Link round-up for 30 May 2026

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

o o o o o

He had to leave, but he didn't look happy about it.

Looks like these guys aren't handling transportation any better than we do.

Don't let your cat get inside the ceiling.

In fact, cats cause trouble everywhere.

This is a civilized way to hide (books and a tea-kettle -- can I move in too?).

This was a public-spirited intervention.

Here are a few fun facts about various countries.

This is the Calchaquí Valley near Salta, Argentina.

Classiest furniture items ever.

The London Underground has brought in a special group of non-human engineers to reduce flooding.

Here is an animal that can photosynthesize.

This is a masterpiece of precision engineering, from two thousand years ago.

Meet Gordon Cooper, who showed what human intelligence and skill can accomplish under pressure.

Researchers are using recently-dead, partially-reactivated human brains for testing the effects of drugs.  They insist there's no risk that any awareness or sensation exists in the brains under these conditions -- but they're still using anesthesia.  How sure are they?

Walking makes you more creative by helping your mind wander.

It is possible to get too much sleep, as well as too little.

When your boss is such an asshole that you quit, do what you have to do, but handle it a bit carefully.

Index funds could put your retirement investments in danger from the "AI" bubble.

Libraries are medicine for the mind.

Amazon customer service sounds like an "AI" nightmare.

YouTube says it will start labeling "AI"-generated videos so we can avoid them more easily.

We're doing children no favors by teaching them fragility instead of self-control.  Those who cannot master their own impulses and urges are not truly free.

While technology has progressed over the last half-century, the economy has gotten much worse.

A new book about "AI" and truth turns out to contain a lot of fake "AI"-generated citations because the "author" used "AI" to help "write" it (we have to put so many things in quote marks these days because "AI" is making all our words not mean what they mean any more).  But he, an obvious addict, just can't stop using the "magical" hallucination machine.  He's not alone; several "AI"-addled academics seem shocked that they're expected to do actual work to avoid fake information in the papers they "write".

Non-religious people (now making up nearly a third of Americans and growing rapidly), are expensive for political campaigns to reach and take more effort to win over.

This is what it was like for women in the US in the 1960s, barely over half a century ago.

This is what was happening in Syria in the late 1940s.  I can pretty much guarantee you don't know any of it.  But you need to.

This is not apartheid.

"But courage is standing by what you believe when it costs you something."

Two men have been arrested for posting huge amounts of "AI" fake porn of real people without their consent.

In case the Trumpazoids start claiming there are mail-in voting irregularities in Maryland, here's what really happened.

"The names and slogans change.  The complicity doesn't."

As Google keeps buggering up its search engine with more and more unwanted "AI", people are switching to DuckDuckGo.

Jeff Bezos reminds us that his rockets can explode just as good as Elon Musk's.  The force of the blast is estimated at one kiloton, or one-fifteenth as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.  That's got to have done some serious damage to the launch facility.

It looks as though California will exempt Linux from its privacy-wrecking age-verification law.  (Linux probably couldn't have complied with it anyway.  Dumbass politicians don't understand how anything works.)

Those pesky journalists are being "defiant" anyway.

The harassment directed at Jewish institutions in Mamdani's New York has gotten bad enough that the New York state government has stepped in.  The new law protects "houses of worship and educational centers" in general, but everybody knows damn well which group is mostly being targeted by the thugs these days.

Mamdani says he will not attend the "Israel Day on Fifth" parade tomorrow, the first New York mayor to refuse to participate since the parade began in 1964.  There was a protest at Gracie Mansion, but Mamdani grants himself the anti-protest buffer zone he had vetoed for Jewish schools and synagogues.

"It turns self-defense into sin.  Lovely little ideological trap."

CEOs are plotting to use "AI" to turn the American workplace into a hellscape of micromanagement and intensive supervision.

See which of these two assessments of our country's problems more closely aligns with your own view.

A "bunker" community designed to help rich assholes survive an apocalypse goes sour as residents turn on each other.

Remember Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim -- and who the vermin were who celebrated their deaths.

