Link round-up for 3 October 2026

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

Four weeks to Halloween!

o o o o o

Fire the watermelon artillery!

Let me "help" you climb down.

Birds deal with the modern world.

He makes a dignified entrance.

It's time to weigh the kittens.

What if there were a giant banana orbiting the Earth?

Find your Halloween bumper stickers here.

It's one Halloween decoration within another.

Learn how Carrie Fisher tried to rescue Napoleon's penis.

Blogger Mr Shife and his dogs welcome October.

You're never too young to appreciate good music.

Pictures here from the Haunted Happenings Grand Parade in Salem MA.  This year was especially festive as it's the city's four hundredth anniversary.

It's not only orcas now -- a pod of sperm whales has joined the war on yachts.

See the dramatic rescue of a baby elephant swept away by a flood in West Bengal, India.  At first I wasn't sure whether this was real, but there have been multiple news stories about the incident -- it's real.

On FZ1073, ordinary people rose to heroism and prevented disaster.

A nation of lions.

Here's an interesting visualization of how gravity makes the solar system work.

The Crypt of Civilization is a message aimed at people more than six thousand years in the future.

There's now a pill that can prevent covid if taken soon enough after exposure.

A test of facial recognition technology to catch criminals showed it to be a huge waste of time and money.

India is rapidly shifting from coal to solar power, with emissions flat since 2024 despite surging use of electricity.

"Energy drinks" don't actually give you much energy -- they just block the chemical signals that tell your brain how tired you are.

Anything you obtain overseas that the authorities in your own country might disapprove of, you should send home by first-class mail, not take in your luggage.  It's expensive but well worth it to avoid hassles.

All those prompts you enter into "AI" programs to create images -- yes, including the porny ones -- are being read by contractors at the "AI" companies.

A group of medical organizations run by real doctors have now released their seasonal vaccine recommendations.  Rely on this and ignore the Trump / RFK Jr quackistocracy.

Walmart insists it isn't introducing "personalized pricing" despite increasingly using digital labels.  Watch these fuckers like a hawk and hold them to it.

These people have found vibrators useful for some surprising purposes.

Virginia voters:  here's why you need to vote for that same-sex marriage amendment to the state constitution, even though the right is federally protected.

The Supreme Court is going as far as it dares in helping Trump to undermine voting rights -- it's up to citizens and the institutions of civil society to protect them.

Meta's new Muse "AI" agent is already being seriously creepy.  But the biggest problem with these "agents" is that most people simply don't want them.

If you have been imprisoned in Connecticut, the state can seize your assets to cover the cost of your incarceration, even years later.

"If you can't hold it, you don't own it" -- plus, physical media allow you to avoid algorithms.

Here's an example of how "AI" is ruining things for artists.

She had car insurance and could prove it, but still got two tickets, because the police trusted Flock's fucked-up system.

Christianity must destroy human happiness to succeed.

These ding-dongs insist they've found the actual Noah's Ark.  It's a bit like announcing you've discovered the actual spaceship that Superman flew to Earth in as a baby.

Twenty years after the publication of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins looks back at the book -- and the delusion.

The woketardazoids are now claiming that fingernails not being garishly painted is a form of racism.

Urine-drinking weirdos find they can easily get "AI" chatbots to "vindicate" their practice.

Not many people deserve to end up in an Omani jail.  But these assholes do.

"'You will not be tolerated' is not an argument.  It is a threat to make women too afraid to speak."

The Kathleen Stock quote on sexuality in last week's "truths and inspirations" post got some positive feedback from commenters, so here's the full article it came from.

Must-read of the week:  You have no obligation to be sexually attracted or available to anyone (incredible that this even needs to be said), having boundaries is not bigotry, and pressuring someone to have sex by accusing them of bigotry if they don't is downright rapey.

California has just enacted several good laws, sponsored by the California Federation of Labor Unions, to protect workers from "AI" in the workplace.  Newsom has vetoed laws like these in the past, and the tech-bro corporate lobby spent millions trying to stop them, but the unions fought hard, and prevailed.

Americans' trust in the Supreme Court is at an all-time low.

What a horrible mess Trump has made of Washington DC.  It's going to take years to undo all this crap and put it back how it was.

This is the face of anti-Zionism.

Substack fights for freedom of the press.

An Iranian-American student asked the Tucker-Carlson-endorsed Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to condemn the mass-murdering Iranian regime (which he evidently wouldn't do); now the student is facing a wave of threats and harassment.

We demand that you respect our privacy!

This woman at Cornell is still trying to get justice after two years.  It's going to be a hard fight.  Instagram apparently tried to hide an essay on the scandal.  I'd say let this woman handle it.

"AI" programs cannot "go rogue" and act volitionally any more than your car is willfully "going rogue" when it rolls away and hits somebody after you forgot to set the parking brake.  Stop talking voodoo nonsense and prosecute the damn companies and executives.

Relish senator Eric Schmitt's epic self-pwnage during the Jack Smith hearings.

"AI" companies will need to make six trillion dollars in revenue by 2031 to justify their investment in data centers.  Needless to say, there is no possibility of that happening.

Why are heterosexuals in a few liberal cities masquerading as "queer"?

Amazon's efforts at pro-data-center propaganda are off to a rocky start.

All these Republicans knew who and what Trump was, right from the beginning.  They still do.

A lot of falsehoods are circulating about the Lindsay Clancy case.

The number of teenagers identifying as LGB is declining, driven mostly by a drop in the number of girls identifying as bisexual -- a number which spiked in the last few years probably due more to fashion than reality.

Tesla's California factory sounds like something out of the Jim Crow era (link from Rade).

SpaceX's rocket test on Monday wasn't such a great success as the media said at first.

Politicians from both of the billionaire-dominated parties have been corrupted by "AI" companies.  The nineteenth century offers a lesson in what to do about it.

"What you are feeling is a rush over having exerted control over a person."

Trump's policies are devastating Iowa's farming economy, with consequences likely to be felt in the election.

In politics, accusing your opponent of being pro-data-center is so damaging that in this case it's being treated as defamatory.

Just as Trump is now so toxic that some Republican candidates are "running away from" him, some Democrats in swing states are asking AOC to stay away from their campaigns.

Interesting discussion here about "AI" regulation and the "it's going to kill us all" scam.  This article is really long, but worth reading if you want a solid insight into the topic.  Read it when you can set aside some time.

I've always said that impeaching Trump is a waste of time since there aren't 67 votes in the Senate to actually remove him.  If the votes were there to remove him, it would be not only worth doing but obligatory.  Here's an argument that it could happen in the first half of 2027.

The Trump administration is using "AI" to make some Medicare coverage decisions, with disastrous results.

Who exactly was it that walked out on Netanyahu's UN speech?

Canada is far more popular with Americans than Trump is.

Most Americans and Canadians agree on at least one thing -- they hate Trump's tariffs.

Sorry, you guys are total nutters.  And lunatics.

Anti-Jewish bigotry is on the rise again in the land where Hitler was born.

This experiment has failed.  Send them back.  You don't need this.

And of course, it comes with that flag.

The head of the company that operates the Eiffel Tower will step down after a scandal in which the female staff at the tower were excluded from working during the visit of a bigoted Hindu group.

Sweden warns that, if Russia attacks, its retaliation will reach deep into Russian territory.

Little by little, Ukraine is liberating its land from Russia.

See Ukrainian precision strikes on a Russian military center in Belgorod.

More precision strikes here, on military cargo vehicles.

This attack on a rocket launcher had spectacular effects.

Here are attacks on various military targets as seen by drone operators.

View the damage caused on this Russian cargo ship by a drone attack.

A petrochemical plant goes kaboom.

These leaked Russian military documents reveal casualties and desertions on a staggering scale, as well as some other serious problems.

There's one less murderous piece of human garbage in the world.

The Saudi regime put its faith (and bribes) in Trump -- and now it's in deep shit.

More links at Red State Blues, Abortion Every Day, and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, some links for Blasphemy Day, and an essay on division on the right and unity for the nation.

o o o o o

He is recovering well enough to speak with India's prime minister.

Division on the right -- unity for the nation?

The American right wing is not homogenous.  It comprises several factions, but the most important division is between what might be called the "elitist" cadre, which includes most of the traditional leadership of the Republican party, and a more populist tendency making up much of the rank-and-file.

The elitists most strongly support free trade, "free markets" (that is, minimizing regulatory oversight over the predatory behavior of corporations), and relatively open immigration to guarantee a supply of cheap labor, while being largely indifferent to the effects of these policies on American workers; their holiest grail of all is tax cuts for the rich and for corporations.  Many of them care little about cultural issues.  They are conservatives with a strong libertarian streak.  Many have an internationalist world-view.  Most of them are rich or have economic incentives or ideological reasons to defend the interests of the rich.

The right-populist masses have little visceral interest in those elitist issues, though they tend to pay them lip service due to long exposure to propaganda outlets controlled by the elitists.  Their real focus is on their economic interests and on cultural issues.  The latter include Christianity (at least among older people), a traditional view of male and female roles, attachment to rural culture and suspicion of urban culture, hostility toward the normalization of what they consider sexual perversion and laxity and toward "weirdness" and "wokeness" generally, and (very important) a strong attachment to gun culture and gun rights.  Immigration is an especially hot-button issue since it attacks both economic and cultural concerns -- it increases competition for jobs, and also exacerbates the presence of foreign cultures and languages and erodes the majority status of the white population.  Almost all right-populists have a strongly nationalist world-view (though many prefer the term "patriot"), and many of them are isolationists, knowing little about foreign countries and caring less, except insofar as international trade plays a role in whatever business they are in.

