What grinds my gears

Some American TV series of the 1980's (including quite fondly remembered ones, like Knight Rider) had this strange habit of showing a kind of "teaser" of the contents of the episode at the beginning of the episode. Or at least some of their TV broadcasts did (I think these were cut from or never added to VHS and DVD releases of these series, although there might have been some that did.) This was actually relatively common in many TV series of the time. As far as I remember, this habit was eventually dropped by the 1990's, and almost no TV series used it anymore. However, for some strange reason the habit was caught and rekindled by other types of TV shows, particularly the "reality TV" ones: Indeed, while not all, some of them, even to this day, do the exact same thing: They show a kind of "teaser" of the contents of the episode at the beginning. Whether this is considered ok or annoying depends a lot on the individual viewer, I suppose. For some ...

I have written before about the actual reason why American cops are so insistent about ID'ing you , and that actual reason is that it's not merely that they want to see your ID, but they have to enter it in their computer systems, which then gets logged in the NCIC , which is a massive computer database owned and run by the FBI. Not that it required much confirmation, as it's already quite obvious, but in this video an American ex-cop very explicitly confirms that yes, they are indeed taught at the police academy to always demand people's ID and, particularly, to always enter it in one of their various computer systems that are directly connected to the FBI's NCIC system. Two things, however, that he does not confirm or speculate about in the video, though, at least not directly: 1) The reason  why  they are so insistent in entering everybody they ever encounter into the NCIC, and 2) how come this is so universal across the entire country, the same thing being taug...

The United Kingdom has become very infamous in the past ten-or-so years for having started to police people's speech and expression of opinion, for reasons that literally nobody knows (nor have I ever heard  where  that policy is coming from. It appears to be kept under the wraps.) It's very telling that, factually and without exaggeration, the UK incarcerates more people every single year for their expression of opinion online than Russia does. And by a quite large margin at that. Let that sink in for a moment. I believe that the UK broke the 10-thousand arrests per year landmark a couple of years ago, which is a staggering amount. And all that while, at the same time, solving actual crimes, such as burglaries, thefts, assaults, vandalism, rape and so on, has plummeted. There are several cities in the country where the police solves less than 1% of all such crimes. Indeed: They literally arrest more people for their expression of opinion than for actual crimes such as theft a...

An American police officer arrives at the scene of a relatively minor fender bender that had no injuries. After investigating a bit he wrote some citations for the 63-year-old man he deemed the culprit of the accident. He then asked the man to sign the citation. The man refused to sign it, which is actually his right. In the United States you are not legally obliged to sign those citations if you don't want to. However, the cop insisted. When the man kept refusing to sign it, the cop assaulted the man, started torturing him, and then murdered him by tasing him repeatedly. And, indeed, this was confirmed by the coroner, who ruled it a homicide. In other words, it was not an accident or some kind of medical episode, but a homicide: The man had been killed by the direct action of the police officer. And the only reason for the murder was because the man refused to sign a piece of paper. That's it. That's the whole reason. So, what happened to the cop? He got fired from his pos...

Recently the far-leftist stupidity once again raised its insane head by allowing a man to steal the trophies and prizes of women, this time by a man entering a "World's Strongest Woman" competition held in Arlington, Texas. Isn't it funny that for decades they complained about men invading women's spaces and taking away opportunities from women, and now all that has been reversed and they are actually  supporting  men participating in competitions against women and taking away their prizes and victories? At least some of the women in the competition, particularly the one who came second (ie. would have won if it wasn't for this man), didn't appear to be very happy about it. The second-place competitor outright walked out of the stage during the reward ceremony, quite clearly in protest. Well, like I have written a couple of times before, I actually blame the women in the competition. Why? Because they would have the  perfect  tool to combat this, yet they ...

Sometimes when American cops deal with so-called "sovereign citizens" who believe they don't need a driver's license to drive a car on a public road, the cops will say "driving not a right but a privilege". Sometimes other people (such as youtubers who make videos about sovcits) repeat the same adage. I wish they stopped doing that, because it's confusing and misleading. Sure, perhaps for certain particular definitions of "right" and "privilege" that sentence might be technically correct, but for the most generally and commonly used definitions it's just false. Consider it from this perspective: Do you have the right to build a house in the United States (and other free countries)? Yes, yes you do. There is no law against it. However, that doesn't mean you don't have to follow the relevant laws, codes and statutes. Do you have the right to create your own private business corporation to manufacture and sell products? Yes, ...

