Link round-up for 16 May 2026

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

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Cats just love their cardboard boxes.

She threw away a log, but it had its revenge.

These are signs of the times (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

Monkeys react to (sometimes very annoying) humans.

Dumbth is always entertaining.

Staying asleep can be really hard work.

A watch that works like this would be very handy.

This is a baby platypus.

This is the Dawes Arboretum in Ohio (right-click pictures and open the link in a new tab for full size).

See a humane intervention for two seals.

An experiment in raising children to be experts was successful, but doesn't actually tell us much about how expertise works in most cases.

There's now an antiviral pill to prevent covid after exposure.  So far only Japan has approved it for actual use.

A senior scientist at Google has published a paper arguing that the tech we call "AI" today is inherently incapable of ever becoming conscious.

The problem of microplastics contamination is probably hugely exaggerated.  An elementary error led to false results in earlier studies.

There's evidence that slower, low-stress exercise builds muscle better than the intense and exhausting workouts in favor today.

What are you doing to your cells?

Minors are finding online age verification comically easy to defeat.

If you get an unexpected package, it may be a "brushing" scam.

Most pointless innovation ever -- you can now cheat at jigsaw puzzles.

Be wary of being condescending.  You may not even realize when you're doing it.

YouTube has developed a bug that can freeze your system.  The link explains how to neutralize it.

Some doctors are now using "AI scribe" programs to produce records of patient visits and treatment, resulting in official documentation riddled with errors.  Check your medical visit summaries and other records carefully.

Endlessly escalating safety precautions eventually becomes counterproductive (this is important).

Japan is producing cardboard military drones that can be mass-produced cheaply and therefore can be deployed in enormous numbers.

So, what's the real story on Chinese electric cars?

"Smart" glasses are being used to extort money from women by invading their privacy.

When men get obsessed with "AI", their wives feel abandoned.  Consider trading up, ladies.

"You can't shame someone into supporting you."

We need the enrichment provided by cultural diversity.

Here's how an elderly protester in Portland pwned ICE in court.  If she did it, others can.

The Hawaii legislature has passed a bipartisan law intended to neutralize the effect of the Citizens United decision.  If they can make this stick, presumably other states will do the same.

A win in South Carolina:  an election-rigging gerrymander was stopped in the state senate as a few Republicans joined all the Democrats in voting it down.

Here are some intelligent thoughts from Roger Ebert about mass shootings.

The Supreme Court is protecting access to mailed abortion pills, for now.  They may realize that Republicans are playing with fire here.  Access to abortion pills by mail provides a work-around for forced-birth laws, which women and girls in states with such laws can use fairly easily, so they still have de facto access to abortion, taking the issue off the front burner for most.  If that is really taken away and abortion becomes genuinely inaccessible in large parts of the country, then it will suddenly become a major issue in elections again, as voters suddenly feel an urgent need to resist a massive attack on personal freedom.

House Democrats, along with a couple of Republicans, are forcing a vote on Ukraine aid, bypassing Johnson's obstruction.

Whether today or in the 1930s, people believe what they want to believe.

Yet another new study -- from researchers at Microslop, no less -- affirms that "AI" cannot do most of what human employees do in office environments.  If they can ever get "AI" to actually work, the results may be more than they bargained for (note the choice of image for that post -- people are waking up to the fact that we're in a class war).

A groundswell of environmentalist opposition stopped a data center in northeastern Wisconsin.  The company cited a lack of support from local officials, but I'd bet those local officials took one look at how their voters were reacting and realized they'd better stop this thing if they wanted to keep their jobs.

This is not only tacky but flagrantly unconstitutional.  If you want a religious government, move to Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Independent House rep Kevin Kiley is trying to force a vote on banning midcycle redistricting.  What we really need is a ban on gerrymandering, but perhaps he felt that that had no chance of passing in today's grossly corrupted and anti-democratic political environment.

With anti-Semitism and hate for Israel on the rise, the Democratic party is an increasingly hostile place for Jewish politicians.

Ho Feng-Shan deserves to be remembered.  So does Irena Sendler.

