Video of the day -- a cube of absurdity

Unbelievable.  Just the energy demands of air-conditioning a structure of such size in the climate of central Arabia are mind-boggling.  If they ever even start building this thing, which I doubt, it will end up being abandoned half-completed, a colossal rusting monument to hubris and wasted money towering over the slums.

And no matter what high-tech monstrosities they try to build, it's still not a modern country if women have to be swaddled up in full-body cloth garbage bags and don't have equal rights with men, and gays are executed.

The grandiose and all-hat-no-cattle nature of this project reminds me of Elon Musk's ludicrous Mars colonization fantasies -- or this thing:

Link round-up for 12 April 2025

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

o o o o o

You have been warned.

"1/3 fewer cries than the leg!  Low fat yo!"

It is unwise to drive a truck like this.

Here's a low-tech roomba.

You want a flying car?  Here's one.

Frogs use mass transit.

I never expected to see an elephant shagging an anthill, but.....

Nice table -- hope it doesn't leak.

Here's a somewhat surprising optical illusion.

Meet Théophile Steinlen, an early-twentieth-century Paris artist with a fixation on black cats.

This was a kind-hearted rescue at sea.

It was the first time he walked.

From Wales comes further evidence that the shingles vaccine reduces the risk of dementia.

Can we join the space club?

Orcas can kill other animals by flinging them to death.

Canadian researchers have developed a stir stick that can detect a spiked drink.

A clinic in Tanzania is beating tuberculosis with the help of rats.

Seismometers left on the Moon by the astronauts have revealed that moonquakes are more common than expected.  It's still something of a mystery.

Glutamate can help speed up the recovery of a damaged liver (I don't know why this story is illustrated with a picture of a kidney).

Donations are saving this valuable museum.

Best idea ever.  Seriously, if something like this actually existed, I'd get one and wear it everywhere.

Here are some websites which, these bloggers claim, can save you money on medical expenses.  I have not tried or investigated any of them myself.

Take rabies seriously -- stay the hell away from wild animals.  Read this too -- it's long, but well worth it if you have any doubts about the need to absolutely avoid this.

If you own any Apple products, you may want to check out this guy (scroll down for link to his channel).

Meme-ists respond to the stock market crash.

Canada awaits its eleventh province (link from Chief Squirrel; this is a satire site).

Paramount Plus is censoring its streamed Star Trek episodes.  Keep your stuff on DVD so you can be sure you're seeing it as it really was.

Here's a listing of the best one hundred science fiction movies ever (I've seen forty-four of them).  It's better than most such lists are, probably because actual scientists participated in the selection, but still includes a few movies like Ghostbusters and Star Wars that aren't really science fiction (found via Miss Cellania).

After the Snow White disaster, Disney has put its next live-action remake, Tangled, on indefinite hold.

JK Rowling's success and popularity just keep growing.  The haters are a noisy but insignificant fringe.

I'm not sure this is what Jesus had in mind.

Consult a reliable source, not "AI".  Incredible that this guy relied on ChatGPT for something this important.

The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls responds to the John Oliver Show.  SheWon debunks more of his nonsense.  It seems viewers aren't fooled.

Blogger Annie reports a new attack on Social Security, and suggests actions to take.

70% of hiring managers lie to interviewees about the job.

Large collection of political images here.

She wrote a letter to the YMCA.  A similar incident later has sparked a protest.

There's a debate going on at Daily Kos about whether or not to ban "AI" images.  This recent fake ad highlights the ethical and legal issues.

Health experts are speaking out against RFK Jr.

Given enough time, it is definitely possible that a true Nazi movement could emerge in the US.  I stand by my earlier warning on the subject.

They reap what they sow.

This is a serious mental illness and you will never convince any normal person otherwise.

Oregon and Washington are suing to preserve our vote-by-mail system.

April 9 should become a national holiday, celebrating the defeat of the filthiest evil in all of US history.

Georgia authorities have abandoned their medieval harassment of a woman who was arrested after having a miscarriage.

No one should worry about having these guys around.

