Link round-up for 11 July 2026

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

I felt quite ill most of Friday and so was not able to do as much on finalizing this as usual, hence the shorter length.  That's also why I haven't visited the blogs I normally do.  Feeling mostly better now.

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These signs are open to interpretation.

This patriotic show went a little awry.

Evil mattresses continue their war against humanity.

These are not the best people to be removing wasp nests.

Felix Martinez had a hard time getting excused from jury duty.

Basketball players score perfect hits.

Wet Be Poople.

Cats have little patience with human nonsense.

What's the deal with CVS receipts?

He did a spectacular dive into the pool.

How cute, the child already knows his name.

Now this is the truly American way to play music.

This is the "Motherland Calls" monument in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), Russia, commemorating the defense of the city during World War II.  Well over a million people died, making it almost certainly the deadliest single battle in all of history.

Researchers have discovered how exercise "de-ages" muscle in older people -- and why it doesn't work as well for some.

If you use a self-driving taxi, don't be surprised if it stinks -- some people are smoking inside them, since there's no driver to stop them.

Apple's "hide my e-mail" feature may be doing just the opposite.  According to this report, the problem was reported to Apple over a year ago and still has not been fixed.

If you use Linktree, be aware that it's being shitted up with "AI".

"AI"-generated travel review summaries strongly recommend places known to have serious problems.

This short fictional tale captures life in the modern office.

Townspeople in Wisconsin are suing Microslop over noise and other problems caused by a nearby data center.

Kallie Keeler was sexually assaulted, then betrayed.  Now she's getting legal help.

"I don't understand how people's patriotism can vary depending on what party holds the White House.  Mine has never varied one bit based on mere politicians."

Here are three truths vital to understanding the world of today.

Mitch McConnell and Graham Platner exemplify the dishonesty plaguing US politics.

For two years, Ken Paxton has apparently been violating one of the voting-integrity laws he made such a show of enforcing.

Now that Platner has dropped out, Maine Democrats need a new Senate candidate.  So far I'm impressed with this guy.  He's got the economic-populist agenda without the misogyny or the Israel-bashing (and without the Nazi tattoo).  He's also currently polling best against Collins.

When the "AI" collapse finally comes, let the industry die.  No government bail-outs or rescues.

The split within the Catholic Church seems to be deepening, with traditionalist archbishop Carlo Viganò supporting the SSPX and suggesting that it's the pope who is in schism, along with his "conciliar-synodal church" which isn't the "real" Catholic Church.

Officials in Cheyenne WY are cracking down on data centers after one of them released dangerous bacteria into the water system.

"Submissiveness is the hallmark of womanhood."

We've finally found an issue that unites ordinary Americans of the left and right against the oligarchy.  Now let's build on it.

The stock market is probably even more over-valued than it was right before the crash that led to the Great Depression.

Without massive subsidies, "AI" is unaffordable.  It costs more than the humans it replaces, and still can't do the job.

"Now the tide has turned.....  The backlash is coming, and it's going to be ugly."

Many of Trump's supporters have been financially ruined by putting their money in his various investment schemes, while he himself has made over a billion dollars off of them.  I've said all along, Trump is first and foremost a con man.

"A society cannot remain liberal if it treats every challenge to liberalism as just another form of diversity."  The Western liberal mind-set, in its current form, is disastrously ill-suited to dealing with the reality of Islam.

Illinois has imposed some safety restrictions on "AI" companies.  Great, now ban the damn data centers FFS.

The Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado offers some pushback against the despicable Melat Kiros.

An Air Force engineer charged with destroying over a dozen "AI" surveillance cameras has received a huge outpouring of public support.

Here's what some of our oligarchs have been up to recently.

"That is one of the civic habits we are losing.  We are becoming quick at identifying villains and slow at understanding claims.  We know how to attach labels, detect contamination, and turn disagreement into a question of moral hygiene, while forgetting how to stay with an argument long enough to know what it actually says."

This Tuesday was an important anniversary in the land of my ancestors.

The police arrested the victim, and allowed the attackers to escape.

