Link round-up for 18 October 2025

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

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Behold the works of stupid people.

This Halloween guardian skeleton is very effective.

Yikes!  A bug!

It's the hottest new sound.

This nutball is really scared of Halloween.

It's a baptism, in its way.

Kids will be kids, and sometimes a pain in the ass.

This is what's known as bad timing.

Catch the wave!

They don't make 'em like this any more.

See some more great windows from the Skeleton Craze at Manitou Springs CO.  And here is another set.

It's not pink season.

Some people go big with Halloween decorations.

I've heard of hot wheels, but.....

Look at how small these things are.

Autism is not a single condition and doesn't have a single cause -- that is, we have probably been conflating two or more distinct conditions together under one name (found via Miss Cellania).

You can greatly reduce your cancer risk through diet.

The fight against global warming continues, despite Trump.

Dr Toru Miyazaki hopes to have his planned treatment to double the lifespan of cats available to the public by 2027.

These four vaccines reduce your risk of dementia, since the diseases they help prevent can accelerate brain deterioration.

Scientists in Spain and China have developed a nanoparticle treatment that reverses Alzheimer's disease in mice.  It has not yet been tested on humans.

NASA's Trumpified leadership is gutting the workforce at JPL, the lab responsible for the spectacularly successful Mars rovers.

We're beginning to understand how long covid works.

Beavers are being restored to tribal lands in California where they lived generations ago, improving the local water resources.

An eight-hour work day is still too long.

Mexico has a deep-rooted skeleton culture, some of it disquieting.

Don't depend on pre-modern "traditional" treatments to achieve an abortion.

If you have an Android phone, beware of this hack that can steal your information from it.

It's easy to get this chatbot to betray its user's private information.  You should assume other types of chatbot have similar vulnerabilities.

Don't drink this.

If you're going to one of the No Kings events today, here are some tips about your phone.  Blogger Annie has a message for those who can't participate but want to show their support.  Portland's long-suffering downtown shops anticipate a boost in business from our city's rally.

Amazon "smart" devices are escalating the number of ads they impose on users, prompting many people to stop using them or return them.

Microsoft is turning Windows 11 into an "AI"-clogged nightmare.  Time to start thinking about Linux?

History is full of stupid mistakes (link from Rade).

"Stop mentioning facts we don't like!"

Long-term structural issues should not distract from the need to solve immediate problems.

Some people can "find" fascist undertones in absolutely anything (the image at right here shows what the necklace looks like).  If it has indeed been withdrawn, those that were already sold will skyrocket in value.

OpenAI is spending money that doesn't exist to build data centers it can't run to make a product that doesn't work and loses them money every time a customer uses it.  This kind of nonsense is now basically propping up the whole stock market.

Liars will lie.  It's just in their nature.

Trump has gotten the covid and flu vaccinations that so many of his followers refuse.

Overworked, exhausted Americans are using PTO to catch up on rest rather than going on vacations.

Here's a reminder about healthcare.

Almost two-thirds of Americans want to raise taxes on the rich to fix the deficit.  There's far less support for cutting spending.

Even Fox News refused to go along with the Trumpazoids' latest effort to censor news reporting from the Pentagon.  Many journalists handed in their badges and walked out rather than submit.

"AI" companies are resorting to "junk bonds" -- high-risk debt -- to keep on inflating the bubble, as financial experts grow increasingly alarmed.  Rates of adoption of "AI" by real companies are starting to drop.

Harvard says that most of the federal research funding Trump took away has been restored.  Trump is still trying to cancel it.

Dumbest lawyer ever.  Who would hire him after this?

"Women speaking up is a 'privilege' and men get to decide when that privilege is withdrawn."

A conservative blogger wrestles with the crimes of the Catholic Church.  Here are some more of those crimes (the Mortara case is a classic, but I didn't know they were still doing this in the twentieth century).

The "Young Republicans" organization is a vomitous cesspit of racists, anti-Semites, and misogynistic perverts.  Vance is disgustingly trying to downplay and excuse this.  I think his words here will become a real issue if he runs for president in 2028.  Oh, and those people aren't kids.

Age-verification laws are now requiring people to upload identifying information onto verification sites where it can be hacked and stolen.  The first such hacking has already happened (scroll down, there's a lot of blank space at the top for some reason).  Of course, one could argue that those who comply with age-verification rules instead of using a VPN are "obeying in advance" and deserve whatever consequences they suffer as a result.

Must-read of the week:  Why is Trump so determined to prevent the release of the Epstein files?

"AI" data centers' demand for electricity is driving a resurgence of coal burning in the US.  Even so, the last coal plant in New England has just shut down, three years ahead of schedule.

Those increasingly-unpopular data centers are likely to become an election issue.

Today's libertarian ideology is all about being an anti-social asshole.

In Michigan, 32,000 home care workers have voted to unionize.

Mamdani is a profoundly evil man.

Measles is spreading rapidly through South Carolina counties with high rates of religious exemptions from vaccination.

The haters are still out there yelling and screaming.

"AI" is eating the world alive.

Islam drags societies backward.

The resistance should be silly.

Meet the famous Portland protest frog, Seth Todd.  (Should that be Seth Toad?)  Our main city newspaper rebukes Trump.

Scientists are learning by experience that "AI" doesn't work.

What if president Truman had been as dumb as today's radicals?

The Elections Board of Greenville county SC is flagrantly violating Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution.

At least a hundred and seventy US citizens have been detained by immigration agents during the current deportation drive.

Billionaires are preparing for the end of society.  In fact, society should be preparing for the end of billionaires.  If there were to be a general civilizational collapse (there won't be), I suspect a lot of people would make it their business to hunt down these assholes in their bunkers or whatever and do away with them.  They have no idea how much their worthless lives depend on institutions holding back the wrath of the masses they're exploiting.

Almost three weeks into the shutdown, unpaid air traffic controllers are exhausted and angry at being used as political pawns.  Congress is still just posturing and stonewalling instead of trying to solve the problem; speaker Johnson won't even bring the House back into regular session because he's frightened of Adelita Grijalva being sworn in and voting to release the Epstein files.  As I linked last week, Robert Reich believes that air traffic controllers will ultimately end the shutdown by putting pressure on Congress.

In Washington state, the Catholic Church has won its battle to protect child rapists from justice, at least for now.

Governor Newsom of California has vetoed a bill to protect minors from "AI".

See ordinary citizens in Chicago intervene to thwart an ICE abduction.

If you don't believe in due process for others, maybe you don't deserve it yourself.

Trump promised to revitalize the US shipbuilding industry.  In reality, he's sinking it.

The proportion of young Americans who identify as trans or "queer" has dropped sharply since 2023.  Perhaps the fad is passing?

Another win for people power -- this small Wisconsin town successfully blocked Microsoft from building a data center nearby.

Mike Johnson faced the voters on C-Span.  It didn't go well.

Democratic activists in Missouri and Ohio carry on the battle against gerrymandering despite a lack of support from the national party.  The party is focusing support on pro-gerrymandering efforts in California -- that is, it prioritizes destroying democracy in blue states over saving it in red states.

This painting needed an update.

In much of the US, housing is becoming more affordable.  Of course the commentariat manages to frame this as a problem.

The parasite class is still using the same excuses and rhetoric as it did a hundred and fifty years ago.

Future UK prime minister Nigel Farage takes a tough line on Russia.

When a violent terrorist movement realizes it's losing, it becomes even more violent.

In the UK, some people really are above the law.

A British feminist conference got taken over by pro-genocide cranks.

The exoneration of Hamit Coskun is a rare but welcome victory for free speech.

Since the British police won't do their job, Graham Linehan is hiring someone who will.

An Australian university set out to catch students who had used "AI" to cheat on exams -- but the university used its own "AI" to do this, and it inevitably screwed up and falsely accused students who were innocent.

The Australian government caused this rape, then ignored the victim.

The Dutch government has seized a Chinese-owned chip company in the Netherlands.

Poland has greatly built up its military to counter potential Russian aggression; it now has the third-largest military in NATO after the US and Turkey.

One of Russia's crappy submarines broke down at sea and is limping home, ending Russia's naval presence in the Mediterranean.

Russia's steel industry is starting to collapse.

Ordinary Russians are getting tired of the Ukraine war.

I have seen several posts and stories like this one about the intensive militarization being imposed on children in Russia.  Kids this young won't be old enough to fight for at least fifteen years.  Putin seems to be anticipating a long period of warfare.

The Russian army uses "blocking units" which operate behind the front line and shoot soldiers who try to retreat (the Red Army in World War II also did this) -- but sometimes those soldiers shoot back.

Russians brutally tortured this doctor from occupied Ukraine.

It's two years since Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina.  Next Sunday (October 26), the country will hold mid-term elections for part of its legislature.  Trump has offered the country a US$20 billion bailout (recently increased to US$40 billion), but only if Milei's party wins.  In effect, it's a bribe to Argentine voters to vote a certain way.  The bailout is unpopular with US farmers, who have lost their Chinese soybean market to Argentina due to Trump's trade wars this year.

The world is a much better place without Yahya Sinwar.

Even with the "peace" deal enabling Hamas to survive and kill again, Israel can rightly claim at least a partial victory.  The Iranian theocracy acknowledges that jihadism got its ass kicked.

Several Arab regimes are threatening to abandon the Gaza "peace" process unless Hamas is disarmed.

India and the UK are stepping up economic and military cooperation in the face of Trump's random foreign-policy blundering.

More links at Red State Blues, WAHF, and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  some Halloween videos, an image round-up, and an example of how the left loses working-class voters.

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Just as the fact that the name "Nazi" was short for "National Socialist" doesn't mean that the Nazis really were socialist, the mere fact that the name "Antifa" is short for "anti-fascist" doesn't make Antifa's ideology or behavior synonymous with anti-fascism, and nor does it mean that everyone who is against Antifa is automatically fascist.

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