NPR has pictures from the Hands Off protests all over the country.  Jay Kuo believes they'll discourage Trump and embolden opposition in Congress.  See blogger reports and photos from New York City, Detroit, and other places (I think these are largely Salt Lake City).  Pictures from red states here, from small towns here.  Blogger Rade's rally in Tiverton RI made the local front page.  Some have commented that the protesters were largely older people, but that's not surprising -- retirees have more free time for such activities than those still working do.

50501 has another wave of rallies scheduled for April 19.

Stephanie Turner's courage has not gone unrecognized.  The man she refused to face is no longer a member of his college's fencing team, though it's unclear whether he left voluntarily or was removed.

The FDA is allowing its employees to work from home again after an earlier order dragging them back to the office led to too many people quitting.

Portland OR has established a laundry facility for homeless people.

The Social Security system is now beginning to malfunction as DOGE buggers it up in various ways.  However, the Trumpazoids have backed down on plans to close field offices -- and now claim they were never planning to do so at all.

Trump backs down on congestion pricing in New York.

Funding the government via tariffs can't work.

"This is totalitarian insanity."  And every time such a thing happens, one more family wakes up to the necessity of resistance.

A new law in New Jersey makes it a crime to create or share "AI" fake nudes of minors or non-consenting adults.

The Trump tariffs would probably have led to a massive level of cross-border smuggling.  This was written before Trump backed down on the tariffs, but it still makes some interesting points.

A man with such contempt for ordinary people shouldn't be a senator.

Trump now needs the help of other democracies for his trade war with China.  Too bad he's just spent weeks pissing them all off.

All around the world, the terror continues.  Civilization must never accept this as normal or tolerable.

Two rights groups in Canada are suing the government there over the practice of putting male criminals in women's prisons, where they can prey on the women inmates.

EU regulators are considering a fine of over $1 billion for Twitter.

France is fairly well prepared to take on a leading role in defending Europe against Russia.

Trump couldn't be bothered to honor the four US soldiers who died in Lithuania, but the Lithuanians did.

Germany is paying for Ukraine's access to the French Eutelsat system, to reduce its reliance on Starlink.

Drones have hit Russia's only fiber optic manufacturing plant.

Russian soldiers show off their spiffy new fighting vehicle.

Russian troops claim that their commanders are using drones to attack their own soldiers who retreat, and that they are sending wounded soldiers on suicide missions to clear mines.

Chinese nationals are fighting for the Russian army in Ukraine.

Levi Salem Musa Marhabi is the last Jew in Yemen.

Half of the total US force of B-2 bombers have been deployed to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.  One interpretation is that Trump intends to threaten Iran with an attack on its nuclear program, or perhaps even carry out such an attack if his popularity in the US falls far enough, to manufacture a unifying foreign-policy crisis.

There are divisions among the Taliban over exactly how badly to oppress women.

More links at WAHF and Chop Wood Carry Water.  Update:  Red State Blues now has theirs posted.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a video on Chinese architecture, and Trump backing down on tariffs.

o o o o o

Canada's new prime minister, Mark Carney, deserves a lot of the credit for bringing Trump to heel.

Trump caves! Trump backs down! Trump folds!

In the end, he did it again.  After days of insisting that his idiotic tariffs were positively, definitely for real this time -- days during which the stock market plummeted like a meteor, and other major economies like the EU and China announced retaliation instead of groveling as he had hoped -- Trump backed down yet again and announced a ninety-day "pause" in the tariffs on every target except China.  The stock market quickly shot up again, and sane people everywhere breathed a sigh of relief.

He had been under plenty of pressure to do so.  The dramatic fall in stocks affirmed that the tariff plan was going to be a total disaster.  Economists everywhere said the same.  Leaders of other countries said so.  Billionaire business leaders said so.  The fact that the stock market briefly recovered on a false report that the tariffs were on hold said so.  Evidently some combination of these got through to him.  (Trump has been claiming that lots of countries have gotten in touch wanting to make deals, but there is no evidence for this.)

