Link round-up for 18 December 2022

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

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Her back-up singer stole the show.

A manly man goes grocery shopping.

Tighten those nuts!

Dogs suffer through Christmas.

He almost made the delivery.

Time for a few Christmas cartoons.

Snow is not water.

An exciting suggestion, but not really right for kids.

Here's a video history of Haunted Mansion gingerbread houses, more suited to Creepmas than Christmas.

Great bike stunt..... oops.

He 3D-printed his own gun..... oops.

Berate, harangue, denounce, reprimand.....

It's clean, pure water out in nature.

Learn the saga of the moose dropping festival.

Cute Christmas ad here.

Mexico is a colorful place.

You'll regret accepting his help.

Quit teasing the cats, dude.

Quit confusing the snake, dude.

Serves you right for being mean to the dog, dude.

What if a time traveler tried to save Jesus?

Wide range of interesting images here.

Satan rightfully owns a small piece of land in Finland.

Hear some Pashtun traditional music.

This is a brief flight after World War I.

Keep these plants away from your cat.

Help Ukraine via these verified charities.

Help Iranians bypass internet censorship.

It's now obsolete.

A book on the significance of wine (!) in the Nazi occupation of France exemplifies how good storytelling can bring history to life.

Who needs aliens when we have whatever the hell this is.

Compare the colossal kippers of the ocean.

This giant octopus seems to like the camera.

This a forced discharge of thunderclouds (the projectile is trailing an anchored wire to connect the cloud to the ground).

See the effect of a tornado on houses.

Peru has a boiling river.

See a hurricane nine hundred million miles away.

It is possible to train butterflies, to an extent.

A radical new genetic treatment has cured a 13-year-old girl of terminal leukemia.

British scientists have rejuvenated skin cells, making them thirty years younger.  The same methods should work on other cell types.

Systems for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will play a role in defeating global warming.  Here's what they might look like.

In the US alone, the covid vaccines have saved 3,200,000 lives and prevented 18,500,000 hospitalizations.

Don't rob yourself of a good life (found via SilverAppleQueen).

This is why I hate winter.

Self-publishing at Amazon can involve technical problems.

The person who wrote this exists.  Note that it was posted just three days ago, after the FTX meltdown, after the crypto collapse was well under way.  The level of delusion is matched only by the torrent of panicky insults aimed at anyone who might not get with the program.

Here's a work-around for those websites that won't let you view them if you're using an ad blocker.

Here's a site you can use to upload videos and share them.  They claim they don't censor based on content type, so long as it's legal.

Shaw Kenawe takes a look at those Trump NFT "trading cards".  Some people who bought them can't find them.

The meat industry is suing a small Wisconsin town which is trying to do something about the dangerous filth and pollution the industry inflicts on local people.

There aren't really red or blue states.

Republican and Democratic senators work together to ban TikTok, the Chinese regime's global spyware platform.

Here is a petition to demand that Biden issue an executive order extending paid sick leave to railway workers who have been forbidden to go on strike for it.  It's supported by Daily Kos and some other substantial groups, so I hope it will get some traction.  (Background on the issue here and here.)  500 labor historians have condemned the betrayal of the workers by Biden and Congress (found via Angry Bear), and kudos to Rashida Tlaib for urging him to act.  Yes, he can do it.

Lack of paid sick time is only part of how railway workers have been pushed to the brink.  Prohibiting strikes institutionalizes exploitation.

The US is the only rich country with no across-the-board government guarantee of paid sick time.  Here's how a civilized country handles the issue.

Democrats' abandonment of workers has enabled Republicans to win over growing numbers of working-class voters -- and no, not only white ones.

This is the Keystone oil spill seen from the air.

The good guys are winning the culture war.

You are not hearing the voice of God.

Green Eagle blog checks in with the wingnutosphere -- yep, crazy as ever.

If the power goes off in Texas again, don't get nasty.  Just don't.

Forced-birth fanatics are hypocritical and cruel.

The headline is fake, but 23 dead monkeys is too many.  Petition here to stop Elon Musk's cruel and pointless experiments.  The development of brain-computer interfacing is important, but it will be achieved by actual scientists, not by some posturing billionaire so delusional he thinks humans can colonize Mars.

