Link round-up for 22 November 2025

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

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For those who didn't see this last Saturday -- my e-mail address has changed.  For the new one, click on "Email" in the left sidebar of my Blogger profile.  I will continue to check the old e-mail for a while, but eventually it will be phased out.

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Radioactive shrimp.....

Badly-made signs are more interesting.

Working with clay is not for everyone.

Here are some people being not very good at doing things.

You should know these units of measurement.

He is a great magician.

This work of art is titled Cat Descending a Staircase.

You don't need to buy Christmas decorations.  You can just temporarily repurpose your Halloween ones.

Lots of cartoons for smart people here.

Some stunning sunset pictures from Las Vegas here.

Very cool embroidered solar system here.

See a short animation illustrating how vaccines work.

The mRNA covid vaccines probably help fight cancer too.

"We're getting very close to defeating cancer once and for all."

New research shows that, contrary to expectations, coffee lowers the risk of some heart problems.

A diet high in added sugar makes your skin age faster.

Interesting overview here of the main differences between men's and women's skeletons.

Humpback whales off the east coast of Australia have recovered so strongly that there are now more of them than in pre-whaling times.

Micro-doses of an Ozempic-like drug slow down some aspects of the aging process in mice.

Ultra-processed food is really harmful to health, yet consumption of it is rising rapidly all over the world.

People are buying this $59 gadget to temporarily disable time-wasting programs on their smartphones.  Seriously?  You can't simply not-do things you know are a waste of time?

This British town used "AI" to generate a huge Christmas mural, with predictable results.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse need to be updated.

Expertise still matters.

She took this fucktard down, with the help of some public-spirited passers-by.

Is downtown parking really like this now?  I wouldn't know.

Today's "AI" spelling/grammar checkers are far inferior to the non-"AI" ones we had thirty years ago.

People want in-person, real-world dating again.  Tinder is struggling to adapt.

Here's how hackers can take over a Samsung phone, and what to do about it if you have one.

The revived Vine which bans "AI"-generated junk is actually not good news.  Apparently it will "scrape" (plagiarize) your videos to train "AI".

Don't let closed-minded people discourage you from writing.  Your real audience is elsewhere, even if you rarely see them.

Firefox is incorporating more and more "AI" crap.  Here's the latest on how to get rid of it.

Build a better fire with a Dakota fire hole.

"No sensitive information was accessed....."  @#&^%$!# corporations have shitty security and don't care about your privacy.

30% of job postings nowadays are fake and do not result in a hire.  The post includes tips for spotting the bogus ones so you don't waste time.

In 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, another victim of the sloppy security revealed by the recent jewel theft.

Here's the kind of thing that happens when some stupid authoritarian regime doesn't listen to scientists.

"Let the mask fall.  Let the fake ones go."

Georgia is a hot spot for data center construction -- and for the popular resistance against them.

Gemini 3 is apparently the best "AI" yet, and it still gets very simple things absurdly wrong.

In July, three Jewish students at a posh private school in Virginia were subjected to brutal anti-Semitic harassment -- and the school expelled the victims.  Now the school has settled, paying out $100,000 to the victims' family.

Working-poor Americans can't even afford McDonalds any more.  And no, this is not just about "MAGA America".  The impoverishment of the poorest as a tiny elite heaps up mountains of wealth has been going on uninterruptedly for forty years, under the rule of both parties.

Must-read of the week:  Here's a detailed look back at the case of "Katie Johnson", who filed a lawsuit against Trump in 2016 saying he had raped her under Epstein's auspices when she was thirteen. She withdrew the suit at the time after getting death threats.  The post also explains why it's highly unlikely that the Epstein files as a whole could have been scrubbed of incriminating information.

What does the red hand mean?

The No Kings Alliance is mobilizing to support the striking Starbucks workers.

"Miss Palestine" is the perfect representative of her "country".

The price of Bitcoin fell to around $82,000 this week, down from its high of $126,000 in early October.  Bitcoin will leave a legacy to the world.

To fight anti-Semitism most effectively, we must understand how it is spread.

When your life is a lie, the truth hurts -- but insults have no impact on reality.

A new Trumpazoid decree encourages religious harassment within the US military.

Another discharge petition won in the House this week, to force a vote on a bipartisan bill to restore federal workers' collective bargaining rights which Trump took away.  The vote has not yet been held.

A huge mob of Jew-haters chanting pro-genocide slogans swarmed a synagogue in New York city this week.  Mamdani ludicrously claimed that the event being held at the synagogue at the time -- in support of migration to Israel -- was "in violation of international law".  Making nice with this guy won't work.  He and mob actions like this will likely motivate more Jews to emigrate to Israel than the event itself did.

The city needs to prepare for the worst.  Jewish New Yorkers already are buying guns and seeking out firearms training for self-defense if needed.

Even after Nvidia's claims of high earnings, its stock plummeted this week, with other "AI"-related stocks also dropping.  Yet many "AI" investors are still in deep denial about the looming bubble.