As Germany's nativist party, the AfD, soars above the sclerotic old establishment parties in the polls, mobs of thugs block roads in an effort to disrupt the AfD's annual party conference.  This is what the Nazi Brownshirts did -- forcibly disrupt meetings of parties the Nazis considered enemies.  Especially in light of Germany's history, it's alarming to see such an open attack on democratic norms there today.

When Trump was aggressively threatening Greenland, France and other European countries were prepared for a shooting war over the issue.

What country is this?

Despite the rising anti-Semitism in Europe, Israel-bashing has not been a successful election strategy there.  It's very interesting that Italy's prime minister Giorgia Meloni, the only leader of a major European country whose roots are in the nativist movement, is also a strong supporter of Israel, while Spain's Pedro Sánchez, a leftist, is notorious for pandering to anti-Semitism.

The nativist movement is winning the support of the young and educated with appeals to national identity and culture.  This is an anti-nativist site loyal to the old outdated pro-EU politics, as you can tell from the "far right" epithet, but it still gives a reasonably informative picture of what's going on.

Europe doesn't need this.

"Jews are not welcome," the mob shouted.  Not Zionists, not Israelis, but Jews.  This is unambiguous anti-Semitism.

Pope Leo hypocritically exhorts real countries to welcome unwanted mass migration, while strictly excluding it from the Vatican.

Canada steps up to help Ukraine boost its air defenses.

Ukrainian soldiers feed a dog.

Yet another Russian refinery burns in Tatarstan, hundreds of miles east of Moscow.

Gas lines in Russia are getting just ridiculous.  Some gas stations have a policy of letting powerful officials bypass the lines -- and ordinary Russians are not happy.

The Iranian regime's funeral for Ali Khāmenei was marked by chaos, and bullying by the Islamist authorities to force people to participate (and sometimes worse than bullying).  The massive spending on the event, at a time of economic privation for most Iranians, has caused resentment.

Turkish authorities banned a gay cruise ship from docking for a scheduled stop in Turkey, citing "moral standards" and "family values".  Gay people, no matter how much you hate on Israel, Islamists will never accept you.

There's something missing from Egypt's national soccer team.

The story of Fawzia Amin Sido exemplifies how Westerners fail to understand Islam.

Gay sex may soon become legal in Trinidad, but the country's Christian and Hindu religious establishments are fighting to prevent it.

More links at Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, some problems I don't have, and Pat Condell's straight talking about religion.

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For the benefit of newer readers who might be misled:  I am not Jewish, nor gay, nor (obviously) a woman.  You don't need to be a member of a group to object to them being mistreated.

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FFS the man was a walking thicket of red flags.  That's been clear for months.  No one could have anticipated the rape accusation specifically, but it was obvious that something more would come out at some point, and then something more, and so on.  It's just lucky for the Democrats that this came out when there was still time to replace him.

And, yes, the real problem here is that there's a large number of Democratic-leaning voters for whom a Nazi tattoo (or "globalize the intifada") is not a deal breaker.  That's a sign of a profound sickness -- which isn't going away even though Platner has.  And "Yes but Trump did blah blah" is not going to cut it.  Evil doesn't become acceptable because someone else is more evil.

Some straight talking from Pat Condell

Among my readers there are probably some, poor deprived souls that they are, who are not familiar with YouTuber Pat Condell.  I've been watching his videos on and off for years, and I know of no one who can match him for blunt, honest talk on the subject of religion.  These are some of what I consider his best ones -- they're several years old, but Condell's wisdom is timeless.

One note, to those who are themselves religious -- he really does not pull any punches, so you may find what he says offensive.  Watch at your own risk.

First up, why religion doesn't deserve respect:


Next, his message to atheists:


Islam in Europe -- if anything, things have gotten even worse since he made this:


People are getting sick and tired of the situation -- this one was prophetic, in light of what's now happening in European party politics:

Some problems I don't have

My Saturday link round-ups usually include a few "PSA"-type links warning people about various problems, often related to computers or other such devices, that they should be aware of or do something about.  I myself, however, practically never suffer from such problems.

