Link round-up for 20 June 2026

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

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Inconsiderate jaywalkers hold up traffic.

Is he far enough away to be safe?

Sisyphus meets Ouroboros.

Here is a cat watching a horror movie.

Police dogs enjoy their jobs.

This warrior woman really wants you to notice her hat.

Passengers on the left side of the train, please keep your windows closed.

Now this is interior decorating.  There's no place like Scary Mary's place.

Infrared photography makes the ordinary world look like an alien planet (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

June 15 was National Megalodon Day.

Watch the evolution of life on Earth since the Cambrian explosion in three minutes.

Iridescent clouds are a spectacular, if rare, phenomenon (found via SickoRicko).

Take a trip inside a leaf (click the CC button at lower right to turn on captions -- they'll tell you what you're looking at).

Marjoreene has gone to Mexico for anti-aging stem cell therapy which is not yet available in the US.  Such technology has been proven effective in mice but not yet tested on humans.

The HPV vaccine has eliminated death from cervical cancer in England.

Aircraft-based lasers are the future of anti-missile defense.

Mexico is producing an electric car (really a minivan) costing just $8,500.  It's not yet clear whether it will be allowed to be sold in the US.

Anything is better than using "AI" to "help" you write.

These glasses look ridiculous, will hurt your ears and probably give you a migraine, and cost $2,195.  Probably not going to be a hot seller.

In a grim economy, "AI" scams are giving desperate people false hope.  It won't end well.

Home-owners living near SpaceX are suing over damage to their houses from the vibration caused by launches.

In Dallas, FIFA has destroyed a classic whale mural by a world-renowned artist so they can paint some sports junk on the wall instead.

Texas Republicans brought an elephant into their convention.  It behaved appropriately.

A British politician reaches peak bullshit (no, I don't know what he's talking about, but apparently neither does he).

"AI"-coded apps are starting to hit the market, but they're junk and nobody wants them.

Religion is man-made -- for men.

Student reading and writing ability improves dramatically when electronic gadgets are banned from the classroom.

If you support pornography, you're supporting people like this (warning -- disgusting).

23% of renter households in the US fell behind on rent in 2025, a percentage which has been rising steadily since 2019.  Rents increased 37% over the same period.

This was the legacy of slavery in the US.

Many of Trump's voters are turning against him -- but they want to hear a clear anti-corporate, anti-inflation message from the Democrats before supporting them.  Economic populism with no pussyfooting around to avoid offending rich donors.

On average, conservatives suffer worse health than liberals and die at higher rates.  The reason is the different attitudes toward vaccines, and toward modern medical science generally.

The US anti-data-center resistance is gaining momentum, with seventy-five projects blocked or delayed in the first three months of this year.  It's a massive grassroots campaign uniting people from across the political spectrum, but the two major parties are reluctant to support it because of the donations they get from billionaire "AI" corporate donors -- an example of the corruption which shows the need for a third party.  But this Pennsylvania Democrat, at least, won her primary by embracing the issue.

"Gay" (in the sense of homosexual) has a clear definition, but "queer" just keeps getting more and more inclusive.

This person exists.  Don't hire him.

The Obama Presidential Center is opening this weekend, with an array of stars performing at the ceremony, in marked contrast to Trump's mega-dud event in Washington where almost all of the scheduled performers canceled.

"OpenAI and Anthropic are unsustainable and recklessly-run companies that do not make sense outside of the broken world of Silicon Valley.  The tech industry and venture capital are run by a coterie of has-beens who create no value."

Some Congressional Republicans are highly critical of Trump's Iran deal, with one calling it "the worst foreign policy blunder in decades".  Trump has predictably responded with personal insults and non sequiturs.  He also called the Iranian gangster-regime's leaders "people that I think are very rational people" and "not radicalized".  This man is not mentally fit to be chief executive of a hot-dog stand.

Why is the West so receptive to absurd claims about an Israeli "genocide" in Gaza?

Trump's policies have taken away SNAP benefits from over four million people, almost half of them apparently children.

The Senate seems ready to pass a bill banning big investors from buying up huge numbers of houses and holding them hostage for profit.  The bill would still need to get past the House and Trump.

Rejection of "AI" is not a partisan issue.

Trump gets birthday greetings from Denmark (this is real, but the original was posted on Facebook, which I can't view or link to).

