Video of the day -- a walk around town

This is a few minutes just walking around in an ordinary town (I'm not sure which one) in the country of Angola in western Africa.  Compare what this looks like to where you live.  Watching this, a couple of salient points immediately occurred to me:

First, try to imagine the mentally debilitating effect on a child growing up in a stultifying environment like this.  We all know the benefits of a colorful, variegated, stimulating environment with trees and interesting things to do.  Even for an adult who is used to these conditions, it seems it would be depressing living among this all the time.

Second, you are probably asking yourself "why does Angola look like this?" when in fact you should be asking "why doesn't the whole world look like this?"  Because most of it did, for most of history.  A typical European village a thousand years ago probably looked almost equally miserable, centuries after the loss of the advances under the Romans and centuries before the beginning of their restoration in modern times.  At least some houses shown in the video have electricity, based on the overhead wires, even if it only works some of the time.

Poverty and squalor and filth are not some special condition that requires malevolence or a conspiracy to explain.  They are the normal default state in which life naturally languishes when nobody undertakes the hard work of improving things.  That hard work -- scientific research and the technological infrastructure it makes possible -- are why we live our lives at a level of hygiene, convenience, and variety which our ancestors of a few centuries ago literally could not have imagined.  What hardships remain in the modern world are mostly due to extreme unequal distribution of wealth -- the product of a flawed economic and political system, not of science or technology.

One final observation:  The life expectancy in Angola now is sixty-five years.  This is among the lowest in the world and obviously far worse than that of the West or eastern Asia -- or most regions today.  But it's far better than that of even the richest countries in 1900.  The reason for the difference is vaccines and other modern medical innovations, which are available to some extent even in the poorest countries today.

Link round-up for 30 May 2026

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

o o o o o

He had to leave, but he didn't look happy about it.

Looks like these guys aren't handling transportation any better than we do.

Don't let your cat get inside the ceiling.

In fact, cats cause trouble everywhere.

This is a civilized way to hide (books and a tea-kettle -- can I move in too?).

This was a public-spirited intervention.

Here are a few fun facts about various countries.

This is the Calchaquí Valley near Salta, Argentina.

Classiest furniture items ever.

The London Underground has brought in a special group of non-human engineers to reduce flooding.

Here is an animal that can photosynthesize.

This is a masterpiece of precision engineering, from two thousand years ago.

Meet Gordon Cooper, who showed what human intelligence and skill can accomplish under pressure.

Researchers are using recently-dead, partially-reactivated human brains for testing the effects of drugs.  They insist there's no risk that any awareness or sensation exists in the brains under these conditions -- but they're still using anesthesia.  How sure are they?

Walking makes you more creative by helping your mind wander.

It is possible to get too much sleep, as well as too little.

When your boss is such an asshole that you quit, do what you have to do, but handle it a bit carefully.

Index funds could put your retirement investments in danger from the "AI" bubble.

Libraries are medicine for the mind.

Amazon customer service sounds like an "AI" nightmare.

YouTube says it will start labeling "AI"-generated videos so we can avoid them more easily.

We're doing children no favors by teaching them fragility instead of self-control.  Those who cannot master their own impulses and urges are not truly free.

While technology has progressed over the last half-century, the economy has gotten much worse.

A new book about "AI" and truth turns out to contain a lot of fake "AI"-generated citations because the "author" used "AI" to help "write" it (we have to put so many things in quote marks these days because "AI" is making all our words not mean what they mean any more).  But he, an obvious addict, just can't stop using the "magical" hallucination machine.  He's not alone; several "AI"-addled academics seem shocked that they're expected to do actual work to avoid fake information in the papers they "write".

Non-religious people (now making up nearly a third of Americans and growing rapidly), are expensive for political campaigns to reach and take more effort to win over.

This is what it was like for women in the US in the 1960s, barely over half a century ago.

This is what was happening in Syria in the late 1940s.  I can pretty much guarantee you don't know any of it.  But you need to.

This is not apartheid.

"But courage is standing by what you believe when it costs you something."

Two men have been arrested for posting huge amounts of "AI" fake porn of real people without their consent.

In case the Trumpazoids start claiming there are mail-in voting irregularities in Maryland, here's what really happened.

"The names and slogans change.  The complicity doesn't."

As Google keeps buggering up its search engine with more and more unwanted "AI", people are switching to DuckDuckGo.

Jeff Bezos reminds us that his rockets can explode just as good as Elon Musk's.  The force of the blast is estimated at one kiloton, or one-fifteenth as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.  That's got to have done some serious damage to the launch facility.

It looks as though California will exempt Linux from its privacy-wrecking age-verification law.  (Linux probably couldn't have complied with it anyway.  Dumbass politicians don't understand how anything works.)

Those pesky journalists are being "defiant" anyway.

The harassment directed at Jewish institutions in Mamdani's New York has gotten bad enough that the New York state government has stepped in.  The new law protects "houses of worship and educational centers" in general, but everybody knows damn well which group is mostly being targeted by the thugs these days.

