Link round-up for 17 March 2024

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

o o o o o

Cats, the agents of destruction.

The town quickly succumbed to the devastating invasion.

The art reveals the inner dreams of the artist.

A wheelbarrow is available -- might as well use it.

Don't mess with this cat.

A crypto-bro's efforts to look wealthy didn't work out too well.

It's good to take a nice warm shower.

How many of these do you remember?

Please monitor the fish doorbell.

This cosplayer goes all out.

Everyone will watch TV, if the program is tailored to their interests.

Interesting concept, but just imagine getting run over by this thing.

When the sign says "beware of falling rocks", believe it.

Celebrate bad movies.

Sartre wasn't so good at transcending stuff.

Cemeteries bear the marks of the living.

He left his prison, but the prison did not leave him.

The Bible treats humans as fundamentally distinct from animals, but many ancient Greek and Roman writers recognized the intelligence of some animals.

Los Angeles is "spongy".

There are now far more giant sequoia trees growing in the UK than in California where they originated.

Animals are more dangerous than you think.

To protect the health of your gut microbiome, eat properly.

There's a statistical correlation between higher intelligence and being non-religious, and the reasons aren't difficult to find.

There are a lot more sick people now than there used to be, and that's a good thing.

Slate is not a trustworthy source of information.

Utah is now only 42% Mormon.  Growing numbers of gays, liberals, and open-minded skeptics are leaving the Mormon religion, and most don't join any other religion.  At that link, note point 6 -- the data show that the commonest reason people leave is that they no longer believe Mormonism's truth claims, but the surveyor refuses to accept this, even though it's the most-cited reason why people leave any religion.  They have to believe that people leave for irrational emotional reasons.

Should the government give millions of dollars to rich people because they don't understand how sand works?

"AI" chatbots are programmed to refuse questions that their designers disapprove of, but there's a fairly easy way to circumvent to block.

More details here on WordPress scheme to sell the work of its bloggers to be plagiarized by "AI" (found via Silverapplequeen).

Amid Boeing's safety woes, China is proffering a competing airliner of its own.  I wouldn't trust Chinese engineering either, though.

Trump wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.  He is also now the main obstacle to getting the border under control.

Internet misinformation is a serious health hazard.

Here's yet another fundie authoritarian boys' club with a "NO GURLS ALOWED" sign in front of the clubhouse.

The cruelty is the point.

Lady Atheist blog observes a special birthday.

After a new Texas law forced PornHub to shut down access in the state, searches for VPNs surged there.

This T-shirt image looks like a scary threat of violence against religion.  Actually, it's being promoted by a fundie university.

Hackers and other miscreants can read your "private" "AI"-assistant chats, even if they're encrypted.

March 12 was Detrans Awareness Day.

If you have a recent-model car, it's probably spying on you.

What can be done about the disappearance of local news media?

Darwinfish 2 assesses the State of the Union speech.

The recent surge in anti-Semitism is massive, but too many non-Jews refuse to recognize it.

Gay is a sexual orientation.  LGBTQ+ is a fad.

It's Donald Trump's party now.

Titania McGrath was created as a parody, but reality has already caught up.

Housing costs are a major burden on most Americans, but it sounds as if the government will be offering more excuses than action.

Ben Shapiro is an asshole.

Don't be intimidated by Trump's cheap-thug-style threats.  The actual evidence is that violence on a substantial scale is unlikely.

The WPATH leaks have definitively exposed the cruel abomination of "gender-affirming care".  The end of the long madness is drawing near.

Religio-wingnuts throw a fit after Kamala Harris becomes the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion facility.

There's a powerful and dangerous cult operating in our society.

What do puberty blockers do to boys?

"Boycott Israel" campaigns are part of the return of the eradicationist mentality toward Jews.

The cryptocurrency scam is now working to defeat two Democratic senators who want to bring it to heel.

This sniveling fucktard can STFU.  Stoltenberg schools him on reality.

WDI unveils a Desisted and Detransitioned Women's Bill of Rights.

The DOJ has opened a criminal investigation into the January Boeing door-plug blowout (found via Crazy Eddie).  Just this week, another weird malfunction on a Boeing plane caused fifty injuries.

Biden had some words for Putin during the State of the Union speech.

Often it's those born outside the West who understand it most clearly.

The governor of Massachusetts is proposing a general pardon for misdemeanor marijuana convictions.

The head of the UAW testified before Congress, and for a brief moment this country's real central problem was put in the spotlight.

Biden's proposed budget offers genuine progress, a step toward raising taxes on the wealthy toward more reasonable levels and returning their plundered wealth to the working people who created it.

Some ruined lives can never be restored.

The failure to stand with Israeli victims of Hamas is a fundamental betrayal by "progressives" of their own claimed principles.  And anti-Semitism is now primarily a disease of the left.

Nobody is marching for the dead Muslims of the Yemen or Syria conflicts, who far outnumber the victims in Gaza -- because those deaths don't present an opportunity to blame the Jews.

Some wingnuts have trouble with plain English.

DeJoy is still casting his miasma over the Postal Service.

Marine Le Pen appears to be turning against Putin over Ukraine.

As gender-identity nonsense takes root in Spain, soldiers learn how to game the system.

Russia's air defenses seem helpless to stop Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia's oil industry.

180,000 women marched in Mexico City to protest a wave of femicidal violence.

Here's what's really going on in the Gaza Strip.

In Turkey, thousands of women marched to demand an end to the wave of domestic violence and murder sweeping the country -- despite the religio-nationalist Erdoğan government's ban on the protests.

India's new citizenship act explicitly discriminates against Muslims in immigration.  In neighboring Pakistan, non-Muslims are viciously persecuted.

The North Korean regime is conscripting people into forced labor for construction.  The plain straightforward word for this is "slavery".

More links at WAHF and Fair and Unbalanced.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and a question for pet owners.

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.

o o o o o

Blogspot's stat counter has been acting up again.  It's telling me my blog is getting sudden surges of page views which can't actually be real because they're coming from implausible places.  When the counter tells me I'm getting more views from Singapore or Hong Kong than from the entire United States, obviously that's not real.  I don't know whether it's some kind of bot wave or just a glitch in the counter, but it's annoying because it means I have no accurate way of knowing how many views I'm actually getting.