Link round-up for 8 November 2025

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

If you like a blog post I link to here, remember to leave a supportive comment on that post as well as (or instead of) here.  That way you can be sure the blogger will see it.

o o o o o

Have a last few funny Halloween images.

Here's an idiot on a motorcycle -- actually, make that two of them.

Some people just shouldn't attempt cooking.

Pole-vaulting is a difficult sport.

Er, that hill looks a bit too steep.

This is why flying cars would be a bad idea.

Gotta go now, but I'll be back next Halloween.

Hot red peppers teach a thief a lesson.

Lots of bad editing here.

Autumn is coming.

This is the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii.

The fearsome death-ball sponge is the most recently discovered of the abominations of the sea.

This  may be the world's biggest spider colony, with a population of over a hundred thousand (found via Miss Cellania).

The first-ever artificial cornea implant has just been performed in Rehovot, Israel.  Since the implant is artificial, it does not require a donor and does not pose a risk of rejection.

A Trumpazoid plan to wreck NASA has leaked.

French writer Guy de Maupassant eloquently evoked the humiliations and hypocrisies of war.

Existentialism isn't actually very useful in an emergency.

FFS this is getting like whack-a-mole.  "AI" features have now been force-added to Gmail.  Here's how to get rid of them -- unfortunately it's complicated.

Another major update to Windows 11 is being rolled out.  Here's how to de-clutter it.

If you use a wheelchair and expect to ever take a plane flight, read this.

There is something of a trend toward "dumb homes", free of "smart" devices and pointless automation and connectivity.

These TVs take screenshots of what you're watching and send them to third parties.

Here's a site where you can donate to fulfill wishes from foster children.

"Porn was only ever the excuse."

Steinbeck understood poverty because he deliberately lived in it for a while.  But the "respectable" people of his time didn't want the truth.

Humanoid robot servants are the wave of the future.  Here is more video of the same robot.  Seriously, eighty thousand dollars for this?

"Hate = anything you say that we disagree with."

Bigoted, ignorant Christian priest wants to ban Halloween.

That which is asserted without evidence should be dismissed without discussion.

Tesla Cybertrucks are again being recalled because an external part is merely glued on and easily falls off under real-world conditions.

Boy George, the former pop star most recently known for spending fifteen months in prison for kidnapping and torturing a sex worker, continues to be his loathsome self.

"AI" data centers emit a terrible stench as well as noise.

The immigrant must adapt to the existing culture, not the existing culture to the immigrant.

Vast numbers of error-prone, insecure license-plate-reading cameras are in place across the US.  There's now a bipartisan effort to get rid of them.

Here are six clues that a video is likely to be an "AI"-generated fake.

This man is going to spend a lot of his life being angry.

This posting does a great job of driving home the consequences of forced-birth policies, but it may be disturbing to some.

Google has been studying the potential use of "AI" to develop new forms of malware.  It can't even do that very well.

Most working-class voters view the Democrats as "woke, weak, and out of touch".  The party needs to change to address this, but many activists still prefer to lecture and name-call the voters.

This is pretty good pay for a part-time job.

"We're hitting levels of hypocrisy we never thought possible."

The Louvre has really crap security.  It's amazing it doesn't get robbed every week.

The Marsh family sings of threatened free speech in the US.

The study of "AI psychosis" (severe mental disorders caused by using chatbots) brings "indisputable proof that you can go from not having a psychotic disorder to having a psychotic disorder literally just from talking too much to a very aggrandizing source and/or echo chamber."  I wonder if this can help us understand how politics junkies, who spend a lot of time in an ideological echo chamber, get the way they are.

As with the Holocaust, denialism about the atrocities of October 7 is running rampant, especially among "progressive" groups.

Right-wing news site RedState is pulling no punches about how bad this week's election was for Republicans and the warning to them for 2026.  (The "Schumer shutdown" rhetoric at the end of the article is just the usual partisan bullshit and can be ignored.)  It's worth noting that one of the very few surprise Republican wins was for a Loudoun county VA school board, where recent history has made the trans issue loom especially large.  Riccardi emphasized the issue in her campaign.

The CEO of OpenAI got tetchy when he was asked how the company can commit to spending a hundred times what it makes in revenue.  He later floated the idea of a government bail-out for the industry -- and the backlash was fierce.

The Supreme Court may well strike down Trump's tariffs,  providing a huge stimulus to the stock market and perhaps to the real economy as well.

The Unz Review, an explicitly anti-Jewish "news" site, celebrates the recent triumphs of both Fuentes and Mamdani and dreams that they might someday join forces.  You may refuse to believe that Mamdani is an anti-Semite, but the other anti-Semites accept him as one.

Many evangelical women are "disengaging from religion" because of their churches' support  for Trump.

A bipartisan throng of state governors and local leaders demand that Congress end the shutdown.

The cruelty is the point.

Mamdani provides a widely-applicable model for legitimizing anti-Semitism in the political mainstream.

"AI"-centric companies lost a trillion dollars in value on the stock market this week.  Perhaps the bubble is already starting to collapse?

The egregious gerrymander looming in California could be stopped by a coming Supreme Court ruling in the Louisiana v Callais case.  If the Court rightly forbids taking race into account in drawing Congressional districts (how the hell was that ever treated as legal in the first place?), the new California map -- and the maps in many states -- will be struck down.  California Republicans have also filed a lawsuit.

Hints are emerging that the Epstein files include some serious stuff on Trump.

Fox News fell for some obviously "AI" fake videos that were created to smear SNAP recipients, basing an entire story on them.  Newsmax fell for this too.

In New York City, the resignations begin.

US consumer confidence is at its lowest level in three and a half years due to the effects of the shutdown.

The billionaires are expanding their suffocating control of the media.

There has been a wave of criminals posing as ICE agents to commit crimes, an easy trick to pull off since ICE agents notoriously do not show official identification.

This sadistic CEO was murdered, apparently by his own employees.  Read and see for yourself if you think they were justified.

"Either we'll fix it the easy way, with tax policy, or we'll fix it the hard way, the way the French did."

88% of Americans live in states that are now suffering an economic downturn.

It's the modern Versailles, ostentatiously wallowing in luxury while millions go hungry.

Trump's latest effort to distract from the Epstein files is a threat to invade Nigeria because of the massacres of Christians by the Islamist extremists there -- massacres which have been going on for years.  It's terrible but this isn't some new problem that suddenly needs action when it previously didn't.

Class war and women's safety are both essential -- the former must not be used as an excuse to neglect the latter.

The BBC's Arabic-language service promoted Hamas propaganda during the Gaza war.

Birmingham UK is becoming a frightening and dangerous place.

Australia now generates so much solar power that electricity is free of charge in some parts of the country, during certain hours.

Belgium will start shooting down the unidentified (but presumably Russian) drones that have been hovering around its military bases.

As the Russian economy crumbles, sales of this one item are booming.  Probably the result of so many men being dead or away at the front.

Ukrainians have knocked out a major oil pipeline near Moscow.  With winter approaching, it's time to focus on destroying the electricity and fuel supplies to Moscow and St Petersburg -- the two places where real unrest could actually threaten the Putin regime.

One of Russia's biggest oil refineries has halted operations due to drone attacks.

Partisans are starting fires at railway facilities all over Russia.  Without the tools to cause really major damage, they seem to be focusing on essential electrical equipment.  They took a similar approach with this communications tower.

"Look at what kind of army we have in Russia."

Russian soldiers are being seriously wounded in such numbers as to overwhelm the available medical support.

Russians apparently taped this live rodent to a drone before launch.  As noted in the link I included last Saturday, they do this fairly often now.  See the comments below the video -- people react strongly.

See drone's-eye-view video of attacks on Russian soldiers.  Here's a group of Russian armored vehicles that got stuck crossing a river and became sitting ducks -- apparently a somewhat common scenario due to Russian incompetence.

Here's an attack on a Russian ATV as seen by a soldier who got out just in time, illustrating the speed and accuracy of Ukrainian drones.

A majority of Iranians recognize that the recent twelve-day war was an attack on the theocracy, not on Iran as a nation.  69% of them want the theocracy to stop calling for the destruction of Israel.

Women are leaving Japan's rural areas because of entrenched outdated gender roles.

The new US-India defense agreement will advance India's ambition to become a major military power.

"AI" data centers are proliferating across India, bringing the same kind of problems as in the US.

China is now suffering serious effects from climate change.

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

My own posts this week:  California's proposed billionaire wealth tax, an image round-up, some observations on the election, and a video on God's god.

o o o o o

Notice how these days news headlines use the word "amid" (as in "X happens amid Y") to insinuate that two things are connected without having to come right out and say they're connected or specify exactly how.  Something worth being aware of.

o o o o o

As best I can keep track, Trump is now threatening war with Venezuela, Mexico, and Nigeria.  For now, I wouldn't worry -- his purpose with all of this is to get people talking about something other than the Epstein files, not to set serious policy.  A few months ago he was threatening Greenland and Canada, but you don't hear much about that now.

o o o o o

A lot of Mamdani's economic policy ideas actually appeal to me, but they're totally irrelevant.  Paying attention to that would be like paying attention to David Duke's economic platform when he ran for office in Louisiana.  In this type of situation, there is only one issue.

o o o o o

It seems that voters turned against Republicans largely because they failed to reduce inflated prices -- an issue Trump explicitly ran on.  It appears to be an emerging pattern.  Democrats under Biden touted bogus official low inflation figures (calculated on the basis of irrelevant "basket of goods" prices that don't reflect what most people buy), while telling people to ignore the rising prices they could see with their own eyes in stores, and the voters punished them for it.  Then Trump took office, and instead of focusing on cutting prices, he pivoted to his usual agenda of petty personal vendettas and picking fights with our fellow democracies, while imposing tariffs which actually worsened inflation -- and, again, claiming inflation was down when it obviously was not.  Voters punished Republicans this week.

It's all too easy to imagine the same pattern repeating again.  Trump continues on his current trajectory.  The Democrats take the House and Senate next year, and instead of focusing like a laser beam on prices and jobs, they pivot to yet another pointless Trump impeachment or restoring the "right" of mentally-ill men in dresses to use the girls' bathroom, causing mainstream voters (as opposed to the activist fringe) to tear their hair in frustration and go back to the Republicans in 2028.  It seems all too likely, unless some unexpected new leader arises who can knock heads together and keep the party focused.

o o o o o

Take the "crushing" rhetoric in this one with a grain of salt.  The ACA has enabled tens of millions more people to afford health insurance than could afford it before.  Nevertheless, Marjoreene's blunt criticism of her own party's failings, and willingness to get out of the right-wing echo chamber by going on Maher's show, are a heartening repudiation of the dead-end polarization politics that is ruining our country.