Link round-up for 28 March 2026

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

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Mattresses have declared war on humanity.

These people have their own takes on things.

Here's a very ordinary car race.

Yes, there was life before the internet.

He's got places to go, but he just doesn't want to get out of bed.

This is interior decorating that both humans and cats will like.

This is St Paul's Cathedral in London.  It's well worth opening the photo to view it at full size.

All four of the bases of DNA have been found in an asteroid, confirming that the basic building blocks of life form naturally even in what seem like very unfavorable conditions.

Repeated cloning of an animal eventually leads to lethal genetic abnormalities.

Here's how Israel and the US are waging a new kind of war in Iran.

Direct messaging on Instagram is no longer secure (if it ever really was).

Giving false answers is inherent in the very nature of "AI".  This can never change, and in fact the problem is getting worse, not better, in successive models.

Do you belong to a self-isolating cult?  Not all cults are religious!  From experience I'd say political activists are like this way more than they realize.

Some countries and institutions try to block VPNs.  Advice about work-arounds here and here.  I don't use a VPN (yet), so I haven't tried any of these.

Here's a reason why riding in a Waymo isn't safe.  What a political jackass can do, a mugger or a rapist could also do.

An E coli outbreak linked to unpasteurized cheese and milk has sickened nine people (that we know of), three of whom had to be hospitalized.

More than two-thirds of women who get involved in BDSM or kink are subjected to violent or degrading acts they didn't consent to.  And that's just those who were willing to say so in a survey.  As one commenter observes, "'safe sane and consensual' my ass".  If your guy starts trying to get you into that shit, dump him.  Such people are disturbed freaks and cannot be trusted.

Excuse-makers for such behavior have been known to claim that it's therapeutic for the victim.  This is dangerous nonsense, and it's often just a pretext for sadism.

If "AI"-generated fake porn or nudes of you have been posted on the internet, this site claims it can get them taken down, at least in many places.

Today is the day of the No Kings rallies.  If you can't attend but want to support, there are other options.

After a strong user backlash, Microslop is backing off a little from saturating Windows 11 with unwanted "AI".  But only a little.

One airline actually has plans to make flying more comfortable.

Testosterone can have terrible effects on women -- there are links to documentation at the end of the post.

NPR has been interviewing Iranians leaving Iran.  Most of them support the Israeli-US military campaign to remove the theocracy.

Who are the real activists?

Must-read of the week:  Bridget Phetasy pays tribute to the sane women.

Here's an entertaining video of the "Canadian Resistance Army" (found via Anvilcloud).

Check out the work of artist "Redkatherine" (actually a Russian, real name not publicly known) -- and the disturbing story of her disappearance.

This weird habit from decades ago is less and less common today.

"We're not even seen as human here."

A former DHS official finds the anti-ICE resistance's tactics to be disturbingly effective.  This is a Fox News report, which makes the acknowledgement all the more striking.

In a time of rising anti-Semitism, there's a case to be made that Jews should have guns.

Ruy Teixeira is closing down his blog The Liberal Patriot.  His reasons will make uncomfortable reading for anyone who cares about the future of the Democratic party beyond 2026.

Here's a look at why politicians tend to adopt radical positions that most voters don't want (the article specifies Democrats, but this actually applies to politicians of either party).

In Colorado, an initiative to keep boys off of girls' sports teams in schools has qualified and will appear on the November ballot.

The city council of a suburb in Oklahoma approved a data center nearby.  Now voters are trying to get an initiative on the ballot to recall all of them, plus the mayor for good measure.

The great majority of the data centers the "AI" industry claims to be building are not, in fact, being built and probably never will be.  See also the last part of the post, starting with the headline "The end of software engineering", where he explains how "AI" is destroying the tech industry and flooding the country with junk software.

The trans fad seems to be winding down, at least as far as minors are concerned.

Here are the popularity scores of a couple dozen major political figures.  It looks like Beshear or Shapiro are the Democrats' best options for a presidential candidate -- not Newsom or Harris.

Trump paid a French energy company a billion dollars to cancel two wind farm projects off the US east coast.  The very next day, the US's biggest offshore wind farm went online.

The clean energy industry is fighting back against Republican efforts to undermine it.

There are things worse than war.

In the end, he revealed his true self.

What was the role of Christianity in Nazi ideology?

Now that Goldman Sachs has confirmed that "AI" is contributing nothing to US economic growth at all, the tech companies..... are planning to dump even more hundreds of billions of dollars down the same rat hole.

Markwayne Mullin's effusive apologies during confirmation were an acknowledgement of how badly ICE's horrifically abusive and unconstitutional tactics have alienated mainstream Americans.

Meet a modern-day slave-holder.

The much-touted claims of a religious revival in the UK are based on a survey which was full of erroneous data.  In reality, church attendance there is still declining.

While some US aid to Ukraine is being redirected to the Iran war, the UK has committed an immediate £100 million to Ukrainian air defense.  The UK regularly gives Ukraine £3 billion in military aid per year.

Ukraine has utterly routed an attempted major Russian offensive.

See video of the Ukrainian attack on the Primorsk oil terminal near St Petersburg.  Here's the damage as seen from space.

The Putin regime plans to colonize occupied Ukrainian territory with Russians.  But if this is going to take until 2045, it's unlikely that Russian rule there will last long enough to implement it.

UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba warns the US not to relent on the military campaign against the Iranian theocracy until the threat is truly neutralized.  The worst possible outcome would be one in which the theocracy remains in power.

The US media are following their usual script on the Iran war, but the war itself isn't.  It's actually going much better than the media would have us believe.

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

My posts this week:  a video on extreme shepherding, an image round-up, a few news and commentary updates, and a discussion on poisonous politics.

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I know these round-ups have been getting shorter lately.  I've been so fixated on the news from Iran that a lot of my other internetting has fallen by the wayside.

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The Iran war is a potential opportunity to get the more rational conservatives on board with clean energy.  The less dependent the US is on fossil fuels, the less dependent it is on the Middle East.  Surely any self-declared patriot would prefer that.

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Be very cautious in dealing with ideological people, even if you think you know them fairly well.  If you express a belief (or cite a fact) that sets them off -- and it can be surprisingly difficult to anticipate exactly what might do that -- all the normal standards of behavior go out the window and they will feel free to treat you unethically and unfairly.  It happened to me this week, with one of the people involved being someone I had thought I could trust.  Even my demands for an explanation of why they were behaving unethically were treated as an intolerable offense.  That's all I'm going to say about this incident.  But be wary around that kind of person.  Especially if it's online, you don't really know people as well as you think you do.

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