Link round-up for 3 December 2023

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

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Just put your arm around her.

I shall now push down this wall..... oops.

Signs of the times, indeed.

Some people even cheat at musical chairs.

No problem here after all -- or maybe there is (slightly NSFW).

What a relief, to finally finish a tough job.

Update some old stories for modern times.

Time to unload the garbage truck.

"It's the only way to fly!"

Welcome to the modern university.

Do not let whatever the hell this is into your house.  Or anywhere.

Far Corner Café blog has started its online advent calendar for the year.

Well, that's a way to get people interested in emergency preparedness.

Sometimes being profound is just a waste of time.

Best to stay inside.

Aside from everything else, the Barbie movie had some really good music.

Antarctica is unbearable.

Here's a way to remove a tight ring.

Blogger Annie reposts some cute animal videos from Twitter before its anticipated disappearance.

The Marvels and Wish are the latest in Disney's endless string of flops.  After so many woke, preachy, mediocre movies, Disney seems to have irredeemably budlighted its brand.

It's not just movies -- woke books being pushed by ideology-addled publishers are also flopping.  The public just doesn't want this stuff.

Bigfoot isn't a mystery.

This architecture is a mystery.

The building of the Eiffel Tower provoked a vigorous debate at the time.

Solar power farms can take many forms.

Covid caused a huge spike in premature births -- but the vaccines soon returned the rate to normal.

Beware of wild animals that seem in distress or too friendly -- they probably have rabies and you are in terrible danger if they get near you.

Following the stunning success of Ingenuity, NASA is designing an improved helicopter for future Mars missions.

A lot of data that people store on "the cloud" is mysteriously vanishing.  FFS just buy a flash drive.

Dogs all across the US are falling prey to a mysterious respiratory infection.

You can lengthen your life by several years just by eating better (found via Miss Cellania).

Here's an online tool for annotating images.  I have not tried using it.  Links to more tools are along the top edge of the screen.

A quarter-century ago, some people foresaw the current shittyization of the internet.

YouTube really is getting more and more petty (more here).  Using the internet without an ad-blocker isn't just annoying, it's dangerous.  That last link also has a weird story of YouTube customer service.

Blogger Burr Deming continues to recover from the October attack on him.

Tesla opens up whole new vistas of things for Elon Musk to be wrong about.  And the "cybertruck" is a huge step backward technologically.  It's typical of his whole history.

Sports Illustrated reportedly used "AI" to generate fake articles -- and fake authors to attribute them to, complete with fake pictures and bios.

Victoria's Secret faces a backlash after apologizing for trying to protect customers when a man insisted on using a women's changing room.

Several stores will soon get rid of self-checkout.  This is annoying.  I usually use self-checkout just because it's faster -- there are rarely lines to wait in, unlike with the real cashiers.

They're all just too old.

This hero doesn't wear a cape.

Elon Musk to advertisers:  "Go fuck yourself".  Investors are now abandoning Tesla in disgust at his behavior.

Some people go to absurd extremes over their appearance, even though in many cases it's counterproductive.

If you have an elderly relative with declining mental acuity, you always need to be on the lookout for scammers.

Left-leaning women don't want relationships with Trumpanzee men, and the Washington Post has plenty of wrong-headed things to say about it.

Another witch-hunt cancellation has failed ignominiously.

Social media want you angry and agitated.  Don't fall for it.

In our ugly and debased culture of fuck this, fuck that, fuck you, and the upraised middle finger, you can make a difference with just a few words.

What if the holy book is true?

The far right and far left have one thing in common.

I refuse to be lectured by arrogant, wealthy hypocrites.

Without a solid constitutional guarantee of secularism, religious extremists will use democracy to attack freedom (see comments too).

The Oakland CA city council is a cesspit of hate and bigotry, unable to condemn Hamas's atrocities while supporting a ceasefire which would benefit the terrorists.

Monica Lewinsky -- yes, Monica Lewinsky -- has some sensible and moderate ideas for amendments to fix problems time has revealed in the Constitution.  Good luck on getting two-thirds of the House and Senate plus the legislatures of 38 states to approve them, though.

A screaming "pro-Palestinian" mob stormed a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony and children's choir in Ypsilanti MI, ruining the event and terrorizing children.

This is not a pro-worker administration.  If it were, it would be going all-out to support the workers' struggle to preserve and expand work-from-home.

It has been common for medical students, as part of their training, to perform penetrative exams on unconscious patients who have not given consent or even been informed.  Pennsylvania has now banned the practice.

This is what "decolonization" looks like.

Texas Democrat James Talarico, himself a Christian, eloquently rebukes an effort to force schools to display the Ten Commandments.

Reject any ideology that justifies or hides sexual abuse.

Local celebrities help Democrats win local elections.  Perhaps it can work on a national scale.

Elon Musk's visit to Israel after endorsing anti-Semitic tweets is just meaningless PR.

"Jew-hatred chic" is naïve as well as evil.

A short-staffed Walgreens allegedly required a cashier to work in its pharmacy, work for which she had no proper qualifications and was at risk of making dangerous mistakes.

Friends who sympathize with Hamas aren't worth keeping.

A new ruling will make it harder to ban TikTok.

"These boys are 'Gavin's Golden Boys.'  They are allowed to do whatever they want and girls are acceptable collateral damage."

