Link round-up for 25 October 2025

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

Note:  There will be no image round-up post this coming week.

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These cats aren't satisfied with mere cardboard boxes.

They have Halloween in Australia too.

Exercise equipment is dangerous.  I'll stick to my grueling regimen of 100 teacup lifts every morning.

Check out this Thai ad for bug spray.  It is possible to make ads people will actually watch.

There's more than one reason why having a window in the bathroom is a bad idea.

What a beautiful crab.

Have some tea in the woods with a nice man.

It's a bug-eat-bug world.

Halloween is near -- get spooky.

More spooky stuff here, and a weird-looking but real church (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

Blogger Lady M has her place all ready for Halloween.

Bohemian Valhalla blog serves up some creepy imagery.

Elitch Gardens in Denver offers a lavish Halloween Fright Fest.

More great windows here from the Manitou Springs CO Skeleton Craze.

If you're in Paris, the Coulée Verte is a pleasant and varied walk.

Yuri Knorozov was definitely a cat person.

See a fake crab and a death ray.

Take a close look at the Sun, a nightmare world without which our own world could not exist.

Green sea turtles are no longer an endangered species.

To save animals, conservationists need to work with local people.

Here are some videos of people speaking various indigenous North American languages.

Never treat an honest businessman so disrespectfully.

Watch out for scam phone calls about your credit card.

Beware of the ClickFix hacking method, which is increasingly common.

Here's how to disable "AI" auto-dubbing on YouTube.

Windows 11 is a virus.  Here are some programs for getting rid of all the garbage built into it (I haven't tried these).

"AI" browsers are simple to hack, giving crooks easy access to all your most sensitive information.

Fake video is getting more convincing.  Be alert.

"Ghost tapping" is a form of robbery that targets credit cards with the tap-to-pay feature.

If you're considering using the Universe browser, read this.

ChatGPT spies on its users and nags them to buy things.  Amazon has a new "AI" tool that will "help you decide what to buy".  These companies must think we're total idiots.

"AI"-generated junk is infiltrating Spotify playlists, and Spotify refuses to ban it.  Users are furious.

What is the point of Oscar the Grouch?

"Live" sports events are now so ad-clogged that what you're seeing becomes delayed relative to the actual game.

General Motors wants to integrate "AI" into its cars.  Tesla Cybertrucks are too rare to present a major risk to other drivers, but GM cars are ubiquitous enough that this could make all of our roads prohibitively dangerous.  The comments are worth a look too.

Remember when machines made us freer.

Hospitals are using "AI" for voice-to-text transcription even though it inserts nonexistent wording into its transcripts in 80% of cases.

He really wanted to watch.

Here's a good discussion (in the comments) about Elon Musk's silly techno-fantasies.  I wouldn't bother reading the article linked in the post unless you want to join the discussion -- it's just the same old hype about "AI", robots, etc but even more naïve than usual.

As Christianity declines across the US, unneeded church lands are being converted for affordable housing.

"AI" summaries of the news misrepresent stories in 45% of cases.

Americans are falling behind with payments on their insanely-high-priced cars, with 1.7 million cars repossessed last year.

The Social Security Administration has set next year's COLA at 2.8%.  Is there anything you actually buy -- not the various baskets of goods economists use to calculate inflation, but things like groceries and rent that you actually spend money on -- for which the cost has risen by as little as 2.8% per year over the last decade or two?

Most actual tech workers who work with "AI" don't believe the hype the executives of their own companies are spouting about it.

Quacks empowered by RFK Jr are carrying out a systematic attack on the US health system on a state-by-state basis.

A Chicago judge has ruled that ICE agents can be arrested if they break the law.  I'm amazed this was ever in dispute.  Ordinary cops can be arrested if they break the law, as the one who killed George Floyd was.

An "AI" surveillance system at a Baltimore school mistook a bag of chips for a gun (found via Earth-Bound Misfit).  Cops were called and the Dorito desperado was handcuffed and searched.

Must-read of the week:  Some great insights on art, language, and intelligence, and why "AI" can never truly do any of those things.

Here's why BDS cannot bring down Israel or even substantially harm it.

