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Boss cat.
They just want dinner, no matter where they have to sit.
His life is hanging by a..... sock.
Always keep your parrots clean.
A film character learns that he's been transported to the unimaginably distant future.
Housewives get by.
This bird asks the tough questions.
This French car commercial seems kind of over-the-top.
Art can be so vivid.
Set animals to music.
Australia has some dubious confections.
Why do ghosts say "boo"?
Must be a really cold day.
This cat is making observations on physics (link from Annie).
Find it in Ohio.
These are ghost apples.
They had to destroy the moss in order to save it.
Moby Dick is cosmic horror.
Lady M discovers some nicely creepy art. This is described as "AI", but the look of it suggests to me that there's some actual talent and work involved, not just typing prompts into a machine to make it generate an image. The artist's website doesn't discuss how the pictures are made. See also these oddities on an Australian beach.
"Do you ever dream of land?"
Here's why patients with long covid often react so badly to exercise.
Vaccines are our greatest tool for preventing death and suffering -- and there's more to come soon.
Japan's SLIM spacecraft has landed successfully on the Moon, but it apparently suffered a power-generation failure. Combined with the recent Artemis One failure, this is a reminder that our technology can't yet make long-range space flight as safe as people today (as opposed to 1969) would consider necessary for sending humans.
If you want to stay younger, walk more.
Whales are big.
Some good psychology graphics here.
These Christians seriously believe that a girl became "demonically oppressed" after swimming in a pool at a site formerly used for Satanic rituals. I can't find anything in this story to differentiate it from the crudest superstitions of primitive peoples.
This site has thirty gigabytes of obscure music from the eighties and nineties, available for download.
The Emmys exemplifies the determined irrelevance of modern awards shows.
Your home appliances should not be spying on you.
".....but you can't make me play along."
Tips here on getting your child's pictures off the internet -- should work with pictures of yourself as well.
There are alternatives to Google.
God wants you to eat poo-infused bread.
A lot of Tumblr is actually like this.
Suggestions here for dealing with attention-seeking narcissists in your environment.
Watching YouTube with an ad blocker may slow down your computer and make it overheat, though this time it's apparently not YouTube's fault. Supposedly this site and this site can help, but I have no idea how they work.
This person exists (scroll down to "got-no-skill"), and there are plenty more like him on Tumblr.
Several major stores are giving up on self-checkout.
They keep coming up with amazing new forms of stupidity.
Speaking of stupidity, Elon Musk's "cybertruck" is about to become a boat.
The experiences of men and women are not the same.
I hope my boss doesn't torture people, but.....
At age eighty-five, his great courage made him a hero to remember.
Work is so awful that "Sunday scaries" about returning to it the next day are a thing.
What did Martin Luther King Jr think about Zionism?
Here, starkly and simply, is what's at stake if we don't help Ukraine.
The public is strongly turning against schools' promotion of fake or gender-swapped pronouns.
Congress is considering regulations for facial-recognition technology, which has already led to several false arrests.
Who deserves credit for the legalization of same-sex marriage in the US?
It's important that atheists vote (see the comments too).
Behold the "progressive" left. But there are several quite different types of leftists.
The real threat to US democracy is militant Christianity. Trump is just their figurehead; if he did not exist, some other man or group of men would be playing that role.
Bill Maher is one of the most trusted media figures in the US -- good news since he usually offers straight talk without an ideological filter.
Why has Boeing gone so shitty?
Somehow it's no surprise that this guy turned out to be a pedo creep.
Measles is spreading in the US due to the plague of anti-vaccine idiocy.
Top-down, totalitarian ideology won't help poor people.
As in Ohio last year, Republicans in Missouri are trying to make it harder to pass an abortion-rights amendment.
These people exist. Because apparently a lot of schools don't teach real history any more.
The site SheWon, which tracks women athletes robbed of honors due to male participation in female sports, has a new page listing the men.
If you're going to have religious invocations at public meetings, you have to include other religions, not just your own.
A Nazi mob laid siege to a cancer hospital in New York because it had accepted a donation from an anti-Nazi billionaire.
A school in Massachusetts banned smartphones, and the benefits were huge.
Here's why there most probably won't be another January-6-style insurrection.
Both right-wing and left-wing radicals need to realize that the broad mass of people are moving on and leaving them behind.
Younger Americans aren't engaged with the world of work because they've seen how earlier generations were screwed over by the bosses.
Lucas Kunce, the economic-populist, labor-oriented Democrat who is challenging Josh Hawley this year, seems to be off to a good start.