Elsewhere in the elonmuskosphere, Twitter has stopped paying its bills, even office rent, and is apparently considering not paying severance to former employees.  And Musk has provoked a campaign of harassment against a former executive.

Starbucks workers are on strike against management's union-busting behavior.

This is not healthcare.

Here's what the Hunter Biden laptop thing is really about.

We need to take a broad look at how to protect working-class rights and incomes in an age of increasing automation.

It's not just Christianity -- religions in general are apocalyptic and morbid.

Almost everybody dislikes one part or another of the Bill of Rights -- which is exactly why it's so necessary.

How reliable is US support for Ukraine?

Religion poisons everything, even a relationship with a daughter's family.

DeSantis attacks science for political points, pandering to the anti-vax nutbars.

Labels don't tell us as much about a person as we think.

A single Catholic diocese is sitting on the names of hundreds of priests credibly accused of child sexual abuse.

The evil Fed continues its war on American workers, even though inflation is already way down.

Imposing a work requirement for the child tax credit serves no possible purpose except shitting on poor people for the sheer hell of it.

This is what a leader sounds like.

They are men of God.

Forced-birthers get mad that they can't, well, force more births.

Here's why we need ex-Muslim Awareness Month.

He wrote a letter to his teenage self.

Senator Jon Tester suggests he's open to a ban on cryptocurrency.

Blah, blah, blah, if you want motivated employees, just let them work from home and pay them better.

Here's a clear timeline of Trump and his stolen classified documents, and the specific laws he apparently broke.

But they keep telling us this never happens!

A steadily growing share of younger voters are going Republican.

Christians in the UK claim persecution on the flimsiest of grounds.

JK Rowling is funding an entirely women-run support center for sex-crime victims in Edinburgh.  Predictably, some people aren't happy.

Nurses in the UK go on strike against an intransigent government.

The implosion of the Church of England is largely due to its own reactionary policies.

A Norwegian artist is facing a possible prison term just for saying the equivalent of 2+2=4.  Americans, be grateful for the First Amendment.

A mob of men attacked attendees at a feminist meeting in Germany, including kicking a pregnant woman.

Greece is now getting more electricity from renewables than from fossil fuels.

The Ukraine war is establishing the basis for future close cooperation between the US and eastern Europe.

It's extremely unlikely that Belarus will join Putin's war.

Such is the fate of Russian conscripts.

War in Ukraine is a very comprehensive site on the war, with detailed news, background info, and pictures (found via Annie Asks You).

Time examines women's leadership of the Iranian uprising.

It's the Islamic Republic of Murder (found via Hackwhackers).

The Iranian theocracy has been kicked off the UN panel on women's rights.  Why the hell was it ever there in the first place?

See the reality of the World Cup.

Your tax dollars support murderous Saudi aggression in Yemen.

The Taliban have truly taken Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages.

There's a serious debate in South Korea about whether the country should acquire its own nuclear weapons.  Over 70% of the public supports the idea.

Japan is planning a huge military build-up including new fighter jets, hypersonic missiles, armed drones, cruise missiles, and other long-range weapons.  The main motive is to counter rising threats from China and North Korea, but the Trump era also showed that the US is not as reliable a protector as Japan and other countries had assumed. At some point the possibility of a Japanese nuclear deterrent will surely have to be considered.

More links at Angry Bear, WAHF, and Fair and Unbalanced.

My own posts this week:  the world we live in in images, a ridiculous general, and a look at Saturn's moon Enceladus.

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'Tis the season -- for the professionally-offended snowflakes to start bitching and moaning every time somebody says "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas".  It's not enough for their own holiday to be included, all others must be excluded.  Since December has no holidays meaningful to me at all, I suppose I could take theatrical offense at either greeting -- but I prefer to go by intentions.  If people mean well, I'm OK with it.  One wishes our touchy Christianists would do the same.

Today marks seventeen days since railway workers were robbed of their right to strike for paid sick leave.  Issue the executive order, Biden!