Trump's "revenge tour" of primary challenges to Republicans he doesn't like seems to have buggered up his ability to get votes in Congress, including approval of a new Supreme Court pick if the opportunity arises.

Republican primary voters in Texas did Trump's bidding and nominated scandal-plagued Bill Paxton for the Senate, giving the Democrats their best opportunity to win in the state in decades.  Democratic voters in Texas's 35th Congressional district, by contrast, strongly rejected the utterly deranged Maureen Galindo as a candidate.

As "AI" companies raise their prices to reflect the actual costs of providing the technology, more and more customers are finding it's not worth it.

"The quote unsettled people because it named something many Western institutions have spent years trying to blur:  the widening gap between public language and private belief."

As the Supreme Court continues to protect the mailing of abortion pills, forced-birth wingnuts declare that their patience has run out and demand that Trump take stronger action to force women and girls to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

Microslop is canceling its Claude Code licenses now that it's being charged something more in line with what the "AI" actually costs to provide, making the cost untenable.

Mob violence and threats are targeting Jews, not Israelis or Zionists.  This is Jew-hatred plain and simple.  Anyone who insists on hairsplitting between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is part of the problem.

A carefully-designed experiment shows that while "AI" may seem at first to help math students, in reality it inhibits learning.

"Once human beings become abstractions, cruelty becomes easier."

At least one top Maine Democrat is putting principle above party, declaring Graham Platner's Nazi tattoo and his claims about it "disqualifying".  Platner is refusing to apologize to a Purple Heart veteran whom he grossly insulted.

The Trumpified DoJ is launching an "investigation" of E Jean Carroll, the woman Trump was found legally liable for sexually assaulting.  Julian Sanchez claims it isn't a real investigation (found via Red State Blues), but the situation sounds murky at best.

The parasite class seems to be evolving into a distinct and inferior type of human, devoid of the higher moral and social sensibilities.

Oklahoma has recently banned marriage by minors, but many Republicans opposed the law, mostly for religious reasons.

Pride Month has been stolen.

This is what was happening in Poland after World War II.

What can be done about such uncompromising hatred?

"The next step is not private agreement.  It is public resistance".

In a sane world, this judge would be removed from his position and flogged.

It's now more than a year since the British Supreme Court ruled in favor of protecting women's rights, but institutions are still dragging their feet.

A Belgian court has said it straight out -- under "hate speech" laws, you can be punished for telling the truth.

The Spanish police know how to deal with assholes.

Europeans have learned they can't trust the US any more.

Russia's economy is deteriorating across the board.

Russia's recent massive missile attack on Ukraine included one of its much-hyped Oreshnik missiles, but Russian military bloggers are unimpressed with the results.

Ukraine's military emphasizes decentralization and flexibility, in contrast to Russia's rigid, top-down system.

Ukrainian drone operators are on the hunt for Russian logistics in the occupied territories.

See a Ukrainian attack on a Russian warship in the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles from Ukraine.

This brief video shows the magnitude of the earlier strike against Tuapse.

Video from the Gaza conflict illustrates the tactics of both Israel and Hamas.

The Iranian theocracy's supreme leader Mojtabā Khāmenei, or whoever speaks in his name these days, has issued a renewed call for the annihilation of Israel.  This regime is sparing no effort to remind us that it is too dangerous to be left in power.

A video clip has emerged from the great massacre of protesters in January.  This is Mashhad, a small city in the northeast.

This is the reality of life in the country today.

Iranians feel angry and betrayed at Trump's negotiations with the regime.  It indeed looks like he has abandoned them and now risks leaving the regime in power to rebuild and threaten Israel and the West in the future, while also continuing to grind down the Iranian people.

In India, rising temperatures are becoming life-threatening for some workers.

Some families in Bangladesh are unable to get the measles vaccine.  Americans have no such excuse.

A planned change to North Korea's nuclear doctrine may have unforeseen consequences.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, two Scotland travel videos, and lives within lives.

o o o o o