Link round-up for 7 November 2026

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

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You can get an OnlyFans calendar.

I want this cat as my manager.

This was the worst possible place to put the entrance.

They're messing with the wrong guy here.

Some people just can't get thihgs right.

I guess they're not speaking the same language.

Yeah, that's a big one.

Blogger Mr Shife is being sued by his dog.

Here are a few unfortunate oddities.

What if real life was like a computer?

Apparently the Armenian Parliament is completely silly.

English terms for nationality are weird.

Drive a car that stands out from the crowd.

Here are a last few Halloween decorations, from blogger Lady M and photographer Ginny Hartzler.

These witches know their moves.

Admire the proud parents.

Keep your hands to yourself.

This is the future, if the tech-bros win.

Shadow of a Doubt blog remembers Patrick Stewart.

Sometimes even animals need emotional support animals.

This is what bad weather looks like.

Here are some upside-down icebergs.

Who the hell left all these jars here?

This is Madrid.

Trade and cultural connections between India and the West go back much further than most people realize -- even to Roman times.

Renewing your passport may be easier than you think.

Watch out for this scam that uses a fake Cloudflare verification (this post has some large blank areas in the middle of the text, so keep scrolling until you really reach the end).

Here's how to get rid of, or at least limit, "AI" on various devices and programs.

At least some "smart" TVs spy on you even when they're turned off, even if you've opted out.

"The work is what happens within you."

There's now a wave of "AI" image fakery targeting men, though it's nothing like as degrading as all the "AI" fake porn targeting women.

".....lube up your backsides and put on some lipstick because a lot of you are on your way to the slammer."  Charming.

A former Meta executive denounces the company's Muse "AI" agent as a dangerous privacy risk.

Same old shit.

The Catholic Church's "International Association of Exorcists" (yes, there is such a thing) wants to replace Halloween with more of their dreary same-old-same-old saints-and-processions stuff.  Their pathetic ignorance is shown by conflating Satanism and Wicca, two totally different things.  It's mind-blowing to me that the Catholic Church still has exorcists in the twenty-first century.

Blogger Carol Seidl compares experiences of healthcare in the US vs France.

A record number of scientists, engineers, doctors, and nurses were elected as members of Congress this week.  That's got to be an improvement.

".....look at the way they react when a woman is sexually harassed."

Individualism is an important positive value.  Do not allow the collectivists to change the meaning of the word.

Here are some things you should not do.

"Kauft nicht bei Juden!"

Last week, tech stocks continued the previous week's plummet.  No one knows for sure, but it certainly looks like the "AI" bubble collapse could be imminent.

The right-wing news site NRO offers a surprisingly honest post-mortem on the Republicans' huge election defeat.  On the right-wing sites I read, I've seen almost none of the usual "Democrats stole the election" nonsense.  I think the margins were so large in many cases that such claims are obviously implausible.

Ted Cruz has a simpler explanation -- the economy stinks, people are hurting, and Republican politicians showed no sign of giving a shit.  That was almost certainly the biggest single issue.

Tesla is apparently discontinuing production of the godawful Cybertruck, an irrecoverable flop with buyers.

The election included forty-one ballot measures about data centers, across ten states.  On all but one of them, the anti-data-center side prevailed -- and the margins were large.  56% of voters said data centers were a major factor influencing how they voted.  Anti-data-center Congressional candidates also won big.  It seems there was a populist message in this election -- reject "AI", hate "AI", stop "AI".

Many localities passed initiatives to ban or restrict surveillance cameras, or voted out local politicians who weren't fully on board with getting rid of them.

This week Google announced that schools that ban its "AI" would also lose access to its search engine.  Within a day, after a huge backlash, the company was frantically backing down.

Emptywheel blog makes the case for why even the progs should support Hakeem Jeffries for speaker of the House.

Montana has passed initiative 194, banning corporations from making campaign contributions, with 65% of the vote.  If the law survives Constitutional challenges, and other states adopt similar measures, it would mean de facto cancellation of Citizens United.

