Link round-up for 18 July 2026

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

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Exercise is dangerous.  Guess I'll just stay lazy.

Nice collection of random memes here.

You're in the presence of a true fan.

This world needs proofreaders.

Most interesting bench ever.

Have some cheerful and fearful food.  And a scary watermelon.

Don't invade other people's space with your hair.  This time, the asshole got some payback.

This blogger had an eventful morning.

This is Boldt Castle in New York (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

"The day you lose someone isn't the worst."

Beautiful poem here on feelings of entropy.

Medieval China had an interesting system for preventing forging of documents.

Sand sometimes behaves oddly.

This video shows what's really happening when we see the Moon go through phases.

Learn about the Matilda Effect.

Visit Antifa's secret weather control facility.

Enjoy a relaxing train ride in northern Ontario.

Nineteenth-century guides to romance were often much more reasonable than you'd expect.

Mathematics is a unique natural art form.  I never got further than basic algebra -- my brain just isn't geared for math -- but I can still appreciate this.

"AI" "translation" adds some, uh, interesting nuances.  Here's more detail about one example.

Grammar checkers now use "AI", rendering them worthless.

There are apparently issues with Adobe Acrobat.

Meta's "AI" glasses are pandering to their true market -- creeps and perverts.  The backlash against video-recording glasses is now so strong that people are becoming afraid to wear them in public.  Good.

If you work in customer service, beware of assholes trying to pick political fights during normal interactions, and perhaps secretly video-record your reactions.

Montefiore hospital in New York is laying off nurses and replacing them with "AI".  A lawsuit claims the Mayo Clinic is buggering up patient care by using "AI".  Be aware that your own local hospital might start doing the same kinds of things.

They can't do this to me because my car is so old.  You may not be so lucky.

Jackasses with drones trying to take pictures are becoming a threat to firefighting efforts.

The evidence is in -- smartphones and social media are causing actual brain damage in young people.  "I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week.  My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact.  My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded."

The use of cartoons as propaganda goes back a century and is still a problem today (link from commenter NickM).

Large numbers of Americans are now abandoning social media because they don't find the experience fun any more.  Feeds full of "sponsored" content and other irrelevant junk, and an increase in political content, are a big part of the reason.

This person asked "AI" whether various paintings found on the internet were "AI"-generated fakes or not.  It gave the wrong answer every single time.

After three years of delay, E Jean Carroll has finally received the money Trump was ordered to pay her.

As Trump wallows in corruption and sexual sleaze, Americans remember and admire a more honorable president (as for JFK, though, it's worth remembering that he was even sleazier than Trump).

Has-been pop star "Boy George" has fled from Twitter.  In case you don't get the radiator reference, in 2009 George received a fifteen-month prison sentence for abducting a man, chaining him to a wall fixture, and beating him.

This person exists.  And there are more like her.

Here's a report from the Conference for Palestine in Detroit.  Interesting stuff.

OpenAI's much-hyped new "AI" browser, just released in October, is such a problem-riddled failure that the company is pulling the plug on it next month.

Meta released an "AI" feature allowing users to pull data from anyone's Instagram account to generate fake pictures.  The public backlash was so severe that they withdrew the feature after just three days.

SpaceX's latest rocket launch failure has tanked its stock even further, now down 45% from its high just a month ago.

Resistance against surveillance cameras is going viral.

69% of Americans support a proposal by Bernie Sanders to seize 50% of the stock of "AI" companies.  Sanders's plan would keep the stock in government hands, thus basically semi-nationalizing those companies rather than returning the wealth to the producer class, but this still suggests widespread support for large-scale re-distribution of wealth from the billionaire parasite class back to the people.

Ro Khanna seems to be grossly exaggerating his story of being "detained" in Israel.  However, a detailed analysis of the incident shows that the Israelis could have handled the provocation better.

New York state has imposed a one-year moratorium on new data centers over fifty megawatts.  Tech-bro oligarchs are freaking out.

The cyclospora parasite causing the current diarrhea outbreak was being closely monitored by the CDC until a year ago when the Trumpazoids started randomly shutting down and defunding government programs.  Since then it hasn't been tracked, allowing the outbreak to spread more easily.

In the August 4 primary, Democratic voters in Michigan will have a chance to stand against the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping the party by supporting Haley Stevens as the party's Senate nominee.  Her opponent is a Mamdani-like Israel-basher.  The most recent available survey shows her ahead.

A mainstay of the "AI" hucksterism is "criti-hype" -- propaganda designed to look like it's warning of dangers posed by "AI" while actually trying to make it sound cool (because if it's dangerous, it must be powerful and effective).  Here's an example, and the real story behind it.  Also, apparently terrorists are stupid.

