People power in California

A California union is showing the whole country's politicians how it's done.  SEIU-UHW, a major union of healthcare workers, is acting to get an initiative on the 2026 state ballot which would create a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires.  The money would be allocated 90% for healthcare and 10% for education.  The tax amount would be calculated based on 2025 net worth, and billionaires would not be able to dodge it by moving assets out of the state.  Presumably they couldn't be taxed there if they themselves move out, but probably many or most would not, with the tax being only 5%.

Governor Newsom has always strongly opposed raising taxes on the wealthy -- like most politicians, he's a slavish toady of the billionaire parasite class.  That's why SEIU-UHW is using California's initiative process to sideline him and go directly to the voters.  It's a model for other states to follow, at least those states which allow citizen ballot initiatives.  The parasite class can always buy off politicians, but they can't buy off millions of voters.

5% isn't much, out of wealth that was mostly plundered from workers over decades -- but it's a start, and an inspiration.  If this initiative and others like it win with large enough margins of support, the clear wave of mass demand could force Congress itself to act on a national scale.  It's an old saying but true:  "Continuing to follow leaders is getting us nowhere."  But if the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow.

Link round-up for 1 November 2025

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

Only 364 days until Halloween!  Better start getting ready!

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Leave the porcupine alone.

Mice have their day.

Sometimes things just don't go well.

Thud!

Pervs beware, this gal is prepared.

If you guys can't take a hint.....

These Halloween displays come with a little extra oomph.

A customer goes home from a restaurant in Alaska.

Why did the dog suddenly do that..... oh.

Pick up after yourself, and clean the shark.

These cats scare away more than just mice.

Here's a fun overview of how bicycles developed.

Japanese scientists have developed an enhanced form of vitamin K that has the potential to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's.  It sounds like it will take a while to turn it into an actual therapy, though.

The US obesity rate has dropped slightly, probably due to widespread use of semaglutide.

Autistic blogger Johnny Profane argues that RFK Jr's nonsense about autism, Tylenol, vaccines, etc is a smokescreen for eugenics.  The post also contains numerous links on related topics.

Björn Andrésen has died.  Yes, him.

The best kind of studying is when you don't realize you're studying.

We need more statues honoring the truly great, and fewer statues of politicians.

Listen to Tolkien, not to "Tolkien professors".

Treat yourself like the animal you are.

She's an astronaut, and she plays one on TV.

Trump will not get into Valhalla.

Don't dream of returning to the past.  It was terrible.  Especially for women.

"Not a single person in that room understands how the scientific method actually works."

Here's why you need to learn skills you won't use.

Windows 11 pushes ads on users.  Here's what you can do about it.  And here's how to completely disable Copilot, which is being pushed hard in current Windows 11 updates.

Microsoft is trying to force Copilot on Office 365 users.  Here's how to stop it (in Australia there are other options).

If you use Google Drive (I don't even know what that is), here's a tip to make it work faster.

Yes, flight attendants are talking about you -- they even have a special code for it.

The great Guillermo del Toro makes it clear that his films will never be sullied by "AI".

This man destroyed his health by trying to treat joint pain with quack herbal medicines.

"How does it affect you?"

An effort to use "AI" to generate sample video-game imagery failed ludicrously.  At one point a whole train pops into existence out of nowhere, not even on train tracks but on the platform.

Here's how the great Louvre jewel robbery was carried out.  Basically, security at the Louvre was an absolute joke.  People will, or should, get fired over this.

In tests of the ability of "AI" agents to replace freelance workers, the best agent was able to complete only 2.5% of its assigned tasks to a satisfactory level.

Anybody who sides with this guy is an asshole.

Satirical billboards in San Francisco warn the public about "AI".

She saw her name on a movie poster.

Watch a teacher-student interaction in which the student learns a valuable lesson.

"CEOs are literally scrambling to re-hire, or pay people like me to come in and fix some truly horrific situations."

If there's one thing pretty much all Americans agree on, it's that we all hate putting the clocks back and forward an hour every six months.  Several states have passed legislation, but are waiting for our useless Congress to act.

If the left keeps denouncing everyone who thinks for themselves as "far right", eventually it will have no one left except ideological cranks.

The co-CEO of Waymo recently suggested that society is ready to put up with its driverless cars killing people.  As a sort of appetizer, one of them just ran over a cat in San Francisco.