Usage of ChatGPT has peaked and begun to decline.  It seems to be part of a general turning away from "AI".  Perhaps the fad is passing.

What did the Irish government do when Hitler died?

The AWS outage this week followed after Amazon laid off hundreds of workers from its cloud computing unit and replaced them with "AI" -- so Amazon is now planning to do the same with six hundred thousand more workers.  The outage knocked out $2,449 "smart mattresses" and even people's "bored ape" NFT collections.  But what kind of dumbass would actually own either of those things?

It's not only Jews -- Mamdani also seems to have a real problem with Hindus.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has some sensible ideas for strengthening democracy.

Massachusetts is cracking down on violent street take-overs.

Darwinfish 2 blog reports from the No Kings rally in Baltimore MD.  Here's a report from Macon GA.  Here are some signs from the various rallies.  During the whole nationwide event, there seems to have been only one arrest of a participant, although several Trumpazoids were arrested for violent assaults.  Blogger Annie has more pictures and a look at why the movement is succeeding.  Could it be..... SATAN???

"The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you're learning to do doesn't matter."

The fruits of polarization:  this guy shot up a house because he didn't like the owner's politics.

It is possible to overcome polarization and hatred if people are willing to be civil and give each other a hearing.  Here's an extreme but real example.  Get out of the echo chamber.

This was a vicious, explicitly anti-Semitic attack on Jewish children -- in a suburb of Chicago.  And I'll bet you didn't hear a word about it in the mainstream media.  Nor will any left-wing political blog mention it.

A conservative blogger has some criticisms of the No Kings rallies -- and of Trump.

Prioritizing peace over justice means you will get neither.

Trump has backed down from sending federal goons to San Francisco.

Stop acting surprised when older people show up for protests.

Vance believes that the elected legislature of a sovereign democratic nation voting about its own internal affairs is an "insult".

You can't trust the media.  All too often they put a dishonest spin on the news.  Here's an example of how they lie by omission.

"The FBI has not been here."

Besides supporting Mamdani who refused to condemn the genocidal jihadist slogan "globalize the intifadah", the left-activist fringe is now rallying around Graham Platner, a candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination in Maine who has a tattoo of a Nazi symbol.  Platner is also a "staunch critic" of Israel and has been photographed with a white supremacist who said that he and Platner "have a lot in common".  Yes, his supporters have excuses for all of it, but just imagine how apeshit they'd go at right-wingers who endorsed a candidate with such a track record.  Susan Collins must be thanking her lucky stars.

The military leadership recognizes that Hegseth is a clown.  Give the military credit when they do the right thing.

Anti-Semitism in the US today takes many forms.

It's an "old African saying".

Stop believing that everybody who disagrees with you is evil.  This is outright lying, possibly legally-actionable defamation.

"AI" depends on millions of workers in poor countries doing miserable work for terrible pay.

Trump is throwing one of his toddler tantrums at Canada because the Ontario government made an ad quoting Reagan.

The UK's largest police force says that it will no longer investigate "non-crime hate incidents", meaning "incidents" of people expressing opinions the government disapproves of.  No police force in a free society should ever have been doing this anyway.

He won't be deported because he was too fast.

An oil refinery in Ryazan, Russia, burns after being hit by Ukrainian cruise missiles.

The gas lines in Russia are pretty bad.

Employers in Russia are falling behind on paying wages -- and the situation is worsening rapidly.

Even convicts don't want to join the Russian army.

A Russian soldier described a mutiny in his unit.

Won't somebody please think of the poor terrorists?

Hamas is now murdering children of Palestinians whom it suspects of collaborating with the Palestinian Authority.

This is Afghanistan, and the world.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a brief round-up on the No Kings rallies, and a video on how the media distort the news and exacerbate polarization.

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Anytime you hear someone disparage individualism and try to exalt the collective over the individual, know that you are in the presence of an enemy.

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I think Trump's getting desperate.  Wrecking the White House, sending troops into cities to provoke confrontation, blowing up random fishing boats off South America, the "poo on No Kings" video, the Argentine bail-out and beef deal -- he wants to get people talking about anything, anything, other than the Epstein files.

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More adventures of stupid people:


When the words of a song are hard to hear, subtitles can help: