.

"The point is that if we recognize it or find out about it, we get recourse....."

What is the true meaning of the International Day to Combat Islamophobia?

Democratic politicians still have a lot to learn about appealing to rural and mainstream voters.  Just changing the subject away from their unpopular cultural positions isn't good enough.

However, Democratic voters have more sense, at least in Illinois -- all six of the Israel-bashing fringe House candidates perceived as potential "Squad" members in that state lost their primaries this week and will not be candidates in the general election.

"The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you’re learning to do doesn't matter."

A US district judge has blocked a lot of the damage RFK Jr is doing to the US vaccine recommendation system.  Now let's see whether he obeys the order.

Opposition by residents has stopped a data center in Maryland.

Promoters of Jew-hatred like Mamdani, Tucker Carlson, "the Squad", and Nick Fuentes need to be ostracized and universally condemned.  Neutral attitudes, such as that of JD Vance, are not good enough.

If you live in the UK, don't vote for the Greens, even if they seem like a safe protest vote.

The volume of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia has doubled since November, while Russia's ability to intercept them has declined as its air defense systems are being destroyed.

Ukraine is developing sea-going drones capable of operating in the open ocean, promising to revolutionize naval warfare.

Protesters in one town in Cuba ransacked and vandalized the local Communist party office.

The Iran war has exposed the Arab states of the Gulf as paper tigers.

In Iran, the appointment of a military adviser drew widespread ridicule on social media.

Here's a summary of why historian Victor Davis Hanson believes the Iranian theocracy will fall, and fairly soon.

Israeli air attacks are increasingly targeting the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards -- the enforcers the theocracy would rely on to suppress an uprising.

Crown prince Rezā Pahlavi's latest interview mentions a network of resistance operatives, the "Immortal Guards", working within the theocracy to undermine it.  Pahlavi and his supporters are already planning for what comes after the end of the regime.

China, like Russia, is now providing military aid to the Iranian regime.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a job worth getting done, and a video of our highways in the sky.

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I admit I don't know much about Ro Khanna, but can we at least consider him as a presidential candidate in 2028?  He's strongly supporting Bernie Sanders's billionaire tax bill, he seems solid on anti-Semitism, and he worked closely with Thomas Massie to get the Epstein files exposed -- an important cause in itself, and we need a president who can work with members of the opposite party.  The guy seems like a better option than most.

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Dumbass politicians have no clue how technology works -- and they don't even know that they don't know:

Video of the day -- highways in the sky

There is a great beauty in visions like this.  Think of the skill and precision it takes to keep all of this traffic flowing safely and in proper order, day after day, year after year.  An achievement our ancestors as recently as a couple of centuries ago could scarcely have imagined.  Use fullscreen (before playing, click arrowhead at lower right, then click the fullscreen icon).

A job worth getting done

As readers have probably gathered from my posts, recent weeks have been an intense time for me.  The Middle East is what I know best, and especially how the Iranian people have suffered (for two generations now) under that ghastly regime, how it has suffocated the potential of that nation.  Now at last there is some real hope.  Whatever damage the military campaign is causing is nothing compared to the misery and suffering that would result from the theocracy staying in power.  And the military campaign will eventually end, one way or another, whereas allowing the theocracy to remain in power would just mean more and more murder and torture and rape and horror and hopelessness for decades or generations more, with no end in sight.

That's the only thing that matters -- whether the Iranians can get rid of this regime or not.  I don't care at all about the US domestic political aspects of this and have hardly bothered even reading about them.  That's why I've mostly been relying on news sources based in the Middle East itself, which focus on the situation on the ground over there instead of blathering on about what Trump says or what people are saying about him.

Trump is certainly not the person whom I would have chosen to supervise the US part of the campaign, but our military below the Hegseth level is still performing superbly as it has traditionally done.  And -- fortunately, from a political standpoint -- it still seems to be Israel that is acting as the senior partner.  I know a lot of people don't like Netanyahu (I'm not a fan, really), but he does have a track record of getting things done, and is certainly far more competent than Trump at choosing the right means to accomplish a goal and sticking with his plans until they reach fruition.  And he's been talking for years about the huge gulf between the Iranian people and the regime, and how Iran is a potential ally to Israel and the West once the theocracy is gone.  The Israelis understand Iran.  They can't afford not to.

Israel cannot, and the US will not, actually conquer and occupy a country two and a half times the size of Texas with a population of over ninety million.  The goal is to do so much damage to the apparatus of repression that the Iranian people themselves can overthrow the theocracy.  They showed in January that they were willing to fight for freedom.  The Israeli-US role is to create the conditions for them to succeed.

There are signs that the theocracy is running scared.  Since the campaign began, it has carried out a new wave of mass arrests and escalated its threats against the people.  Here is the abuse meted out to two nurses whose only crime was to have treated wounded protesters, as part of their regular jobs at a hospital, during the regime's mass murder of protesters in January.  The regime's thugs had specifically ordered hospital staff not to help wounded people.  It has always been well known that rape and torture of detainees is part of the theocracy's standard treatment of dissidents.  This is part of what will just go on and on with no end in sight, if the regime is not overthrown.

But the campaign is having its effects.  In addition to the growing disruption of the regime's communications which I linked earlier, the banking system is increasingly unable to function.  Israeli drones are destroying the checkpoints which the Basij (regime militia) uses to control the cities.  Iranians are still managing to communicate with each other and the outside world, to a limited extent, despite the regime's efforts to prevent it.  According to Israeli intelligence, the theocracy is only just beginning to realize how badly its capabilities have been damaged -- and the military campaign will continue for at least several more weeks.

"Top security official" Ali Lārijāni is calling upon other Islamic states, which the theocracy has been in conflict with for years, to rally to its side in the name of Islamic unity.  Good luck with that.  The Arab states of the Gulf are at the forefront of pressing the US not to falter until the threat posed by the theocracy is neutralized.

[Update:  One hour after I posted this, it came out that Israel has killed the head of the Basij and possibly also Lārijāni, who was believed to be the actual new head of the regime since the death of Khāmenei.  Things are moving fast.]

Bizarrely, the theocracy is threatening to attack Ukraine on the grounds that it is providing drone technology to help defend countries Iran is firing missiles at.  I've seen no sign that it is actually attacking Ukraine or can spare the weapons to do so.

Perhaps even more bizarrely, there's a report that US intelligence has some evidence that Mojtabā Khāmenei, the new supreme leader, is gay.  This would be a startling case of hypocrisy for a regime which not only imposes, but actually carries out, the death penalty for homosexuality.

We will soon be hearing -- have already been hearing -- from the most twisted and ugly and morally depraved elements within the US.  The types who view this conflict as just one more opportunity for petty domestic political point-scoring.  The ones who would happily leave the theocracy in power in Iran, at a staggering cost in human suffering, if they fear its fall might be perceived as a "win" for Trump.  The vile Israel-haters of the far left and far right have already oozed forth with their Der Stürmer conspiratardia about evil Jewish manipulation of the US.  Don't listen to them.  This is a job worth getting done.

Truths and inspirations for 16 March 2026

If images are hard to see or read, click for full size.

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

For full details on his proposal, click here.  I posted about it here.

Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, live in distinct groups, and each group has a sharply-delineated territory.  All groups in an area know exactly where the borders are.  Packs of adult males regularly patrol the borders of their group's territory, and any "foreign" male chimpanzee found on their side of the line is likely to be ripped to pieces.  Borders exist in nature.

Found this on a right-wing blog.  The level of ignorance here is staggering.  The Iranian theocracy is Shiite.  Dā'ish (ISIS) was a fanatical Sunni extremist movement which mass-slaughtered Shiites whenever it could catch them, and publicly bragged about doing so.  There is probably no entity on Earth less likely to take orders from the Iranian theocracy than Dā'ish.

"International law" is a contradiction in terms and a self-evident absurdity.

About "Marsha P Johnson" of Stonewall fame.