"The people pushing BDS the hardest have not thought about this because thinking about it would complicate their performance."

Fixing Social Security would be easy.  It's just a matter of political will.

More economic-populist messaging won't help the Democratic party as long as everyone knows it's not an economic-populist party.

Using "AI" as a pretext for layoffs highlights the widening class disparities that characterize our time.

This is child abuse (warning -- disgusting).

Tesla's robotaxis are definitively a failure.

Trump seems to be giving up his court fight against wind energy.  However, the administration is trying to help Elon Musk beat an NAACP lawsuit about unpermitted turbines at a data center in Mississippi, which are causing health and environmental issues.

Children need to be protected from perversity and exploitation on the internet, but nothing can justify undermining adults' online privacy.  Parents, not the government, need to be the ones taking action here.

American Indian activists in Canada and the US speak out on Islamic imperialism.

A British cop is being investigated for using "AI" to create fake evidence.

In Northern Ireland, the anti-immigration resistance is bringing together Protestants and Catholics who were at each other's throats a generation ago.

Europe is rapidly cutting back its use of American technology, having learned from Trump that being dependent on the US is dangerous.

The AfD, Germany's nativist party, is now polling at 29% support, much higher than any other party (the CDU/CSU is the party currently in power).

Amazon has contracts with several outside parties to launch its satellites, but only France's Arianespace is actually getting the job done, as the US's floundering billionaire-owned rocket companies stagger from one fiasco to another.

A French activist is being threatened with jail for saying what everybody in the country knows is the truth.

Jordan Bardella, a likely future presidential candidate for France's nativist party, is keeping his distance from Trump and doesn't want his endorsement.

Here's a report from the gay pride parade in Córdoba, Spain.

Israelis and supporters of the Iranian resistance were expelled from a pride parade in Italy.  Evidently opponents of the jihadist ideology that persecutes and kills gay people aren't welcome.

With the passage of a new law, Mexico now has far more civilized labor standards than the US does.

When I went to Kyiv in 2007, I visited the catacombs of Pechersk, which are nine centuries old and house the mummified remains of many medieval monks.  Pechersk is considered one of the most important Christian historic sites in eastern Europe.  This week a Russian Shāhed drone hit the cathedral there, causing a fire and other damage.  It's the most serious attack on Ukraine's cultural heritage yet.

Thick smoke was seen over Moscow after multiple drone strikes on a refinery there on Thursday.  Check out the size of the lid being blown off a storage tank at 1:23.  Later that day it got this bad.

Yes, this is what a superpower's defense of its capital city looks like.

Ukraine attacked this chemical plant in occupied Crimea.

The inhabitants of Gaza are suffering cruel shortages.

Trump's Iran deal is a betrayal of Israel and of the Iranian people, and a clear victory for the regime -- Trump basically surrendered, throwing away the achievements of the US and Israeli military.  The deal doesn't even seem to include regular comprehensive inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities as Obama's JCPOA did.  Crown prince Pahlavi, widely accepted as a leader figure by the Iranian resistance, has condemned it.  Israel was not consulted on the deal and its interests were ignored, so it is not bound by the deal.  Naftali Bennett, a possible successor to Netanyahu as prime minister, declares that Israel will still try to help the Iranians against the regime, even if Trump has abandoned the fight.

Trump's abject weakness on Iran risks emboldening Putin.

The Islamic regime in Iran is still executing protesters, including teenagers.

Protests have erupted in Kenya against Trump's plan to make that country a dumping ground for Americans with ebola.

The military regime in Niger has imposed a new penal code making homosexuality a crime.  Its actual wording criminalizes "LGBTQIA+ acts", specifying that the "A" stands for "asexual".  What would an "asexual act" consist of?  Can you be imprisoned for not having sex?

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  an image round-up, a warning about blog censorship, and a video on the "tic-tac" UFO incident.

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It seems quite clear what motivated Trump's craven surrender to the Iranian regime.  He's making decisions based on US domestic politics rather than on the realities on the ground.  He wants the war to be out of the headlines and gas prices to be down by the time of the November election, and if that means backstabbing Israel and the Iranian people and leaving this huge problem in place to grow stronger again and have to be dealt with by a future president, he doesn't care.

His position seems to be that Israel should just sit there and do nothing when it gets attacked, to avoid disrupting his surrender.  Obviously Israel will not go along with that.