Mamdani says he will not attend the "Israel Day on Fifth" parade tomorrow, the first New York mayor to refuse to participate since the parade began in 1964.  There was a protest at Gracie Mansion, but Mamdani grants himself the anti-protest buffer zone he had vetoed for Jewish schools and synagogues.

"It turns self-defense into sin.  Lovely little ideological trap."

CEOs are plotting to use "AI" to turn the American workplace into a hellscape of micromanagement and intensive supervision.

See which of these two assessments of our country's problems more closely aligns with your own view.

A "bunker" community designed to help rich assholes survive an apocalypse goes sour as residents turn on each other.

Remember Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim -- and who the vermin were who celebrated their deaths.

Trump's "revenge tour" of primary challenges to Republicans he doesn't like seems to have buggered up his ability to get votes in Congress, including approval of a new Supreme Court pick if the opportunity arises.

Republican primary voters in Texas did Trump's bidding and nominated scandal-plagued Bill Paxton for the Senate, giving the Democrats their best opportunity to win in the state in decades.  Democratic voters in Texas's 35th Congressional district, by contrast, strongly rejected the utterly deranged Maureen Galindo as a candidate.

As "AI" companies raise their prices to reflect the actual costs of providing the technology, more and more customers are finding it's not worth it.

"The quote unsettled people because it named something many Western institutions have spent years trying to blur:  the widening gap between public language and private belief."

As the Supreme Court continues to protect the mailing of abortion pills, forced-birth wingnuts declare that their patience has run out and demand that Trump take stronger action to force women and girls to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

Microslop is canceling its Claude Code licenses now that it's being charged something more in line with what the "AI" actually costs to provide, making the cost untenable.

Mob violence and threats are targeting Jews, not Israelis or Zionists.  This is Jew-hatred plain and simple.  Anyone who insists on hairsplitting between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is part of the problem.

A carefully-designed experiment shows that while "AI" may seem at first to help math students, in reality it inhibits learning.

"Once human beings become abstractions, cruelty becomes easier."

At least one top Maine Democrat is putting principle above party, declaring Graham Platner's Nazi tattoo and his claims about it "disqualifying".  Platner is refusing to apologize to a Purple Heart veteran whom he grossly insulted.

The Trumpified DoJ is launching an "investigation" of E Jean Carroll, the woman Trump was found legally liable for sexually assaulting.  Julian Sanchez claims it isn't a real investigation (found via Red State Blues), but the situation sounds murky at best.

The parasite class seems to be evolving into a distinct and inferior type of human, devoid of the higher moral and social sensibilities.

Oklahoma has recently banned marriage by minors, but many Republicans opposed the law, mostly for religious reasons.

Pride Month has been stolen.

This is what was happening in Poland after World War II.

What can be done about such uncompromising hatred?

"The next step is not private agreement.  It is public resistance".

In a sane world, this judge would be removed from his position and flogged.

It's now more than a year since the British Supreme Court ruled in favor of protecting women's rights, but institutions are still dragging their feet.

A Belgian court has said it straight out -- under "hate speech" laws, you can be punished for telling the truth.

The Spanish police know how to deal with assholes.

Europeans have learned they can't trust the US any more.

Russia's economy is deteriorating across the board.

Russia's recent massive missile attack on Ukraine included one of its much-hyped Oreshnik missiles, but Russian military bloggers are unimpressed with the results.

Ukraine's military emphasizes decentralization and flexibility, in contrast to Russia's rigid, top-down system.

Ukrainian drone operators are on the hunt for Russian logistics in the occupied territories.

See a Ukrainian attack on a Russian warship in the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles from Ukraine.

This brief video shows the magnitude of the earlier strike against Tuapse.

Video from the Gaza conflict illustrates the tactics of both Israel and Hamas.

The Iranian theocracy's supreme leader Mojtabā Khāmenei, or whoever speaks in his name these days, has issued a renewed call for the annihilation of Israel.  This regime is sparing no effort to remind us that it is too dangerous to be left in power.

A video clip has emerged from the great massacre of protesters in January.  This is Mashhad, a small city in the northeast.

This is the reality of life in the country today.

Iranians feel angry and betrayed at Trump's negotiations with the regime.  It indeed looks like he has abandoned them and now risks leaving the regime in power to rebuild and threaten Israel and the West in the future, while also continuing to grind down the Iranian people.

In India, rising temperatures are becoming life-threatening for some workers.

Some families in Bangladesh are unable to get the measles vaccine.  Americans have no such excuse.

A planned change to North Korea's nuclear doctrine may have unforeseen consequences.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, two Scotland travel videos, and lives within lives.

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Lives within lives

Life on this world takes many forms, and science sometimes discovers aspects of biology which are as strange and fascinating as anything one might expect to encounter on an alien planet.  Consider the case of Mixotricha paradoxa.

