Link round-up for 3 January 2026

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

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Strong winds make inflatable Christmas decorations even more awesome.

Baseball is a dangerous game.

Maybe you shouldn't invite sea creatures to your holiday party.

Pounce!

Dr Who is bad at parallel parking.

Everything has ridiculous names now.

It's just a minor rockslide that won't disrupt traffic much.

Don't use fireworks indoors, idiots.

Tough job -- carrying a fragile object up a shitty staircase.

Kaze to ki no uta.

Canada has giant galloping snow monsters.

This is Nazaré in Portugal.

This is Witches Gulch in Wisconsin.

This is the Kosciol Mariacki in Kraków, Poland.

It can be a blessing to simply live in the moment.

Blogger Esme responds to the Danish postal service's decision to stop delivering letters.

These ten scientific truths remain true no matter how much some people don't like them (found via Miss Cellania).

One of the US's leading scientific research centers is being shut down by Trumpazoid ignoramuses.

This sounds like a major step forward in treating uterine cancer.

This year's flu season has been devastating, with two thousand dead in the US.  You can still get a flu shot if you've been putting it off.

An exhaustive study shows no negative brain effects from fluoride in tap water.  Millions of idiots will confidently dismiss this and instead believe some YouTube video made by a fellow idiot who doesn't understand how scientific studies work and can't spell "fluoride".

Do these four things for a longer and healthier life (none are surprising).

Popular Mechanics reports a new theoretical basis for a faster-than-light space drive which would be somewhat more practical than the Alcubierre drive.  Some caveats:  (1) it still requires "negative energy" which may or may not actually exist; (2) an overview of articles at Popular Mechanics suggests that its fidelity to hard science is uneven at best; (3) the fact that something has become a common staple of science fiction is not evidence that it is possible in reality.

This site claims it can detect "AI" fakery.  I haven't tried it.

Here are some tutorials for getting rid of OneDrive.

The US Postal Service is changing how it postmarks mail -- the postmark date applied may now be later that the date you put the letter in the mailbox.  This may affect whether things like mailed payments or ballots are deemed to be on time.

Any images that you post on Twitter can be "AI"-edited into shit versions by any other user.  If you don't want your pictures to be trashed, delete them from Twitter ASAP.

Some smartphones have a hard-to-detect program called Mobile Services Manager which installs apps on your phone without your knowledge.  Here's how to disable it.

Avoid locations that are likely to have a lot of fundamentalist Christians.  They're becoming epicenters of disease.

There's growing interest in ProtonMail, a privacy-focused e-mail alternative to corporate systems like Outlook and Gmail.  Proton also includes other services such as a VPN.

ChatGPT is about to become infested with ads.  Maybe that will finally drive away a good chunk of the fools who currently use it.

Here's a map showing kindergarten vaccination rates across the US, by county.

The Marshall Islands, a small independent country in the Pacific, is launching a universal basic income program paying each citizen $800 per year.  The payments will be in cryptocurrency, but presumably there is some system for converting this to actual money.

A Utah town's police department is using "AI" to generate police reports, resulting in one report claiming that a police officer had turned into a frog.

Dave Barry reviews the year 2025.

For some, this is not a joyous season.

It's the "vibe era" -- why bother striving for excellence when you can just use "AI" to churn out something barely good enough?  You don't need to make any effort and fixing the mess will be someone else's problem.

The world's richest five hundred people added more than two trillion dollars to their net worth in 2025.  Elon Musk alone added $190 billion.

Ron DeSantis, of all people, has emerged as a stalwart opponent of "AI".

This man got a lucky break, but how many others are screwed over by the system just as badly?

Confront the reality of a parent's worst nightmare.

Americans are waking up to the realization that the billionaire oligarchs are the real enemy.  Much of the revolt against "AI" and the focus on Epstein is part of this.

"Femdom" kink is just more female submission to degrading and ridiculous male perversion.

Nineteenth-century ideas about tuberculosis were weird (except in Spain, apparently).

Billionaire venture capitalists are really this stupid.  Remember this story when you read about their confidence in "AI".

The story of George Washington's prayer at Valley Forge is a lie.

Be kind.

The rich are different from you and me.

Claims in June that "AI" was escaping human control and trying to blackmail people were the result of contrived tests -- basically just more fakery to hype the failed technology.

"Genderism is Scientology on steroids."

Echoing the methods of gangster states like Russia or China, legislators in some democratic countries support restrictions on VPNs to enforce censorship of various kinds.  This will certainly be one of the first issues I look at when deciding how to vote in the future.

