What grinds my gears

As I have commented many times in this blog, most flat-earthers seem to have the cognitive capacity of a 7-year-old. This is not just a random insult and spurious defamation. I'm being 100% serious. They seem to be, in many aspects, stuck at the 7-to-10 years old level of intellectual, mental and cognitive capacity, while having the life experience of an adult (this life experience being about the only thing that allows them to function in society acceptably well.) One good example of this is how many of them seem somehow incapable of understanding the concept of "force", and they have the same misconception about it than a friend of mine had when we were about 12 or so: And that's that they think that a "force" being applied to an object towards a certain direction means that the object has to  move  towards that direction (and, thus, if the object doesn't move to that direction, or moves to some other direction, that means that there is no such force.)...

I started watching the British TV series "Black Mirror" on Netflix, and noticed a curious abundance of black actors in the series. Most (if not all) episodes of the series take place in the UK, so the amount of black people in the series is quite disproportionate to the real demographics of the UK (even to this day, and especially in 2011, when the first season was made.) My problem is not with black people appearing in such a TV show. Of course leftists would never believe me, but I can genuinely say that I'm not some kind of racist who hates black people and doesn't want to see them in movies and TV. Heck, some of my all-time favorite actors are black (and that's because those particular actors are so charismatic and badass .) The problem is not the skin color of the actors, or even their abundance. Heck, I would be completely fine if the entire series had nothing but black actors and nobody else. The problem is that I know  why  there are so many black actors: ...

For some unfathomable reason the citizens of New York City elected one Zohran Mamdani as their mayor. What's peculiar about him, and the very reason why they voted for him, is that he is very openly and blatantly socialist and communist, preaching the virtues of socialism and collectivism , denigrating capitalism, and making all kinds of asinine promises, like free bus rides for everybody, "taxing the rich", lower rent, and so on. New Yorkers got bamboozled by him on many fronts, and some of the frauds were clear even before he got elected, as pointed out by many politicians and experts. Most prominently, he cannot raise taxes on the rich because he is a city mayor, and income tax is decided at the state level (by the New York State Senate in this case), not at the city level. He literally cannot raise those taxes. So that was just an outright lie from the get-go. So what did he do instead? Well, he increased taxes that the city  can  legally raise, and that would be cit...

I have been writing for over 15 years now how American universities are pumping out thousands and thousands of brainwashed drones who have been trained in political activism and who are going to get into all positions of power and take over every institution, every organization, every company, and enforce their insane political activism. Well, what do you know, we are already seeing the results of this, not only in the fact that almost all of the major corporations have been completely invaded (and thus are engaging in a massive amount of illegal racial discrimination), but there are brainwashed drones in all positions of power now, all the way up to the Senate, as well as several city mayors. One of their openly stated goals is "tax the rich". To raise the taxes for the richest people to egregious levels. They appear to live in this illusion that the richest people in the country are somehow stuck in their current place of living. As an example, the mayor of New York, who is...

Did you know that if you are a citizen of the UK and you have purchased anything on Valve's Steam platform, you are probably right at this moment suing Valve? Oh, you didn't know that? This is news to you? Nobody informed you or asked you? Well, turns out that UK laws are absolutely insane. Indeed, there's an ongoing class action lawsuit against Valve, and you are likely one of the litigants even though nobody asked you, or even told you about it. Is this, once again, the UK government being the tyrants that they have demonstrated again and again to be? Surprisingly, no. It's not the UK government. And this is what actually makes it ten times crazier: It's an individual person, named Vicki Shotbolt, who all by herself, as an individual person, has dragged you into a lawsuit against Valve, without asking you, without informing you, without anybody telling you. You can "opt out" of the lawsuit, because nobody has told you, you are likely not even know you ne...

Sometimes even smart people get bamboozled and misled by some conspiracy theories, and that's because those are often presented like outright scams: The people behind the creation of the conspiracy theory, if they are talented enough and know what they are doing, concoct this elaborate picture of something in a way that sounds extremely believable, if the subject matter is new to you. They essentially present a "here are all the facts, you decide" piece of work which has been carefully designed to sound competent, complete and reliable... while in fact it engages in an enormous amount of cherry-picking, selection bias, hiding evidence that contradicts the conspiracy theory (or sometimes even presenting said evidence but distorted in a manner that makes it appear to actually support the conspiracy theory), and outright fabricating "facts" that are not true. Almost nobody is immune to this any more than they are immune to scams in general. Even the smartest and sa...