Part of why Trump is the way he is may be that he literally has no sense of humor.

Here's some background on the man in the Gold's Gym case.

No, the US is not undergoing a Christian revival, whatever the right-wingers want to believe.

"All I see is Jew hatred being made acceptable and mainstream."

There have always been plenty of liberals who owned guns, but more are now buying them due to fear of violent right-wingers.

The tech bros now want to use "AI" to speed up approval of nuclear reactors.  Let a hundred Chernobyls bloom!

If a swastika isn't a hate symbol, then what the hell is?

Lately Elon Musk is becoming indistinguishable from some mentally-ill homeless person who wanders around blurting out random nonsense, except that he dresses more expensively.

China hasn't gone back to making big soybean purchases from the US as Trump claimed it would.

Plaintiffs in a lawsuit in California submitted evidence in court which had been faked using "AI".  We really need to start putting people in prison for this shit.

If you're a man and you want to ogle naked women against their will, go to New Jersey.

An anti-hemp provision in the bill to end the shutdown will devastate the marijuana industry in non-prohibition states.

Sadistic murder?  "Things happen."

A hero immigrant gets recognized and rewarded.  We all know how this guy would have been treated if this had been in the US.

Women are dying in Texas because of forced-birth laws.

"The vast majority of people who've already adopted trans identities and medicalized themselves would never have done so if they'd known that the cultural climate over the past few years was only a blip, and that the rest of the world was not going to go along forever with their pretend identities."

See a message from some of Epstein's victims (found via SickoRicko).

53% of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy and want to see limits on the accumulation of wealth, up from 46% last year.  71% support a national billionaire tax.

It's nonsense to claim that all cultures are equal.

The massively invasive "security" state built up since September 11 has become more dangerous to ourselves than to the terrorists.  Time to get rid of it.

History has vindicated Israel before, and will again.

The revelation that Epstein approached Russia with an offer of useful information about Trump suggests a possible explanation for Trump's strangely subservient attitude toward Putin over the years (found via Nan's Notebook).

Here in Oregon, ICE is checking license plates of random cars they see on the road against state DMV records to try to ID non-citizens.  Our state's senators are trying to put a stop to this.

"Men who demand access to women's spaces are the reason women's spaces are necessary."

Marjorie Taylor Greene is now getting threats as Trump turns against her for breaking out of mindless lockstep with MAGA on a few issues.  The Georgia Republican party is supporting her.  She has apologized for her early toxic rhetoric and promised to stop using it.  This may be just due to the shock of having it turned against her, but anything that helps tone down the hysterical attack rhetoric of today's politics is a positive.

Update (new link):  Marjoreene is resigning in January.  It's too soon to tell if she's quitting under pressure from Trump or preparing to run for some other office.

Trump did try to pressure the Senate into slow-walking the Epstein files bill.  Obviously he failed utterly, since they passed it with effective unanimity the same day the House did.

Medicare premiums will go up a lot in 2026 -- to cover the rising costs of the Medicare Advantage scam, which traditional Medicare is now apparently subsidizing.

The Olympics is finally catching up with the times, rejecting the trans nonsense it had briefly embraced.

This seems barely short of an act of war.  If the ship is deliberately endangering RAF planes, the British surely have every right to sink it.

Even in Poland, the last strongly-religious country in Europe, 62% of people now support same-sex civil partnerships, up from 25% in 2011.  Same-sex marriage is a ways off yet.

The Trump "peace plan" for Ukraine is pure appeasement.  It would reward Putin for starting the war and thus guarantee more war in the future.

Europe could support Ukraine without the US, if every country there provided the same level of aid as the Scandinavian countries do.

Russia trains drone operators by "hunting" civilians in Ukrainian cities.

Does this sound like a winning team to you?

This Russian military unit is holding a contest.

Interesting discussion here of how the Ukraine war is likely to evolve in 2026.

Russia's air cargo industry is heading toward collapse due to a lack of spare parts (probably due to sanctions) and lack of personnel (probably due to everyone getting dragooned into the Ukraine war).

Russia claims to have various super-weapons, but they probably don't matter much.

North Korea has been cutting back on military aid to Russia as its own stockpiles run low.  Some of the shells it sent were so badly maintained that they needed to be refurbished.  If North Korea had to fight a real war, its military would probably prove to be as shitty as Russia's.

Being Chinese is a pretty miserable existence these days, except for the wealthy elite.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  Joe Klein on the government shutdown, an image round-up, and why we still need to fight to fully expose all of Epstein's clients.

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Always remember that Mamdani got only barely 50% of the vote, in a very blue city, in an election in which moderate Democrats across the country won by far bigger margins in far purpler areas.  Mamdani's win does not herald some massive lurch toward normalizing anti-Semitism among New Yorkers or Americans generally.  It's a freak anomaly and likely a transient one.

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Trump asks for advice -- but from the worst possible people to give it:


China is gross: