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....

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...

The American left (and by extension, more and more of their ideological "offspring" in other countries) has been indoctrinating their followers, particularly starting from university students, for the past 15 or so years not just into political activism, but violent political activism. Physical violence, both towards people and property, has been completely normalized among the leftist political side in the United States. Physically assaulting political opponents and dissidents, even to the point of sending them to the hospital or even worse, has become completely normalized and extremely prevalent. Acts of physical violence, harassment and threats of violence have become completely normalized. Violence against property has become completely normalized. During the last 15 years the American far left has caused literally tens of billions of dollars in property damage, both to private and public property. They have committed acts of vandalism, destruction, arson and sabotage ...

Someone posted on Reddit this: Like always, American leftists just can't understand what their critics mean when they say things that they "don't want politics in my games". When people say they "don't want politics", that's just a shorthand for them not wanting modern real-world political activism in their games. Just because a game may contain something that's inherently political or the result of politics doesn't necessarily mean the game itself is modern-day political activism. To understand what types of content they are talking about, there are key points that need to be considered: Does the game contain modern-day controversial political topics? What is (quite clearly) the motivation behind adding those topics to the game? Is the game (quite clearly) trying to influence the player's political views, notions, opinions, thinking and behavior with respect to modern ongoing politics? If the answer is "yes", then it's po...

I recently watched a video about a full-on American "sovereign citizen" who got stopped by traffic cops and who went through the typical sovcit script (the "moorish citizen" variant of it, to be more precise). Rather unusually, in this case when the cops threatened to take her out of the car by force she started the car and drove away, leading to a hot pursuit, which ended up relatively quickly thanks to a car stopping device that one of the police cars had. Unsurprisingly, when the car had been stopped, the cops proceeded with what appears to be standard operating procedure and pointed their guns at the car while screaming at her like insane asylum lunatics, and when she exited the car they went through the standard rehearsal of having her walk backwards away from the car and so on and so forth. Stopping and arresting her was, rather obviously, the completely right thing to do in this case, as she had very egregiously broken several major laws and was an actual dan...

The infamous game Assassin's Creed Shadows has been marred with controversy for something like half a year now, before it has even been published. Ubisoft already delayed its publication twice, pushing it back by 3-4 months (for very vaguely stated reasons). However now, as of writing this, it's about to be finally officially published. Just for the fun of it, I'm going to predict how its sales will go. This is likely to be quite wrong, but who cares. Maybe I'll get it spot-on. My prediction is that regardless of all the controversy, it will at least recoup its production costs, give or take a few million dollars one way or the other. This means selling something like 5-10 million copies worldwide over the course of the first year or so. In other words, it won't be an enormous success, but it won't be a catastrophic failure either (of the sort of Concord.) The game has been marred with controversy since it was announced, up until it's about to be launched. A...

To any flat-earther who might possibly be reading this, I have a set of challenges for you. Even if you are unable to actually research and give accurate answers, at least think about them for a while. That's all I ask. 1. How do scientist predict eclipses? Scientists can predict both solar and lunar eclipses literally to the second (exactly when it will start, when it will end, and what exact path the shadow will take), literally decades in advance. And they are not using some kind of super-secret methods and formulas for this: It's all open and public information and data. How do they do that? Especially, how are they able to predict the eclipses with that incredible level of accuracy literally decades in advance? Also: The data, models and formulas they are using are based on a strictly globe-Earth heliocentric model, and you can corroborate this by yourself if you want. Please explain how it could possibly apply to a flat Earth model. 2. How do scientist coordinate in the...

This video shows bodycam footage of some guy who called the police because, allegedly, someone had poked his son with his hand. When security camera footage was reviewed by the cops, it turns out that the man was just mistaken, and that person had never touched the boy in any way, so it's all just a big nothingburger. What's peculiar about this is how the man talks to the cops. This reveals a particular type of personality that many people have probably encountered (if they aren't like that themselves). I myself have encountered this kind of person a few times. And that's the type of personality that when he gets upset about something, he gets a kind of obsession about it, and just feels the compulsive need to keep ranting about it over and over and over, well beyond what's reasonable, well beyond having made his opinions clear already, for no discernible reason or goal. Indeed, in the bodycam footage the guy just goes on and on and on about the incident, saying th...

American "sovereign citizenship" is a full-on conspiracy theory in the United States (and lately in a few other countries). I have a more detailed description of this here . Needless to say, these people are completely deluded and delusional. They have swallowed an absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory that makes them believe they don't need to follow laws, especially any traffic laws, and they believe that their sovcit rhetoric is actually a kind of "secret code" that law enforcement officers and judges secretly understand and obey. The deeper someone has gotten into the sovcit conspiracy theory, the more strongly they believe that when they use these secret code words, expressions and sentences, they can game the system and get away with not having to follow the law. They believe that they have gotten into the huge secret conspiracy behind the government of the country, and can play it to their advantage. They often get stopped and sometimes arrested and put on...

I have written several times in this blog about how the modern far left, especially in the United States (but to an ever increasing extent in many other countries as well) is a bona fide cult, and how it exhibits almost every single characteristic of a cult, one of them being behavioral control. One example of such a blog post here . Behavioral control, both in religious and non-religious cults, often starts with small things, and this is no exception. These small things tend to be stuff that outsiders will find strange and even ridiculous, things that people in normal society do not do. The perfect example of this, as mentioned in that other blog post, is the "finger snapping" and later "jazz hands" replacing clapping, particularly among American far-lefist cultists. At face value that example, while laughable and ridiculous, might feel small, inconsequential and innocent enough. However, it has an underlying reason behind it. And what distinguishes it from other s...

I sometimes watch a Twitch channel that broadcasts live Grand Sumo events. When there is no Grand Sumo tournament ongoing, the channel may broadcast stuff about Japanese culture, as well as some Pokemon gameplay. Twitch supports channels having descriptive tags. Here are the tags for this particular channel: One of those tags is not like the others, and sticks out like a sore thumb. And not just because it's the only tag written in all-caps. The channel has literally nothing to do with any "ADHD" topics. Nothing. The streamer might mention briefly something about it if asked in the chat. That's literally the only situation where it gets mentioned. So why exactly is that tag there? What purpose does it serve? It literally tells nothing about the channel and its contents. And, as you might have guessed, the streamer exhibits absolutely no symptoms whatsoever about any kind of mental issues. Nothing. He speaks completely normally, commentates on the sumo events complete...

Sometimes the YouTube algorithm will recommend me some video with just a few (and sometimes even no) views, sometimes even when the content has very little to do with what I usually watch. Well, kudos to the YouTube developers for trying to help small creators get more views, I suppose. Sometimes I check these YouTube channels, and a few times I have encountered channels that I find rather incomprehensible, in a rather peculiar way. You see, there are YouTube channels in existence where the author uploads several videos per week, and has been doing so for numerous years (and thus the channel having several hundreds if not even several thousands of videos), where the overall quality of the videos seems relatively good (good picture and sound quality, ie. relatively good camera and sound equipment, interesting background, in most cases the author's living room or similar), but where each video has an abysmally low number of views. I kid you not, nor am I exaggerating in any way, but ...

YouTube has had for some years now some kind of AI automoderation of comments, where it will automatically remove comments that, I assume, are deemed "breaking community guidelines" or otherwise inappropriate. Having some kind of automated moderation system kind of makes sense given that people probably write literally and without exaggeration millions of comments every single day. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is millions of comments every hour. The automoderation system has many, many problems, though. For starters, the user is not notified in any way, shape or form if his or her comment was automatically removed. The comment just disappears silently. The only way you can see if your comment has been autoremoved is to reload the page, or try to edit your own comment (in which case it will give an error message when you try to submit the edited message). At no point do you get any notification or any indication that this has been done; you can only find ou...

Neil Druckmann is the studio head of the game developer company Naughty Dog, the company that developed some of the best-known best-received video games such as The Last of Us and the Uncharted series. While the company leadership has probably always been left-leaning, they never tried to inject modern politics into their games, which no doubt helped creating some of the most memorable and well-received games in history. Well, up to about 2012 give or take (with the original The Last of Us game possibly being the last of their games that was spared far-leftist messaging. Unfortunately its expansion pack published just a year later was already full-on far-leftist SJW slop, so... sigh.) Recently Neil Druckmann gave an interview about their upcoming game Intergalactic . In that interview he comments a bit about The Last of Us Part 2 : Druckmann: "And we spent, like, years just coming up with a timeline, and it's dealing with... it's funny, like, I joke about this with the ...

One of the funniest protest speeches I have ever seen was made by some US federal worker at one of the nine billion pathetic anti-DOGE protests recently. She says (using that ear-shattering whiny as-annoying-as-possible voice that's so typical of karens): "When you wake up or you are on your weekend and you get the 'Fork In The Road' message, 'hey, what the hell did you do, you lazy federal worker, this week?' How frightening is it that someone on X, the owner of X, speaks to you directly to say 'what did you do last week at work?' and if you don't answer, I'm going to fire you." The lack of self-awareness is just astonishing and hilarious. She is very directly and unambiguously saying "how dare this private citizen ask me, a federal worker, what I have been doing, and holding me accountable for my work? He even dares to speak to me directly!!!" Yeah, how dare the puny citizens question the mighty Federal Workers and ask what they...