Several youtubers have in recent years tried to raise awareness of one of the most innocently devious phenomena in modern medicine, a statistical bias that fools even most medical professionals, and it's related to the success of cancer treatment. It is widely known and lauded that cancer survival rates have gone significantly up since the 1970's and earlier, which, according to these statistics, is a huge success story in modern medical science. However, as many people (including medical professionals and researchers) have pointed out, this is actually a statistical anomaly, not an actual fact. Yes, life expectancy has genuinely gone up thanks to more modern cancer treatment, but not even nearly as much as these misguided statistics would indicate. The main problem is that "surviving cancer" in these statistics is not measured by how many people were completely cured of cancer. One would think that that's precisely what they are looking at, but perhaps a bit surp...

There are many tenets to so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome that the vast majority of American far-leftists believe wholesale, and the list of these tenets would be quite long indeed, but one of these tenets, which relates to this blog post, is a quite petty and infantile one: And it's that Donald Trump is unintelligent, childish, petulant, doesn't know what he's doing, and constantly engages in childish rants and completely incoherent rambling, says stupid things, and so on. In fact, if you google for the expression "word salad", you'll find tons and tons of links to people accusing Trump of it, ie. that his speeches and what he says is often incoherent, dumb, childish and incomprehensible. And, like all the other tenets of Trump Derangement Syndrome, most of them just believe that and are constantly making that claim. The problem? They don't actually have examples of this. You know they don't have examples because if there were any, you can be godd...

European colonialism that happened about two to five hundred years ago, done by countries like England, France and Portugal, is most often painted in an extremely negative light: "White supremacist" nations invading, taking over and colonizing foreign lands of people they considered inferior, thinking that they have the God-given right to those lands and those resources, who exploited the lands and the people, stole their land and property, and took them as slaves, leaving only devastation and desolation behind. Then, during the past one to two hundred years ago all these European countries withdrew from their colonies and allowed them to become independent. What a horrendous episode in human history! Such a travesty! Such crimes against humanity! Lands ravaged, resources stolen, people abused and taken as slaves. Yet, when you actually start looking about the actual situation that happened before, during and after European imperialism, shoving the politics and moralizing asi...

Recently some rumors have been making the rounds that the highly anticipated next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, ie. GTA 6, will "feature pride parades and queer representation". As far as I know, and at least as of writing this blog post, these rumors have not been confirmed, and thus could be false. However, I am making a promise here: If the rumors turn out to be true and the game does feature those things, I'm not buying the game. Based on principle and nothing else. I'm voting with my wallet. That's a promise. I don't care if the game ends up selling 500 million copies and becomes universally acclaimed and considered the best video game that has ever been made, making games like Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild feel like amateur trash in comparison. I'm still not buying it. There are thousand and thousands of other games in existence. I can perfectly well skip this one. 

If you go to the web page of almost any company, be it big or small, you'll most often find there some kind of "code of conduct" or extremely similar page that will placate to modern far-leftism to one degree or another. But the thing is: Surprisingly few companies actually want to engage in this kind of politics and would just want to remain completely neutral, just doing what they are best at, and leave politics aside. Yet, company after company after company have added all kinds of "code of conduct" and similar pages to their websites. But why? Have they been invaded by far-leftist activists who have pressured the higher-ups into this? Sometimes yes, but not even nearly always. So why is it so common? Why do so many companies feel the need to virtue-signal in this manner, trying to placate to modern far-leftism? It's surprisingly little known, and for some reason not talked about very much, but these companies are being effectively  forced  to add such ...

The social and economic situation in the United Kingdom has been going down for a couple of decades now, at an ever accelerating rate. Millions of immigrants, most of them completely illegal, are being imported into the country who for the most part do not contribute to the economy nor pay taxes and are pure beneficiaries of welfare, and the economy, governmental services have been going down. Crime statistics are going up, safety is going down, and police authoritarianism has significantly increased. The situation has become so bad that just last year, in 2024, a whopping 257000 working tax-paying citizens of the United Kingdom moved out of the country. In the previous year the number was 77000, which is itself also staggering, and shows that the mass emigration of the working class, which actually contributes to the economy and society, is only accelerating. So the UK has brought in a million people who only consume tax money, they don't pay it, and has lost over a quarter millio...

Recently in Germany six armed police officers raided in the middle of the night the home of a German citizen, seized all of his electronic devices, forced him to reveal the pin number to his smartphone, dragged him to the police station where they took a boatload of biometric data, including weight, height, multitudes of photos, biometric data from his hands, and a blood sample for DNA. Was he, perhaps, suspected of murder, assault, rape, robbery, or some kind of other severe crime? Or perhaps the electronics that they seized contained highly illegal material that he not only had downloaded but was also distributing? Or maybe he is a notorious hacker who has broken into computer systems and stolen boatloads of money? Nope. They did that because of one social media post that he had written. So surely the post itself was highly illegal to elicit such a reaction? Was it, perhaps, threatening to commit an act of terrorism? Or perhaps he was writing credible threats against someone's li...

I have written before in more detail about the beliefs and  bona fide  conspiracy theory of the so-called "sovereign citizens" of the United States (although, as mentioned there, while they used to use that term to classify themselves for decades, in later years they have stopped using it and outright deny it because of the bad reputation, especially among law enforcement and the federal government. Their beliefs and tactics have not changed, though, just how they call themselves.) One of the most hilarious beliefs that they have, which comes up oftentimes when they interact with cops, and which makes them sound outright bizarre, is that they believe that not only is the United States government a "private corporation", but that legally, secretly behind the scenes, every citizen is considered a kind of abstract "asset", a "corporation" of its own, that has a legal contract with this "private corporation" that's the government of th...

Craziness from the American left is to be expected given that they have been deeply, deeply indoctrinated and brainwashed to the point of outright psychopathy (and I'm being literal with that word, it's not hyperbolic.) However, while certainly significantly less common, people turning crazy on the American conservative side also happens in significant amounts, which becomes very noticeable when it's a celebrity or prominent influencer who does so. There's of course the occasional case of " The Amazing Lucas " who for years and years used to be a very reasonable and rational full-on American conservative and was very popular, but who at some point went completely bonkers, to the point of losing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a short period of time (which in YouTube is extremely rare and requires you to really piss off your audience.) However, I'm not really talking about those cases. I'm mostly talking about people who were and s...

The far-leftist ideology started invading and taking hold of universities, primarily starting in the United States, first very slowly perhaps in the 80's and 90's, but at an accelerating rate during the first decade of the 2000's, and exploding and completely taking over towards the end of that decade, to the point that by 2010 and forward most universities had been completely hijacked and taken over by far-leftist activists who completely changed how universities run and operate, and how and what they teach the students. In other words, they succeeded in making American universities indoctrination and training camps that produce far-leftist activists. The takeover was so successful that in the vast, vast majority of American universities students were so deeply indoctrinated that they became outright militant: The students themselves would watch each other and  aggressively  enforce the core tenets of the ideology. Indeed, if a student were to show any dissent, would quest...

Do you know the old joke of "how do you know a politician is lying?", the answer being "his lips move". Well, that description pretty much describes Zohran Mamdani. He is the recently elected mayor of New York City, who very prominently promulgates his socialist beliefs and run his campaign based on socialist ideas, promising his constituents that he would increase taxes for the rich and provide all kinds of free services to the citizens, like free bus transport and many other public services. The majority of inhabitants of New York City are notoriously far-leftists for some reason, so unsurprisingly they voted for him and he got elected. Many big-name far-leftst New Yorkers are making victory laps and considering this a slap in the face of "maga" republicans and Trump. What they don't realize is that they have just been bamboozled by a lying politician, by smoke and mirrors. Taxes are statewide, and determined by the government of the  state  of New Y...

Whenever a celebrity, a politician, a journalist, a TV host, or any similar high-profile person publicly endorses mass immigration and repeats the propaganda slogan "diversity is our strength", when people check where that person lives, quite unsurprisingly a clear pattern emerges: In the vast, vast majority of cases, those people live in areas of the country with the least amount of immigrants, the least amount of "diversity". These tend to be affluent areas with no cheap apartments, no migrant hotels, no migrant processing centers, no places where migrants are placed, no migrants loitering on the streets, no migrant tent camps, no trash on the streets. In terms of population these areas tend to be at a minimum 90% native white people, quite often 99%. Unsurprisingly, the very few migrants that can afford to live there are rich ones, completely westernized (probably from very young), with high education and a high-paying job. There have been cases where the governm...

There are several websites, such as gettyimages, that sell pictures and short pieces of video, and have literally millions of them. When the pictures are copyrighted and these websites have the rights to them, then there's nothing wrong with that. However, there are also enormous amounts of images being sold in these websites that are officially in the public domain. Selling those images for money is not in itself illegal. "Public domain" means that you can do whatever you want with that material, and that includes selling it for money. There is no law against that. However, gettyimages, nor any of those other similar websites, are disclosing the information that those images are actually in the public domain. They are not disclosing the information that you could find the exact images elsewhere and can legally use them for whatever you want without paying a penny to anybody. Instead, these pictures are being sold for money as any other picture. That is, in my opinion, at...

While quite rare, there are several examples of older women who are now daring to write about their life experiences as 2nd and 3rd wave feminists, and how they regret almost all of it because it gave them nothing more than making them miserable, lonely and resentful, and now they are too old and lonely, the best of life having passed them. Turns out that the "liberation of women" is not so "liberating" after all. Pretty much all of them list the same key issues with 2nd-wave (and later) feminism and the so-called "liberation" of women. One of the most fundamental key problems with the entire ideology is that it makes women think that men are competition. Men are "rivals", they are the "enemy", they are the people who compete against you and who are trying to oppress you, screw you over, take advantage of you, subjugate and suppress you, deny you opportunities and take them away from you. Women raised in this kind of ideology and mental...