The internet is far too dominated by Americans and American issues, to an extent that sometimes confuses foreign users.  We tend to forget that we're only four percent of the world.

Here's an example of how medieval lies are being brought back with fake statistics.

Gavin Newsom, again affirming his status as a craven toady of the billionaire parasite class, opposes most regulation of data centers in California.

Hakeem Jeffries opposes cutting off military aid to Israel, though he's still spouting pre-October-7 nonsense about settlements and a Palestinian state.

"AI" is hitting the movie industry at just the wrong time culturally, as fans seek more humanity and authenticity in movies.

The enemy is running scared.

"Civilizations do not usually perish because their enemies become stronger.  They perish because they lose the intellectual and moral confidence to distinguish good from evil, liberty from tyranny, and civilization from barbarism."

As anti-Semitism rises in the West, more and more Jewish people "see the writing on the wall" and invest in Israeli real estate just in case they have to flee.

Yes, the Nazi Holocaust had other victims besides Jews, but.....

Paper reviewers at a machine learning conference are outraged that they got caught using "AI" to fake their reviews.

Dumbasses who invested in SpaceX stock lament their losses.

The executive editor of the New York Times acknowledges that the now-infamous "Israel dog rape" article wouldn't have been published if it had been treated as news rather than an opinion piece.

The LAPD is ending its agreement with the Flock Safety camera company, partly due to public concerns about surveillance.

Hegseth wants to test soldiers for "testosterone deficiency".  I suppose it's remotely possible there might be some valid medical reason for this, but it sounds like just more of his usual brain-dead obsession with being macho.

"AI"-tards wonder why people are still reading human-written books when there's so much "AI"-generated text available.  Why are people still eating food when there's so much feces available?

"Israel exists because generations of Jews reached the same conclusion: Never again would their survival depend entirely upon the goodwill of others."

Public mass protest in Germany actually led Hitler to end the mass killing of disabled and mentally-handicapped people.  So why didn't similar protests stop the Holocaust?

The political left, formerly the defender of women's rights, has now betrayed them.  If there's not a serious change in direction, eventually it will lose women's votes.

Hispanic Texans who voted for Trump are now turning against him because of deportations.  This seems bizarre to me.  He made it clear enough, before the election, what he was planning to do.  Weren't they paying attention then?  At any rate, Talarico stands to benefit.

Despite the lack of video, there's plenty of reason to believe ICE is not being truthful about its latest killings.

People thought Platner was a fighter.  He's a whiner.

If there is any justice in the political world, this will be the end of Tim Walz's career.

A new bridge connecting Michigan and Ontario, which has been finished but unused for months because Trump wanted to bicker with Canada about who owns it, will finally open.

Amnesty International UK temporarily listed a help center for rape victims as a "hate group".  Women's and gay groups that were blacklisted are being offered help to sue.

In September, Germany's nativist AfD party is likely to win an outright majority in the state government of Sachsen-Anhalt.  The old establishment parties are panicking.

Italian law stands up to Islamic barbarism, in this case at least.

Watch Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian ships in the Sea of Azov.  Russia has been forced to shut down its shipping there entirely.

Ukraine is destroying Russian trucks much faster than Russia can replace them.

Russians watch another refinery burning, hundreds of miles from Ukraine, with more attack drones flying in and no sign of any air defense at work.

Yet another oil depot burns, this one near Rostov.

Fourteen countries, including the US, the UK, and Japan, have smacked down China's claims of Anschluss over the South China Sea, much to the tinpot Beijing regime's annoyance.

More links at Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  a video clip from The Wicker Man, an image round-up, and some observations on wealth.

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I'm not among those celebrating the death of Lindsey Graham.  It's true that he was a craven Trump toady and checked most of the usual Republican asshole boxes, but he was also a strong supporter of Ukraine and Israel, and these days we need all of those we can get.

But yes, Sam Neill and Bonnie Tyler are much more of a loss.

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Inevitably Trump is back to trading potshots with the Iranian regime, but so far he's hitting military and infrastructural targets rather than regime-change targets.  He's forgotten, if he ever understood at all, that there can never be real peace as long as that regime is still in power.

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A few observations on wealth

Soon after SpaceX's recent IPO, Elon Musk became, just briefly, the world's first trillionaire.  (He quickly lost that status as the stock price fell; it is now below the initial offering price, meaning that those who bought have now lost money, on paper.)  This illustrates the fact that super-wealth largely takes the form of numbers in computerized ledgers, not concrete assets -- Musk never had an actual stash of currency and physical goods with an aggregate value of a trillion dollars.  Nevertheless, he did own assets on paper (or rather in some computer database) whose theoretical market value briefly reached that level.

