Computer note (2)

The computer is fixed and back home.  Unfortunately today looks to be our first really hot day of the summer at 95°F or so (not as bad as the eastern part of the country just had, but very hot by local standards).  Bleargh.  Normal posting will resume tonight when it's cooler.

Computer note

My main computer is down.  I probably will not be able to get it fixed until Monday.  My ability to add posts or approve comments will be a bit limited until then.

Link round-up for 28 June 2025

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

o o o o o

This dog had to settle for the next best thing.

He really wanted to splash that guy -- and paid the price.

Here are some animals in the wrong places.

Let her just imagine the movie.

The plane is almost ready for take-off.

Cats are awesome.

Hey, he's one of our biggest customers.

Some odd design choices here.

But how do you turn it off?

I don't care what this guy's "actual job" is.  This is who he is.

We live in an age of uniquely stupid architectural ideas.

Don't get too close to that thing, it will suck you into a parallel world or something.

You don't need to be an animal to sound like one.

JFC the size of this bug.

Some colorful images here (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

This bird looks tired.

Flowers add a lot of color to life.

Crazy Eddie blog observed World Giraffe Day.

Pretty much everything in this video would kill you if you let it get near you.

Plant domestication caused as much change as animal domestication.

The UK is experimenting with technology to restore the lost ice to the north polar ice cap.

We're starting to find out what androgen blockers and estrogen do to males.

An experimental stem-cell treatment has freed some diabetics from the need for insulin injections.

A new weight-loss pill doesn't depend on suppressing the appetite.

The Trumpazoids have buggered up NASA so badly that the agency may never recover.

Colette Delawalla is fighting back against the Trumpist attacks on US science.

A claim has been circulating on the net that Canada has set up a gay suicide hotline for Americans after Trump defunded the US one.  This is not true -- get the actual facts here (found via SickoRicko).

Never let "AI" guide you through the wilds.

Here are some things you'll see traveling across the US.

This is how to deal with freeloaders.

Drone warfare takes various forms.

He is a well-qualified CEO.

Please just stop being silly.  Everybody's getting tired of it.

A successful YouTuber says the platform is manipulating its algorithm to suppress content it disapproves of.

Anthropic destroyed millions of books to create some garbage "AI" thing.  The article says there's no indication that any rare or valuable volumes were lost, but with destruction on such a scale there's no way to really know.

A group of bodybuilders in Moscow is helping crack down on illegal-parking assholes.

Rite-Aid is filing for bankruptcy again and will apparently go out of business.  I've been using them for years and now both the locations near me are closing.  It's a pain.

38% of UK women say they've been subjected to violent abuse during consensual sex (well, they didn't consent to the abuse), an effect of the disgusting degeneration of male sexuality under the influence of porn.

The DOJ is threatening Daily Kos.  You can contribute to their legal defense at that link.

Ignore the moan-groan-doom-gloom crowd on the environment.  If there's one group that's guaranteed to be wrong, it's them.

The number of female athletes who lose rightful wins due to males in their sports is not tiny as the apologists sometimes claim.  It's at least in the thousands.

A crane has collapsed at the SpaceX base where the latest Musk rocket explosion recently happened.  We're now hearing that debris from the explosion fell in Mexico, and killed some dolphins and sea turtles off the coast.

This is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen.

Fines need to be fair.  Scandinavia has figured it out.

Growing up atheist can be frightening.

It turns out there really are jobs Americans won't do.

The US Army Chorus sent Trump a message (this is from February).

Crates of food lie rotting in the streets as ICE raids ruin the produce market business in Los Angeles.

Citizen resistance thwarted an attempted ICE abduction, apparently in southern California.  Neighborhood defense groups are being organized all over the area.

Andrew Sullivan explains how the gay rights movement turned victory into disaster.  Since you can't view the comments at that link, here are some of them.

A West Virginia congressman has become obsessed with a bizarre and gruesome case of religious fetus fetishism.

It was the Republicans' gains among Latinos that made the decisive difference in the 2024 election.

Tesla's robotaxis were just unleashed on Austin TX, and are already revealed as a dangerous fiasco, with numerous scary incidents coming to light.  Meanwhile, the company's sales continue to decline.

The US has one of the world's highest incarceration rates, but that rate is now falling steeply and will continue to do so over the next decade.

DOGE is a failure by any standard.

There's a saying that "if there's one Nazi at your table, and the rest of you don't kick him out, it's a Nazi table".  Here is a case where this applies.

From 1975 to now, the bottom 90% of Americans have been underpaid by $79 trillion.  If workers had been fully paid for the value they create, the country today would be almost unimaginably different.

The Republican agenda will devastate rural America.

Extreme heat caused a street in Missouri to suddenly buckle upward, sending a car momentarily airborne.

A Marine veteran tells off the police.

55% of US voters now support Trump's bombing of Iran, but views on the subject are clearly very volatile.

Democrats need to be honest with leftists.

Kseniia Petrova has been released, but still faces trumped-up charges.