Mixotricha is a protozoan -- a microscopic one-celled organism (there are many species of protozoa, amoebas being another example).  Under the microscope, it appears vaguely pear-shaped, covered with roughly a quarter million "cilia" -- tiny hair-like growths which wave in a synchronized way to propel it through its environment.  (That environment itself is of some interest, but I'll be getting to that in a moment).  Many protozoa have cilia, but Mixotricha is different.  Its cilia are not really cilia.  They are separate organisms, bacteria of the "spirochete" type, long and thin and active.  These spirochete bacteria are attached to the surface of the Mixotricha by brackets and are symbiotic with it.  They have been compared to rowers propelling a ship.

You might be surprised that so many bacteria could be attached to one protozoan; however, even though bacteria and protozoa are both microscopic one-celled organisms, there is a tremendous difference in size between them.

There exist on Earth two distinct types of cells.  The "prokaryotic" type is tiny and simple, with very little internal structure; the "eukaryotic" type is far larger, with complex internal structure including a distinct nucleus.  Bacteria, and a class of similar organisms called "archaea", are prokaryotic cells.  All protozoa are eukaryotic cells.  All multi-cellular living things -- animals (including humans), plants, fungi, etc. -- are made of eukaryotic cells.

Aside from the spirochetes, three other species of bacteria are symbiotic with Mixotricha, living on or even inside it, performing a variety of functions without which it could not survive, such as extracting energy from the nutrients which it absorbs from its environment.

(It's now believed, by the way, that eukaryotic cells first arose as symbiotic combinations of the original, simpler prokaryotic cells.  Modern animal cells contain small fuel-processing bodies called mitochondria, which have their own DNA and whose "ancestors" must have been bacteria which became symbiotic with larger cells billions of years ago and ended up being absorbed by them.  The same is true of the chloroplasts (photosynthesizing bodies) within plant cells.  Modern Mixotricha's symbiotic relationships may resemble the arrangements which gave rise to eukaryotic cells in the first place.)

Mixotricha are not solitary creatures; they swarm through their environment in substantial numbers.  And each individual one of them is, as we have seen, host to a whole community of hundreds of thousands of bacteria.

And what is that environment in which these Mixotricha live and move?  It is the digestive tract of a termite -- specifically, a termite of a species native to northern Australia.  You probably know that termites cannot, on their own, digest the wood they eat; they are dependent on micro-organisms inside their digestive systems to do it for them.  Mixotricha is one such micro-organism.  (Different species of termites use different species of microscopic helpers.)

Termites, of course, are social insects, living in colonies which, for some species, can number in the millions.  Most of the termites in a colony are sterile, with a few "queen" termites functioning as egg-laying machines.  Rather than viewing each termite as an individual, it's probably more correct to think of an entire colony as a super-organism, with the "queens" being analogous to stem cells which replenish the colony's numbers to replace worker termites as they die off; and the flying termites which sometimes leave to start new colonies are the super-organism's reproductive organs, or spores.

So that super-organism consists of a swarm of individual termites, each of which contains countless Mixotricha in its gut, each of which in turn is host to its hundreds of thousands of symbiotic bacteria.

Lives within lives within lives within lives.....

Videos of the day -- Ruth Aisling

On my post about travel last week, a couple of people expressed an interest in Scotland.  As it happens, one of the YouTubers I most frequently watch is Ruth Aisling (pronounced ASH-ling), who specializes in travel around Scotland and makes spectacular videos showcasing the country.  She has some experience with travel, having lived in Mexico and Japan (and can speak Spanish and Japanese), but eventually returned to her own country for some in-depth exploration.  She's been traveling around Scotland by herself for three years and has covered some very remote places as well as major ones.  She uses a camera drone, which explains the numerous aerial views (and how she can include herself in moving shots from a distance without a camera crew).

Her videos are on the longer side, generally twenty to thirty minutes -- much longer than I will generally watch, but I always find them so absorbing that I almost end up wishing they were longer.

This one is about Stirling, the "smallest city in Scotland" at thirty-five thousand people ("city" in the UK has an exact legal definition which isn't entirely based on size).  While small enough to get around easily, it's crammed with interesting relics of centuries past.  The visit to Stirling Castle starts at 14:50, but the whole thing is well worth watching if you're interested in the country -- use fullscreen of course.


An example of a remote place, which tourists usually overlook, is the small island of Gigha on the west coast.  With fewer than two hundred inhabitants, the island used to be the property of a big landowner, but was bought by its people in 2002 and is now community-owned.


Aisling's video channel is here, and she has a general website here.

Truths and inspirations for 25 May 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.]

Evidently my assessment of this song was correct.

I'll be surprised if I get even that.

Keep resisting.  Stand up for the innocent.

We need both, and it's a plain fact that vaccines revolutionized human survival in the face of disease.  But prevention, especially healthy eating, is seriously neglected in the US -- and note that it's mostly the same kind of people who are anti-vaccine who are also belligerently assertive about eating the flesh of filthy animals and processed junk full of fat and/or refined sugar.

Yes, it is actually possible to be this stupid.