Here's an example of how to watch for biases and biased sources in the media.

There's a growing consensus among doctors that chatbot use is linked to psychosis.

"Oh, er, no, I'm not as familiar with the subject as you."

Self-driving cars can't handle power outages or bad weather.

New York state is mandating mental health warnings on social media platforms.

As of the new year, millions of Americans can no longer afford health insurance as ACA subsidies expire.  A poll in November showed that 74% of Americans (including 50% of Republicans) supported extending the subsidies.

Our parasite oligarchs are flaunting their wealth and power in our faces, and public opinion is turning strongly against them.  (And no, most of them are not at all "whip smart", just greedy, unethical, and lucky.)  Their all-out support for "AI" helps make them even more hated.

Author John Scalzi tested several "AI" programs with simple and basic factual questions.

The sheer scale of the Holocaust almost defies comprehension.

Here is what Ukraine means for Americans.

A museum in Ukraine hosts memories of what most Ukrainians now recognize as their country's biggest mistake -- giving up its nuclear weapons in 1991 in exchange for worthless security guarantees.  All the blood shed in the Ukraine war is on the hands of the nuclear non-proliferation crackpots almost as much as on Putin's.

Now that "AI" has buggered up the old normal job application process, some people are using dating apps to find jobs.

The police review board of Salem OR now includes a man with a very unusual perspective on law enforcement -- he's a convicted murderer.  Discussion here.

A chatbot can't meaningfully apologize for its behavior, just as a make of car with defective brakes can't apologize for running over people.  Responsibility rests not with the machine but with the corporate executives whose decisions made it destructive.

"So here we are, in the golden age of preventable diseases and weaponized ignorance, watching two men who couldn't pass a high-school biology test if you spotted them the mitochondria lead a parade of lost souls straight into the arms of viruses we'd already beaten."

Trickle-down actually trickles up.

The decline of Tesla sales is accelerating.

65% of Americans agree that global warming is contributing to the rise in the cost of living.

An Indiana state senator posted "AI" images of himself beating up Santa Claus, for some unfathomable reason.

Back to the Dark Ages -- a woman in Alabama was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for a stillbirth.

The withdrawal of the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT was an example of the danger of billionaire ownership of the media.

Democratic voters want a crackdown on "AI" and data centers.  The leadership isn't listening.  But some politicians are starting to wise up.

Interesting discussion here of the different business practices of Costco and Walmart.

Maybe this is the real reason why the Epstein redactions were so badly bungled?

The government shutdown, which dragged on for more than a month as congresscritters pointed fingers and posturingly tried to out-stubborn each other, is still having repercussions for ordinary people.

Here's an overview of prospective 2028 presidential candidates.  It's way early, but this article has some interesting info.  I like Buttigieg and Cox (while admittedly knowing little about the latter) -- both sound likely to be good for overcoming the extreme polarization of current politics.  But I doubt either of them could be nominated.

We don't need any more people like this.

If Russia is a superpower, why are its soldiers advancing into combat in what are basically golf carts?

The satellites Russia depends on for early warning of US missile launches have mostly stopped working.

Russia and Ukraine have begun a local ceasefire at Zaporizhzhia to allow for repairs to the nuclear reactor there.

The increasing power of religious law has made Iraq a cesspit of child marriage.

Starting in the last few days of 2025, large-scale protests erupted in cities across Iran.  These were prompted by economic woes (the Iranian riyal is down to less than a millionth of a dollar and GDP growth in 2025 was negligible), but quickly turned against the theocracy itself.  There have also been reports of pro-Israel chants which, if true, suggests a full repudiation of the regime's jihadist ideology.  So far at least one of the regime's thugs has been killed, as have several protesters.  Elsewhere, protesters captured a Revolutionary Guards (regime enforcers') base and set fire to a building there.  I'll be watching with optimism, but cautiously; Iranians have held massive protests before, only to eventually see the theocracy re-assert itself.

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

My posts this week:  a video on the real shithole country, an image round-up, and the major stories of 2025.

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Anybody else notice YouTube getting crappier recently?  Almost everything it suggests now seems to be either "AI"-generated (at least the voice -- I'm getting better at spotting that) or clickbait where you can't really tell what it's about without clicking on it.  Increasingly I'm just sticking to channels I already know, to avoid that kind of stuff.

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To the people who claim that the Trump assassination attempt at Butler PA in 2024 was faked, what do they think happened to Corey Comperatore?

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Parasitic financial capitalism is destroying restaurants:


Stop wasting money:


Dehumanization: