Link round-up for 22 August 2026

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

Ten weeks to Halloween!

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I wish I would encounter this kind of ATM glitch.

Leave my kid alone!

Yap yap yap..... oops.

This guy does way too much work around the house.

I Am Mental blog brings us some more cringe commercials from decades past.  Let's just say several words seem to have changed their meaning since then.

Sometimes, being rude has consequences.

Here's a review of a Jason Statham movie.  Never mind which one -- the review works for all of them.

Here's an exhibition with some very unusual art on display.

Some great sky photos from Las Vegas here.

An Ohio blogger visits Oregon's wine country.

This is the Cetina Spring in Croatia, also known as the Eye of the Earth (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

There's a lot more to bees than you think.

Here's a good demonstration of how light works.

The mRNA cancer vaccine is looking promising.

It's not aliens.  It's really not.

This explains why there are only two sexes -- think gametes, not chromosomes.

Instagram is still awash in creepazoid content made with "smart" glasses.  These glasses have become a major tool for harassing women.  They're also helping teenage boys get an early start on the creepy pervy stuff.

Use your power as a customer to complain on behalf of workers.  Their bosses may not listen to them, but they'll listen to you.

Here's a guide to self-defense against surveillance.

This is why the ground smells like that after a rain.

If a person avoids making eye contact, it may be autism, not shiftiness.

Here's a librarian's guide to disabling "AI" features in various programs, conveniently in alphabetical order.

One of the influencers OpenAI paid to shill for them is shocked at the anti-"AI" backlash she's getting.  I don't know how this person "influences" things -- she sounds totally clueless.

In fairness, here are some influencers even stupider than that.

A weird cult of cannibalism exists among us.

The publisher of Axios apparently can't read properly.

Nobody's spying on our customers.  Eventually the store won.

Life expectancy in the US has started rising again, but the news isn't as good as one might think.

"We all know, dudes.  If children see it, everyone sees it."

Here's an advance look at the Trump navy.

A Kentucky school handed out "AI"-generated garbage to students, including a ridiculously garbled map of the US.

There's a campaign afoot to turn Halloween into a night of action against surveillance cameras.

YouTube ads just keep getting worse.  But I myself haven't seen a single ad on YouTube for years, because of uBlock Origin, nor has YouTube ever stopped me from watching anything because I was using an ad blocker.

Lazy, "AI"-using fakers are enraged that watermarks may expose them for what they are.

US politics is awash in money from many groups -- singling out AIPAC as uniquely illegitimate is bizarre and disturbing.

An Ohio grand jury refused to indict a man for destroying a surveillance camera.

Many medical students are using chatbots to cheat, meaning they aren't learning the skills they will need, yet may still manage to graduate and become doctors.

Here sits a freedom-loving citizen.

After half a century of skyrocketing inequality, with a tiny oligarchy sucking up more and more of the wealth the workers produce, many ordinary people are now resorting to gimmicky loan schemes to pay basic expenses like rent and utilities.

Former Trumpazoid Rich Logis left the cult and is now helping others to do so.

Democratic party leaders in San Francisco are kowtowing to their billionaire donor masters and coming out against the California billionaire tax initiative.  The story includes a standard politician trick that California voters should be alert for -- claiming that while they oppose this initiative, they would support a national billionaire tax later.  It is always easy to say you support some vague thing that might or might not materialize at some time in the future, while opposing the actual concrete proposal which is on the table now.  Of course, if someone did propose a national billionaire tax in Congress, they would find something wrong with it and oppose it, while claiming they would support some other hypothetical proposal in the future.  And so on.  No plan is perfect.  But this initiative is what's actually available, here and now, this November.

It's way too early to be considering 2028 presidential candidates, but here's a survey of current public preference.  Rubio is leading Vance on the Republican side.  Buttigieg does best against both, while AOC is the only Democrat projected to lose against both.