There's a case to be made for mandatory voting, especially when you see who's against it.

Big clients are abandoning law firms that appeased Trump in favor of those that stood up to him.

Rising temperatures are killing thousands of people worldwide -- and perhaps far more.

The wealth of the world's billionaires grew by six and a half trillion dollars over the last decade.  The wealth of the richest 1% grew by thirty-four trillion.

Anti-Semitism is a rising danger across the UK, and things are clearly getting worse in the US as well.

France helped intercept Iranian drones aimed at Israel.

In a frightening echo of its terrible past, Germany is persecuting people who criticize politicians or express forbidden opinions.

Attacks on Russian motorcycle troops illustrate the high precision of modern drones.  No need to waste a drone on this guy, though.

Israel is the Atlas of the West.  Cowardly European leaders expect it to do the hard work of defending against jihadism while they rhetorically stab it in the back.

Trump's interference in the Israel-Iran war may not have been as irrelevant as I first concluded.  It's the worst of both worlds -- the brief US strikes at a mere three targets did not "obliterate" those targets as Trump claimed, and had only negligible impact on the overall nuclear program compared with the far more widespread and effective attacks carried out by Israel over the previous twelve days.  But as Western interference has so often done in the past, Trump pressured Israel into stopping its onslaught before the job was finished, so he could claim the credit for a fatuous "ceasefire" which merely prevented Israel from further degrading the theocracy's military power or further weakening its tyranny over the Iranian people.  Thus this ceasefire increases the future danger to Israel and to the West.

Only democracy can truly end the Iranian nuclear threat.

This is what real toxic masculinity looks like.

More links at Red State Blues, WAHF, and Chop Wood Carry Water.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and the Israel-Iran war.

o o o o o

The last few days have evoked gloom and foreboding for me.  It's a feeling that has been growing since the shocking response of so many in the West to the October 7 attack on Israel, with the increasing spread of excuse-making for the genocidal jihadist "Palestinian" movement and the occasional appearance on left-leaning blogs of rhetoric and imagery worthy of Der Stürmer, along with the ever-more-numerous other cases of anti-Semitic violence and threats I've documented in these round-ups.  This week saw Trump force the Jewish state to leave its efforts to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat half-finished -- and saw the Democrats in New York City nominate for mayor a man who blamed Israel after October 7 and has embraced the slogan "globalize the intifada", an unambiguous call for mass violence against Jews, at a time when murderous anti-Semitic attacks are already happening all across the US.

It all adds up to something dark and horrible and deadly rising up again from the grim and blood-soaked past, something we thought we had crushed once and for all in 1945.  And hardly anyone on the left seems to even recognize the threat, let alone give it the attention it deserves.

Part of the reason why so many people in Germany before Hitler's rise to power failed to do more to stop the Nazis, was that they judged the communists to be a greater threat -- the communists did, after all, have a powerful foreign backer (the USSR).  Some even saw the Nazis as a useful bulwark against the communist menace.  No analogy is perfect, but it does seem that today the obsession with Trumpism (again backed by Russia) is similarly distracting much of the US left from the threat of the actual neo-Nazi movement infesting our campuses and activist groups and increasingly the left fringe of the Democratic party itself.  Trumpism is genuinely dangerous, just as communism was in pre-1933 Germany, but the pattern of fixating on it at the expense of confronting a true existential threat seems to be repeating itself.

o o o o o

There is somebody here who doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, and it ain't Netanyahu:


These people have more than a hundred nuclear weapons:


Stop the insanity:

The Israel-Iran war

Twelve days into the current hot war between Israel and Iran, a clearer picture is emerging, although the ultimate outcome remains murky.

Israel's priority, of course, was to degrade the Iranian nuclear program and other military capabilities as much as possible, to reduce future threats to itself.  It has had some success at this, not only destroying and damaging nuclear facilities and weapons stockpiles but also killing some nuclear scientists.  These airstrikes have been precisely targeted, with an eye to minimizing civilian casualties as Israel always does -- inevitably there have been some, but remarkably few for an attack of this scale.  The Iranian theocracy's response has been to fire missiles into Israel apparently more or less at random.  Most of these have been intercepted, and those that got through have mainly hit civilian areas, killing some people but doing no damage to Israel's military.

Of much greater long-term significance, Israel has also struck at many political targets, clearly aiming to weaken the regime's grip on Iran.  Netanyahu has always recognized the Iranian people as potential allies against the hated theocracy.  "Regime change" imposed from outside is probably impossible and would be unlikely to produce enduring or positive results if it happened, but if Israel can inflict serious damage on the theocracy's thugs and its sadistic machinery of enforcement, it can create a window of opportunity for organic change from within.

The most recent wave of attacks was clearly focused on this possibility.  Israel destroyed the gates of the notorious Evin Prison, and attacked various local headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards (see one such strike here) and of the Basij militia, the theocracy's famously brutal internal Gestapo force.  The intent is obviously to cripple the regime's ability to respond to a popular uprising, should one materialize.  The opposition is certainly capable of organizing one -- the 2009-2010 protest demonstrations in Iran were reported at the time as being the largest in the history of the world.