As I have written before , some time ago Pope Leo XIV condemned the deportation of illegal immigrants from the United States, completely ignoring and disregarding the immigration laws of that country and its right to self-govern and, most importantly and hypocritically, completely ignoring what the Vatican does to people who try to illegally remain within that country. Indeed, the Vatican is an actual internationally officially recognized sovereign nation, an independent country of its own. Not symbolically, not some kind of "country in name only", but an actual literal officially recognized independent country. And the Pope is literally the sovereign, the monarch, of that country, officially, both in the national and international sense. Again, not symbolically, not some kind of "head of state in name only", but literally and officially. The Pope is as much the monarch of the Vatican as Charles III is the King of the United Kingdom, or Emmanuel Macron is the Presid...

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about the youtuber who goes by the nickname TL;DR (which officially expands to "Teal Deer") who many years ago was one of the biggest anti-leftist youtubers, with almost 200 thousand subscribers, and an average view count per video of about 100 thousand views. At some point, maybe about five-or-so years ago, he just decided that YouTube is a "censorious platform" (his own words) that deranks and delists anti-leftist videos, and as some sort of (quite empty) protest and knee-jerk reaction decided to private all of his YouTube videos and move to alternative (and much smaller) video sharing platforms. The huge irony is that, while he got about 100 thousand views per video on average on YouTube, in those alternative platforms he got an average of about 2 thousand views per video. In other words, he cut his own viewership by two orders of magnitude. For all intents and purposes he censored himself, and did it much more effectively tha...

As I have written before , the amount of racial discrimination in large American tech companies is just astonishing. According to recent statistics that examined the top 500 tech companies in the United States, only 6% of all new hires were white people, even though they account for over 80% of the population. That's an absolutely egregious amount of discrimination based only and solely on people's race. It's precisely the kind of racial discrimination that's highly illegal even in the United States. Several leaks from IBM have showed that company being particularly egregious about this, as they engage in blatant and direct racial discrimination in hiring. Leaks have shown that the company withholds bonuses from executives who fail to meet race-based hiring quotas, and even fires people who refuse to discriminate in hiring based on race. There have also been other leaks about discriminatory practice and "DEI" indoctrination within the company.  Because of thes...

Consider this analogy: A tribe of a couple hundred people live in isolation, their level of technology being that of the Stone Age: They live in straw huts, every day they hunt and gather for survival, and that's it. Their most advanced technology is some wooden spear sharpened with a rock. The entire tribe regularly suffers from famine because there's so little to hunt and gather, and overall their living conditions are very poor. Then two of them put their heads together and start thinking about how they could make their own lives better. They start thinking, they start tinkering, they start developing, they start testing and experimenting. After years of this kind of work they start to slowly developing for themselves a farm where they cultivate plants and raise domesticated animals. They develop tools for this purpose, they develop better buildings and better infrastructure. It takes years and years, and it's a lot of work, but over time it starts paying off: Their cult...

Recently Destin Sandlin, the owner and author of the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay (one of the biggest channels of its content category) made a video about the so-called "Johari Window" . Said "window" is a sort of classification about knowledge about oneself, as an individual person, about your personality traits, behavior, customs, beliefs, and other personal characteristics, divided into four categories: Things that you know about yourself which is also known to others. Nothing to hide here. Things that only you know about yourself, which you have never revealed to others, and which others have no way of knowing about you. Things that you don't know about yourself but which others do, as they can see things about you that you yourself don't even notice. In other words, personal characteristics that you are unaware of, but which others have noticed and can see. Things about yourself that you are unaware of and which nobody else knows or has noticed eithe...

For some reason for a couple of years now videos about "owning" video games pop up at semi-regular intervals. And, so far, I have not seen a single one that actually handles the subject correctly. It has become really tiresome to see authors, even those who should know better, talk about the ownership of video games and very explicitly and directly comparing it to ownership of physical objects. Indeed, just recently I saw once again such a video, where the author (who is the kind of educated person who should know better) explicitly made the stereotypical comparison with "imagine if you buy a hammer, and later the manufacturer comes to your home and takes it away." He also explicitly talked about how video games "have become" license-based (or at least attempted to, by the publishers), as if they had not been in the past and this were a new thing that the gaming industry is trying to introduce into the mix. Sigh. The sheer ignorance is so tiresome by this ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently made a post about how they are leaving X/Twitter in favor of other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Mastodon and TikTok. They made a long post about their reasoning for it, and it just doesn't make any sense. They talk about how small businesses might use Instagram or someone's "abortion fund" might use TikTok to spread information, or how "you're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community" and a bunch of other weird justifications. None of that makes any sense because they are writing as if using Twitter was somehow mutually exclusive with using all those other platforms. As if, unless they leave Twitter, they can't use those other platforms to communicate with people. Which, of course, is completely asinine. There's absolutely no reason why they can't duplicate their posts an all social media platforms, including Twitter. Posting on Twitter does not somehow exclu...

