Link round-up for 9 August 2025

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

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Enjoy some space monster fart music.

Create a need, fulfill it immediately.

This vodka bottle label offers some extra detail.

Just dive from the boat..... oops.

Let me show you what skipping a stone looks like..... oops.

Hungriest kitten ever.

I suspect his car insurance doesn't cover this.

Appearances can be deceiving.

I have no idea what's going on here, but somebody should probably put a stop to it.

This is the Bosch parade in the Netherlands.

Here's a cool song in praise of lies.

Meet the bobbit worm, another abomination of the deep (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

See what bioluminescent microorganisms do to waves.

Read two very different stories of struggles for survival, both with an Antarctic setting.

Kids exposed to the internet younger than thirteen are at increased risk for a wide range of mental-health problems as they get older.

Whales are quietly starving as rising ocean temperatures damage their food sources.

Modern science stands ready to fight for the vital potato.

The world is on the verge of a breakthrough in the fight against global warming as new development shifts massively toward clean energy.  Yeah, the US government is pretty much AWOL on this, but it usually has been.  What matters is what the other 96% of the world is doing.

A giant iceberg is on the move in the southern Atlantic (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

A video of a robot successfully folding laundry went viral last week.  Of course, it was faked.

Even crafts hobbyists now have to do extra work to avoid "AI".

Here's a listing of art, writing, and social media sites by whether they're pro- or anti-"AI", and in what ways.  It's painful that DeviantArt has gone to shit -- not only is it drowning in "AI" stuff, but the censorship just keeps getting worse.  It used to be a really cool place.

Science education can prevent you from being fooled by many kinds of scams and nonsense.

Spot the difference.

If you tattoo yourself with an accursed symbol, you may suffer serious consequences.

When you listen, actually listen.

"Stop watching the news.  Get off line.  They make their money in negativity.  And start looking out your window.  Start existing where you are."

If you suddenly had the job of taking care of a bunch of kids, what questions would you ask?

Hackers can easily make ChatGPT reveal your personal information.

There is value in adapting to inconvenience.

In 1978 when US women had almost no financial independence, eight women in Colorado started their own bank to move things forward (this is true -- I looked it up).

Here's a historic photo from 1967.

Proton's use of "AI" is compromising its security.

No, that zoo in Denmark is not asking people to donate pets to feed its carnivores.  It's just another example of shitty machine translation.

Blogger Johnny Profane has just released his first book (on PDF), a collection of writing and art about the autistic experience.

Here's a post rather in the style of my "truths and inspirations" posts -- this blog also seems to do them regularly.  And here's a variegated image round-up.

An advantage of knowing French is that French news reporting about the US is more objective and less focused on whipping up outrage than the hopelessly polarized mess we get here.

Who was John Money?  (Not to be confused with Johnny Cash.)

Subsistence farming is a nightmare.  There are good reasons why rural people all over the world flock to cities.

"AI agents" blunder just as badly as chatbots, but the kind of tasks they are given makes the errors far more dangerous.  And here's something even scarier -- using "AI" in medical diagnoses.  Here's what happened to one guy who took nutrition advice from ChatGPT.

I don't usually care for politician nicknames, but this one is better than most.

Moviegoers rebelled after AMC threatened to show half an hour of ads before each movie.  The company is now considering backing down.

Stupidity has consequences.

Disney is getting worried about a possible public backlash against the use of "AI" in movies.

Germaine Greer has no more patience with all the bullshit.  What a breath of fresh air.

Blogger Bluzdude is retiring -- from a company apparently run by inept jackasses.

OpenAI just released GPT-5, the newest version of ChatGPT, and it's at least as bad as the previous ones (check that map out).  Even hard-core users are unimpressed.  So why did they bother?

What on Earth is he doing?  This behavior doesn't even look human.

A consensus is emerging that Trump got played by the various foreign governments he recently made trade deals with -- and that those deals amount to pretty much nothing.  The EU is even being pretty upfront about it.

For men in their mid-twenties, a college degree is of little or no help in getting a job.  I wonder if a lot of that is due to companies starting to use "AI" for clerical jobs rather than humans -- if so, it won't last, as every company that has tried that seems to realize it's a failure after a few months.

Here's one reason why marriage and home ownership have declined.

This was justifiable homicide.

There's a report that the Dalai Lama hung out with Epstein -- and his press office is not responding to questions.  And nobody should be surprised about this asshole being in that circle.

South Park's recent mockery of Trump is part of a proud American tradition.

"If the truth isn't appealing to them, they will seek an enforced and universal lie, and they will seek it delivered by a court."