Graduates who used "AI" at college are coming out with such bad work skills that some employers are actively avoiding them.  One company is even hiring humanities graduates instead -- even if their degrees are irrelevant to the job, they have intact critical thinking abilities.

A man whose daughter was murdered is harassed by a mob of thugs at a supposed cultural event.

"Someone there who didn't dare speak listened and heard you."  Speak the truth even when it seems useless.

Fewer and fewer Americans are training to become pastors or priests, suggesting a growing shortage in those fields in the future.

An "AI" bot was put in charge of managing a coffee shop, resulting in a series of ludicrous and money-losing decisions.

"There was no attempt to engage.  No appearance of curiosity.  No indication that they had come to listen.  They had come to perform."

Officials of a township in Michigan voted to reject a data center nearby, as residents wanted.  Then a billionaire who stood to gain sued the township and forced it to accept the data center.

This judge, a former chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic party, has left the party and re-registered as an independent due to the party's coddling of anti-Semitism.  The left-activist fringe doggedly refuses to acknowledge this problem, but that won't make it go away -- it just makes it worse.

A graduation speaker from the business world was shocked when students ferociously booed at her pro-"AI" sentiments.  The people pushing this shit have no clue how much everybody hates it.

The Trumpazoid in charge of the Department of Agriculture is harassing employees with religious propaganda.

The actual construction of data centers is running far behind industry claims.  This analysis concludes that most of the data center capacity allegedly being built is just smoke and mirrors and will never actually materialize.

Fetterman reminds us that he's "strongly pro-choice, pro-weed, pro-LGBT, pro-SNAP, pro-labor".  Anyone who thinks he's a de facto Republican is just nuts.

"It's like we have to learn all over why we separated prisons by sex to begin with."

The Trumpazoid candidate trying to primary Thomas Massie got caught clumsily faking a social media post with "AI".

UK prime minister Keir Starmer is as clueless about women as he is about most other things.

The leader of the UK Conservative party, at least, is unequivocal about the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping the country.

A "Sudeten German" group is planning a conference in Brno in Czechia, a hugely provocative move which has already caused international tension.  The expulsion of Sudeten Germans from then-Czechoslovakia happened in 1945, so any actual expellees, even if they were small children when it happened, would be at least eighty-one now.  Attempting to make an issue of this today implies a stance that refugee status is inheritable by descendants -- the exact same nonsense that keeps the fake "Palestinian refugee" problem ongoing in the Middle East, generations after the 1948 population exchange.  Europe is supposed to be more mature.

A new film documents the struggle to honor the memory of Samuel Paty, the French schoolteacher murdered by a Muslim thug in 2020 (I posted about the murder at the time).

Russian military trucks go kaboom.

Watch a Ukrainian drone with a shotgun destroy Russian drones in flight.

The Russian town of Engels is suffering a "fecal apocalypse" as its sewer system fails.  More here.

A Ukrainian drone plus a Russian ammunition stockpile equals a spectacular explosion.

See several more Russian targets destroyed (the video is below the first picture).

Modern weapons make any troop concentration suicidal.

A Russian POW describes how he is treated in Ukrainian captivity.

the Ukraine-Russia stalemate is now clearly shifting in Ukraine's favor.  Ukraine is now a formidable asset and ally to Europe, not a burden on its resources.

A former US ambassador to Russia assesses the growing weakness and instability of Putin's dictatorship.

Here is what aid to the Palestinian Authority (in the West Bank) is paying for.

A new report documents the atrocities of October 7 (link from commenter NickM).  Even the Nazis almost never reached such extremes of gleeful sadism.

Israel will take legal action against The New York Times over its scurrilous blood libels.  Here is some background.

As expected, the Iranian regime is using the ceasefire to import military equipment from Russia and rebuild its capacity for future aggression, while Hamas rearms and reasserts its control over Gaza.

India's prime minister Modi calls for more working from home and online meetings to minimize use of fossil fuels.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and how I lived my whole life without religion.

[Image at top:  Jerusalem]

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Note:  I am no longer linking to posts or articles which (a) support gerrymandering, by either party, for any reason, or suggest that gerrymandering can ever be justified or legitimate, or (b) oppose the overthrow of the Iranian regime.  Both of these positions are absolutely morally abhorrent to me.  Gerrymandering is a unique bipartisan attack on democracy in that it means the dominant party in a state, rather than the voters, determines the make-up of the state's Congressional delegation.  The only moral position is to relentlessly oppose every attempt at gerrymandering, in any state, by either party.  As for Iran, too many Americans are quite willing to see the regime there remain in power, subjecting ninety million people to murderous barbarity which those Americans would never tolerate or defend if it were happening here, because they think it's more important to score points in the petty game of US domestic politics.  I try to be tolerant of differing viewpoints, but some things cross a clear line into genuine evil.

I've made one exception in this round-up because it's a post that also covers many other things, and the blogger has always been supportive of me.  But I can't continue to do so going forward.  You have to draw the line somewhere.

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I'm seeing a lot of wingnuts around the net proclaiming that they refuse to take hantavirus seriously and will ignore any proposed precautions against it.  It's not clear yet how serious hantavirus will be, but if it turns out to be a major killer like covid, we'll see yet another demonstration of natural selection in action.

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She's talking about the UK, but the same applies here.  Nobody owes loyalty to a political party.  If the party acts against your interests or principles, then you have every right and reason to abandon it.

Who I am, part 3 -- the non-religious life

My two recent quasi-autobiographical posts (on why I'm not a politics blogger and my ancestry and culture) covered a lot but omitted a point which is unusual, at least for my generation -- growing up without religion.

(I dislike the word "atheist".  Any word ending in "-ist" implies some sort of belief system, and my point is that I lack any belief system in that category.  There is no inherent commonality between all people who don't have a religion, any more than there is between all people who don't believe the Earth is flat.)

It's common to run into non-religious bloggers, but most of them grew up with a religion and later left it, sometimes incurring a severe internal struggle in the process, and often by way of switching to a different religion first.  My experience was very different.  My parents immigrated from a country where religion was just not a big issue for most people, even back in the 1950s.  They were quite startled when Americans sometimes asked them questions like what church they attended (and this would have been in the New York City / Long Island area, not the deep South).  In the UK people did not bring up such things.

As I was growing up, my parents never tried to teach me religion, and I honestly didn't have any idea what it was for a long time.  I did have a child's book of Bible stories, but my parents never suggested that these were any different from the child's book of Aesop's fables which I also had.  They were just stories.  My parents never specifically avoided religion or tried to steer me away from it, either.  I can remember seeing Billy Graham on TV and suchlike.  They simply never made an issue of it one way or another.

My father had a background in science and engineering and, I think, became increasingly hostile to religion as he learned more about the history of science.  He had a special interest in the rebirth of science in the Renaissance, and how religion bitterly resisted the progress achieved by Copernicus, Galileo, and later Darwin, as well as fighting against science in countless other cases.  My mother never spontaneously showed any interest in the subject, though much later in life I think she was occasionally a little unnerved by how strongly anti-religion I became as an adult.  To her, it was simply not something people had strong feelings about.

When I went to university and started studying Middle Eastern history, of course, those gaps in my knowledge were rapidly filled in -- given the huge importance of religion in the history of that region, it was essential to understanding.  The emphasis was on Islam, the dominant religion there since the seventh century, although there was also some study of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity, all of which also originated in the Middle East and influenced it.  To this day, though, I have a more thorough understanding of Islamic theology and belief than of those of Christianity.

The idea of actually believing in any of the religions that I was studying never even occurred to me as an option.  My interest was purely anthropological, just as you could probably study ancient Odinism or Greek mythology for years and never think of "converting" to it.

As best I can remember, I have only been inside a church twice in my whole life.  When I was a student, a friend who was strongly Catholic invited me to the baptism ceremony of his new baby; later, when I visited Germany in 1984, I went inside the great Köln cathedral, purely as sightseeing.

Much later, I developed an odd feeling for several years that entering a church would be somehow contaminating, as if any structure where Christianity was practiced had a kind of miasma of evil tainting it.  Later still, I realized this was just more of the same superstition I disdained.  A building is just a building.

