Posted On: Tuesday - April 30th 2024 6:54PM MST
In Topics: University Global Climate Stupidity Pundits Science
Just as an aside (can you start a post with an aside? I dunno...), the interviewer in the video below is long-time Libertarian - non-Reformed John Stossel. I've always liked this guy. That I barely recognized him is due to my not having watched him in 30 years or more, I bet* - we've both gotten older. I'm glad he's still at his work, which has always been skepticism of the Lyin' Press narratives.
In the comments under a recent post we discussed just for a bit what to do with, or think about, those who have been on the wrong - stupid - side of a political issue after they eventually see the light and become experts for the other side. Should we listen to them now? People can learn, but then, some of us - I'm picturing the Kung Flu PanicFest here - got it in the first place. If someone did not, how fundamentally smart could they be, at least on that subject?
Here, I present Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech (before that U. of Colorado**) Climate/Atmospheric Science Professor. She made the big time in the Climate Calamity™ world about 20 years back with her research on hurricanes. I'm sure she'd done real technical work in this area, but her publishing of a famous article in Science magazine linking an increase in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes to Global Warming (the term of art at the time) sounds more like playing to the audience. That audience HATES HATES HATES American industry and wants CONTROL. They like people whose research suggests we PANIC, NOW.
Dr. Curry became, as she says in the interview with Mr. Stossel, a "rock star". I imagine it IS pretty hard to resist being made famous, being introduced to big shots around the country (and the world) and to be made into a savior of sorts. It's like being Greta but with 50 more IQ points and an understanding of math and the scientific method.
That she understands the scientific method, as opposed to Nitwit Brit John Oliver and the other idiots in the TV clip below (early on in the 7 minute video), is what got Judith Curry to go on-line and reason with her "denier" critics about her hurricane research. She came to understand their scientific points and agreed that she'd been mistaken. This particular issue itself, the "increase" in big hurricanes, has me thinking less of Dr. Curry than I would have otherwise. It was, after all, just observation***, the tabulating of categories of hurricanes over the years and sea temperature data. I can't read the full paper, but here is the abstract from that '05 article:
We examined the number of tropical cyclones and cyclone days as well as tropical cyclone intensity over the past 35 years, in an environment of increasing sea surface temperature. A large increase was seen in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5. The largest increase occurred in the North Pacific, Indian, and Southwest Pacific Oceans, and the smallest percentage increase occurred in the North Atlantic Ocean. These increases have taken place while the number of cyclones and cyclone days has decreased in all basins except the North Atlantic during the past decade.Well, if you look at a longer time-scale, it turns out, no, she was wrong. Where have we seen that before? A pretend would-be scientist like Al Gore would just ignore any criticism and proof that he's been wrong as all hell about his predictions. A real scientist would want to know why his (her, this time) predictions were "off", to put it nicely and would welcome input that might give some reasons for the discrepancies. Judith Curry is a real scientist, then.
I'll write some more about what we may think about the Judith Curry's of the world after the video. (I give credit to Gateway Pundit article for bringing this to my attention.)
Dr. Curry explained in the interview how the incentives that encourage scientists to become Climate Alarmists work in this "industry" of academic research. This is pretty much what Peak Stupidity explained long ago, but with more detail and her own personal story. After acting like a scientist and working to get to the root of arguments and discrepancies, she was no longer a rock star. She was officially a denier, and life is not as nice when you are a denier.
Judith Curry looks pretty young in some of the pictures of her as a scientist in her early days. One can forgive her lack of rigor and yearning for fame in the political world of Climate Alarmism. However, once I realized this paper on hurricanes was from only 19 years ago, I did the arithmetic on this now 70 y/o lady and realized she was over 50 when she got her big break as the next Carl Sagan or something. She was no wide-eyed young researcher saving the world. She really should have known what was going on politically. She retired from Georgia Tech finally due to the "anti-skeptic bias" and the "craziness" (both her own words) of the political nature of climate science.
Good on her, but what are we to think of her? She let herself go along when they gave her the rock star treatment. She bought into the Climate Calamity™ even if she did think her initial work on hurricanes was correct. That's not very principled. Then, she did know what would happen when she tried to correct her scientific errors and political bias. She stood up anyway.
OK, but I'm not really up for any climate forecasts (her current occupation, in industry) from Judith Curry no matter what they conclude. She showed us that she can be influenced politically
I hate to bring up this sore point, but, say Steve Sailer tried to write more now about a new contagious virus and what we should all do? (It's only the latter part that I had any problem with.) I think he's wise enough to just drop it now. That'd be like your Peak Stupidity blogger here, 20 years from now with a still-humming (somehow!) American economy - with no great turmoil or crash in between - deigning to expound more on our Global Financial Stupidity views. I would not blame you - there reading on your 25 y/o kluged-together computer hooked up to power supplied by a generator run by a guy on a stationary bicycle - for skipping those particular posts.
* I remember his expose of the Lyin' Press, NBC affiliate, when it had rigged up explosives to better "prove" the non-crashworthiness of certain model Chevy pick-up trucks with side-saddle gas tanks. Holy moley, that article is from 1993. I changed "20 years" to "30 years" above. I'd have lost my initial bet.
** Also Penn State University, Purdue, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but I mentioned U-Colorado because the school in Boulder has a well-known program.
*** Of course, there's the common-sense view that increasing sea surface temperatures in the parts of the ocean where hurricanes form and develop would mean bigger hurricanes. However, that's not difficult theoretical science there, just simple observation, based on concepts that have been around since way before Judith Curry.
Comments (2)
Doing the right thing, 2020 style
Posted On: Monday - April 29th 2024 6:50PM MST
In Topics: Trump Liberty/Libertarianism Kung Flu Stupidity Totalitarianism President DeSantis
The Instapundit linked to an ~ year-old post of one of his bloggers, one Ed Driscoll, that itself was purely a long excerpt of a Wall Street Journal article of the previous day by one James Taranto. Mr. Taranto had written a 3-year "flashback" to the height of the Kung Flu stupidity.
I provided that link to the WSJ for readers who may be subscribers. Peak Stupidity had had it with the immigration stupidity of that publication 20 years back, as we mentioned in passing within our old post Taking the Wall Street Journal, ass-backwards. Being a lifetime non-subscriber to the WSJ at this point, I couldn't read anything past:
Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior. The governor who defied Trump to reopen during Covid was also ahead of DeSantis in combating woke corporations.Let me just excerpt Ed Driscoll's whole excerpt here and then proceed to demonstrate that nobody shines in this story. Only one of 3 politicians, in fact, doesn't totally suck in this story:
In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”Governor Kemp beat Governor DeSantis is defying the Feral Gov't Kung Flu-based Totalitarianism by 9 days. Great. However, here's where he did anything but shine, in my mind: Per his own words here, he did "what was right".
The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.
That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:
“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”
Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”
“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”
“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”
Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”
The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”
At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”
Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”
In this specific case here, reversing the Kung Flu Totalitarianism in Georgia, sure Brian Kemp did what was right. However, he said that he did what was right in order that he not look weak, lose all respect with the Georgia legislators, and get hammered in the media. How about if the situation was different, say he was Governor of a Kung Flu hell-hole like Massachusetts and he wouldn't have looked week, or lost respect with legislators, or gotten hammered in the media? Would Brian Kemp have "done what's right" then? It surely doesn't sound like it, from his own words. In other words, Mr. Kemp did not do what's right. Doing what's right means you're doing it, duh, because it's right! Period!
Then-President Trump surely doesn't shine in this episodic flashback either. In cases like this, because he never did have any real principles, doing what is right does not really ring a bell with this guy. What I especially didn't like about him here is is this "I allowed them this 'freedom'" bit. The guy's got a lot of gall. Federalism, natural rights, and the US Constitution are not his strong points.