The title of this blog post is probably not a surprise to anybody, but it's still a horrifying fact of American policing: The vast, vast majority of American police officers have zero or extremely minimal training in how to deal with a citizen having a mental health crisis. This is particularly bad and scary because cops get constantly called to such situations, and thus they go there with no idea how to handle it. And, thus, they usually just handle it like they have been taught to handle dangerous people who are a potential or actual danger to the cops: In other words, with violence and sometimes lethal force. I don't know what the numbers are, but I wouldn't be surprised that, given the size and population of the country, cops are being called to people having a mental health crisis probably several times every day. Given how prevalent this situation is, one would think that they would have extensive special training for it. But no. They don't. Or, at least, extremel...

Flat-earthers tend to have very childish notions about pretty much everything, and how space rockets work is no exception. A 10-year-old child often wonders why space rockets don't go straight up rather than making a curve that ends up with the rocket flying almost horizontally. Wouldn't it be easier to just go straight up? And, of course, flat-earthers can't understand it either because they are at the same intellectual level. Well, I'll try to explain it as simply as possible: Space rockets, even those that end up launching probes or space capsules away from Earth, need to get into low-Earth orbit first. Why? Because getting to space requires an absolutely humongous amount of fuel, and the main rocket booster (the biggest cylinder) and the auxiliary boosters (the slightly smaller cylinders on the sides) have only a limited amount of fuel in order to get to space before running out of fuel. In other words, the big rocket booster does not have enough fuel to go on forev...

A few weeks ago King Charles III of the United Kingdom made several speeches about Ramadan, and even organized events and banquets for Muslim dignitaries explicitly celebrating that festivity. Can you guess how many speeches he has given about Easter, even though such speeches have been a tradition for the British royalty for decades, perhaps even centuries? Zero. Not one single speech. Not even a social media post. Nothing. When it comes to the King of the United Kingdom, this is not just a small thing. He has advisors, he has family members, he has an entire staff organizing every single public appearance, every single speech, helping him with every single decision he makes, and who understand how important each public appearance is, and what kind of signals such public appearances and speeches give to the public and the world at large. Both the King himself and especially his staff are hyper-aware of the signals they are giving when he gives or does not give particular speeches for ...

For something like 20 years now the far left, most prominently in Europe, has been repeating the mantra "diversity is strength", over and over and over. They were saying it 20 years ago, they were saying it 10 years ago, and they are still saying it to this very day, over and over and over, at every possible opportunity. The thing is, and I'm not making this up, during these 20+ years I have never heard, not once, any of them even trying to explain  why  or  how . Not once. They just repeat the mantra as if it were a self-evident fact that doesn't need explanation. It just is, because it is, period. No explanations needed. Recently some Irish TV program interviewed a school teacher about how there are children from multiple nationalities in her class, and how many of them are struggling with even basic understanding of English, and how this requires extra resources to try to teach them to understand and speak English, and how this is a burden to the schooling system. ...

The United States is notable for an almost unique quirk of its (current) laws, which automatically grant citizenship to anybody who is born within the country. This completely regardless of the circumstances of the birth. Indeed, if for example, say, a pregnant Belgian woman just happens to be visiting the United States for a week as a tourist, and she happens to go into labor and give birth when there, the child will be automatically given US citizenship merely because of the location where the child was born, and no other reason.  And, indeed, the United States is probably the only country in the world that has this quirk (or, at a minimum, is one of the extremely few that do.) Pretty much no other country in the world has this, and citizenship is not granted automatically even if you are born in the country. This is the result of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdic...

Several free open-source projects are once again, as of writing this, virtue-signaling for the millionth time with some completely made-up bullshit event, like this: As if "trans" people were not already "visible" enough, given how much they have been pushed to the forefront everywhere by everybody in every single aspect of society. It's all nothing but empty virtue-signaling, political activism and social engineering. What they are saying there is also quite clearly completely made-up. KDE, and all the other open source projects out there, would be completely fine without the self-appointed "trans contributors". This is nothing but empty words placating to an agenda (not even to people, ultimately, but to the political agenda). Also it is extremely clear that the vast, vast majority of those alleged "trans contributors" are not actually transsexual. They just claim to be. A common response to that is "why would anybody lie about it?...