In Tampa FL, a security guard shot and killed a gunman who was storming a bank and had already killed a woman in the parking lot.  Without this armed guard's decisive action, there would have been a massacre.  This is Leanne Selman, the woman who was murdered.  The dead murderer, like all such, was mere garbage who doesn't deserve to be remembered or named.

The new Congress may be able to do more than you expect -- Republicans now have far less reason to slavishly toe Trump's line.

Some voters were getting political information from chatbots, which got things completely wrong as usual.

Les Leopold assesses Dan Osborn's defeat.  It's absurd to claim he would have done better running as a Democrat -- Republicans relentlessly painted him as "really" a Democrat, and that's a big part of why he lost.  The key need is a new, truly working-class party, neither left nor right, which will be clearly differentiated from both Democrats and Republicans.

"What possible reason have you given Bob and his son to vote Republican?  Do you honestly think you deserve their vote?"

Buzzfeed's stock has collapsed, from $2.09 earlier this year to $0.57 now, as its embrace of "AI" led to disaster.

Democrats now control enough state governments to enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would nullify the Electoral College and bring about election of the president by popular vote.  In this post from 2024, I explain how the Compact would work and why it would not be a good idea, however tempting it sounds.

"His mental health required another person to publicly pretend that reality was an error."

Over the past two months Fox news has gone heavy on pro-data-center propaganda -- and its viewership has plummeted.

California governor Newsom has taken a huge, steaming dump on crime victims by commuting the death sentences of every death-row prisoner in the state.  As the article notes, this will please "wealthy, white and college-educated voters", but "more moderate blue-collar voters..... are not in line with him on this".  Nationally, two-thirds of voters support the death penalty for murderers.

Donors to likely next House speaker Hakeem Jeffries include several tech-bro billionaires.  The amounts cited seem small by the usual standards of billionaire influence-buying, though, so I don't know how much of a corrupting effect this will have.

"AI" enables Trump to live in a fake alternate reality and shields him from the truth.  This post was written before the election, but it helps to explain why he believed that he and the Republicans were more popular than they really were.  Time will tell whether the election result will shock him to his senses.

Several police officers in Charlotte NC engaged in a competition to see who could arrest the most black people.

This huge planned data center in Alberta will produce staggering amounts of waste heat (though I'm skeptical of the nuclear-bomb comparison) and greenhouse-gas emissions equal to four percent of those of the whole country of Canada.

Yeah, these are just students protesting funding cuts, right.

Small drones destroy a Russian tank.  I'd hate to be inside that thing.

A fully-loaded rocket launcher makes an impressive explosion.  Here's another one -- notice how the drone homes right in on the fuel tank for best effect.  This ammunition depot made an even bigger blast.

These Russians were having a bad day.

One of Russia's biggest oil refineries burns spectacularly after a drone attack.  This is a different one, fire all over.

Here, drones destroy a couple of more conventional military targets.

How's that supply route to Crimea looking these days?

If the Russian army can't beat Ukraine, maybe sacrificing camels will work.  #@%$!*@ superstitious dumbasses.

The Economist estimates that Russia has suffered between 1,400,000 and 2,100,000 military casualties in the Ukraine war, including 374,000 to 770,000 deaths.  The higher figure for deaths would exceed American losses in the Civil War, the deadliest war in our history.

Good fucking riddance.

The Iranian regime has declared that if Trump attacks again, there will be "no geographical limits" on its retaliation.  We should be prepared for, say, strikes against military or nuclear facilities here in the US, using drones either smuggled in or obtained and modified here.

Taiwan has learned a great deal from Ukraine on how to resist a possible future Chinese invasion.

More links at Red State Blues, Legal Mama Reviews, and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and my assessment of the election.

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Despite all of Trump's threats and bluster and bungled efforts at sabotage, despite all the nightmare scenarios that have been circulating on the internet, the election proceeded normally and essentially problem-free.  There is not and never was any "threat to democracy" -- except from gerrymandering by both parties.

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