Believe me, if Donald Trump were to take this arrogant attitude when it comes to getting the US military out of the rest of the world to completely lockdown the borders and deport any and all illegal aliens at his command, you wouldn't read complaints out of Peak Stupidity. The invasion is an existential problem, and those involved are not subject to any steeenking Constitutional rights. However, 4 years ago Trump acted like a flip-flopping, unprincipled, clueless moron when it came to the Kung Flu PanicFest. He should shut up about that stuff... if at, haha, all possible.
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Honesty Researcher found cheating on Honesty Research papers, no lie!
Posted On: Saturday - April 27th 2024 2:08PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity University Humor
This is not The Babylon Bee. It's not Not the Bee either (a site I will peruse more, BTW).
This is where the truly elite thinkers of our age are trained, eventually going on to high positions to make major economic decisions for the whole world that are really, really stupid.
I don't know. Business School? Besides Accounting, the first month and a half of Economics, and perhaps some Business Law, business schools are more University fluff, good places for students who need the extra time to party at the frat house, throw some disk on the quad, and then have something that looks good on the office wall later at the Dad's car dealership.
Michael Scott, no small figure in the wide world of the northeastern Pennsylvania paper sales industry, has lectured before about the worthlessness of Business School.... and books, too.
This may have been a TED talk, but I'm not sure:
Yet there are various branches of the field of Business, one of them being research into honesty, no lie, honesty, at Harvard's School of Business. Though probably seen with disdain and held in much ill repute by the rest of the faculty simply due to the nature of her research, Professor Francesca Gino has been a leader in this field.
Just give me some tenderness, beneath that honesty...*
What is honesty? What characteristics make one an honest person? What are the 12 facets of honesty? Does honesty come naturally, or is it more trouble to be honest and a lot easier to lie? Honestly, there's a lot to this budding field.
The problem is that Professor Gino has been cheating like hell with the data in her research papers on honesty. From the SCIENCE!!.org website (as related by The Western Journal and brought to Peak Stupidity's attention by The GateWay Pundit) we learn Honesty researcher committed research misconduct, according to newly unsealed Harvard report. There's a lot of time that has been put into this, with a 1,300 page report by the HBS and a $25 million lawsuit by the Professor back at em.
Some sleuthing bloggers figured something was amiss in 4 of the Honestly Professor's papers:
Three of the papers were retracted last year, with retraction notices saying HBS’s investigation—which at that time remained confidential—had found “discrepancies” between the published data and those held in Gino’s records. The fourth, a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, had already been retracted in 2021 after the Data Colada bloggers found evidence of fraud in separate data contributed by Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely.So, she didn't like the data she got and put more data that fit the already-written Conclusion into the paper. What does the remind me of...? Anyone, anyone, ... Climate ... anyone, anyone, Bueller... Alarm-something, anyone...?
The HBS report reveals that Gino offered two explanations for those discrepancies: that she, or her research assistants, may have made errors in working with the data—or that someone else tampered with the data for malicious reasons. Gino pointed to a particular collaborator—whose name is redacted in the report but who was a co-author on the 2012 paper—as having had both means and motive to sabotage her, saying this author had access to her data files and the software used to gather data, and that she was angry with Gino ...Peak Stupidity was able to get a peak at that report and we noted an error in the redaction process. Instead of solid black, the redaction was accidentally done with yellow highlighter, you know, by an intern:
"The dog ate my honesty data. Honestly!" It's hard to get away with this anymore. We are in the digital age. All the numbers were on Professor Gino's computer. That's why you hire lawyers.
In his statement, Gino’s lawyer said, “Harvard found no evidence that Prof. Gino modified data.” Gino’s lawsuit against Harvard alleges that the investigation was “motivated by gender” and that she was treated more harshly than male colleagues.... not to mention feline "colleagues". Allegedly, he was only on the computer to scope out new places to hunt, sleep, and pee on the corners of houses using Google-Earth. Who knows, really?
What was he angry about, one wonders, something about her moving the furniture around? (They HATE that!)