This millionaire set out on a killing spree for thrills -- but one of his would-be victims turned the tables (link from Rade).

If you don't fight censorship of things you hate, it will be too late when they come for the things you like.

The credit-card companies are feeling the pressure -- don't let them dodge with lies.

Trump's toadies are having "very productive" meetings with Ghislaine Maxwell -- a sign that new bullshit and misdirection is on the way.

This Amazon driver delivered a little something extra.

"Jew hatred isn't rising because people are confused.  It's rising because people have a way to feel safe and righteous expressing it again."

Highly-recommended read of the week:  Some unorthodox ideas on architecture, beauty, and psychological tyranny.  I don't know if I really agree, but it's fascinating.

Learn about the work of Angie the ICE chaser.

Even though falling birth rates are a bad thing, they stem from a lot of good things.

The "AI" bubble is so huge that it's now propping up the US economy, offsetting the damage done by tariffs.  When it finally collapses, the resulting crash could be worse than the dot-com bust.

Federal agencies are re-hiring more and more of the workers DOGE fired -- notably the National Weather Service, after the Texas flood disaster.

While you're fussing over light bulbs and plastic bags for the sake of the environment, the parasite class is doing this.

The Coast Guard final report on the Titan sub implosion confirms what we already knew -- Stockton Rush was an arrogant, stupid, narcissistic asshole.  Probably most CEOs are in that mold, but he was in a position where the consequences were especially visible and dramatic.

Pornography has made sex into something miserable and exhausting.  Censorship is never the answer, but something needs to be done about this.

Sanity has scored a win at Kaiser Permanente, but don't give them too much credit.

Mark Zuckerberg specializes in "new" ideas that have already been tried and failed.

Two Republican senators are fighting to protect tax credits for clean energy.

Tesla's robotaxi launch was such a fiasco that investors are suing.

Official harassment of foreign visitors is killing tourism to the US, even though the US media are ignoring it.

A bipartisan Senate bill aims to prevent call center workers from being replaced with "AI" -- and to keep those jobs in the US.  This should be widely supported.  We all know how maddening it is struggling with one of those idiot robot voice systems on the phone.  Right now I'm on the verge of canceling one of my credit cards because the last time I called them it took forever to get to an actual person, and when I did he didn't know English well enough to understand what I was saying.

Tesla has a pattern of stiffing its vendors, even though it's owned by the richest man in the world.

A Mississippi judge issued a garbled ruling full of fake citations, almost certainly generated by "AI".

Some job seekers find they're being interviewed by chatbots instead of humans.

A Republican congresscritter's town hall in Nebraska erupts in booing of Republican policies and chants of "tax the rich!".

ICE is launching a recruiting drive, aiming to roughly double in size.

"Put simply, firing human workers has turned into a perverse point of pride among the C-suite class, a worrying new reality as executives continue to lay off thousands of workers while simultaneously making deep investments in AI tech."

Citizens in Kansas responded fast and vigorously when ICE raided two restaurants there (part of this is paywalled, but enough is visible to give you the story).

The Republican super-gerrymandering of Texas has a good chance of backfiring.

Elon Musk's new political party is dead in the water.

Western leaders clinging to the "Palestinian state" delusion are just repeating old mistakes.

Here's how a business which helps build low-cost houses in the US is being destroyed by tariffs.

The US Coast Guard abducted a Canadian fisherman who was almost certainly well within Canadian waters at the time.

The UK has a new terrorist group, and it's completely incoherent.

A British blogger examines the harms done by internet censorship.

In the last five years the UK has seen a huge shift in public opinion on trans ideology (click images to enlarge to readable size).  A new book documents the struggle.

The EU has granted refugee status to Isabella Cêpa, a Brazilian feminist threatened with 25 years in prison for refusing to pretend that a male politician is a woman.

The way the US carried out its bombing of Iran in June was calculated to send a message to Russia, and perhaps to China as well.

Ukraine hit this Russian oil refinery hard.

Think how desperate Russia must be to send men in this condition into battle.

What an asshole.  Good riddance.

War is Hell (warning:  a bit gruesome).

Israel is committing a serious crime in Gaza.

Even the UN admits that most aid trucks sent into Gaza are stopped and looted by mobs or by terrorists and never reach their intended destinations.

The West's moral confusion is Hamas's chief asset.

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

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and the Hiroshima bombing anniversary.

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I've had it with people who expect me to be running around yelling and screaming with my hair on fire 24/7 about Trump.  I've got a life to live.


Here's Brad Polumbo again, calling out teh crayzee -- this time in the form of Christian rap music:


Indians mock Trump after he called India a "dead economy":