A Jewish -- not Israeli, Jewish -- newspaper was blocked from a press conference in which far-left Portland city councilors slandered Israel.

Some "AI" data centers will soon be subjecting their neighbors to jet engine noise.

The gerrymandering attack on democracy launched by Republicans in Texas has now spread to Virginia, where it's the Democrats who are threatening to redraw districts to empower their own party rather than reflecting the will of the voters, while Republicans sue to stop them.  Next door in North Carolina, voters are fighting to defend democracy against Republican gerrymandering.  In Utah, as in California, the attack on democracy will take the form of a ballot initiative.  Voters in both states will have a chance to say no to the gerrymanderers.

Don't believe everything you read, even if there's a photo.

Amazon's tormenting of its drivers just keeps getting worse.

Now the bigots want a TV show to be boycotted because it's being shown in Israel.  This obsessive hatred would be almost comical if it weren't so disgusting.

"The idea that a woman's existence is only as valid as her outer appearance is a foundational concept of misogyny."

Don't be fooled by gaslighting in support of Mamdani.  He's even more dangerous than I originally thought.

Political must-read of the week:  Today the Democratic party's popularity is at its lowest level in thirty-five years.  To recover, it needs to ditch the social issues that alienate voters, and focus on economic populism.

Elon Musk's robots still can't do anything, but he wants to be paid a trillion dollars to build more of them.

Hatred against Jews is going mainstream on both right and left.

A new homeless shelter here in Portland has been a disaster for the surrounding neighborhood, with 911 calls from the area tripling (though many of these calls apparently come from workers within the shelter).  This kind of thing is part of why I've always preferred to rent -- homeowners in the area are saying they will move out, but who will buy their houses now?  As a renter, if something like this happened in my own area, I could move out, and finding a new tenant would be the landlord's problem.

At protests, dress for public interpretation, not for self-expression.

Governments are plotting to balance their budgets by looting your inheritance instead of by taxing billionaires properly.

The largest federal workers' union is demanding an immediate end to the shutdown.

Allowing SNAP benefits to lapse will harm the overall economy.  If the stoppage lasts long enough, many grocery stores in rural areas will go out of business.

This Daily Kos posting exemplifies what's wrong with the left-activist base.  The poster quotes a Democratic senator as saying "the costs of continuing the shutdown are going to be felt by people who are going to food banks and federal employees" and that it may be time to end it.  The poster responds with rhetoric about "Dems ready to cave" and a picture of a white flag, and demands that legislators like this senator be primaried.  He doesn't deign to mention those "people who are going to food banks and federal employees" or their ongoing sufferings.  Not a word.  Not an atom of compassion.  To him all those people are merely expendable poker chips in a sick game where all that matters is which politicians win and which party gets the blame.  He's no better than -- no different than -- the MAGA types who gloat and jeer at the suffering of people losing their SNAP benefits or being abused by ICE thugs.  These filth are so possessed by ideology that flesh-and-blood humans don't exist for them.  They are a disease in politics.

Elon Musk's political antics have cost Tesla more than one million car sales in the US, a loss of tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

Here are the companies and individuals funding Trump's wrecking of the White House.

Chatbots are promoting Russian propaganda.

Jewish support for Mamdani is plummeting, down from 29% in early October to 16% now, narrowing his lead over Cuomo.  At this point, though, there's not much hope that he can be stopped.

Chicagoans are using whistles to mobilize against ICE.

"Truth sounds like hate to those who hate truth."

Voters now trust Democrats more than Republicans on the economy.  The biggest issue is that the Republicans have failed to get prices down, with Trump's tariffs threatening to re-ignite inflation.

How does US aid to Israel work?

Nick Fuentes has turned against Trump, citing his erratic policies and the incompetence of his toadies.  Despite all the damage he's done, Trump's attacks on democracy are failing.

Democratic leaders are leading efforts to document ICE abuses so that agents can eventually be held accountable.

The wingnuts' plans to use the shutdown to further wreck the federal government are coming to naught.

Forget about Graham Platner -- if he's nominated, Susan Collins will cruise to re-election.  "White people aren't as racist or stupid as Trump thinks" -- "living in white rural America, I'm afraid to tell you they actually are" -- as a Senate candidate he'd be running in mostly white, rural Maine.  That one quote alone would be enough to sink him, and Collins would be harping on it 24/7.

As resistance grows in the West, "AI" companies are pushing to build their ecologically-disastrous data centers in poorer countries.