There was never any chance that the claimed benefit of the tariffs -- bringing industrial production back to the US -- would materialize.  Factories take years to plan, build, and make operational.  No one was going to make such a large long-term investment on the basis of tariffs that everyone knew would be removed anyway the next time a sane president was in office, and the utter chaos of the US economy and government since the Trump-Musk Dunning-Kruger duo took over makes our country a singularly unappetizing place for investment.

The latter problem is not going away just because Trump has paused the tariffs.  As long as he's in charge, especially with Elon Musk also buggering things up, the chaos will continue.  There is no plan.  Unless Congress gets its act together and reins him in, the economy will be at the mercy of whatever random idiocy the sporadic sputterings of his senescent remaining brain cells happen to generate.  He's still doubling down on his bone-headed refusal to understand what tariffs even are, though this must have been explained to him countless times:


This fiasco affirms, yet again, that this country is now being run by a conglomeration of idiots.  There is no diabolically-cunning eleventeen-dimensional plan to, say, manipulate the stock market by staging this mess.  Trump imposed tariffs on places that are not independent countries or, in at least one case, even inhabited.  Even he must know that repeatedly announcing tariffs and then backing down -- for the third time now -- makes him look like a bungler.  Musk and his silly DOGE brats keep randomly firing federal workers en masse and then frantically trying to get them back when it turns out they do something critical like nuclear-weapons maintenance (not that what the other workers do isn't important, but it's often important in ways Musk is too stupid to understand).  Top cabinet-level nitwits not only discussed sensitive military plans in an un-secure group chat, but accidentally included a journalist who thereby had both the ability and the motive to expose their incompetence.  They also keep personal data, which could be used to hack their communications, publicly visible on the internet.  And on and on and on.  None of this stuff is the behavior of crafty supervillains.  The reason why they look like stupid, blundering incompetents is that they actually are stupid, blundering incompetents.

It's not clear why China alone is still being targeted for tariffs.  Trump said that it's because China retaliated, but the EU and Canada also retaliated, or at least made it very clear that they intended to do so.  Perhaps it's a hopeful sign -- somebody may have managed to get it through Trump's calcified skull that China is actually an enemy, which the EU and Canada are not.  As I observed during Trump's first term, if he had worked to get the other major democracies on board with a common campaign of economic pressure against China, it would have been a constructive policy that might really have achieved something.  China is the true modern-day Nazi Germany, and any company that does business with that abomination fully deserves whatever nasty consequences it suffers.  Trump's error was to start trade wars with everybody, thus unifying the world against the US rather than against China.  One can hope that he finally gets this -- although persuading the other big economies to join in such an anti-China campaign would now be much harder, in the wake of the belligerent tariff fiasco.

But the important take-away here is that pressure works.  Trump has repeatedly backed down when he faced enough resistance of whatever kind -- now even on the tariffs about which he seemed so bull-headedly determined.  He's an airhead, a lightweight, a balloon full of hot gas that can be blown from place to place by whatever winds grow strong enough.  We must be the strong wind.

Video of the day -- the tofu-dreg empire

No matter what happens to the US, China is not going to supplant us.  Their civil engineering is absolute crap even by Third World standards (watch this if you're not already familiar with the problem).  The long-suffering Chinese people have coined the term "tofu-dreg" to refer to such garbage-quality construction.  There's no reason to think that the quality of the Chinese military's equipment is any better, or that it suffers any less than the Russian military does from the corruption and incompetence endemic to dictatorial regimes.

Truths and inspirations for 7 April 2025

If something's hard to see or read, click to enlarge.

[For the link round-up, click here.]

The colors on the hands are those of the flags of Ukraine and Poland.

Made by Rade.

Sign at the Hands Off event in Chicago, April 5.

Made by Louise Woodward-Styles.  Stephanie Turner is the latest woman athlete to insist that 2+2=4 even when The Party says it's 5.

The cultists can throw around all the Newspeak and squid ink and gaslighting they want in defense of this kind of thing.  Everyone who isn't totally mentally captured knows it's crazy.

As an economic power, Russia is only barely larger than Spain and ranks far behind any of the four biggest European democracies.

This is from the 1950s.