Link round-up for 30 August 2025

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

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When a toddler falls down while playing, he always runs to mommy.

If you go to Iceland, be sure to visit scenic Gjaldskylda.

I don't recommend this hairstyle.

Wrong fish.

Hey, quit pestering my friend.

Cooling down makes things get hotter (slightly NSFW).

This guy must have really annoyed a basketball player.

Worst bike path ever.

Check out the cartoons of John Atkinson.

Sic semper.....

Here's why you shouldn't ship a fully-loaded truck on a raft.

I guess whatever country this is doesn't have very strict vehicle inspections.

You think you have potholes?  China has potholes.

Revenant Manor is a treasury of Halloween imagery.

No eldritch kitchen is complete without witch jars.

Skeleton Key blog will return late Sunday to start posting Halloween-y goodness.

Johnny Profane is holding another live online reading at 12:45 eastern tomorrow.

Remarkable sunset photo here from Sydney, Australia.

Great pictures here of the Faroe islands (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

See a skilled fisherman at work.

London is planting orchards to help cool the city during heat waves.

In countries like India where even the normal climate is hot, global warming is already becoming deadly.

RFK Jr is shutting down mRNA research that showed promise of giving us a universal cancer vaccine, among other benefits.

Male and female are defined by gametes, not by identity or even by chromosomes.

The Nature Conservancy is partnering with local villages in Borneo to protect millions of acres of orangutan habitat.

I've seen this fake picture of the Martian sky in several places.  Don't be fooled.

It took just a single insight from geology for this blogger to abandon religion.

YouTube will soon add shitty, "AI"-generated translations of the audio on new videos, unless the uploader turns it off.  It's already shittyizing videos with "AI" visual "enhancement" which apparently cannot be turned off.

If you use Gmail, be especially alert for scams or suspicious account activity.

OpenAI scans users' ChatGPT conversations and reports some material to the police.

Here are two web browsers to avoid using.

Watch out for this elaborate scam mostly targeting the elderly.

Here are some options for websites that disable right-click.

This kind of place is not safe for a dog.

In 1987 the FBI investigated a Texas man for selling military secrets to..... oh, just go read it, you'd never believe me if I said it.

Someday we may start using "AI" for important things.  For now, just let it explain biology.

Here's a subtle pwning of a pretentious corporate asshole, a type of which we've all encountered a few.

Germany entertains a crank legal crusade against ad-blockers.

Keep your #@!&% phone turned off while driving.

TypePad, a blog hosting site similar to Blogspot or WordPress, will shut down at the end of September, taking all its hosted blogs down with it.  All bloggers, keep back-ups of your important posts.

There's no point in technology that only does things we don't want it to do and doesn't even do them properly.

Forget the logo -- Cracker Barrel's interior design changes are hideous.

It's not so difficult to avoid online ID requirements.

Here's how to do a boycott that will actually matter.

People don't want a future infested with "smart" whatever, constantly spying on them and sticking its nose in.

Attention corporations:  stop sending people around to bug the hell out of everybody.  It is not winning you any goodwill.

No one should feel obligated to respect such absurd nonsense (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

If you ignore your girlfriend/boyfriend to fiddle with your smartphone, it will serve you right when they dump you for somebody respectful.

Here's an example of the shenanigans with imaginary money and fake numbers that are propping up "AI" companies.

Now that birth-control pills are available without a prescription in the US (as has long been the case in many other countries), they're being much more widely used, including by people who rarely used effective birth control before.

The fast-food industry, too, has been embracing "AI" only to have it fail miserably.

This person exists.

Using "AI" for business purposes could get you sued because nearly everything it produces is based on plagiarism of copyrighted material.

Wild animals are dangerous, not picturesque.  And that goes double for anything that lives in the sea.

Who is Nadeen Ayoub?

What a shitty guy.

"AI" is giving people misinformation about specials at restaurants, much to the aggravation of the owners.

Blogger Rade considers the possibility that Trump is dying.

While big retailers and businesses continue to abandon crime-infested downtown Portland, small shops hang on in hopes of a recovery -- and spend money on security.

The Klarna effect set the pattern for tech employment in the US, and apparently in China too.  Coinbase's CEO seems especially eager to rush his company into the tar pit.

The world is full of atrocities that don't fit any narrative.

The MSM are pushing so much bullshit about Gaza that it would be a superhuman job to set the record straight, but this is a start.

Police are finally starting to crack down on the mob street takeovers that have been terrorizing some parts of Portland, mostly poorer and minority areas.  In one case the mob attacked police with firecrackers.

