Link round-up for 27 June 2026

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

Reminder:  If you like a blog post I link to here, leave a supportive comment on that post as well as (or instead of) here.  That way you can be sure the blogger will see it.

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If you need a tree cut down, do not hire these people.

And don't hire this guy to do, well, pretty much anything.

Cats have things their own way.

She's the DJ of the kitchen.

This must be that duck that they wanted to keep out.

They caught a big fish.

"I never have any idea what's going on here."

This is a cool house.  A refuge from everything being off-white and rectangular.

In Córdoba, Spain, the Roman engineering is so impressive that even the Devil wants a selfie with it.

Blogger Darrell Michaels has a collection of photos from a lifetime of travel.  Right-click any image and open the link in a new tab for full size.

Here's a Cadillac from 1915.  No electronics, just comfy seats.

The classic 1954 gi-ant movie Them is getting a new upgraded blue-ray version.

Find out why sloths poo on the ground (found via SickoRicko).

Fear the power of the wind.

Here's a photo tour of a nuclear reactor decommissioned in 1994.

Former NOAA scientists fired by DOGE have launched a website to keep on providing the public with actual climate information uncontaminated by ideological crackpottery.

Do gay men have distinctive voices?  If this is true, it is definitely not universal.  I have known gay men who had no unusual voice qualities at all.  He does include links to the studies he's citing so you can see them for yourself.

Calcium supplements may not protect older people against bone fractures as much as we thought.

If you work someplace where you get tips and the company is doing anything like this, talk to a lawyer.

The Postal Service is considering a new and illegal rule which would seriously interfere with voting by mail.  You have until July 2 to take action.

There's now some evidence that marijuana can protect against Alzheimer's.  But it isn't for everybody.  This blogger's experience is a warning of how it can go wrong.

You can farm without farmland.  Some of this stuff must be kind of expensive, though.

Here is something to avoid doing.

Beware this warning sign of a dangerous man.

Yes, your chatbot is spying on you.  Just stop using the damn things.

You may be able to get a religious exemption from using "AI" at work, even if you aren't religious.

Some grocery stores are deploying "AI" shopping carts to nag and pester you while you shop, and of course to show you ads.

Here's a site that tracks LPR cameras and explains the dangers they pose.

We're doing lawns wrong.

Johnny Profane is making his extensive writings on autism easier to share.

No one should be expected to stay stuck in a cultural pigeonhole because of ancestry.

Hunter Biden is making the most of his new sobriety.

Can you believe Debbie Harry is the same age as Trump?  But she sure looks a lot more vigorous.

"Shanna" posts posed photos of what it would be like if Islam worked the other way around.

A24 spent years building up its image as an artist-centered film company (the recent film Backrooms was its biggest hit).  Now it's formed a partnership with Google to develop new ways of putting "AI" slop in movies.  Fans are not happy.

"You want to know what you would have done when the Nazis were coming to power?  You are doing it right now."  Yes, he really did say this.

"AI" companies are flooding both of the billionaire-dominated political parties with donations, to guarantee that they'll have influence regardless of which one wins in November.

56% of Americans support abolishing the Electoral College and electing the president by popular vote.  Only 23% oppose doing so.

Here's how you can distinguish a real rebel hero from a phony.

People are losing patience with getting crappy "AI" customer service on the phone instead of a real person, with many considering abandoning companies that force them to use it.

Here is the true answer to the question "do Jews look Middle Eastern?"

California's union-backed billionaire tax proposal has qualified for the November ballot.  Notice the talk about political leaders (that is, toadies of the billionaire parasite class) trying to make some kind of "deal" to stop voters from having their say on this.  Governor Newsom, and both of the billionaire-controlled parties' candidates for governor, oppose the proposal.  They are desperate to stop this -- which just shows how absolutely vital it is that the voters enact it.  It also shows how right Les Leopold is that we need a union-based political force fully independent of the two billionaire parties, which are both now lost to the people.

Here's a great interview with Cory Doctorow about why "AI" is so appealing to idiots, and what the end of the bubble will be like.

Graham Platner is a litmus test.

These people exist.

The co-founder of Wikipedia has been banned from editing it.

As the "AI" plague spreads, we need to revive -- and also properly understand -- the spirit of the Luddites.

Trump, throwing a tantrum because the Senate isn't passing his "SAVE" vote-suppression act, has refused to sign an unrelated bill that would have limited housing speculation.  He may not realize that it will become law anyway unless he vetoes it -- and it passed with such huge bipartisan majorities that Congress would likely override a veto.

The partisan nature of so many recent Supreme Court decisions is historically unprecedented, showing why enlargement or some other Congressional fix is needed.

With the passage of enough time, the truth comes out and the bullshit is forgotten.

This self-driving Tesla ran down and killed a woman.  Inside her own house.

Hegseth has suspended mandatory flu vaccinations within the US military.  There's already been at least one major flu outbreak at a military base.

The drop in SpaceX stock has ended Elon Musk's brief status as a trillionaire.

Zionism just means Jews having the same rights as everybody else.  That's why the bigots hate it.