To begin with, I don't have to deal with most of the issues created by "AI" because I don't use it.  Ever.  For anything.  Not to create pictures, not to write things, not to "help" write things.  I don't use it in any way whatsoever.  I don't think I would even know how.  I never knowingly post an "AI"-created image or video, although I'm sure a few slip through here and there because I don't realize they're "AI"-generated.  (I did make one exception, for this post, using some British-made "AI" videos because they were necessary to illustrate a political point.)  By never using it, I avoid the issues it can create.

I never use Google for searches.  I don't understand why anybody still does.  There are many search engines out there and Google is generally recognized as the worst, especially now that it gives you "AI" summaries ahead of real results.  I mostly use DuckDuckGo, for which you can easily use settings to completely turn off all "AI" features, as I have.  For a few special cases, I use Yandex because it's uncensored.  It doesn't restrict or block results for searches on "forbidden" topics, such as suicide methods.  I'm sixty-five and I don't need some damn blue-nose nanny bot telling me what I can and can't read.  Yandex is based in Russia, but there's an English-language version which works fine.

I don't have an Alexa or a Siri or anything like that, and I never will.  I don't have any "smart" devices of any kind, and I never will.  I have no gadgets nagging and pestering me about things and reporting information about me back to some hypertrophic corporation.  I never save anything to "the cloud".  All my stuff is backed up on flash drives and a portable hard drive physically locked in a safe.  I don't even know what "Google Docs" is.  I don't have pictures "hosted" anywhere.  All the pictures I post in the image round-ups and so forth are just uploaded from my own computer.  No third parties to deal with.

I use Firefox almost exclusively.  It allows you to turn off and hide all "AI" features in its settings, and I have.  I added uBlock Origin years ago.  It was a very simple set-up and didn't even require restarting anything.  So I never see ads.  Not even on YouTube.

Speaking of which, YouTube is obviously dying.  Yes, I can watch it ad-free thanks to uBlock Origin (it sounds like it's unwatchable without an ad blocker), but these days it's so infested with "AI"-generated videos that it's becoming a real slog to watch, and not enjoyable any more.  I mostly just stick to channels I already know.  I assume over time more and more content creators will migrate to other platforms like Vimeo.

I never save any passwords, which would enable someone else to get into my accounts if he got access to my computer.  I keep my passwords on a document on my secondary computer, which is not connected to the internet and cannot connect to it.  In that document, the passwords are written in a code which no one except me can understand.  Try hacking that.

My internet computer uses Linux.  I will never need to deal with Windows 10 or 11.  No bloatware, no spyware, no "AI", no needing to create an account, none of Microslop's bullshit.  The computer just does what I want it to do and that's that.

I drive a 1999 car.  It has none of the tracking spyware and other electronic junk that modern cars have.  I just keep on and on repairing it regardless of cost.  By now I've probably spent more on repairs than the car could be sold for, but that doesn't matter -- it's still far less than the cost of replacing it, with the ridiculous prices of even used cars these days, and any replacement car would be full of that pricey, snoopy electronic junk I don't want.  I drive very little.  The car will probably outlast me.

Most importantly, none of this even involved making any effort, which is a good thing because I'm basically rather lazy.  I've just ignored all the companies pushing new fake-exciting ways to do things.  I'm not interested in it, I don't care about it, I don't want any of it.  I just keep doing things the way I always have, with the occasional add-on like uBlock Origin which is easy to set up and actually solves a problem without creating any.

It shouldn't take you any major effort either.  You're not doomed to be part of the ubiquitous "AI"-using, smartphone-gawking, app-downloading blight on the planet.  It shouldn't even cost you any serious money to unplug from all the garbage.  It will probably save you more than it costs.

Truths and inspirations for 6 July 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.]

Anybody who still believes "AI" is a source of information, or is reliable for anything at all, must be soft in the head.

Europe and the Middle East are full of huge structures built by the Romans two thousand years ago and still standing -- still in use, in some cases.  The junk Trump builds crumbles in weeks.

Did you think Trump is as bad as it can get?  With open jihadist sympathizers entering US politics, and being treated as legitimate and respectable by at least one major party, I fear we're risking something a lot worse.

It's absurd for a "self-proclaimed military history enthusiast" to claim he didn't know what that symbol was.

Part of Trump's border wall (what little he ever built) in Arizona.