Democrats are making the fight against data centers part of their effort to flip a Senate seat in Ohio -- and the Republicans say it's working, and will work nationally.  But their "solution" is to try to weaken public opposition to data centers rather than getting on the bandwagon themselves.  They are clueless.  But there are some exceptions -- Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers supports a moratorium.

Opposition to data centers is also becoming a major political issue in Florida.

Democratic candidates who focus their campaigns on fighting Trump are flopping in primaries.  People want legislators who will focus on actual problems like prices and jobs, not on political infighting and posturing.

In California, strip-searches of women prison inmates are now being video-recorded and uploaded to the cloud.

It increasingly looks like the gerrymandering of Texas is going to backfire because of the massive Hispanic swing away from the Republicans.

Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, is capitalizing on public hostility to data centers to put Abbott on the defensive.  Polling up to now has shown her only three or four points behind Abbott, so if she can move the needle with this issue it could prove decisive.

Learn why a long-time sports columnist for the Seattle Times just resigned.  Discussion here, Mediaite assessment here.

The feud between Ossoff and Trump is getting ridiculous.  Ossoff is attracting support because of his blunt and honest straight talk about Trump's corruption and hypocrisy.  But Trump's underlings are responding with childish insults.  "Cuck loser" and "feminine theatre kid" are the language of zit-face teenage incels on Twitter, not a national leader.

"Everything they actually do, they accuse us of."

Marjoreene claims that Trump and his gang are contemplating the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.  (Just before the 2016 election I warned about this exact thing.)  If this is true, one can only hope that the military leadership will talk some sense into them -- or be ready to refuse orders to commit what would almost certainly be mass murder.

The revolt against surveillance cameras is just the beginning.  There will be more and more resistance to the politicians and billionaires using technology to erode freedom.  Already, power-crazed tech-bro CEOs and "AI" defenders are facing the righteous rage and hatred of the people.

ICE is being sued for harassing people who criticize it.

A store in Tennessee that deals solely in Trump merchandise is going out of business due to declining customer interest.

This seems disqualifying to me.  A senator damn well needs to know at least the basics of foreign policy.  Even I could have given a better answer on the Taiwan question.

When people say "globalize the intifada", this is what "intifada" means.

A federal judge has restored some abortion protections in Idaho.

Trump's attitude about conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln is in line with his history of disdain for the military.

Mamdani is resisting Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to his pattern of anti-Jewish actions since taking office.

The US Navy may have to waste billions on a pointless redesign of its aircraft carriers just because Trump thinks it looks better.

When the "AI" bubble collapses in the US, Europe will be affected too.

The Guardian is saturated with defamatory lies and bias against Israel.  Earlier I did recommend it as a news source, but it should not be trusted on anything to do with Israel or Jewish people.

The German government is increasing surveillance of its people, especially of the nativist AfD party which it designates "extremist" -- rather absurd since voters are flocking to it and abandoning the old establishment parties.  Such efforts to thwart and undermine democracy are especially alarming in view of Germany's history.

Not all the migrants who flooded Ceuta have left -- there have been fifteen rapes reported since the invasion and women are leaving the territory.

Moroccan riot police blocked another attempted mob invasion of Ceuta last weekend.  I guess they realized all the stories about looting and rape from the previous incursion weren't doing their country's image any good.

Well, this is one way for Russians to opt out of those long gas lines.

The fuel shortage is leading to food shortages, even in Moscow, as trucks can't get fuel to make deliveries.

Watch the biggest Wildberries hub in Russia burning.  That's a lot of smoke.

Russia is equipping its tanks with a new active defense system against drone attacks, but Ukrainians are still destroying them by overwhelming them with sheer numbers.  These drones cost just a few hundred dollars each, while a tank costs millions.

Even if Israel elects a new prime minister instead of Netanyahu, it won't make the haters any less hateful.

Hamas is using a Gaza hospital as a torture and interrogation center.

Iran is rebuilding its military power much faster than Israel and the US expected it would be able to.

Members of the Basij militia, the Iranian regime's internal army of thug enforcers, are afraid of being publicly identified.  There is also a lot of concern about "social pressure" on Basij members and other regime supporters to switch to the opposition to avoid "social rejection".  That certainly sounds like the regime has almost no support in the general society.