Big win in Utah:  A state judge has struck down the legislature's gerrymandered Congressional map and reinstated the redistricting reforms enacted by referendum in 2018.  It seems bizarre that the legislature ever thought it could just override a law the voters had passed.

".....and it's almost always from people who care more about moral purity than actual change."

If you dream of violent revolution, read this.

The tech-bro elite is flaming-batshit crazy and business people are idiots and weirdos.  Here are some more idiots.

Ghislaine Maxwell says that she and Epstein did know Elon Musk.  To be fair, of course, don't forget that she'll probably say anything if she thinks it would make a pardon from Trump more likely.

Yes, there is systematic media bias.

ICE agents are being demoralized by public outrage over their abuses.  Keep up the pressure.

"You bitches used to know your place."

Why do Democrats fail at media messaging?  It's mostly incompetence and control-freakery.

Juries aren't buying the bullshit.

When Trump started cutting CDC grants, many blue states and cities successfully sued to keep theirs, while red states just accepted the cuts.  This is making the red states' already inferior health outcomes even worse.

Some of the MSM have described the Minneapolis school shooter as a woman.  He wasn't, but he seems to have been a Jew-hater and general crackpot.

The "AI" industry has invested $100 million in PACs to support pro- "AI" candidates for Congress next year.

The latest mob assault and stabbing in downtown Portland illustrates how the area remains intolerably dangerous, while "activists" bitch and whine about the police taking normal precautions while arresting the thugs.

Here's more on the potential backfiring of the Texas gerrymander -- it relies on Hispanic support for Republicans remaining at the level of 2024, which may not happen.

On the other hand, even with everything that's happening, a steady flow of voters are abandoning the Democratic party, describing it as "out of touch", "woke", and "weak".

Tiny houses are becoming popular, but they involve a lot of problems.

Here are some examples of how our institutional guardrails are holding firm against Trump's power grabs.

If blue states choose to play hardball, they can do a lot to resist.

About a third of the US is already in a recession or close to it.

The failure of DOGE is a refutation of an extraordinarily stupid view of government.

Never forget what these monsters did.  Someday, they must be held accountable.

It is interesting that Mamdani attributes his success to "you have a relentless focus on an economic agenda..... and you turn the political instinct from lecturing to listening" -- which is exactly what I've been saying for years the Democrats need to do.

There's a lot of conservative opposition to Trump's recent ludicrously unconstitutional attempt to ban flag-burning.

"Way to make it all about you, bro."

Blue states are exploring ways to reduce federal influence.

The MSM are touting SpaceX's rocket test this week as a success, due to its unusual failure to explode, but part of it did explode, even though the damage didn't cause it to crash.  Each one of SpaceX's string of dud launches has cost it hundreds of millions of dollars.

Colorado Democrats are trying to make it illegal to sue "AI" companies.

This elderly woman defied Trump's harassment for four years.

A group of men followed, filmed, and harassed these girls and violently assaulted one of them -- and police arrested one of the victims.  It is madness.  This happened in Scotland; Americans must never give up the Second Amendment.

Australia's largest bank used "AI" as a smokescreen to move hundreds of jobs to India.

Tesla sales in Europe are still plummeting.

Russians left mines under this bridge.  Ukrainians found them.

This is a gas-processing plant at Ust-Luga near St Petersburg, a port critical to Russia's "shadow fleet" fuel exports.  The port will run at half capacity for the next month.

Watch Ukrainian drones destroy a Russian mine-laying vehicle and munitions transport.

India has agreed to slightly reduce its funding of Russian atrocities in Ukraine via oil imports.  It's a start.

More links at Red State Blues and WAHF.

My posts this week:  a video of imagery from the New Horizons probe, an image round-up, and the empire of shriveled souls.

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This round-up is my five-thousandth post on this blog.

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I recently saw Elon Musk's net worth cited as $400 billion.  Just a few months ago it was $470 billion.  Keep up the pressure on Tesla and his other enterprises -- it's working.

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Once again it's necessary to point out that, no, the presence of large numbers of guns is not what causes violent crime.  If it were, then the places with the most guns would have the most violent crime, which is not the case.  The places with the most privately-owned guns are the US, the Arabian peninsula, and a few central and northern European countries, all of which have very low levels of violent crime by global standards.  The highest violent crime rates are in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Russia, where private gun ownership is relatively rare.  It's not the guns, it's culture.

The US has had a lot of privately-owned guns throughout its whole history, but mass shootings are mostly a phenomenon of the last few decades.  Other factors are what make the difference.

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An organization worth supporting:


Democrats, you need to listen to this guy, because what you're doing isn't working: