18 January 2025

Link round-up for 18 January 2025

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

o o o o o

Cats hide, with varying degrees of success.

This penguin is bad at penguining.

Behold the works of not-very-bright people.

Ads were even more ridiculous in the old days.

They're gonna need a bigger boat.

I can fly!..... oops.

These cats have attitude.

Cartoons here, of a distinctly phallocentric variety.

It's a dog's life.

Admire the grace and artistry of this ice dancer.

There are enough black cats here that it feels like Halloween again.

There's something fishy about these stairways.

This Australian "generation gap" video is actually an ad, but it's a classic.

Quit while you're ahead.

Next time, just wait, idiot.

This balloon is over-inflated, so I'll let some air out.

Let's take a close look at lipstick.

See assholes get what they deserve.

I like the style of this vampire-and-werewolf romance.

Live your life your own way.  Don't waste it on false values.

Watch a bubble freeze in just one minute.

The sea is weird (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

See the unique beauty of the Shah Cheragh mosque in Shiraz, Iran.

On this occasion, Americans were good neighbors.

According to this assessment, a Pacific subduction-zone earthquake would kill and injure fewer than ten thousand people in Oregon's I-5 corridor (most of whose population is in the Portland area).  This seems astonishing since it's vastly lower than previous estimates I've seen, but it's based on this scenario from state governments and FEMA which seems authoritative.  I'll have to reconsider whether it's really necessary to move out of the area.  Both links are from Crazy Eddie.

India reaches another technological milestone, docking two satellites together in space.

In just the last five years, world-wide efforts against climate change have cut the expected level of warming in half.  There is still much more to do, but this is a huge achievement.

These rules for writing seem sensible to me.

Tips here on spotting fake "AI" images of knitting patterns.

An investigation of nineteenth-century sculpture uncovers an old story of squalor and degradation.

Solutions like this are not solutions.

Insanely-overpriced cars just aren't selling.

Beware of this phone scam that seems to be going around.

SponsorBlock is a Firefox add-on to block those sponsor message ads in YouTube videos that uBlock Origins doesn't catch.

Here's why you should return your shopping carts at the supermarket (JFC, some people drag ideology into everything).

Walgreens replaced the glass window doors of its refrigerators with ad-clogged "smart screens", and quickly found out it was a bad idea.

For people who feel stressed out because Trump won the election, most of this seems like good advice, especially #3.

This person should not be a judge.  How could any black defendant in front of her have any expectation of fair treatment?

BAFTA has nominated a man for best actress.

If your employer requires you to be "on call" when not at work, you could be owed a lot of money.

Nitwits who reject modern hygiene tend to quickly find out why we adopted it in the first place.

This is the mentality of the invader.

On global warming, the federal government will be AWOL for a while, so get involved on the state level.

The "bystander-intervention model" is the most effective at curbing harmful behavior.

It's important to keep talking about Luigi.

Here's how to handle fact-checking testimony when you're on a jury.

This asshole fiddling with a smartphone instead of paying attention to her job caused the death of a six-year-old girl.

A massive Border Patrol raid on illegal farm workers in California gives a foretaste of what may be coming under Trump.

The fact that Biden has been trying to ban TikTok, while Trump wants to save it, pretty much tells you what you need to know about the issue.

Evil people will always find a way to blame the Jews for everything, even the California fires.  Here's a response to that nonsense.

The US faces a shortage of doctors, and the doctors we do have are wasting more and more time on paperwork and insurance-company rules.

They sacrificed the children to protect a lie.

Political must-read of the week:  The Democratic party's elites erroneously refuse to consider "culture war" issues to be "real" issues, thus staying seriously out-of-step with mainstream voters.

This writer gets it -- the Democratic party needs to go full-on economic populist (though he doesn't use that term).  An economic bill of rights including a guaranteed right to housing, healthcare, and basic income is overwhelmingly supported by the public.

The FTC has found that UnitedHealth massively overcharged cancer patients for vital drugs.

Jack Smith's report on Trump is posted here.  Assessment here.

Dragging work-from-home employees back to the office forces them to waste hundreds of dollars a month and fosters stress and resentment.

Elon Musk has been caught in yet another scam.

1.39 trillion dollars.

Some Republicans want to withhold federal aid for California's fires unless the state changes policies they don't like.  Note that Canada and Mexico have sent us firefighting help without asking that Trump stop being an asshole to them in return.  And never forget that California massively subsidizes the red states.

Don't fall for this lie about California, which I've seen widely circulated.

Johnson Trump has removed the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who strongly supports Ukraine and has called out Russian influence over the Republican party.  That's probably one more vote lost for Johnson's agenda, and other Republicans are unhappy too.

Strengthening people's social connections can help save them from falling prey to conspiratardia.

A federal judge in Kentucky has restored Title IX protections for women's sports.

Getting the full Republican agenda through Congress is going to be damn near impossible.

Two Christian-owned companies are suing to make it harder to avoid HIV infection.  The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

Blogger Annie assesses Biden's farewell address.

"Censorship is authoritarian and it will always have more collateral damage than you can imagine."

Hypothesis here on the NYPD's handling of Mangione.

This assessment of Biden's presidency sees mostly a succession of missed opportunities.

Landlords are price-gouging in the wake of the Los Angeles fires -- likely breaking the law.

Americans in the know (and with enough cash) are scrambling to buy foreign-made goods now instead of later, to avoid the price increases Trump's tariffs will bring.

People are leaving states with forced-birth laws, which could lose as much as 1% of total population over five years.

Rubio understands China, but there's a risk that oligarchs with ties to the gangster-regime there may corrupt US foreign policy under Trump.

A doctor describes an experience with United Healthcare.

