What grinds my gears

I wrote a year ago about the show South Park and how it's strange how the creators are completely irreverent towards almost every single sociopolitical and religious ideology and are clearly not afraid of the backlash and being called names... with one quite prominent exception, which has been quite clearly over the entire history of the series: They quite clearly appear to be morbidly afraid of being deemed racists. They don't care if they are deemed homophobes, transphobes, islamophobes, or whatever, but one accusation is quite clearly off limits: Racists. They are, in fact, apparently so afraid of that label that in that particular regard they are outright far-lefist "woke" to the extreme, embracing the entire far-leftist ideology and doctrine on that particular subject. Perhaps the epitome of this, the culmination, the moment when they fully revealed and declared themselves to be 100% extreme far-leftists when it comes to race, was an episode where Stan's fat...

The British people voted for the United Kingdom to leave the EU. The British government had 4 years to prepare for this exit, but instead of doing so, they sabotaged the entire thing by doing nothing. Instead, they spent the entire 4 years engaging in nothing but anti-Brexit propaganda and trying to find any possible way they could annul the voting result. They didn't succeed in that. However, they did succeed in sabotaging the entire thing by not preparing for it, and thus when the day came (effectively the EU had to forcefully kick the UK out because the time was up, I'm not even kidding) it "caught them by surprise", causing a lot of logistical and economic turmoil. A lot of anti-brexiteers then sneered at it, saying:"See? See? We told you that exiting the EU would cause an economic crisis! You should have listened to us!" Of course it did, because the UK government deliberately sabotaged the entire thing, did not prepare for it, and directly caused the e...

The Linux kernel was always written in C, and during its entire existence its author and sole owner Linus Torvalds has always rejected all and every single suggestion of replacing it or adding support for other programming languages. Unsurprisingly, over the decades there have been literally dozens of such suggestions, and many of the suggested programming languages would have been completely adequate for the job, and with safety features that C lacks. Invariably, Torvalds summarily rejected all of those suggestions. (One of the major officially stated reasons for this is that C is the  de facto  embedded systems programming language, and the amount of C experts, who know the language inside and out, and know how to use it for something like the Linux kernel, is staggering. Thus, changing to a completely different programming language would severely limit and diminish the pool of potential contributors and maintainers, and the number of people reviewing and auditing the code f...

Like so many other European countries, also Spain has a huge illegal immigration problem, with over half a million such people who have illegally entered the country. How to fix that problem? Well, the Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, has had a perfect idea, the perfect solution: Just grant all of them legal residency permits in one fell swoop. That's the perfect way to get rid of all illegal immigrants! The funny thing about that? He is passing the law allowing that... bypassing the Spanish congress completely, in other words, not even putting it up to vote by the congress. In other words, bypassing the democratic process completely. (I have no idea how or why the Spanish legislative system allows this kind of thing, but apparently it does, and the Prime Minister is going to take advantage of it.) In other words, he, personally, is going to pass a landmark law without asking anybody, without putting it up to vote by the congress, without asking the people of Spain, bypassin...

"Moist Cr1tikal", aka. "pengiunz0", aka. as simply "Charlie", is one of the most popular and biggest "talk-to-the-camera" YouTube commentator and entertainer, with over 17 million subscribers and raking 1-2 million views per video pretty much without fail (and given that he uploads such videos several times a day, he is literally a multi-millionaire by that ad revenue alone, something that he has himself confirmed.) He has always been known for his rational, smart, level-headed takes and commentary on stuff, be it video games, be it movies, be it some online drama, be it current real world events, be it funny videos, be it scams, and myriads and myriads of other various topics. One key to his immense popularity is that he has always been politically semi-neutral. Not 100% neutral, not 100% avoiding recent politics and political drama, but what could be deemed as "semi-neutral", presenting level-headed reasonable comments and opinions on...

