What grinds my gears

Do you know how many people were arrested in Russia last year because of social media posts that they had made? About 600. Do you know how many people were arrested in the United Kingdom last year for the same reason? About 3300. The United Kingdom has literally become more of a totalitarian police state than even Russia. Let that sink in. And mind you, the exact same police who arrest people by the thousands every single year for things they have said online are the same who have too few resources to investigate actual crimes. In many parts of the country the number of solved cases of eg. robbery, burglary, home invasion and car theft is absolutely abysmal (in the low single-digit percentage). In fact, if you call the police because your home was robbed, in many parts of the country there's actually a good chance that the police will not even show up at all! They just take the report by phone, and that's it. They never even bother sending any cops. I wish I was making that up....

For quite a long time I have occasionally stumbled across a YouTube video where the author talks about "carbon dioxide" where, for some reason, he seems to have a hard time pronouncing that pair of words clearly. More particularly, most of these people pronounce it so that it becomes almost indistinguishable from "carbon monoxide". And this is not just one or two people I have seen having this problem. I have encountered at least a dozen or so people on YouTube who seem to have this same pronunciation trouble. And no, it's not that they are confusing the two compounds and saying the latter when they mean the former. It's usually very clear that they know and mean it's "dioxide". In fact, in one video the author was actually talking about both compounds, comparing them, describing how they are different and so on. I am not kidding that several times during the video I had a genuinely hard time telling if the guy was saying "carbon dioxide...

I wrote earlier about the absolutely asinine fact that, in the United States, if the police invades your home in pursuit of a suspect, and causes tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to your property, it's all on you. They will not pay you a single penny. Also, even if your property was insured, insurance companies will usually not pay either. Law enforcement can just cause hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to your property, at no fault of your own in any way, and you will be the one who has to pay. Nobody will help you. You just lost all that property, and there's nothing you can do about it. Ok, but what happens if cops damage your property by accident? For example, if they are involved in a car accident that's 100% their fault. Well, what do you know, apparently in this case it's also 100% on you. They will claim immunity, they will not pay you a single penny, and your insurance company will not pay you anything either, citing the c...

I have written about this very subject several times before, but it just never ceases to amaze and amuse me when I see it again and again. I was watching a so-called "First Amendment auditing" video, when a Karen drove to the auditors and angrily declared to them that "you cannot record minors without their consent." What makes this kind of thing the most amusing, and interesting, is that the exact same Karen quite clearly has no concern whatsoever about the myriads of cameras that are attached to walls, ceilings, poles and cars, even when she has absolutely no idea where that footage is going. If I could, I would really and honestly want to question her about this. Why does she think it's acceptable and permissible to "record minors" with cameras that are attached to walls and even private cars (which she quite clearly seems to accept because she quite clearly isn't getting a hissy-fit about those), while strongly opposing it if the camera is bein...

A good portion of the modern western far-left strongly believes in the mythical Maxist-Communism. They argue that the fruit of the labor of the workers belongs to the workers themselves, not to greedy rich obese monocle-wearing moustache-twirling suspender-snapping capitalist CEOs who shamelessly and greedily exploit the workers to get even richer while giving the workers themselves an absolute pittance. The CEOs are swimming in money, while the exploited workers have to live with minimum wage. The most radical of these ideologues advocate for a workers' revolt in every company, a complete takeover, where the rich CEOs are kicked out and the workers steal the company for themselves (regardless of who actually invested, built and created the company and, thus, legally owns it). I'm not even exaggerating. (They might not literally use the word "steal" because it has a negative connotation, but it's effectively what they are saying.) The thing is: They talk the talk,...

The YouTube channel Visual Venture recently published a video summarizing the preliminary findings and evidence of what is happening to current children when they have been allowed to have unrestricted screen time with tablets and other "smart" devices: How Internet Brain Rot Destroyed Gen Alpha . These preliminary studies have shown that this amount of unrestricted use of such devices not only stunts the psychological development of children, but literally stunts the physical development of the brain. It's highly likely that if this physical stunting is allowed to continue for long enough, the brain will never fully develop and the person will be mentally stunted for life. The external symptoms of this developmental deficiency are numerous, and include things like extreme restlessness (when not using the devices), extreme prolonged temper tantrums (a three-hour flight where such a toddler was having a continuous extreme temper tantrum during the entire flight is shown),...

The American left, in their endless quest to undermine and destroy western civilization, especially in the United States, among the literally thousands and thousands of tactics they have come up to try to do this, have strongly pushed the idea of respecting the rights of American indigenous people to their ancestral lands and, at the most radical, returning it to them. This entire idea has many, many problems with it. One of the major problems is defining, exactly, which part of the land belonged to which tribe and why, or whether it belonged to any tribe at all. When European settlers inhabited the North American continent (sometimes warring with and replacing the indigenous people, sometimes just settling on a completely uninhabited part of the continent) there were somewhere around 5-10 million people in the entirety of North America, by rough estimates. That's about the population of Switzerland. The continent was extremely sparsely populated and there were vast expanses of w...