Link round-up for 4 January 2025

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

o o o o o

Have some "AI"-generated Hanukkah illustrations.

This is called being a bad loser.

Luigi Mangione, sex symbol (NSFW).

Small boats and extremely heavy objects are a bad combination.

Cats take charge.

Best New Year headline ever.

Do not use this man's method for starting a car.

This vacuum cleaner billboard is a bit scary.

Early Quakers had awesome names.

She's eager to try on her costume.

If you ever need to blow up a horse, the US Forest Service can help.

Get yourself a new hairstyle easily.

It's a world of careless people.

Ethiopian gals get around.

OK, I'm stumped.  I have no clue what to make of this one or what to say about it (NSFW).

See Japan's dinosaur-crazed district.

Nice table.

Our region is home to these beauteous shrooms.

Riad Sattouf's new novel focuses on reunion with a long-lost brother with whom he no longer shared even a common language.

Star Trek anticipated "AI" half a century ago.

Meet a terrifying monster that sounds like a machine gun, and all its creepy relatives.

Catch the wave!

It took a lot of hard work to read this book.

Comprehensive advice here on how to protect your computer.  Most of this stuff seems obvious, but apparently to a lot of people it isn't.

The value of scientific discoveries is often hard to anticipate.

Bird flu is sweeping through zoos, showing that it can already infect a wide range of animals.

If the US fails to control H5N1 and a global pandemic results, the world will rightly blame the US, just as China was rightly blamed for failing to contain covid.

2024 was the hottest year on record, marked by an intensification of extreme-weather events such as hurricanes.

People who grew up in the time before most vaccines recognize their value.

Weight-loss drugs are starting to beat the obesity epidemic, but they're too expensive for most people.

You never know who will turn out to be a Taylor Swift fan.

Somebody is using "AI" to rip off AO3 fanfics for profit.

If you read AO3, here's how to filter out "AI"-generated stuff.

Tremble at the horrors of socialism (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

South Koreans apparently know who Elon Musk is.

Behold the creation of man.

The Eras tour boosted the economies of entire cities.

Buying physical DVDs provides permanent, unmediated, uncensored access to movies and shows, unlike streaming services which may make films unavailable or censor them (link from Ami).  Yes, streaming costs less, but you don't own anything.  One source I use and recommend is DVD Lady, which carries a huge number of old, obscure, and foreign movies on DVD, including uncensored versions of some that would freak out our modern pearl-clutching sensitivitards.

Facebook is about to get even worse.

Don't buy a Tesla.

Watch out for language that reveals medical quackery.

Esme's Cloud (yes! she's back!) and Annie Asks You welcome 2025, with some trepidation.  Silverapplequeen and Cas d'intérêt are a bit more optimistic.  Bluebird of Bitterness doesn't put much stock in resolutions.

An appeals court has struck down net neutrality, opening the way for ISPs to further shittyize the internet.  Only Congress can fix this now, and don't hold your breath for that to happen with Republicans in charge.

Most people can't "reduce stress".

Medical quackery is dangerous for animals as well as humans.

Evil ideologies can be defeated by courageous people who persist in the face of persecution.

You could get an ad blocker, or.....

Many billionaires have built survival bunkers in preparation for an apocalypse, but it's all rather silly.

These people are so stupid they don't even understand what they're being stupid about.

Never forget or forgive the lies and gaslighting.

The best way to protect our online privacy would be to ban targeted advertising, thus removing most of the incentive to spy on people.

Cultures can and do regress.

Three of the world's most prominent atheists have left the Freedom from Religion Foundation as it sinks into woke conformity-think.

Chris Barker has just posted his annual "Sgt Pepper" picture for 2024, showing prominent people who died during the year.  I don't know how I missed the death of Donald Sutherland!  But including "American democracy" is just stupid posturing.

Women should not have to deal with creepy men stalking them at work.

Most of the South now requires a VPN to access Pornhub, but the Supreme Court may soon intervene.

In 2024 "AI" gave us a wide range of glitches, gibberish, spyware, bad advice (such as telling people to eat rocks), corporate communication blunders, gruesomely-bizarre pictures, robots with guns, and herds of mysteriously-honking cars.  Here's the "rat genitalia" picture that attracted so much attention.

Doctors are now testing "AI" to help diagnose and treat patients, with ludicrous results.  I shudder to think what will happen if they use this junk to do language translation in a medical context.

Most of the editorial board of this evolutionary science journal has resigned en masse.  They cited several grievances, but a major one was that the journal had introduced "AI" into the editing process without warning, garbling papers submitted for publication and requiring escalated human oversight to correct all the errors the "AI" introduced.

Based on what has come out so far, the man who blew up that Tesla in Las Vegas appears to have been ideologically befuddled and a Musk supporter, meaning his act was not intended as part of the class war.  The New Orleans mass murderer was an Islamic extremist who had dreamed of joining Dâ'ish; such people kill simply because killing is what they do.

Look who's not paying any taxes.

Homelessness rose 18% in the US in 2024, as politicians talked and talked and talked and talked while rents kept going up.

The revolution continues.

Religious people -- here's why your efforts to convert atheists usually fall flat.

Daily Kos apparently allows articles "written" by "AI" to appear on its site.  Be aware that anything that appears there might be junk unless it's clearly the work of a real writer.

Words matter -- never concede.

The FBI has caught a man with a huge stockpile of guns and explosives in Virginia.

Hertz is purging electric vehicles from its rental-car inventory.

A female former prison inmate in Washington state is suing, alleging that she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a male prisoner forced on her as a cellmate, while authorities did nothing.