Now, the real paradox comes in here. If Professor Gino was such an expert on honesty, wouldn't she necessarily be an expert on the converse, dishonesty? If she was that solid in her knowledge of dishonesty, how did she not get away with this? Then too, if she's dishonest, maybe she doesn't know as much about honestly or dishonesty after all, so ... does not compute... smoke... my circuits are burning... open the pod bay doors, Wheezy, this is the Big One!
* Who ya' gonna listen to, Billy Joel or Paul Simon?
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Roots Politics from Peak Stupidity
Posted On: Saturday - April 27th 2024 9:12AM MST
In Topics: Lefty MegaStupidity University Media Stupidity Liberty/Libertarianism Morning Constitutional
These 2 stories are in the news enough such that it would probably bore the reader were we do expound much on them right now. I think it's worthwhile to look at the myriad episodes of stupidity we see around us and get at the root. Roots Politics. Remember Roots Rock&Roll? Let's get back to our roots.
There's old JoeTater, doing the Andy Jackson thing - "let them enforce it!", regarding the recent SCROTUS ruling that, no, the President cannot forgive student debt on a whim. From Gateway Pundit, as usual, Biden’s Student Debt Cancellation Has Taxpayers Paying Over $550 Billion, Benefits Wealthier Families. Well, no, that's not actually the real problem.
While the New Plans, like the SAVE plan, contain provisions to relieve debt based on individual or household income, the New Plans will also relieve some longer-term student debt for about 750,000 households making over $312,000 in average household income,” it continued.See "plan"? That's a problem. No Bill has been passed on this (vote-buying) loan forgiveness to make it an Act. Dark Brandon there just issued an Edict. That's not really a Founding Father's concept, the issuing of edicts, that is.
Even that's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that the US Feral Gov't is in the business guaranteeing bank loans of any sort and of loaning money to students directly to begin with. (The latter is pretty much the program now, from what I've read.) Not a soul involved in writing and reading the Constitution for the 1st 3/5* of the history of the American Republic could have imagined that this is Constitutional.
The piece** above has been in all the Conservative news as of late. Pundit after pundit has chimed in, including Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire. I doubt I can add anything that hasn't been said about Miss Katherine Maher herself. (The worst has been in the lady's own writing, in those anti-White tweets of hers over the years.)
Katherine Maher is the new CEO of npr - it's in small letters now - that's National Public Radio. That's what this brewhaha is mainly about, that this National and Public radio network is using American tax dollars to broadcast hard-core anti-White, anti-male hate. Peak Stupidity has had its say already, in "All Things Considered", it's been a long road to Peak Stupidity and then much later a funny story about Seattle Mazda drivers left stuck on NPR.
Now npr says it gets "less than 1%" of its income from the Feral Gov't. That's a lie, as in '20 per The Western Journal here, 8% of npr's funding that year came directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting***, while 5% came from government agencies of different levels, and 10% more came from universities .. funded by the Feral Gov't.
So, of its ~$320 million in revenue, npr gets, let's just plain guess here, about $50 to $100 million yearly from the taxpayers (or, actually, the "This is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy!" current Treasury Bond holders). This is peanuts in the scheme of things. It's from 5 to 10 minutes of Congressional annual expenditures, if we figure they spend money 24/7/365(and sometimes 6), which THEY CAN! Then too, if it's 1% or even 25% of npr's income, especially the former as per their statements, couldn't this outfit get along pretty well without it?****
Yet, this has been a thing for years, the GOP and some outraged or fake-outraged Congressmen and Senators saying "Defund NPR!" and "Defund PBS!" It never happens, and it never will happen, not until the whole financial stupidity we've been experiencing collapses.. That means that it will happen and probably pretty soon.
Let's get back to our political roots. The root of the problem here is that the US Feral Gov't has NO BUSINESS funding ANY media operation!
In wondering why we have all these problems, it might behoove us to get back to Roots Politics. It explains a lot!
* Why 3/5? We are 2 years from the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Things started to get bad just under a century ago. In this student loan business, it's been less than 1/5 of our history that the Feral Gov't got involved. However, Roosevelt's Socialist programs of NEARLY (9 years off) a century ago were on these same lines. These loans COULD have been imagined during his time.
** Piece of work or piece of ass? I'll let the readers decide. One CAN be both of course.
*** From Wikipedia, which, per it's former CEO Katherine Maher's own words, may not be actually telling the truth in that White male style anyway: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is an American publicly funded non-profit corporation, created in 1967 to promote and help support public broadcasting.
**** If you'd asked me, I'd have figured their "news"room had 10 to 20 people. Nope, per a tweet from the ex-CEO Berliner, they have over 80. They could afford to let a few go.
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Illegal Alien is the term, and we're stickin' to it!
Posted On: Friday - April 26th 2024 6:03AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Political Correctness Educational Stupidity
This kind of thing really pisses me off. As with many areas within the realm of Wokeness, terminology is changed to both fool people and not offend... sometimes those we should have no problem offending.
Peak Stupidity will call it Euphemism Creep". People get wise to the old ones, and new euphemisms are forced on us, so we won't be wise to exactly what they refer to ... for a while... then a new one must be coined.
Taking a point from Lionel Shriver's new novel (you've SURELY heard enough about it here!), I get the initial motivation to not cause offense. "Retarded", for instance, is simply a word for "held back". Once the poor kids (and parents thereof) heard this word used too much, another more gentle term was found.
Well, when it comes to the illegal aliens who've been invading this country for half a century, I don't mind offending them with this term. They are offending me by being here!
There's been Euphemism Creep here, from "illegal alien" to just "illegal" to "undocumented immigrant" to "migrant" to "newcomer".
"No human is illegal", the yard signs cry out, regarding the 2nd term. Well no, if he hadn't broken into our country he wouldn't be - his BEING HERE is illegal, get it? (But "alien" with it confuses you all with creatures from outer space, I guess.) "Undocumented" is correct until fake SS #'s are obtained, but they are not supposed to be immigrants. That's the problem with that term. "Migrant" is one of those vague ones used to confuse people. Weren't those old black people come up to Detroit for factory work migrants, and how about those old Okies come to California? Finally, "newcomers" is supposed to make us think of the Taylor family's new neighbors in Mayberry, I guess... Sure, yeah... no, it doesn't work for me.
The fact is, "illegal alien" is a perfectly good term from US law, immigration law, that is, US Code Title 8 1101 and 1365. The blurryblurb above is from this FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) web page.
There's more to comment here on that original story shown above:
A 16-year-old student at Central Davidson High School in Lexington, North Carolina was suspended for three days last week after using the term ‘illegal alien’ during a vocabulary assignment in his English class.That was a perfectly good question. However, you can't offend anyone... except the straight White guys, so...
Leah McGhee’s son has a teacher who assigned vocabulary words during class last Tuesday, including the word ‘alien.’ McGhee says her son made an effort to understand the assignment and responded to his teacher, asking, “Like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?”
According to an email describing the incident, sent to local officials and shared with Carolina Journal, a young man in class took offense to his question and reportedly threatened to fight him, prompting the teacher to call in the assistant principal. Ultimately, his words were deemed by administrative staff to be offensive and disrespectful to classmates who are Hispanic.I bolded that last part because the administrative staff kind of showed its ass here. What would make this term "illegal alien" offensive specifically to Hispanic people? Are you trying to say that a whole lot of them are invaders to this country or something? I can see someone taking offense at THAT.
I remember Genesis drummer/singer Phil Collins using the term back in the day, so there! See "(let me tell ya') It's More Fun, Bein' An Illegal Alien."
Leah McGhee got it right. As much as we hate the invasion, "Illegal Alien" is NOT a slur to begin with. If you want slurs, I GOT slurs.* Peak Stupidity will not budge. Illegal Alien is the term, and we're stickin' to it!