But the more I studied, both at the university and later, it was impossible to avoid seeing the immense harm done by religion over the centuries -- the subordination of women, the persecution of homosexuals and unbelievers, the suffocation of the great age of "Islamic science" (which was actually more of a revival of Hellenistic science under Islamic rule, but that's a whole other complex issue) by the re-assertion of strict Islam in the early twelfth century, and the long stagnation of the Middle East under Islamic dogma from the fourteenth century to modern times, just as Europe was embracing secularism and rebuilding its science and civilization.  Later, as I learned more about Greco-Roman civilization, I came to realize how Christianity had destroyed our true Western culture, taken something from us that can never be restored now.

I discovered Satanism in 1990.  Here at last was a philosophy that stood in no-compromise, no-holds-barred absolute opposition to Christianity and all its values, as opposed to the timid and mealy-mouthed stance of most of atheism at that time.  Satanism is not really a religion -- it is, as I think of it, to religion as medicine is to a disease.  It showed me that much of the poison of Christianity has soaked so deeply into our culture that even most atheists are still affected, not realizing that many of "their" values come from the religion they reject.  It is a tool for rooting out the deepest parts of the infection.

Satanism rejects the toxic concepts which are common not just to Christianity but to most religions -- the belief in some kind of higher power outside the self, the subordination of the individual to a higher purpose or plan, the whole idea that life takes its meaning from service to something outside oneself.  These, along with entirely poisonous teachings like "turn the other cheek" and "resist not evil", are obviously attitudes which masters would aspire to inculcate into their slaves, but they are antithetical to true, self-assertive freedom.

But that very rejection of external authority over the individual meant that Satanism could never be an organized movement with effective leadership, or even control who chose to identify with it.  By the early twenty-first century, the Satanist community (that isn't the right word for it, but I don't think there even is a right word) had become overrun with extreme-right politics and, to a lesser extent, infested with pedophiles -- a ludicrous inversion of its original philosophy.  At the same time, the rise of the New Atheist movement provided a new core of militant opposition to religion.  Around that time I ceased to consider myself a Satanist, though I still value the original philosophy.

My views on religion haven't changed since then, but I spend far less time thinking about it, except in terms of its strictly practical impact on the world, such as efforts to ban abortion here or the continuing subjugation of women in the Middle East.  I have an interest in pre-Christian European paganism, including practices such as Samhain and Walpurgisnacht, but purely as a connection to ancestral culture.  I'm certainly not entertaining any idea that the ancient Celtic or Germanic gods might actually exist.

To me, concepts like God, Heaven, Hell, and suchlike are in the same category as mermaids or unicorns -- it's impossible to prove absolutely that they don't exist, but the concept is so unlikely (and just plain silly) that it's not worth spending any time or mental energy on it.  I honestly have never felt any "God-shaped hole" or any such thing in my life.  If I hadn't grown up in a world where religion is an established thing, I really don't believe the very concept would ever have occurred to me.

For those interested in the modern intellectual revolt against religion, I can recommend The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, probably the most important book of the New Atheist movement, and Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an autobiography offering far more drama and extremes than mine.  These books have been inspirational to me in recent years.

[Please don't attempt defenses of religion in the comments.  A blog is not the place for debating such issues, I've already heard all the arguments many times, and I long ago lost any interest in that kind of debate anyway.  This post is for the same purpose as the earlier two -- purely informing readers about my background so they know what kind of person I am while they're reading my other posts.]

Truths and inspirations for 11 May 2026

If images are hard to see or read, right-click and open the link in a new tab for full-size version.

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

How could anyone possibly imagine this was an improvement?

I don't understand why some people make such an issue of age differences.  The longest and most successful relationship I've had was with a woman twelve years older than I was.

On the Civil Rights Act, in fact about two-thirds of the Democrats in each house of Congress voted for it, while about four-fifths of the Republicans did.  In general this image is true, though.

"Turn the other cheek" and "resist not evil" are teachings for slaves.  Satanism is a philosophy for free people.