Apple's "Siri" device has recorded numerous private conversations "between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on."  Apple has settled a class-action suit, but victims will apparently get only twenty dollars per device!

This is not freedom.  Neither is this.

They charged her $275,296.47 to die.

Why is male educational achievement declining?

You're not helping mentally-ill people by pretending to believe their delusions.

Tech workers are starting to unionize in the face of return-to-office mandates and "AI" threats to jobs.

UHC is still at it.

Unisex toilets in schools and public places are a serious threat to safety.

This report claims the oligarchy is manipulating the justice system to get the harshest possible charges against Luigi Mangione.  But it may backfire.

Focus groups highlight what's gone wrong with the Democrats -- too elitist, obsessed with diversitardia, not willing to fight hard on class issues like higher taxes on the wealthy.

"They were really all just being nice."

Steadily losing both attendees and money, churches across the US are struggling to stay open, and in many cases giving up and closing.

Biden has blocked the sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel, a win for the United Steelworkers union.

Newspeak drives away voters who understand reality.

Under oligarch-controlled health insurance, a hand is not medically necessary.

No, you cannot just move to another country if you don't like it here.

JK Rowling is changing the course of history by tearing down the taboo on challenging woke lunacy.

"Over the last 40 years, by contrast, the size of the economy has more than doubled again, but the earnings of the typical American have barely budged (adjusted for inflation). Most of the gains have gone to the top."

This senator is on the right track on how the Democrats can win back working-class voters -- go all-out on economic populism, and drop the boutique culture-war nonsense that disgusts and alienates normal people.  But it will take guts for the party to declare all-out war on the billionaires to whose donations it has become addicted.  This guy, on the other hand, has it disastrously wrong, advocating that Democrats should stop trying to fix Republican disasters and allow preventable suffering of innocent people on a huge scale in hopes that Republicans will be blamed.  Any elected official who thus betrayed his duty to the people would deserve to be dragged out of office immediately and severely punished.

Republicans have already cut IRS funding, which will make it easier for billionaires to dodge taxes and harder for the average person to get tax help.

69% of Americans blame the US healthcare industry for the UHC CEO shooting.

Your regulations are written in blood.

This is becoming a truly sick society.  Leave the goddamn kids out of your disgusting crap.

The Luigi Mangione "perp walk" is just one more example of the police acting as the parasite class's tool of class warfare.

Atheists are more politically engaged than any religious group.

Oligarch greed becomes an atrocity when it targets healthcare (found via Angry Bear).

Biden is being hailed as "the best president for Indian country in my lifetime".

The decline in global birth rates poses a potential threat to women's freedom.

A British human-rights group is suing over police policy that allows male officers to strip-search female detainees.

UK universities are infested with people who don't understand what universities are for.  It's probably almost as bad in the US.

A piece of paper doesn't change reality.

The king of the Netherlands begs Jews not to flee the country, but still manages to bungle the appeal.

Mexico, our largest trading partner, is evaluating options for retaliation if Trump goes ahead with his planned economic warfare.

A Russian blogger denounces the corrosive effects of Putin's policies on Russian society.

The Iranian theocracy is weaker than ever before in its history.  Strong concerted action by Israel, the US, and the Iranian people could bring it down.

Don't forget Afghan women.  The Taliban have banned women from studying medicine, so in the future there will be no women doctors.  Some Afghan provinces prohibit male doctors from treating women.  Some countries have condemned Talbian barbarism, but much more needs to be done.

Women's universities in South Korea are the scene of protests against going co-ed -- but some men are responding with harassment and threats.

Chinese military technology is such crap that even the Russians are shocked.  Chinese weapons exports are declining as customers realize they're getting rubbish.  It's an indicator of how China would perform in an all-out war against the US and Japan over Taiwan.

The Chinese gangster-regime bitches at the Philippines for preparing to defend itself; the Philippines tells them to fuck off.

My own posts this week:  the two most important stories of 2024, some truths and inspirations, and dawning class awareness on the right.

o o o o o

I had quite a surge in page views in the second half of December, which is odd since I would have thought people were more preoccupied with the holidays and on the internet less.  Did any other bloggers notice the same?

o o o o o

My wish for 2025:  Total victory to Israel and Ukraine, and the fall of the bloody-handed gangster-regimes in Tehran and Moscow.

o o o o o

There are people I know read these round-ups who continue to claim, on their own blogs, that they don't understand why trans ideology is a threat.  They must be working very, very hard to avoid knowing.  The problems, and public awareness of them, won't go away just because someone refuses to read or talk about them.

o o o o o

The House Republicans sadly failed to deliver the entertaining speaker vote fiasco we hoped for, but remember that (a) the flaming nutballs clearly had no hope of actually getting someone other than Johnson, and (b) they had a huge incentive to avoid looking utterly ridiculous like they did in the earlier 15-round vote.  When it's time to actually pass legislation, the nutballs are much more likely to dig in and gum things up.  Johnson will again need to negotiate with the Democrats to get anything done -- and that means making concessions.

o o o o o

The tone-deaf left's reaction to the recent eruption of anti-oligarch fury on the right wing over immigration illustrates why they are so good at losing.  The morons are taking a plague-on-both-your-houses stance, treating the billionaires and their newly-aware critics as merely two sides in a "MAGA civil war", both equally worthy of derision.  A smart left would be reaching out to the disgruntled right-wingers, making a pitch to them on the basis of support for American workers against the wealthy.  But the left's activists and opinion leaders now have such an atrophied class consciousness that they barely qualify to be called "left" at all.  This was a huge opportunity that has been utterly missed.

Update:  Bernie Sanders does get it, at least to this extent.  When you see Laura Loomer praising Sanders, you know things are changing.