Trump did not create this distinction -- it long preceded him.  But he exploited it to rise to power and thus brought it out into the open in a way it had not been before.  Please read this post and this post for more on that.  Trump made himself the embodiment of right-populism in rebellion against the dominance of the elitist cadre, which I think accounts for the fanatical devotion that he inspired in so many right-populists -- at last, here was a major figure talking in blunt language about their issues, the things they really cared about, as opposed to the things the elitist Republican leadership was telling them they should care about.  Of course, Trump turned out to be a con man and a bungler who has badly damaged the economic interests of the working class and of rural people and, despite much bluster, achieved little on the cultural front, while putting most of his energy into enriching himself and pursuing personal vendettas.  Many right-populists now realize he is not what they thought, which accounts for his plummeting popularity these days.

It is important to understand what that drop in popularity, and the signs suggesting a blue wave in November, do not mean.  None of it means that huge numbers of former Trump voters are starting to embrace DEI, abandon gun rights, and support men in dresses using the girls' bathroom.  Their beliefs and values have not changed at all.  What has changed is their growing sense that Trump has betrayed those beliefs and values.  Many ordinary non-ideological people do not have much feeling of attachment to a political party -- when they feel that one party has failed them, they're guardedly willing to give the other one a try.

This article is an interesting assessment of the current situation within the right wing.  The elitists, who have spent the last few years reeling at Trump's grabbing control of the Republican party away from them, see his recent decline (and the fact that he must leave power in 2029 at the latest) as an opportunity to take back control and put things back the way they were.  They are wrong.  The genie Trump released cannot be put back in the bottle.  The right-populist masses have realized the elitists serve no practical purpose, and will not allow them to re-establish their dominant position.  Politics cannot go back to what it was before 2016.

As I've discussed before, many working-class Democratic voters actually share many of the same economic concerns, and some of the cultural ones, as the right-populists.  The left-activist fringe, which plays an outsize role in setting the Democratic party's agenda, occupies a position somewhat (though far from exactly) analogous to that of the elitists on the Republican side.  Their obsession with identity politics, their visceral hostility to gun culture, their insistence on supporting freakish boutique cultural causes such as men playing in women's sports, and their bizarre use of language ("transwomen", "undocumented", everybody who disagrees with them being "fascist", etc) make them seem -- to the average American whose main concerns are things like gas and housing prices and getting a decent-paying job -- like aliens who time-warped in from the 1960s and have somehow taken over, constantly correcting everybody's opinions and choice of words.  And elected Democratic politicians, hamstrung by the influence of billionaire donors, do little to advance working-class interests.  The revolutionary spirit of the FDR era is gone.  It's no wonder that the Democratic party now polls as one of the least-popular institutions in the country.  Millions vote for it mainly because the Republicans seem even more in thrall to the billionaires -- just as millions vote Republican mainly because the Democratic party seems to be run by weirdos who disdain nationalism, guns, and mainstream culture.  In both cases it's a matter of voting for the lesser of two evils, because nobody is offering what the voters really want.

The broad mass of people in this country share a lot of common interests and views, despite being divided into two camps who have been taught to hate each other.  There is a widespread sense that the old politics is exhausted, and that something truly new is needed.  Europe is already seeing the rise of vigorous new nativist parties, sweeping aside the old sclerotic establishment parties that enabled mass immigration and coddle Muslim violence and arrogance.  The issues in the US are different, but here too, if the masses can overcome political polarization and sweep aside the ideological types on both "sides" who fomented that polarization and maintain it, the time seems ripe for a new economic-populist political movement which will, at last, offer what the majority really wants.

For Blasphemy Day

Today is International Blasphemy Day -- a day for denigrating, mocking, and denouncing deeply-held spiritual beliefs of every kind!  The day is observed every September 30, commemorating the publication of the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2005.  It is our absolute right, as part of freedom of expression, to criticize and undermine religion just like any other kind of ideology, in whatever way we choose.

I'm not up to posting much right now -- a flare-up of an old joint-inflammation problem means that I'm having to type mostly left-handed, which greatly slows me down.  But I can't let such an important day pass unobserved.  You can find plenty of relevant material in my posts from 2023, 2024, and 2025.  You might also like these:

Why mockery and ridicule are the best way of handling religion.

How Christianity destroyed Western civilization.

The world we should have had, that never got a chance to exist.

My obituary for Hypatia of Alexandria -- and how she finally won.

Truths and inspirations for 28 September 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.]

FFS just let people be attracted to what they're attracted to and leave the ideology out of it.

Josiah Wedgwood abolitionist teapot, c 1770.

A Buffalo of the People!

Yes, she did say this.

Yes, he did say that.

Then the rapist probably accused her of genociding him.

Sic semper oligarchis!