A curious trend has been becoming more and more prevalent during the last year or two in the Open Source communities. And that's the weaponization of far-leftism in order to try to suppress competing projects. In other words: For examples if some big Open Source project wants to upgrade or replace some older project with a more modern and "better" new version, or if such a project is essentially in a competition with another similar project on who gains more popularity, they are starting to weaponize far-leftism to try to smear, discredit and make a pariah of the other project. And they do this, of course, by throwing all their favorite pet buzzword insults at the other project, like "racist", "fascist", "nazi" and so on. I already wrote before about how the people developing the Wayland project have gone to incredible lengths to try to kill the previous big software platform that Wayland is trying to replace (ie. X.org) by completely stoppin...

I have written about this before, but I think it deserves rehashing.  The American far left came up a decade or so ago with the idea that the United States government needs to pay "reparations" to all black people in the country. "Reparations" for what? For something that happened to other people two hundred years ago. And they aren't demanding like a couple thousand bucks per person. They are demanding  millions  of dollars per person. I think the most insane demand that some activist seriously presented in California's congress was 200 million dollars per person. There are many, many reasons why this cannot work and would only destroy the economy of the country. For starters, any economist, or pretty much anybody with even a modicum of an education, will give you the simple answer to why poverty cannot be fixed by simply printing more money (as children and low-IQ uneducated adults sometimes suggest): Just printing more money and dumping it onto the popula...

A "cent" is the smallest monetary unit in the United States, a hundredth of a dollar. The number of physical cent coins currently in circulation is estimated to be between about 100 and 400 billion coins. For several decades it has been a hotly debated topic among economists, academics and politicians that printing cent coins is a horrendous money sink. There are two major reasons for this: Firstly, the best known reason is that minting cent coins is more expensive than their face value. The current estimate is that it costs 3.7 cents to mint one cent coin. Thus, the government is constantly losing money when it mints cent coins. This money comes from the taxpayers, so ultimately it's the citizens who are losing all this money. Secondly, cent coins tend to not circulate and the overwhelming majority of them just get lost. This is because shops give out almost all existing cent coins as exchange for purchases, but people conversely do not use these cents to buy stuff, inst...

Recently I started watching the 2014 TV series The Flash. It's not exactly a mind-blowing work of art, but it's passable, mostly innocent fun. However, from the very first episode you immediately start seeing the modern "inclusive" touch on everything. While they didn't dare to change Barry Allen himself from the comics, almost everything else is. Kid Flash? Black, of course. (Wasn't originally in the comics.) Barry's adoptive father? Black, of course. Barry's girlfriend and fiancé? Black of course. And his stepsister to boot. I mean, come on... I suppose  biologically  speaking there's in principle nothing wrong in marrying your stepsister, but sheesh. There's the undeniable psychological and social aspect to it. At least they didn't have to change one of the other protagonists, Cisco Ramon, ie. Vibe, who was actually originally Hispanic even in the comics. But I feel that in this case fidelity to the source material was principally not ch...

There's yet another somewhat viral math home problem making the rounds, where the student gave the most obvious and logical answer, only for the "correct" answer to be something completely incomprehensible that no sane human being can understand. The problem goes like: "For every column of objects in an array there are 3 rows. The total number of objects in the array is 12. How many rows and columns does the array have?" Ok, easy enough, an array with 12 objects in total, and 3 rows, so quite clearly it's a 3x4 array. In fact, the first part of the answer is given right in the question. So the answer should be "3 rows and 4 columns." Nope, apparently the correct answer is "6 rows and 2 columns." What? "Columns" and "rows" quite unambiguously refer to a two-dimensional array. I literally can't twist my head to figure out how you get 6 rows from 3 rows. The YouTube channel Wrath of Math, which very often makes videos...

For some reason flat-earthers have become enamored with the so-called Gleason's world map, which is an azimuthal equidistant projection of the surface of the Earth, centered on the North pole, and looks like this: (By the way, there's no mathematical reason why the projection needs to be centered at the North pole. It can literally be centered anywhere on the surface of the sphere, and in fact the Wikipedia page linked above also shows a version centered at the South pole. It's just that centering it at the North pole gives the most useful projection because it just so happens that the vast majority of Earth's land mass is located in the northern hemisphere at this point in its geological history. For this reason the version centered at the South pole shows extreme distortion, as most of the land mass is on the outer rim from that perspective.) Most flat-earthers claim that this is  the  correct map of the world, representing what it actually physically is like. Howeve...