Link round-up for 2 May 2026

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

A note:  Some of my links go to posts on my Infidel753 Tumblr blog.  The posts on that blog are not written by me -- they are "reblogged" from other Tumblr users (Tumblr is designed to facilitate doing this).  The reason I do this is that many Tumblr blogs cannot be viewed by people without Tumblr accounts, or are formatted in a way that blocks reading access after a short time.  Reblogging posts from those blogs onto my own Tumblr blog is the only way to make them properly visible to non-Tumblr people who reach them from these link round-ups.  I'm not trying to claim credit for other people's writing.

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Have some fun at the gym.

Dogs do things their own way.

If you like firing guns, it helps to know some basic physics.

She knows the best way to open a bottle of wine.

The Bible is more modern than you think.

Well, the trick worked OK.

Hold my beer.

Check out this extremely irritating road in China.

Here is some information you could actually do without.

They are watching you.

Check out the HR Giger bar in Gruyères, Switzerland, designed by the artist himself (link from commenter NickM).

A formerly peaceful community erupts into civil war.

Finland stores energy cheaply with sand batteries.

Damming off the Bering Strait could help reduce damage to the climate.  It's hard to imagine this actually being done, though.  A fifty-mile-long dam would be a gigantic project, and this would require US-Russian cooperation.

Phone-free parties are part of a growing youth effort to escape the chronically-online life.

This is how to argue properly instead of talking past each other.  Almost nobody does this because nobody listens and responds, they just regurgitate their own talking points regardless.

Amazon is ending support for older Kindle devices.  This article claims to explain how you can keep using them.

If you get an uncanny or haunted feeling in certain places, it may be more than just your imagination.

Reddit is subjecting some readers to an uncloseable pop-up ad that more or less forces them to download an app.  Here's how to get rid of it.

Using "AI" will make you more vulnerable to dementia later in life.

Even a mere two-week break can measurably reverse the mental damage done by using social media.

Trump, sinking in the polls, is trying to shore up support from the loopier elements of his base by attacking Americans' legal right to contraception.

Massachusetts is considering some very dangerous legislation.

There are fourteen cases of police officers allegedly accessing Flock cameras to stalk people.

Despite Amazon, the number of independent bookstores in the US has actually grown over the last six years.

This woman stopped doing her job and waited to see if anyone would notice.  When she resigned a year later, no one had.

An elephant of the people!  Revolutionary, salt-of-the-earth, working-class elephants in Africa trampled a millionaire trophy hunter to death.

Seems like suitable treatment for a bunch of assholes.

Here's why machines can never replicate humanity.

The narcissist is the main character of his own fantasy world.

Study hurricanes with Kermit and Miss Piggy.

Taylor Swift is on the warpath against "AI" deepfakery.

Most people couldn't maintain their religious beliefs if they really investigated them.

These German school textbooks have some issues.

What an ignoramus.  Yes, I know she corrected herself a few moments later.  It's still astonishing that anyone would do this.

This was Palestine in 1929.

Tech bro corporate types are naïve, arrogant, and cut off from reality.

Bosses are finding that using "AI" to get work done costs more than human employees would have.

Far more people leave the Catholic Church each year than join it, even in countries where Catholicism is historically the dominant religion.  Many leave by converting to another religion, but as I've discussed before, switching between religions is often a gateway to leaving religion entirely.

Georgia is ground zero for the growing mass resistance to data centers.  Notice how only politicians and lobbyists are quoted as supporting the centers or claiming there is a "controversy" -- voters oppose them and castigate the politicians for not listening.

Here's an example of how a dishonest narrative spreads on social media.  Be very cautious about believing such reports.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans has temporarily blocked the rule allowing mifepristone to be provided by mail.  The actual impact on availability, and how long the blockage will last, are not yet clear.

God says it's OK.

Art can show us an alternative to the horrors of reality.

Barney Frank is approaching the end of his life, but still has some advice to give.

This doctor is being threatened with the death penalty for treating injured people.

Entrenched ideological beliefs are often rooted in prejudice and myth.

Our Trumpazoid government now plans to start using "AI" in air traffic control.  This shit is going to kill people.

This is the reality of Islam.

This Bay Area high school ("allegedly") retaliated against a Jewish student for reporting anti-Semitic harassment.  The harassment is hardly surprising when you learn she was enrolled in a "social justice academy program".  You can just imagine what kind of people you'd find in a thing like that.

A law under consideration in South Carolina would enable a rapist to sue his victim if she has an abortion.

GitHub will start charging Copilot users based on usage, in an effort to increase revenue and offset a bit more of the mountain of money they lose on it.  This will mean a massive increase in what users pay, and they're not happy about it.

Trump is in a snit about Jimmy Kimmel again.

Police thwarted a planned terrorist attack in Houston TX.

When justice breaks down, trust will eventually be lost.

Only two and a half years???

A woman prison inmate sexually assaulted by a male inmate in a women-only prison gets a meaningful offer of help.

Britain gains great cultural enrichment from immigration and diversity.  More vibrant immigrant culture here.

In France, too, diversity enriches culture.

Has Paris really gotten this bad?

France's president Macron is planning to replace Notre Dame's nineteenth-century stained-glass windows with modern ones.  Many art enthusiasts are unhappy.

Iranians rally in Paris for the overthrow of the theocracy.

"You are lucky you are not a soap bar, long live Hitler" -- but it's just anti-Zionism and not anti-Semitism, right?  They also insulted people carrying Ukrainian flags.

As supplies of expensive US Patriot missiles run low, Ukraine has developed a new electronic warfare system to stop Russian hypersonic missiles.

Ukraine's military technology and know-how are in high demand, with the Arab states of the Gulf first in line to buy.

Discontent is becoming more openly expressed in Russia, but as yet there's little prospect of a serious challenge to Putin's rule.

Lifting sanctions on Russian oil helps kill Ukrainians -- and also Americans.

Ukraine has hit the Tuapse oil refinery again, and burning oil is flowing in the streets of the town.  Somewhat related, check out this old story from Germany.

The Iranian theocracy has long been notorious for sexual abuse of political prisoners, but it seems to be getting even worse during the current wave of repression.

Even during the pause in the fighting, Iran's economy is under enormous strain.  Its currency the riāl, already worth less than a millionth of a dollar, lost a further 8% of its value this Wednesday alone.

The regime is forcing political prisoners to participate in pro-regime rallies to create an illusion of popular support.

The Iran war cannot end with the Revolutionary Guards still in power.

India has launched its third nuclear ballistic-missile submarine, cementing its emergence as a major nuclear power.

Japan is still trying to sweep the historical truth of the "comfort women" under the rug, with New Zealand being the latest target of pressure.

Let's check in on what's happening in Nigeria.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a video on autonomous killer drones, and Walpurgisnacht.

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Try as I may, it is hard to get a handle on what is happening in Iran during the current interlude of "negotiations", or what the prospects are for bringing down the regime.  I take hope from the fact that several of the Iranian bloggers I follow seem surprisingly optimistic.

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Stupidization is metastasizing through the US political scene.  Trump started the practice of coming up with boring, childish, unimaginative, irritating nicknames for every public figure he didn't like, but now almost everybody's doing it, right or left.  Anti-Semitism infests both "sides", just in slightly different forms.  It used to be only the subnormal-IQ fringe right that dismissed every news event they didn't want to believe as staged, fake, "false flag", etc, but now it's spread across the whole political spectrum.  This week the whole left blogosphere has been full of claims that the Trump assassination attempts were staged, with no apparent awareness that they're sounding like QAnon.

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The secret to happiness and reduced stress.....

Walpurgisnacht

Today and tonight make up a traditional companion festival to Samhain (Halloween).  April 30 is the point on the Earth's orbit exactly opposite to October 31, and the ancient rituals associated with this night -- great bonfires, the warding off of evil spirits -- are clearly similar to those of Samhain, so there is an obvious relationship between the two.  In modern times this date is most commonly called Walpurgisnacht (Walpurga's Night), although that name is of Christian origin, imposed when they took over the observance and tried to make it their own, as they did with so many pagan European and Middle Eastern holidays.  It is still called Hexennacht (Witches' Night) in parts of Germany.  Ancient Celtic cultures, and many modern neo-pagans, celebrate it as Beltane on May 1 -- the ancient Celts counted each night as part of the following day, so the night of April 30 was the same date as May 1 to them.  The ancient festivities of Walpurgisnacht that have come down to us are both Germanic and Celtic, in contrast to the mostly Celtic traditions of Samhain.

The ancients believed that the ashes of the great bonfires had protective powers, using them to ward off evil from both people and cattle.  The maypole dances were a fertility ritual (yes, the maypole was a phallic symbol -- paganism tends to be like that), while the display and wearing of greenery and floral wreaths symbolized the anticipated revival of life in the summer to come.

The English culture I come from has both Germanic and Celtic roots (a Germanic language and many cultural elements grafted onto a population of mostly Celtic origin), so these traditions resonate with me, even though they do not represent a genuinely advanced civilization as the ancient Greco-Roman culture did.

I've always liked this celebratory video by Faun, the German folk-rock band which often uses pagan themes:


Here is another video of theirs, which again expresses the joyous evocation of the pagan Germanic spirit (though not an attempt to exactly imitate the culture or look of any specific period):


Finally, this more lighthearted entry shows one of the modern witch dances performed on this date in the town of Wolfshagen im Harz, central Germany, where thousands gather every year for the festivities:

Traditional festivities which involve dressing up as witches also survive in Finland and Estonia, where the spirit of the indigenous pagan ways has survived better than in most parts of Europe.

Westerners continue to reclaim our indigenous culture, defying the centuries of persecution.

Drone apocalypse

Warning -- this video is somewhat disturbing:

It actually wouldn't be surprising if some of the major national militaries already have technology like this.  They certainly have weapons the general public doesn't know about.  That, however, wouldn't be the true nightmare scenario.  Governments already have the capacity to do all kinds of horrible things, and life in general goes on.  Some governments can be held accountable by elections, while others can be deterred from aggression outside their own borders by the threat of military retaliation.  There are only a couple hundred national governments, and only a subset of those have really advanced technology, so the pool of potential actors is limited.

Indeed, drone warfare in the Ukraine war has already reached almost this level of hunting down and killing individuals, though those drones are remote-controlled by human operators, not autonomous -- which makes them a more cumbersome tool for larger-scale targeted killing.

But the scenario shown here, where fairly inexpensive killer mini-drones become widely available (legally or not), would actually be even more terrifying than the video depicts.  Pretty much any person would be able to kill any other person, with little risk of any consequences.  It wouldn't be just a matter of whether you hate a particular personal enemy enough to want to kill him.  You'd worry that he might use this to kill you, unless you got him first.  In many cases a pre-emptive murder would feel like a matter of survival.  And you'd know that your enemy was likely thinking along the same lines.  No one would be safe unless they spent the rest of their lives in a heavily-armored bunker and never came out even momentarily (which would probably drive them insane eventually), and perhaps not even then.

However, there are a couple of reasons I can think of why this scenario is unlikely to materialize, or at least wouldn't last long if it did.

First, if such technology were widely available, almost every politician in the world above a very low level would be killed off almost immediately.  For any member of Congress you can name, any high-level member of the executive branch, even many state governors and legislators, there are people out there who hate that person enough to kill him or her if the means to do so with no consequences existed.  The same applies in other countries.  And those politicians know that.  If something like this was on the brink of becoming widely available, I think Congress and similar bodies elsewhere would take whatever action was needed, no matter how draconian or unconstitutional, to prevent it.  Fear of their own extermination would create an unprecedented incentive.

Second, nobody wants to live in the kind of nightmare world these things would lead to.  Some, perhaps many, would fight fire with fire.  As soon as such killer drones became available and the results became apparent, every executive at the companies that produced them, every engineer who understood the technology involved, and anyone else who might even tangentially be able to help facilitate designing or making the things, no matter how personally innocent, would end up being massacred by their own creation.  It wouldn't stop until the knowledge and technological capability to create such devices had been erased from the world.

Nevertheless, there is value in considering scenarios like this.  Technology always has the potential to develop in dangerous directions, and it's best to be aware of such possibilities before actually being faced with them.

Truths and inspirations for 27 April 2026

If images are hard to see or read, click to enlarge.

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

This is an Australian term, but useful everywhere, I think.

Needless to say, the Israeli authorities have already arrested the soldiers who vandalized the statue.  Jihadists who destroy Jewish symbols -- or kill Jewish people -- are celebrated by their own side.

When Trump is gone, this is the only thing referring to him that should be left in place in Washington.  It's the perfect monument.

This is perhaps less applicable in the US, whose immigrants (even illegal ones) have relatively low crime rates -- but in Europe, the immigrant population commits violent crimes at a much higher rate than the indigenous Europeans do.

I keep needing to remind myself how many people don't know about things like this.  The ignorance of most Americans about almost everything outside our own country is pathetic and sometimes frightening.

If this is a "genocide", it's the most incompetent genocide in history.