What does that kind of wealth actually mean?  We throw around numbers ending in "-illion" with little sense of what they signify other than "very big number", but they are actually enormously different.  It is possible for a person at the upper income level of those who earn money by their work (rather than by exploiting others), such as a doctor or lawyer, to accumulate net assets of as much as a million dollars.  In some places like Manhattan you can have a net worth of a million and not even feel, or be, truly rich.  A billionaire is an entirely different matter.

The best way I've seen of grasping the difference between the two numbers is the observation that a million seconds is about twelve days, whereas a billion seconds is thirty-two years.  This gives you an idea of the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire.  (As for a trillionaire, one trillion seconds ago there were still living neanderthals on Earth.)  It is practically impossible to earn a billion dollars by working.  Pretty much everyone who holds that kind of wealth got it by maneuvering himself into a role such as a financier, politician, or high-level corporate executive, in which wealth produced by the work of others is diverted into his own coffers.  Such people may or may not also do some work of some actual value, but that value has no real connection to their income or their wealth.  Jeff Bezos probably does some work of some kind, but he does not work nearly as hard as the typical Amazon warehouse employee.  Nor is the "work" of a corporate executive thousands of times more skilled or valuable than that of an ordinary worker, as it would have to be to justify referring to such people's income as "earned".  I have worked at companies where the CEO or CFO position remained vacant for up to a year while candidates were being interviewed and vetted, with no apparent effect on the functioning of the company.  But if the receptionist quits, they get a temp in immediately, because that job actually does something.

(Politicians are a special case.  They do not exploit the labor of large workforces, but leverage their political power to receive large bribes from oligarchs in the form of donations, in-kind gifts, corporate sinecures after leaving politics, etc in exchange for their votes on legislation in which the oligarchs have an interest.  Some become multi-millionaires while in office despite relatively modest salaries.)

There is a tiny category of billionaires who do actually earn what they have -- the most successful artistic creatives.  A person like Taylor Swift or JK Rowling does employ a few people in various capacities, but the value of the work those people do does not contribute a substantial part of the creator's wealth.  (Indeed, on her recent tour, Swift paid every worker a bonus of $100,000 out of her own funds, thus actually compensating them at more than the value of their labor, rather than exploiting them by skimming off value as most employers do.)  Book royalties and concert ticket sales genuinely do represent direct payment by consumers for the value of what that one individual creates, rather than for goods or services provided by the labor of employees.  But of course such cases are very rare.  Few artistic creatives become rich at all.

The difference between such cases and the standard billionaire parasite class is also intuitively apparent from the very different human types they represent.  It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between a novelist or artist and the kind of grey, soulless, narcissistic, emotionally-stunted obsessives who populate the upper reaches of the corporate and financial world, of whom people like Musk and Trump are extreme examples.  Can you imagine Bezos ever giving every Amazon driver and warehouse worker a $100,000 bonus out of his own money?

The great irony is that many billionaires, being exactly the kind of arrested-development types who never grow out of taking Ayn Rand seriously, believe themselves to be producers of wealth and imagine that society is dependent on them.  This ignores not only the fact that most of their wealth was produced by others whom they have positioned themselves to exploit, but also the more fundamental reality that such levels of wealth, the very concept of a billion dollars, can exist only in the context of a large, complex society with institutions like the rule of law, property rights, secure large-scale exchanges of value for value, and the belief systems and enforcement mechanisms that keep all those things running smoothly -- not to mention all the millions of workers who produce the yachts and mansions and private jets and miscellaneous giant trinkets on which they spend their money.  Galt's Gulch fantasies notwithstanding, if all of the billionaire oligarchs were separated from the rest of society and sent to live purely among themselves, isolated from the rest of us and what we produce, they would quickly find themselves sinking into poverty and squalor, even if they had brought their checkbooks and piles of paper cash with them.  (Indeed, a separate "society" made up entirely of histrionic narcissists like Musk and Trump and the kind of dead-soul control freaks and parasites who seem to populate most C-suites, would quickly make Lord of the Flies look like a sane and well-ordered utopia by comparison.)  There is no category of people more dependent on society to sustain its lifestyle than billionaires.  A man can live and thrive without a tapeworm, but the tapeworm quickly dies without the man.

Image round-up for 14 July 2026

More pictures from my collection -- to see any image at full size, right-click and open the link in a new tab.

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

Sicily seen from space, with smoke coming from Mount Etna

The Avala Tower, Belgrade, Serbia

Crater Lake, Oregon

Normandy, France

Piran, Slovenia

The Guinigi Tower in Lucca, Italy, fourteenth century -- the rooftop is a garden, with oak trees

To see it like this, you'd need to be traveling at about a hundred thousand light years per second