Pro-Hamas rallies in the US evoke the legacy of the lynch-mob era.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, abortion in the US was common, legal, and generally accepted.
Don't be fooled -- the new Nazis are not the majority in the West. Not even close.
Here's why you shouldn't vote for the Greens.
Even if you leave Islam, Islam will not leave you.
Trump's relentless asshole behavior during the E Jean Carroll damages trial shows that he doesn't have enough self-control to run a lemonade stand, never mind be president again.
This is just flagrant racial discrimination. They're not even trying to disguise it.
To fix the declining birth rates which afflict so many countries, take care of the needs of parents.
Social Security is under attack again.
A sign of the times -- global WPATH membership has plummeted by two-thirds in just the last year.
Other countries are already preparing for the possibility of a second Trump presidency.
"Mainstream politicians must tackle these issues in a civilised way, or truly nasty characters will be propelled to power."
A Canadian global-warming denialist who blamed last year's wildfires on a government conspiracy has confessed to starting many of those fires himself.
84% of British people agree that women victims of sex-specific violence should have access to women-only support facilities, and yet those who speak in favor of such facilities face official hostility and harassment. What matters is the rights of victims, not woke histrionics.
Hundreds of innocent people were falsely convicted of stealing due to faulty accounting software, even though the company that produced it was aware of the glitches.
Christians in the UK will keep their "right" to harass and bully women near abortion clinics, due to interference in British internal affairs by a Europe-wide "court". Sounds like there's some unfinished business for the Brexiteers.
There's a new axis of misogynistic evil spreading across the world.
Jews in Britain are under attack as never before in modern times.
As the corrupt, Russia-aligned government of South Africa bizarrely accuses Israel of "genocide", Germany comes to the Jewish state's defense.
Europe is cracking down on Orbán's obstruction of aid to Ukraine.
Putin is threatening (and lying about) the Baltic nations. In fact, he can't tolerate democracy on Russia's borders.
There may be a profound evil behind the St Petersburg warehouse fire.
These Russian soldiers seem unimpressed with their new equipment.
Winter conditions in Russia are getting really bad.
Turkey and China are cutting banking ties with Russia rather than run afoul of Western sanctions.
Russians at an Arctic base engage in animal cruelty (disturbing story). I checked, and this was in 2015, but it really happened.
Iranian dissidents put up a banner in Tehran: "We stand with Israel".
Under the barbarism of theocracy, some women remain defiant.
Israel is preparing for the possibility that some women hostages held by Hamas will be pregnant from rape when they return.
This is what they want Israel to make peace with.
How will we know when we've dropped enough bombs on the Houthis?
India's religio-nationalist Modi government continues to push Hindu supremacy and attack minority religions.
China's birth rate fell in 2023, the seventh year in a row. Xi Jinping wants government officials (that is, boring people whom everybody hates) to "influence" the public back to more traditional values. Good luck with that.
Taiwan refuses to be intimidated by the Beijing regime's latest tantrum.
China's stock market has lost almost six trillion dollars in value since early 2021.
Stay the hell out of Thailand. You can get fifty years in prison for being rude about the king.
More links at WAHF and Fair and Unbalanced.
My own posts this week: some truths and inspirations, and religion and the authoritarian mind.
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 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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Great stories. Thanks for posting all of this. I never get to see anything because I just don't have the energy. I've been zapped by the Lupus/Fibromyalgia twins which makes it hard for me to do anything much less read and enjoy life. Other than that. I love reading your posts because it opens me to stuff I would otherwise miss. Thank you so freaking much.
ReplyDeleteThanks. That's what I hope to do -- give people the chance to see different ideas and perspectives.
ReplyDeleteWhales are huge, I can't believe people get that close to them. Whew.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many people including myself that refuse to use self check out because so many people have been falsely accused or prosecuted for stealing.
I have no problem with smartphones being banned in schools. That's the way it should have been from the beginning.
Republicans are always looking to cut social security first instead of looking at other things that could be cut.
You wouldn't catch me getting that close to a whale. And that's a humpback. Blue whales are twice as big.
ReplyDeleteI always use self-checkout because it's faster (the real cashiers always have lines), but that's a good point about being accused of stealing. Still, as long as I've got a receipt for everything, I don't see how they could press charges.
I wish smartphones could be banned in a lot of places. People are seriously addicted to them. It's ridiculous.
What we need to do about the deficit is to get taxes on the wealthy back up to where they were in the fifties and sixties, or at least back up to where they were in Reagan's time. Then we wouldn't have all this nonsense about cutting an already very threadbare social safety net.