These days Steve Bannon seems to be talking more sense about Elon Musk than anyone else is.  Bannon is even calling for higher taxes on the rich.

Trump is aligning himself with the oligarchy -- as expected, it seems his populist talk was just talk.

JP Morgan Chase's return-to-office announcement drew such a harsh employee backlash that the management disabled comments on the article.  I'd bet a lot of their best people will quit.

The economy will turn bad during Trump's term.

The Bezos-owned, Trump-ass-kissing Washington Post seems to be in deep trouble.  At this point the country would be better off without it.  Online traffic is a fraction of what it was a few years ago.  Jennifer Rubin is the latest to leave, launching her own news site.  There are signs of a broader backlash against Trumpist billionaire ownership of the media.

The billionaire that Trump nominated for Treasury secretary opposes raising the minimum wage.

Canada is preparing to respond intelligently to possible Trump tariffs.

In the UK, the anti-immigration nationalist Reform party (called "far right" by the media and miscellaneous idiots) now has 25% support, almost tied with Labour and somewhat ahead of the Conservatives.

The British civil service is trying to reduce the "climate of fear" that has prevailed on trans ideology.

There's evidence of outright police corruption in the UK Muslim rape-gang scandal.  Evil multicuturalists wanted to bury the scandal in case it provoked "Islamophobia".  And why the hell was the government of Wales doing this a year ago?  Bizarre and disturbing.

In Germany, as in some US states, some male prison inmates are being housed in women's prisons -- and there, as here, there have inevitably been sexual assaults.

Evil will seize upon any excuse to minimize the Holocaust.

What a nice person.

Russia's military command-and-control system is crap and Putin keeps firing the best generals anyway.

Reminder:  When US and allied forces were in Afghanistan, Russia was offering a $200,000 bounty for every soldier killed.

Americans leaving TikTok in anticipation of a ban have been trying out RedNote, another Chinese social-media app.  This has allowed them to interact with Chinese RedNote users on a large scale, blowing a hole in the wall of information control the regime uses to restrict the thinking of its subjects.  Now the regime is considering segregating foreign users from interacting with Chinese to prevent this.  Totalitarians are always terrified of the free flow of ideas and information.

Young people in China are fleeing the rat race to "youth retirement villages".

Activists in the Congo and Europe, working together, have stopped an ecologically-dangerous oil-extraction project -- but the government may try again.

More links at Red State Blues and WAHF.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and a video on being alone.

o o o o o

How will Biden be remembered, long-term?  Certainly more positively than his current low approval ratings would suggest.  He has been very good at enacting policies that benefit the country, but not very good at communicating those policies and benefits to the voters.  The worst I could say of him is that he failed to grasp how massive the threat of wealth inequality and oligarchical power has grown since he entered politics, barely mentioning the issue until his farewell address.  He is a basically decent and honorable man who, in the end, was simply the wrong man for the time -- a Jimmy Carter in a time that cried out for a Luigi Mangione (or a thousand of them).

o o o o o

Expect major shifts toward military self-reliance by other democracies in the next few years.  One Trump term could be dismissed as a fluke; two shows that the risk of an isolationist, dictator-coddling president being elected is an ongoing reality about the US for now, making us a chronically unreliable ally.  I wouldn't be surprised to see any or all of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Poland, or Ukraine build an independent nuclear deterrent once that reality sinks in.

o o o o o

Even though the official mourning period for president Carter is not over, the flags in Washington DC will be back at full staff on Monday because Trump whined and bitched about them being at half staff during his inauguration.  It's a symbolic issue, but symbolism can tell you a lot.  Even when on the verge of returning to the most important political office in the world, Trump could not summon up an atom of respect or greatness or humility within himself.  What a petty, childish, squalid little man.

5 Comments:

Blogger Mary Kirkland said...

Earthquakes scare me. I grew up in California and in school we were hounded by teachers telling us to prepare for the 8.0 that everyone thought we were going to get there within a few years. But it didn't happen when they kept telling us it would. I hate to think of a big one anywhere near me.

Vampire and werewolf dating was fun. You already know I like those kinds of stories. lol

There are so many phone scams now. Email scams too.

18 January, 2025 10:39  
Blogger Ami said...

So much frustration and anger over the shitshow in politics. I hope you're right about how difficult it will be for the republican agenda to happen.

Regarding Biden's approval ratings. Who did they ask? I have never been asked. No one I know has ever been asked (as far as I know). Of course one can make statistics say anything they want by surveying the right people. Amazing how often we forget that.

18 January, 2025 10:44  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

Mary: I worry about them too -- I was in the Bay Area when the Loma Prieta quake happened. This one we're anticipating off the Oregon/Washington coast would be the worst in US history, but perhaps not as catastrophic as I'd been led to believe.

I thought the vampire and werewolf story was cute.

Ami: We'll have to see when they start trying to pass stuff in Congress. But I notice that Trump has been backing away from a lot of his main campaign promises.

Surveys and polls don't claim to talk to everybody. They only ask a very small sample of the population, then adjust the results to weight correctly for various demographic groups. They usually get it within a few percentage points of reality, though of course the few exceptions get a huge amount of attention. If polls didn't produce mostly fairly accurate results, political campaigns and the media wouldn't spend millions of dollars on them.

18 January, 2025 18:16  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am a conscientious cart returner. Even if I don’t need one, I’ll round up a couple of strays on my way in. That’s not about what a groovy guy I am, it’s about paying attention. Maybe saving that kid a little effort. Removing safety hazards. In my own little way, leaving a place better than it was when I got there.

19 January, 2025 17:45  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

Good for you. Small things matter. As the saying goes, he who is too big to do that small things is too small to do the big things.

20 January, 2025 01:03  

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