A grassroots resistance campaign squelched the EU's efforts to destroy online privacy.

"After weeks of pressure", king Charles has stripped prince Andrew of many of his titles and privileges because of his association with Epstein and the accusations of Virginia Giuffre.  It took pressure to make him do that???  Weeks of it???

Ukraine continues its devastating attacks on Russia's oil industry.

A Russian soldier explains why the death rate among his comrades is so high.

Russian army dugouts are infested with mice which eat everything in sight.  I can see that Russians would hate mice, but this is disgusting.

When Russian troops were captured by Ukrainians in the battle of Torske, Russia launched a drone strike on its own soldiers who had surrendered.

Iranian women continue to resist the theocracy in whatever ways they can.

Western racists don't care about human rights in the Middle East.

Israel needs to start executing convicted terrorists.  Locking them up just creates an incentive for other terrorists to take hostages to force their release.

The Palestinians already had their chance at a state and peace.

Sanae Takaichi, Japan's new prime minister and the first woman leader in the country's modern history, starts off in office with a stunning 74% approval rating.  She's a strong nationalist -- anti-immigration, tough on China, and supportive of a more powerful military.

Taiwan looks upon Israel as a model for its national defense.  The two democracies have close links, while the Chinese gangster-regime is supporting the jihadists.

China's economy isn't looking so good these days.  And its giant coastal cities are especially vulnerable to rising sea levels.

More links at Red State Blues, WAHF, and Comedy Plus.

My only post this week was for Halloween.

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The government shutdown has now gone on for a month.  Most federal employees are furloughed or working unpaid, and even the military will soon start missing paychecks.  SNAP benefits are about to lapse, at a time when other sources of relief such as food banks are already under great strain.  Politicians keep posturing, finger-pointing, and trying to out-stubborn each other instead of working on solving the problem.

If I had the power to unilaterally enact a Constitutional amendment, it would be this:  Whenever the government shuts down because funding has not been passed, on each day that the shutdown continues, every member of the House and Senate must have their backs bared and receive ten lashes of the whip in public.  One flogging per day for each of them until they get the government re-opened.  I think that would put a stop to this kind of nonsense.

For Halloween

I know the actual day is tomorrow, but I generally avoid posting on Fridays since it's right before the link round-up.

It's the rainy season, of course, but you can still be comfortable.

(Made by Pliny)

You may even choose to just stay home.....

.....have a quiet cup of tea.....

.....and, for once, avoid stress by not checking the news.

But if you choose to have guests over.....

.....make them feel welcome when they arrive.....

.....make sure your place is nice and clean.....

.....maybe even mow the lawn.....

.....use appropriate lighting.....

.....put some music on.....

.....and you'll have a good party atmosphere.

Yes, cooking can be a lot of work.....

.....but hopefully your guests will be appreciative.....

.....and respect your non-smoking household.....

.....and the leftovers should last you for a while.

Happy Halloween, and may the Skeleton Fairy bless you.

Links to more Halloween stuff:

These Portlanders go all out with their displays.  Evidently so do these people in Lambertville NJ.

The Denver Botanical Gardens hosts Glow in the Garden -- more here.

More spooky images at New Witch.  Or try some spooky music videos from the Harp Twins.

For more robust scares, here's a round-up of 2025 horror movies.

For something a bit lighter, try these Halloween cartoons.

Lady M participates in a trunk-or-treat with plenty of witchcraft.

If you get tired of candy, try these demonic cookies.

In the South, Halloween is often..... a bit different.

Here's some Halloween art by Tom Shropshire.

See the final collection of windows from the Manitou Springs CO Skeleton Craze.  And take a look at this year's entries in the town's Emma Crawford Coffin Race.

Here's the real origin of Halloween.

Link round-up for 25 October 2025

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

Note:  There will be no image round-up post this coming week.

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These cats aren't satisfied with mere cardboard boxes.

They have Halloween in Australia too.

Exercise equipment is dangerous.  I'll stick to my grueling regimen of 100 teacup lifts every morning.

Check out this Thai ad for bug spray.  It is possible to make ads people will actually watch.

There's more than one reason why having a window in the bathroom is a bad idea.

What a beautiful crab.

Have some tea in the woods with a nice man.

It's a bug-eat-bug world.

Halloween is near -- get spooky.

More spooky stuff here, and a weird-looking but real church (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login).