Recently ABC News in the United States ran a harrowing story about how a preschooler boy, the son of an illegal immigrant, was returning home from preschool when heartless ICE agents detained him and kept him outside in sub-zero temperatures, trying to see if his family members, most of them illegal immigrants would show up, in other words, essentially keeping the boy as hostage and bait to draw out his family. Carefully selected photos and video clips were shown during the segment to really paint this picture and drive it home, with the cute boy being detained by heartless evil tyrannical gestapo-like ICE agents in the cold of winter. As I have been writing many, many times in this blog: If you just assume that when leftists make a claim about people they oppose, it's a complete lie and fabrication, there's a 99.9% chance that you would be right. And once again you would be completely correct. What actually happened was that ICE agents stopped the car of the father, who had hi...

Measuring someone's IQ, in addition to being somewhat unreliable, is also way too simplistic. Two people with the same measured IQ can be completely different in their cognition, knowledge, experience, ability to reason, skills, and overall behavior. One might not be able to solve complicated logical puzzles but still be very competent and skillful at his job and life in general, while the other, even having the same measured IQ, might be a complete incompetent moron who knows nothing about anything and does everything wrong. Most flat-earthers probably have a slightly lower measured IQ than the average (in other words, probably in the range of about 80-100 or the like, where 100 is the average), but that doesn't tell the entire story. They are very different in a separate axis to most other people in that same range. I don't know if these independent "intelligence axes" have been much studied, researched and discussed in psychology (they probably have), but they ...

Tim Walz is the governor of Minnesota. Also, in recent months Minnesota has been at the center of a huge fraud scandal where by latest accounts literally billions  of tax-payer dollars have been defrauded from the government by fake "healthcare" and "childcare" centers. Minnesota has also become infamous in the last month or so for being the center of a massive violent insurrection by far-leftist activists which is only becoming worse and worse by the day. It has not exactly helped that Tim Walz not only has done nothing to stop it, but he has pretty much directly encouraged it (which is highly illegal, but as a governor he is essentially immune and can do whatever he wants, no matter how illegal.) There's a theory going on that all three things are actually connected. The theory is, and there are some indications that might point towards it, that Tim Walz might not be as ignorant of the ongoing fraud schemes going on in his state as he pretends to be. That he h...

It might feel quite superfluous to say that believing in a conspiracy theory is detrimental to the believers themselves, but when it comes to American " sovereign citizens ", it almost feels like the entire conspiracy theory has been almost purposefully built to get its own believers into as much legal trouble as possible. And it's not just so when it comes to driving cars and traffic stops (the sovcit conspiracy theory is directly claiming to the believers that traffic cops cannot legally arrest them, completely ignoring the overwhelming evidence of the contrary) but especially in the court of law. The American "sovereign citizen" conspiracy theory consists of an astonishing amount of made-up "facts" which have been extrapolated from just a small handful of individual sentences and even words isolated from their context, in legal and non-legal texts. Indeed, from just a half dozen or so very short sentences and words they have built this phone-book-si...

For about 20 years now the American left has indoctrinated and brainwashed millions of people into becoming complete psychopaths . And I'm not using that word as some kind of insult, name-calling or spurious accusations using random words with negative connotations (like leftists love to do when they constantly call people eg. "fascists" with complete disregard to whether that word applies or not.) I am being 100% serious: Indoctrinated brainwashed American leftists are  bona fide  psychopaths. Not figuratively, not metaphorically, not as an exaggeration, not as a spurious insult. Literally. They have been so deeply indoctrinated for 20 years now that they have become completely psychopathic. They literally do not care about human life, they do not care if people get murdered as long as it serves their agenda. In fact, and what's really telling (and as I say in that other blog post), when they are presented with the news that someone they hate has been murdered, their...

For a very long time I have been a purist when it comes to non-English movies, TV series and cartoons, especially Japanese anime: I absolutely loathe dubs and want to always watch them with the original soundtrack with subtitles. It's the best and most accurate original experience, exactly as the authors intended. Even when dubs are very well and professionally made and of high quality, they just cannot carry that same original tone, the way in which the native people speak, the mannerisms in the voice and how people speak. This is particularly relevant when it comes to Japanese because it's a (quite strongly)  pitch-accent language which, as a consequence, has its very peculiar cadence and sound to it, which English just cannot replicate. (Japanese also has many peculiarities that English lacks, such as literally dozens of different first-person pronouns, all of which have subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle differences in tone and idiomatic usage, and it's something that...

For 30 or so years Linux, as the ubiquitous and most popular free open source operating system, prided itself with supporting a staggering amount of different hardware architectures. For a time Linux was in a kind of "soft competition" with FreeBSD to see which one would support more computer architectures, and the list of supported such architectures was long indeed. Yet, for some reason, it appears that those times are slowly but surely coming to an end. The Linux kernel itself has been steadily dropping support for more and more old and obsolete computer architectures, which in many cases is understandable (particularly when their market share is completely abysmal and even that little is quickly diminishing). Also gcc, the ubiquitous compiler used mostly in Linux, has been dropping support for different processor architectures one by one. Perhaps not at the same speed as the kernel, but still. But that's not the major problem. Many of the biggest and most important so...

There's a flat-earther called Kate Shemirani who in some kind of podcast has said this: "Do you think it's a globe hurtling through space? I don't anymore because I worked for British Airways for 10 years on long haul and I met quite a few pilots who said it's not a globe, but we can't talk about it." It should be quite obvious that no British Airways pilot would ever, or has ever said that, at least not seriously. So what exactly is happening here? There are many possibilities: 1) She's a actually not a flat-earther and she's actually trolling the guy she's interviewing (who is a bona fide flat-earther.) It's all just a social experiment or some kind of prank on stupid flat-earthers. Who knows, maybe she hasn't even worked for British Airways at all and is making it all up to make fun of the flat-earther. 2) She is a flat-earther and she is consciously and deliberately lying through her teeth in order to promote the conspiracy theory. ...

For about 10 years now riots have been pretty much a daily occurrence in the United States. At this very moment, as of writing this, Minnesota in particular has escalated to absolute anarchy. For several months rioters have been harassing people, assaulting people, destroying property, impeding law enforcement and committing all kinds of other serious crimes 24/7 without interruptions. Only a microscopic number of these criminals have been arrested, and even from those only some of them have been convicted for their crimes. It's notable that the United States is literally the only country in the world where this can happen. Yes, there have been massive riots in other countries, but in general they last a day, at most two, and usually people are arrested by the hundreds, even the thousands. In pretty much no other country have such massive riots been happening 24/7 for months on end. And do you know why that is? What is the difference between the United States and all the other coun...

Isn't it a bummer that it's so hard to distinguish the nazis, fascist and ICE agents from your own people? You have already attacked your own side numerous times. Well, here's my suggestion for you, to help you distinguish the good guys from the bad guys: You should all start wearing a distinctive piece of clothing that's easy to see and isn't very common. Like for example a shirt of a particular color. I recommend brown, as that's an uncommon shirt color. And to make it even clearer, you could also visibly wear some kind of symbol that symbolizes your side. For example an armband to be put on the upper arm. I recommend bright colors that are easily visible from a distance, like for example bright red and white. If the symbol is in black ink on the white background, it will make it extra visible. You could also have a secret sign that nobody else uses that helps you recognize each other. A hand sign is the most effective and easy to show. For example some kind o...

There was a period of time about six years ago (as of writing this) when, in the United States, for some strange reason a lot of black people were harassing and often violently assaulting East Asian people. Yes, these assaults were extremely widespread, and for some strange reason were almost completely restricted to black people. (I have never heard a good explanation of why.) Well, in one such case a young black man deliberately and purposefully (which he himself later admitted) ran at full speed against and pushed an 84-year-old elderly Asian man, extremely violently knocking him to the ground. The elderly man died of his wounds a couple of days later. In the court trial, which lasted a whopping 5 years for some reason, he admitted having deliberately assaulted the man, and he admitted that his actions directly caused his death. This is a textbook and quintessential clear-cut case of so-called second-degree murder: Killing someone in the process of committing a crime against that pe...