A bipartisan bill in Congress seeks to protect the rights of artists against "AI" theft of their work, but it's unclear how well it would work if passed, given politicians' usual inability to understand how technology works.

America's first openly-transgender state legislator continues to make history.

"AI" is continuing to damage worker skills and productivity at companies that use it.  Now that companies have to pay prices for "AI" that better reflect what it costs to supply it, they're racing to limit the useless expense.

The idiotic UK bureaucracy is threatening to prosecute a man for cleaning up garbage dumped in a river.

Pattern recognition is not bigotry.  They need to leave.

Norway is imposing strict limits on "AI" use in schools.

Six months.  The system is a joke.

The EU Parliament has approved the creation of "return hubs" to facilitate deportation of migrants.  Maybe the rising support for nativist parties across Europe is finally scaring the mainstream politicians into paying attention to the voters.

This week Trump started yet another pointless and embarrassing squabble, claiming that Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni had begged to be photographed with him to boost her ratings at home (a ludicrous claim, since Trump is hugely unpopular in Italy) but he had refused because Italy didn't assist the US during the Iran war.  Meloni of course denied the claim, leading Trump to pile on with more insults.  Meloni's response sounded like an adult losing patience with a bad-tempered toddler -- which is pretty much what was actually going on.  So Trump has now antagonized the one European leader most inclined to be supportive of him.  The European nativist movement in general is turning against him.

Trump's billionaire ambassador is carrying on with the job of offending Italians.

Albanian protests are escalating against a Kushner-Trump beach resort project on what's supposed to be protected land.

Ukraine launched a massive drone attack all across Russia this week, destroying military, energy, and infrastructure targets.

A Ukrainian attack on oil tanks in Russian-occupied Crimea started a major fire.  Fuel trucks headed there need military escorts because of Ukrainian drone attacks.  Gasoline is now in such short supply in Crimea that sales to civilians have been suspended.

Gas lines in Russia are so bad that one city is planning to install portable toilets for people waiting.

An Iranian singer has been sentenced to seventy-four lashes for performing without a hijab.

Don't be fooled by the regime's propaganda on social media.

Vance claims the Iranian regime will allow outside inspections of its nuclear program.  It's not clear whether these would be as comprehensive as the inspections under Obama's JCPOA, but I doubt it, given the amateurishness of Trump's top people.

More links at Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a video on politics and stress, and some observations on the population crisis.

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Any chance we can impose the death penalty for using "compute" as a noun?  God, that's irritating.

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I recently acquired a smartphone because I need it for just three purposes -- to get on the internet if my computer goes down, to take occasional pictures, and to call a ride if I get stranded away from home.  I've learned enough about using it to be able to do those three things, but in general I find it a not-very-user-friendly gadget.  I still don't understand why people spend so much time on them.

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Pessimism and defeatism are a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you stand and fight, you may not win.  If you decide you've lost and give up before the fight even starts, you will definitely not win.

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Being chaotic and disorganized is not some charming personality quirk.  It's a form of laziness which creates extra hassles for other people who have to deal with the mess it generates.

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Some observations on the population crisis

Most people are at least vaguely familiar with this problem.  Birth rates in almost all developed countries, and in some developing ones, have fallen substantially below replacement level.  In some countries populations are shrinking, or would be shrinking if not for immigration.  As other countries become more developed, their own birth rates are headed in the same direction.

The problem

It's obvious enough why this is a problem.  As societies become top-heavy with older people while the relative number of younger people shrinks, the burden of retirement systems becomes ever more difficult to sustain, potentially leading to intergenerational conflicts over resources.  In the US, for example, any effort to cut back the already-threadbare benefits provided by Social Security and Medicare would tip many elderly people over the line into poverty and create a political firestorm.  But once the number of tax-paying workers relative to retirees slips below a certain point, the money will just not be there.  The details would be different in each country, but the fundamental problem is the same.  Also, in many fields, the best and most innovative ideas often come from people in their twenties.  A society with too many aged brains and too few young ones risks becoming less innovative, even stagnant in some areas.

Given enough time, populations will start to shrink.  Some nations would eventually decline so far as to risk being unable to hold their territory against outsiders, or might eventually disappear altogether.  Cultures would lose their robustness.  The status of the French language and culture would be very different in a world where France has forty million people than in a world where it has seventy million.

Finally, there is a psychological issue whose importance I think many neglect.  People need a belief in the future.  A shrinking and aging population creates the feeling that the society is doomed in the long run, that it ultimately has no future.

The next few decades will see a daunting demonstration of the effect of differential birth rates.  According to OECD projections, by 2060 the US will be the world's second-largest economy -- behind India, not China, which will have fallen to third.  China's birth rate is so low that it is doomed to inexorable population shrinkage for the foreseeable future; its paranoid totalitarian regime and the resulting isolation of its people from the outside world are making things worse.  India's vigorous democracy, its strong entrepreneurial culture and open society, and, yes, its demographic vitality and youthful energy, point to an entirely different future.