Blogger Lady M has her place all ready for Halloween.

Bohemian Valhalla blog serves up some creepy imagery.

Elitch Gardens in Denver offers a lavish Halloween Fright Fest.

More great windows here from the Manitou Springs CO Skeleton Craze.

If you're in Paris, the Coulée Verte is a pleasant and varied walk.

Yuri Knorozov was definitely a cat person.

See a fake crab and a death ray.

Take a close look at the Sun, a nightmare world without which our own world could not exist.

Green sea turtles are no longer an endangered species.

To save animals, conservationists need to work with local people.

Here are some videos of people speaking various indigenous North American languages.

Never treat an honest businessman so disrespectfully.

Watch out for scam phone calls about your credit card.

Beware of the ClickFix hacking method, which is increasingly common.

Here's how to disable "AI" auto-dubbing on YouTube.

Windows 11 is a virus.  Here are some programs for getting rid of all the garbage built into it (I haven't tried these).

"AI" browsers are simple to hack, giving crooks easy access to all your most sensitive information.

Fake video is getting more convincing.  Be alert.

"Ghost tapping" is a form of robbery that targets credit cards with the tap-to-pay feature.

If you're considering using the Universe browser, read this.

ChatGPT spies on its users and nags them to buy things.  Amazon has a new "AI" tool that will "help you decide what to buy".  These companies must think we're total idiots.

"AI"-generated junk is infiltrating Spotify playlists, and Spotify refuses to ban it.  Users are furious.

What is the point of Oscar the Grouch?

"Live" sports events are now so ad-clogged that what you're seeing becomes delayed relative to the actual game.

General Motors wants to integrate "AI" into its cars.  Tesla Cybertrucks are too rare to present a major risk to other drivers, but GM cars are ubiquitous enough that this could make all of our roads prohibitively dangerous.  The comments are worth a look too.

Remember when machines made us freer.

Hospitals are using "AI" for voice-to-text transcription even though it inserts nonexistent wording into its transcripts in 80% of cases.

He really wanted to watch.

Here's a good discussion (in the comments) about Elon Musk's silly techno-fantasies.  I wouldn't bother reading the article linked in the post unless you want to join the discussion -- it's just the same old hype about "AI", robots, etc but even more naïve than usual.

As Christianity declines across the US, unneeded church lands are being converted for affordable housing.

"AI" summaries of the news misrepresent stories in 45% of cases.

Americans are falling behind with payments on their insanely-high-priced cars, with 1.7 million cars repossessed last year.

The Social Security Administration has set next year's COLA at 2.8%.  Is there anything you actually buy -- not the various baskets of goods economists use to calculate inflation, but things like groceries and rent that you actually spend money on -- for which the cost has risen by as little as 2.8% per year over the last decade or two?

Most actual tech workers who work with "AI" don't believe the hype the executives of their own companies are spouting about it.

Quacks empowered by RFK Jr are carrying out a systematic attack on the US health system on a state-by-state basis.

A Chicago judge has ruled that ICE agents can be arrested if they break the law.  I'm amazed this was ever in dispute.  Ordinary cops can be arrested if they break the law, as the one who killed George Floyd was.

An "AI" surveillance system at a Baltimore school mistook a bag of chips for a gun (found via Earth-Bound Misfit).  Cops were called and the Dorito desperado was handcuffed and searched.

Must-read of the week:  Some great insights on art, language, and intelligence, and why "AI" can never truly do any of those things.

Here's why BDS cannot bring down Israel or even substantially harm it.

Usage of ChatGPT has peaked and begun to decline.  It seems to be part of a general turning away from "AI".  Perhaps the fad is passing.

What did the Irish government do when Hitler died?

The AWS outage this week followed after Amazon laid off hundreds of workers from its cloud computing unit and replaced them with "AI" -- so Amazon is now planning to do the same with six hundred thousand more workers.  The outage knocked out $2,449 "smart mattresses" and even people's "bored ape" NFT collections.  But what kind of dumbass would actually own either of those things?

It's not only Jews -- Mamdani also seems to have a real problem with Hindus.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has some sensible ideas for strengthening democracy.

Massachusetts is cracking down on violent street take-overs.

Darwinfish 2 blog reports from the No Kings rally in Baltimore MD.  Here's a report from Macon GA.  Here are some signs from the various rallies.  During the whole nationwide event, there seems to have been only one arrest of a participant, although several Trumpazoids were arrested for violent assaults.  Blogger Annie has more pictures and a look at why the movement is succeeding.  Could it be..... SATAN???