California has been a hotbed of letting men into women's sports and shelters, putting male sex criminals in women's prisons, and all the rest of it.  In just the last three years, public opinion in the state has shifted massively against such policies as people see the consequences.  Give it a few more years, and support for trans ideology will be as radioactive at the ballot box as support for the KKK.

The federal DOE is finally taking the issue of boys in girls' spaces seriously, opening an investigation into an incident in a Wisconsin school shower.

Meta is accused of illegally harvesting data from millions of minors and exposing them to harmful content.

The Senate is obstructing efforts to subpoena Jeffrey Epstein's flight logs, which would unmask powerful pedophiles.  We deserve to know exactly whom they're protecting.

This winter will not be a good time for anti-vaxers.

Here's the real issue with "hate speech" laws.

A new study of attitudes toward same-sex marriage shows majority support in some surprising places, such as India and south-east Asia.  In the US, 63% are supportive, while in most Western countries it's three-quarters or higher.

The far left has unmasked itself as anti-Semitic and anti-reality.  The broader left must recognize them as fundamentally enemies.

Private gun ownership in the US is at a record high, with 52% of voters saying that they or someone in their household owns a gun.

Discussion here on why Americans are angry and feeling squeezed by high prices despite inflation being low.

US senators were stunned after being shown 43 minutes of footage documenting the Hamas atrocities of October 7 -- but Israel is still refusing to make this evidence public for the whole world to see, which desperately and urgently needs to happen.  I'm already seeing, right here in the blogosphere, efforts to deny or minimize some of the crimes -- a new Holocaust denialism in the making.  Show the world the truth, all of it, in all its horror.

The MRFF has finally gotten the VA to abandon the perversion of its POW/MIA tables to promote Christian supremacy.

This is indoctrination of children, plain and simple.

The media desperately want the recent shooting of three Palestinian-Americans in Vermont to be a hate crime.

Growing numbers of US women are going to Mexico for abortions.

No, no, no.  I don't want Tuberville blocking military promotions due to unrelated policy disputes, and I don't want a Democrat doing it either.

The Biden administration is cracking down on states' misuse of anti-poverty funds.

"Ultimately, we are alone."  Terrible words.

Aid for Ukraine is the best defense program for the US, and most of the money allocated is actually being spent within the US.

At least two Catholic priests in the Bay Area remain in active ministry despite being credibly accused of child molestation.  The Catholic archdiocese of San Francisco alone has faced more than five hundred lawsuits from alleged victims of priestly sexual abuse.

Democratic leaders are standing firm against the insane calls for an extended ceasefire to allow Hamas to rearm.

Several US cities prohibit businesses from refusing payment in cash.

A New York kosher restaurant is one of the latest targets of America's slow-motion Kristallnacht.

Fifty days after the October 7 attack, the UN group "UN Women" finally got around to posting a statement condemning Hamas's horrific sexual violence -- then almost immediately deleted it.  The whole UN has ignored the atrocities.  This affirms my long-held view that the UN is so irredeemably corrupt that the US should leave it and kick it out of New York.

This is not only bonkers, it will actually kill people.

Even in death, women are not safe from sex abuse.

The BBC is infested with anti-Semites, and management has done little to rein them in.

More than a hundred thousand people attended a rally for Israel in London.  Don't be fooled -- the new Nazis are noisy and violent but they're not the majority.

The mayor of Paris is getting off Twitter.

Six minors are going on trial in Paris for their roles in the murder of Samuel Paty (I posted about the murder here).

The election of Georgia Meloni as prime minister of Italy a year ago triggered a frenzy of wolf-crying from those who always shriek "far right" about any European politician who actually listens to the voters on immigration and Islamism.  Her actual record in office has been that of a fairly moderate populist.  Keep this in mind when listening to all the hysteria about Geert Wilders.

Zelensky acknowledges that Ukraine's counter-offensive did not achieve the desired results.

The Putin regime exhorts Russian women to have more children to offset all the men killed off by the pointless war of aggression against Ukraine.

Ukrainian saboteurs have attacked and damaged a railway tunnel and bridge in Siberia, thousands of miles from Ukraine, cutting a vital link for bringing weapons from China and North Korea to the war zone.

Popular support for the war is plummeting in Russia.

Emily is safe now.

In important ways, Hamas is actually worse than the original Nazis.

The consequences of the the October 7 attack continue to reverberate.  Hamas has no regrets for the atrocities, and promises more to come.

This October 7 hostage tried to escape Hamas.  They killed him.

Afghan women, all their hopes for the future crushed by Taliban repression, struggle with depression and suicidal feelings.

Some employers in Maharashtra state in India require women to get hysterectomies in order to be hired.

The New York assassination plot cannot be allowed to derail US-India relations, but the US must severely punish those involved, and make it clear that it will not tolerate such behavior.

In South Korea, perverted creeps are attacking women with bodily fluids.

The Christian minority in Laos is suffering widespread persecution and harassment.  Buddhism is not better than other religions when it comes to persecuting non-believers.

More links at WAHF, Elder of Ziyon, and Angry Bear.

My posts this week:  an image round-up, and a language comparison.

If any links in this round-up are paywalled or require a log-in to view, please let me know so I can avoid linking to that site in the future.

To suggest an item for inclusion in the next link round-up, you can use the e-mail address on the left in my profile, or if you don't want to use e-mail, leave it in a comment to the previous link round-up.

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