An important question now is whether Israel will be able to continue breaking down the regime's apparatus of repression.  Trump claimed yesterday that a "complete and total" ceasefire would soon take effect, implying that the West had pressured Israel into abandoning the job half-finished, as has so often happened in the past.  However, with Trump, one never knows what relation his blather bears to reality, if any.  ISW reported the following:

Senior Israeli defense officials told an Israeli Army Radio correspondent on June 23 that Israel will increase strikes on Iran in the coming days in order to rapidly achieve its war aims.  This report was published before Trump announced the Iran-Israel ceasefire.  Israel will start adhering to the Iran-Israel ceasefire at 12:00 PM ET on June 23.  The unspecified defense officials said that Israel seeks to fully achieve its objectives in Iran "within a few days."  Israel launched its air campaign on June 12 to "degrade, destroy, and remove [the] threat" of weaponization of the Iranian nuclear program.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on June 22 that Israel was "very, very close" to achieving these aims.  Israeli and Arab officials told the Wall Street Journal on June 23 that Israel intends to "get through" a list of Iranian military targets in the coming days.  Senior Israeli officials have emphasized that Israel would continue its air campaign if Iran attacks Israel or if Israel sees [Iran] is trying to reconstitute.

This leaves it unclear whether Israel seriously intends to abide by the ceasefire, but it certainly suggests that it believes more work remains to be done to minimize the military threat.  And Netanyahu is certainly aware that any progress achieved in reducing that threat will be only temporary as long as the theocracy remains in power.

ISW also reported:

There appear to be internal fissures within the Iranian regime over how to respond to the conflict with the United States and Israel.  Opposition media reported on June 21 that former moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani reportedly met with senior clerics in Qom in recent days to persuade them to pressure Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to concede to key US and Israeli demands..... Unspecified Iranian leaders have reportedly developed a contingency plan to govern Iran without Khamenei in the event that Khamenei is killed or informally sidelined..... The individuals have considered Rouhani for a "key role" in the leadership committee.  Some military officials involved in the plan have engaged Gulf countries to try to gain support for such political change in Iran.

The best outcome of all would be a peaceful transition to democracy, which would spare the country the bloodshed likely to accompany a violent overthrow of the regime.  Nothing in the above report suggests that regime insiders are considering facilitating such a thing, yet.  But if mass demonstrations do materialize, moderates within the theocracy might be willing to make concessions and negotiate with the people rather than resorting to a crackdown as in the past.  Any increase in Rouhani's influence is certainly a positive sign.  And as for "supreme leader" Khamenei, he is 86 and his mental acuity is questionable.  It's high time for him to be "informally sidelined".

The stakes here are incredibly high.  The theocracy is a brutal, medieval regime whose treatment of women, gays, and personal freedom in general makes the most extreme US fundamentalists look like flaming liberals in comparison.  It and its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere are the main drivers of religious fanaticism and violence in the Middle East today.  Judging by their long and variegated history of activism and resistance, the Iranian people are much more politically sophisticated and aware than, say, the Russian people (or than a lot of Americans, frankly).  Fewer than half of them are even Muslim today.  It's hard to imagine them accepting some ill-conceived "regime change" imposed by the US, or anything short of real democracy.  A democratic Iran would transform the entire regional situation, probably eventually aligning with Israel and the West, or at worst becoming a non-aligned but non-aggressive power like India.

As the war unfolded, I feared that Trump would come blundering in with some massive indiscriminate attack and kill a lot of civilians, thus destroying the chance for positive change by triggering a wave of anti-Western outrage.  So far, at least, that hasn't happened.  Trump has bombed a few nuclear targets, but not attacked population centers.  Despite his bluster, it appears that the targets were damaged but far from "totally obliterated", and Trump's own officials admit they don't know yet how effective the attacks were, even at Fordow which was the main target.  The report linked above notes (scroll down) that Israel has bombed Fordow again since the US attack, showing that they don't consider it to have been "obliterated".  In short, the US intrusion into the war was a brief and almost irrelevant sideshow, just the usual Trumpian sound and fury signifying very little.  Hopefully, so it will remain.

I'll be watching the situation in Iran closely, with anxious but hopeful eyes.

Truths and inspirations for 23 June 2025

If something's hard to see or read, click to enlarge.

[For the link round-up, click here.]

Yes.
Dead.

Made by Pliny.

Made by Rad.

Never just say "Iran" when you actually mean the ruling theocracy.  Always insist on a sharp distinction between the nation and the regime.

Nice framing, but notice that even among under-29s, far more say "morally wrong" than "morally acceptable".  And among 30-49s, only men are equally split.

The use of the word "Nazi" to refer to anything that doesn't have hatred for Jews at its core, is a wilful and perverted lie.

"AI" isn't just harmless stupidity, it's actively malignant.