"The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you're learning to do doesn't matter."

The fruits of polarization:  this guy shot up a house because he didn't like the owner's politics.

It is possible to overcome polarization and hatred if people are willing to be civil and give each other a hearing.  Here's an extreme but real example.  Get out of the echo chamber.

This was a vicious, explicitly anti-Semitic attack on Jewish children -- in a suburb of Chicago.  And I'll bet you didn't hear a word about it in the mainstream media.  Nor will any left-wing political blog mention it.

A conservative blogger has some criticisms of the No Kings rallies -- and of Trump.

Prioritizing peace over justice means you will get neither.

Trump has backed down from sending federal goons to San Francisco.

Stop acting surprised when older people show up for protests.

Vance believes that the elected legislature of a sovereign democratic nation voting about its own internal affairs is an "insult".

You can't trust the media.  All too often they put a dishonest spin on the news.  Here's an example of how they lie by omission.

"The FBI has not been here."

Besides supporting Mamdani who refused to condemn the genocidal jihadist slogan "globalize the intifadah", the left-activist fringe is now rallying around Graham Platner, a candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination in Maine who has a tattoo of a Nazi symbol.  Platner is also a "staunch critic" of Israel and has been photographed with a white supremacist who said that he and Platner "have a lot in common".  Yes, his supporters have excuses for all of it, but just imagine how apeshit they'd go at right-wingers who endorsed a candidate with such a track record.  Susan Collins must be thanking her lucky stars.

The military leadership recognizes that Hegseth is a clown.  Give the military credit when they do the right thing.

Anti-Semitism in the US today takes many forms.

It's an "old African saying".

Stop believing that everybody who disagrees with you is evil.  This is outright lying, possibly legally-actionable defamation.

"AI" depends on millions of workers in poor countries doing miserable work for terrible pay.

Trump is throwing one of his toddler tantrums at Canada because the Ontario government made an ad quoting Reagan.

The UK's largest police force says that it will no longer investigate "non-crime hate incidents", meaning "incidents" of people expressing opinions the government disapproves of.  No police force in a free society should ever have been doing this anyway.

He won't be deported because he was too fast.

An oil refinery in Ryazan, Russia, burns after being hit by Ukrainian cruise missiles.

The gas lines in Russia are pretty bad.

Employers in Russia are falling behind on paying wages -- and the situation is worsening rapidly.

Even convicts don't want to join the Russian army.

A Russian soldier described a mutiny in his unit.

Won't somebody please think of the poor terrorists?

Hamas is now murdering children of Palestinians whom it suspects of collaborating with the Palestinian Authority.

This is Afghanistan, and the world.

More links at Red State Blues and Comedy Plus.

My posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, a brief round-up on the No Kings rallies, and a video on how the media distort the news and exacerbate polarization.

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Anytime you hear someone disparage individualism and try to exalt the collective over the individual, know that you are in the presence of an enemy.

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I think Trump's getting desperate.  Wrecking the White House, sending troops into cities to provoke confrontation, blowing up random fishing boats off South America, the "poo on No Kings" video, the Argentine bail-out and beef deal -- he wants to get people talking about anything, anything, other than the Epstein files.

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More adventures of stupid people:


When the words of a song are hard to hear, subtitles can help:

Video of the day -- lying (to yourself) by omission

I was going to just add this at the end of the next link round-up, but it's such a must-see that it deserves its own post.

No Kings

See reports and images from the No Kings rallies in St Petersburg FL, Tiverton RI, Kalamazoo MI, and here in Portland OR, where the downtown rally drew forty thousand people (there were also smaller rallies in some of the suburbs).  Here are pictures from some other cities.  Here are some blogger observations.

Trump posted an incredibly childish "AI"-generated video of himself dumping shit on the protests from a fighter plane.

Organizers estimate total nationwide turnout at almost seven million which, if true, would be one out of every fifty people in the country.  An independent crowd-counting group gives an estimate of a little over five million, with a maximum possible figure of eight million.  The Trumpazoids are worried, and rightly so.

Truths and inspirations for 20 October 2025

If something's hard to see or read, click for full size.

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

They spent billions on this and it can't even do basic math.

Portland OR on Saturday.

Unite the kingdom!