Water-guzzling data centers are being built in arid areas of India, where local people already struggle to get enough water.

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

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a Bill Maher video on Western values, my twentieth blogiversary, and a peculiarity of the English language.

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Does anyone else think Natalie Harp bears a certain resemblance to Ivanka?

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Stop calling the US a "nation of immigrants".  Most Americans are not immigrants.  I was born here -- my parents were immigrants, I am not.  The status of being an immigrant is not inheritable.

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"Is a fetus a human being?" is a question forced-birthers use to distort morality in their favor.  Yes, a human fetus is made of human organic material, just as a fingernail clipping or an extracted tooth is.  It is not a person in any morally meaningful sense, which is what is relevant to the abortion issue.

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When your flagship product is a miserable flop, blame your customers and their employees:

Why do we talk like this?

Is English an unusual language?  It's widely said to be so.  Yet the examples most people tend to cite are not really examples at all, while the true peculiarities of English include things that would never occur to most of its speakers.

One often sees posts claiming to be about ways in which English is strange or difficult, but these are usually just about oddities of spelling, which is a feature of the writing system, not of the language itself.  (When you study linguistics, the first thing they drum into you is that language is that which is spoken and heard -- writing is a separate thing, a representation of language rather than language itself.  Illiterate people have language just as much as literate people do; the majority of the world's languages have no written form at all, and they are real languages just as much as English or French are.  The way I think of it is, a language is like a person, while its written form is like a photograph or drawing of that person.)

It's also a fallacy that English is unusual in including so many words from other languages.  Many languages are like that.  More than half the vocabulary of modern Persian comes from Arabic.  About half the words in Japanese are from Chinese, and today Japanese is assimilating a huge number of new loan words from English.  Latin and Greek are well represented in the scientific and legal terminology of many modern European languages.  During my own brief study of Russian years ago, I couldn't help noticing the number of words that were obviously from German.  Such cases are not rare.

English is unusual in some ways.  Its phonology includes a larger number of distinct sounds than most languages do, and its way of articulating vowels is peculiar (compare the pronunciation of, say, "ago" with any word ending in the same "o" sound in German or French -- where most languages have a pure vowel, the English vowel trails off in a distinct "w" sound).  Some words change their vowel sound depending on whether they are stressed or not -- compare the pronunciation of "for" in the sentences "are you for us or for them?" vs "are you for us or against us?"  Such features make a native-speaker-like pronunciation very difficult for the foreign learner to achieve.  There are also idioms where word order can either change meaning or not depending on context -- "she turned the light on" and "she turned on the light" mean the same thing, but "she turned me on" and "she turned on me" mean very different things.  Such subtleties can easily confuse foreign learners.

But one of the weirdest features of English is a grammatical quirk which is almost unique in the world -- yet is so commonplace in speech that we never think of it.  The question which serves as the title of this post is an example of it.  Do you see it?

The feature I'm referring to is called "do-support".  It's the practice of inserting a meaningless word "do" in certain types of questions and negative statements as an auxiliary verb.  Here are some more examples:

Where do you want to go?
Do you like coffee?
No, I don't like coffee.

English belongs to the Germanic subgroup of the Indo-European language family, but no other Germanic language does this.  A "normal" Germanic language would word the above examples like this:

Where want you to go?
Like you coffee?
No, I like coffee not.

In fact, it's not just that other Germanic languages don't use do-support.  With one small exception which I'll get to in a moment, no other language in the entire world normally uses its word for "do" in this way.  But in English it's a mandatory part of correct usage.  Nobody goes around saying "where want you to go?" or "I like coffee not."  Talking like that would make people stare at you in astonishment.  To speak English correctly, you must use do-support.