I do need to address one crank idea which has taken deep roots among the (perhaps over-)educated and among the ideology-addled elements of society -- the concept of "overpopulation".  One could conceivably argue that a few places like Hong Kong or Bangladesh are overpopulated (though the former actually has a high standard of living, and most of the latter's visible problems are due to poverty, not absolute numbers of people), but the world as a whole, and pretty much all individual countries, are not even close.  The famines which racked the world as recently as the 1970s are now a thing of the past, except in freak cases of government collapse (Somalia) or government incompetence (North Korea), even though global population has doubled since then, now standing at eight billion.  The world as a whole has a huge glut of excess food production capacity relative to demand, as was illustrated during Trump's tariff wars, when countries that imported food from the US were easily able to find alternate suppliers, while US farmers struggled to find alternate markets.

The world is in far better shape environmentally than it was fifty years ago (more forest cover, less pollution of most kinds, etc), while the biggest environmental threat that remains, global warming, is due to obsolete energy-generation technology which most of the world is already rapidly transitioning away from.  Food production remains absurdly inefficient, with vast areas of land used not to grow food for humans, but to grow food for animals whose flesh humans consume (a grossly unhealthy practice for a great-ape species such as ourselves).  With full renunciation of fossil fuels in favor of solar, wind, nuclear, and other clean energy, and abandonment of eating the flesh and secretions of filthy animals for the plant-based foods that are natural and healthy for us, the Earth could support twenty or thirty billion people in sustainable affluence indefinitely.

Solutions

I'll start with one "solution" that won't work -- using immigration to offset the decline in the existing population.  Immigration on a large enough scale to actually do this means importing culturally-alien elements in such numbers as to make the existing majority population feel threatened and ultimately provoke a massive political backlash.  In Europe, where the largest portion of the immigrants are Muslim (with a very different culture and also much higher crime rates than the indigenous people are used to), the result has been a rise in nativist political parties such as the AfD, Reform UK, and the Rassemblement National, which are starting to show more support in polling than the old mainstream parties.  There are signs of the same kind of backlash in the US, even though the largest portion of our immigrants come from Latin America, which is much less culturally alien than Islam is.  Existing majorities ultimately will not tolerate what they correctly interpret as a threat to replace them within their own homelands.

It goes without saying that efforts to ban abortion or birth control should be completely off the table.  Sacrificing individual freedom and women's equality is something no civilized country should contemplate.  In any case, the best such policies could do would be to saddle society with millions of children whose mothers did not want them, which would create problems of its own.

Moving on to more hopeful options, I would note that there is one developed country which still has a healthy birth rate -- Israel.  This is not just due to ultra-orthodox Jews (or Muslims) with huge families driving up the average -- Tel Aviv is overwhelmingly secular, yet three-child families are common.  Perhaps we should try to figure out what Israel is getting right that other developed countries are getting wrong.

Another "solution" is one which works automatically.  Within any society, there are subcultures whose birth rates differ from each other.  Imagine a country where the couples in one subculture typically have one or no children, while those in another (likely much more religious and/or conservative) typically have two or three or even more.  Over time, the second subculture will make up a larger and larger fraction of the whole population relative to the first one, and its higher birth rate will increasingly lift the average birth rate of the whole society.  However, there are obvious problems with advanced societies becoming dominated by more-religious subcultures.  And this effect is offset by the tendency of modern people to abandon religion and the values it fosters (over the last quarter century, non-religious people have grown from about 5% of US society to about 30%, and that's obviously not because we're out-breeding the Christians).

In the longer run, there will be a genuine solution -- anti-aging technology.  The aging process is not some immutable fate imposed by the universe.  It's just another medical problem to be solved, like smallpox.  Progress on technology to stop and even reverse aging is much more advanced than most people realize.  At some point, when it comes into widespread use, we will have a world in which aging, and death by old age, will be a matter of choice, not an inevitability -- no one will be subject to them unless they choose to be.  When individuals can live for hundreds or even thousands of years while maintaining the physical and mental vigor of twenty-five-year-olds, the population will stop shrinking and start growing again -- the only causes of death will be murder, accident, and suicide, and even a very low birthrate will more than offset those.  (Some people may choose to refuse anti-aging treatments, for religious reasons or whatever, but inevitably those people will vanish from the population and cease to be a factor going forward.)  But global full availability of such technology is likely decades away at best.  We need other options to address the problem today.

I don't claim to have a comprehensive program for doing that.  But full-bore economic populism would certainly help, insofar as it included (as it should) strong financial and other support for parents who need it.  It would be absurd to "pay people to have" children they don't want, but such support could enable parents to have children they do want but can't currently afford.

Video of the day -- maximizing stress

I included this at the end of a link round-up a couple of months ago, but I want to make sure everybody sees it because it's so relevant to the way life is these days.  I definitely need to work more on becoming the cool stick guy.

Truths and inspirations for 22 June 2026

If an image is hard to see or read, right-click and open the link in a new tab for the full-size version.

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

No trees even?  Were they deliberately trying to create Hell?

The figure on the left is British prime minister Keir Starmer

Well, ex-prince Andrew was arrested, albeit briefly.  But no one in the US.