What grinds my gears

There are lots of absolutely horrifying stories of absolutely invaluable archaeological and anthropological artifacts and fossil remains being destroyed by completely inept and clueless people, or outright vandalized and destroyed by people with political or religious motives (such as Muslims destroying invaluable statues that are thousands of years old, because of their religion). Not to be outdone, the Australian government wanted to join this group of absolute lunatics. In Australia there have been discovered human fossils from about 40 thousand years ago, at the shores of former very old lakes (which had the precise conditions for fossils to be preserved). These humans had been clearly buried after death and ritualistically, giving us an invaluable amount of information about these very early human societies. The fossils were also extraordinarily well preserved, giving us almost entire skeletons. Human fossils that are this old and well-preserved, and which clearly show indications...

Probably for as long as humans have existed, children of certain age and up have been given a lot of leeway, "free range", in terms of what they do during the day. Meaning that they can go out with friends or even on their own, for hours on end, even the entire day, in many cases without the parents having any idea where they are going, and come back home in the evening. This was still the case almost worldwide up to the 1970's and even largely to the 1980's, and it's still for the most part the case in many countries to this day (even though the introduction of extremely affordable cellphones has somewhat changed this dynamic to some extent in most places.) In fact, in many countries even to this day parents outright encourage their kids to go outside and play. And not just on the front yard of the house. However, in some countries, quite prominently in the United States, some time in the 1980's and 1990's a moral panic started spreading like wildfire. T...

I have written about this very thing in the past, but I think it deserves repeating now that the fight against men competing in women's sport is once again in full swing, largely thanks to Trump's executive order related to this. Many girls and women in the United States (and in a few other countries) are once again raising their objections to males competing against them in sports, using their locker rooms and so on. Unfortunately only a microscopic minority of these girls and women dare to speak out. And who can blame them? I certainly don't. In the current political climate if you speak out against it, you are very likely to experience harassment, discrimination, verbal attacks and, in some cases, even outright physical assault. The current American far-leftist ideology has normalized harassment and violence against dissenters, against anybody who criticizes the ideology. A woman might literally get punched in the face for saying that she doesn't want to compete agai...

A 2023 research paper published in the Nature magazine used neural network AI to try to predict, among other things, people's political affiliation based solely on their facial features. The results seem to show that while for men there was very little difference in terms of traditional attractiveness, for women there was a quite clear pattern of more traditionally attractive women being more likely to be conservative right-wing, while less attractive women tend to be left-wing. While the result might be somewhat surprising, it actually makes sense, psychologically. For the most part the self-esteem and confidence of men is rarely tied to their outwards appearance. While, obviously, traditionally attractive fit muscular men tend to be more confident and have a higher self-esteem, among the more "mundane" looking men there's usually less direct correlation, and even "ugly" men can have a pretty high self-esteem, as they don't care much about their appear...

American cops really, really love to ID people. They have an outright ID fetish. Most of them have an extreme "papers, please" attitude. This even though the United States is one of the few countries in this world where the police actually can't demand your ID willy-nilly for whatever reason they want. They need an actual reasonable suspicion of a crime that they can verbalize in order to lawfully demand your ID. Many are suspecting that this is not them just merely being tyrants (because the custom is oddly global, ie. the exact same in the entire huge country regardless of state, city, local customs, local government, local politics, etc.) Many suspect that it's a form of mass surveillance by the federal government (most likely the FBI). The sad thing is that the vast majority of people don't know their rights in the country, and are too intimidated to refuse when cops demand their ID, even when there's literally no lawful reason for them to do so. Sometim...

Billy Mitchell became famous for, allegedly, making a high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong in 1982 (as well as several other games), and becoming featured in several events such as some kind of Nintendo award event, as well as the (somewhat controversial) documentary King of Kong that focuses largely on him and his achievements in the 1980's and since. He has also been a regular in many gaming conferences and events as a speaker. He has also become infamous because of quite strong evidence that his scores were not legit, cheated in some manner. Most notably, his scores were removed from the video game high scores platform Twin Galaxies (which for a time was the largest and most reputable such platform, even used as an official source by the Guinness Book of Records.) Even more notably, Mitchell sued Twin Galaxies because of this, which was eventually ended with an out-of-court settlement with agreed compromises (Twin Galaxies restored his scores in some kind of "historic...

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....