Different languages have several ways of turning statements into yes-no questions.  Germanic languages other than English invert the order of subject and verb -- "like you coffee?"  Japanese adds a special word, ka, at the end of the sentence, like a spoken question mark, while Arabic adds a functionally similar word, hal, at the beginning of the sentence.  In Russian you make a statement into a question just by adding rising intonation -- "you like coffee" becomes "you like coffee?"  But "do you like coffee?" is a freak.  No other language forms yes-no questions that way.

(Oddly enough, the verb "to be" is exempt from do-support and forms questions the "normal" Germanic way -- we say "are you sick?", not "do you be sick?"  But all other verbs require do-support.)

In linguistics there are various hypotheses about where do-support came from, but it's John McWhorter who offers what seems to me to be the obviously correct one.  As I mentioned, there is one small exception to the global absence of do-support outside English -- the Celtic languages native to the island of Britain, such as Welsh and Cornish, which are survivals of the type of language spoken all over the island before the invasion of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes around 500 CE.  How those Celtic languages developed do-support is lost in the mists of ancient time, but they do indeed have it -- although it doesn't look exactly like English do-support because Celtic has a very different general word-order pattern than English does.

It used to be believed that the Germanic invaders exterminated the Celts throughout the area which is now England and replaced them with Germanic colonists, but an exhaustive genetic study a few years ago showed that the modern English people are, in fact, mostly descended from the Celts who were there before the invasion.  The invaders imposed their Germanic language and culture on the conquered Celtic people, rather than wiping them out and replacing them.

It cannot be coincidence that the only other languages on Earth that have do-support are native to the same island where the English language developed.  Both the Celts and the Anglo-Saxon invaders were mostly illiterate -- there were no schools to teach the Celts the new language, so they just picked it up on the fly as best they could.  It's hardly surprising that they would make errors in doing so, carrying over grammatical habits from their old language into the new one.  That must be how do-support got into English grammar.  The Celtic natives, speaking their badly-learned Old English, greatly outnumbered the Anglo-Saxon invaders who spoke it correctly, so it was their version of English that formed the basis for much of the language going forward.

So, yes, English is an unusual language in some ways -- and one of its rarest and weirdest peculiarities is something you use dozens of times every day without ever realizing how strange it is.

Blogiversary

As of today, I've been doing this blog for exactly twenty years.  When I started it, I never gave any thought to how long it might last, but I'm sure that if someone had told me it would be this long, I'd have been surprised.  I'm sixty-five now, so the blog has been going for almost a third of my entire life.  There's never been any other single project I stuck with for this long.

I didn't put a huge amount of thought into the name at the time.  "Infidel" refers to my strong anti-religion viewpoint, while 753 refers to 753 BCE, the traditional date of the founding of Rome.  It still fits well enough.  The blog covers a wide range of topics, but Western civilization and opposing religion remain central to my sense of self.

It has evolved over time, of course.  A lot of my early posts were just one or two sentences containing a link to something I found interesting.  I started the weekly link round-ups so I would have someplace to put all the links instead of cluttering up the blog with a separate post for each one.

The blog probably won't last another twenty years, since I myself probably won't.  But I have no plans to stop any time soon.  The blog will probably last as long as I do.

Video of the day -- our country, our rules

Perhaps Maher's best commentary ever.  Yes, there is a distinct Western civilization with a distinct culture and values.  Yes, they are better than the culture and values of other civilizations (some of which hardly even merit that title).  Yes, we need to insist that immigrants assimilate to our culture and not vice-versa.  The melting pot not the salad bowl.

Truths and inspirations for 17 August 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.]

To me, this looks very winnable for Osborn.

I checked and the lawsuit story is true.

"AI" is screwing up things that shouldn't even be possible to screw up.

But this is a reality from which we can easily escape.  I've never had an account on any social media platform, and you don't need them either.  Just close them.  No "but I only use it for.....", just close them.

I've thought of the New Testament as Christian mythology for years.  The Old Testament is various ancient Middle Eastern mythology and folk tales mixed with a small amount of real history toward the end.

How can you see a cow up close and still want to drink or eat anything that comes from that thing?

I'm sure all those activists will get right on this as soon as they figure out how to use it to make Israel look bad.