The current situation in Minneapolis has got so bad that psychopathic far-leftist bigots are literally harassing, attacking and assaulting random people on the streets, sometimes even people on their own side. They are in a complete frenzy. Even the tiniest accusation or even suspicion that someone might be "ICE" (which by this point is pretty much everybody) or not an extreme radical psyhopath elicits them harassing and assaulting that person, regardless of who he is. There are many videos out there of them doing this to completely random passersby who have done absolutely nothing. There's even one video where they attack one of their own in this manner. They are not only completely psyhcopathic, they have gone completely berserk. They have stepped up their common tactic that they have been using for the past 10 years of vandalizing public and private property, to just assaulting random people on the streets with zero consideration to anything. And what is the Minneapoli...

I'm not here talking about the products being defective and harmful (because that happens a lot too), but about the knockoffs ruining the lives of the original product inventors/owners. Some time ago a young American entrepreneur had an idea for and made an invention of a collapsible "selfie stick", which solved one of the biggest annoyances about those sticks (which were highly popular especially back then): Even foldable ones were a pain to carry around and handle. So he invented a multi-part telescoping selfie-stick that collapses into the phone case itself, taking essentially no space, being always available, and was impossible to lose (because it was attached to the phone itself, or the phone protective case to be  more precise.) He created a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development and manufacturing of the project. However, he made two major mistakes: He didn't patent it (not that that would have stopped the Chinese copycats, but at least he would have had a...

I wrote in a past blog post about a hilarious event that was captured on video some 10-or-so years ago, in the heyday of the "defund the police" and "abolish the police" protests in the United States. In one of these "abolish the police" protests some man stopped his car near some people who were protesting and started yelling something angrily at them. After a while of doing so he exited the car and started approaching them, still yelling and gesturing angrily. I don't remember what exactly he was saying, but what was the absolute gem and peak of hilarity was the reaction of several of the protestors, most particularly one of the women who said with a very clearly worried and panicky expression and tone of voice "call 911!" It was quite clear from the context, her demeanor, her facial expression and her voice that she was being serious, ie. she was in a state of panic to some degree and instinctively asked people to "call 911!" bec...

Many video games offer a "free demo" version, particularly on the consoles. Most commonly this version will just have the beginning of the game up to a certain point, so that you can get a good picture of what the game is like, and to entice you to buy it in order to continue from where it stops. And, indeed, if the game is actually good and addictive, and you get hooked, it really gives motivation to buy it to continue. The 2023 game Forspoken, which became slightly infamous for having garnered some hype before launch but in the end turning out to be quite a disappointment, did something rather different with its free demo version. Rather than do what most other games do, ie. just start from the beginning as normal, as in the full game, it skipped all the (what I understand to be relatively lengthy) introductory levels, storyline and tutorials, and started well into the game. In other words, completely skipping the start of the story, the setting, the idea. I don't actua...

Most European countries, particularly the Nordic ones, become sometimes famous and infamous for their often surprisingly short jail sentences for very serious crimes. Being extremely rich and peaceful free democratic societies, they believe more in the principles of reformative rather than punitive justice. Thus, you constantly hear of stories of, for example, a rapist-murderer getting some ridiculously short jail sentence, like 2 or 3 years. Not 20 or 30, but literally 2 or 3. And often only half of that is actually spent in jail. In contrast, the United States is not known for this kind of thing, but pretty much the opposite. Where the death penalty is not legal, life sentences are common. And "life sentences" are literal, not metaphorical. (Yes, indeed, in the Nordic countries a so-called "life sentence" means something like 20 years in prison. That's it. It's a "life sentence" in name only.) Yet, the US justice system is so completely asinine t...

Note that technically speaking this post contains a spoiler of the idea of these games, but said idea is actually so vague and, in fact, so unconfirmed that it may just as well not count as a spoiler at all. When Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced, it seemed that it would be just that: A modern remake of the original Final Fantasy VII. In other words, same story, same characters, same events, but completely newly made from the ground up using modern game technology. And that it was... to a large extent. The game actually contains aspects that the original game did not. And these are not just cosmetic, or something like ancillary extra mini-games or side quests or the like, but embedded right into the main story. You see, from time to time some dark ghost-like beings appear and affect the events that are happening. It is explained that these are so-called "Whispers" and it's alluded that they exist and intervene to ensure that the course of destiny is not altered by co...