* In fact, many years ago at this time of year, I'd been using the computer to teach a beautiful girl from Venezuela, before the Commies took it, a series of bad words. (Well, she asked.) The idea was not that she read them out loud, but she did, and hilarity ensued!
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Mike Johnson - Bribed, Blackmailed, or Threatened?
Posted On: Thursday - April 25th 2024 1:40PM MST
In Topics: Pundits US Feral Government Deep State iEspionage
Peak Stupidity rarely disagrees with writer Patrick Cleburne*, who's been very prolific on the VDare site since early '23. He's written on many topics involving the sorry state of the country and the shenanigans of the Feral Gov't, but, as will all VDare articles, they have an immigration invasion component.**
In this case, I have no issue with the ideology again - it's just a difference on what Mr. Cleburne attributes the perfidy of US. House of Representin' Speaker Mike Johnson to. The writer speculates: Why Did Speaker Johnson So Totally Betray His Party And Country? If It Walks Like A Bribe And Talks Like A Bribe...
Neither of us have evidence on hand, so this is speculation here on the part of Peak Stupidity also. However, there must be SOMETHING that motivates every one of these would-be-important "Conservative" high-level politicians to suck up and sell out. In this case, I will discount the copywritten The Cocktail Party theory of Political Stupidity as a motivation. Mike Johnson and family could fit in nicely with the few, but non-negligible ACTUAL Conservatives in Congress and feel pretty socially accepted there.
For background in case the reader is simply too heartbroken to keep following all the forced "L's", aka, traitorous betrayals, of the American people, let me go back a few weeks. Mike Johnson could have had the major spending bill (1/2 the yearly budget, I think) held up as leverage for a serious effort to stop the invasion of the country.*** He just plain let the bill get passed. A few days back, he did the same with a pure giveaway of $100,000,000,000 to the Ukraine, Israel, Gaza/Hamas, and, oh, probably a whole bunch of Deep State and MIC folks who also needed foreign aid.
Now, if you have an idea how much $100 Billion really is****, you may realize that bribing even 10 important politicians a princely sum of, say, $50 Million, making 10 RICH men even after 3 years of BaiDiEnomics means spending only 1/2 of one percent of the funding. It's peanuts.
I wrote that to note that, yes, the bribe(s) could easily be HUGE. I just don't think bribery is the motivation here though. Some of these people do have some principles, or they sure seem as if they do. I don't think all of them relish destroying this country (and paying to kill and maim more people overseas). It seems more likely to me that someone like Mike Johnson would be blackmailed or threatened. I suppose the former is just one version of the latter. One can be threatened more directly than via the threat of exposing dirt on him, i.e. blackmail.
Before he says that bribery "is obvious", Mr. Cleburne notes that Tucker Carlson speculated blackmail in a conversation with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and then wrote:
But ever since Speaker Bob Livingston was destroyed in 1998 at the beginning of the Clinton impeachment battle it has been clear that the ancient D.C. truce was over. Attacks over private life issues on political opponents are to be expected—at least for Republicans. If Johnson had any weakness, why on earth would he have taken the risk?Well, I mean, who of them DOESN'T have something to hide. Who of US doesn't have anything to hide, something that may not even be illegal but just embarrassing or shameful. You figure they don't know everything? Well, we can write another post on the Tucker conversation and that Mike Benz video in which the Feral Gov't
The NSA wasn't mentioned by Tucker or MTG. Since most Americans carry those pieces of iEspionage with them, the NSA doesn't need nearly so many personnel, excuse me, assets, as it did during the Cold War to spy in the Russkies. We are all NSA assets now, as explained better in this post.
I don't know Mike Johnson. I'm not good at reading faces. They say women have this intuition that makes this easier. Maybe MTG has some better insight, as she is right there in the Capitol with these people, voting against bills and vacating turncoats. If Mr. Johnson had been bribed, you'd think he'd be greatly ashamed right now. This would also mean he was never really a moral principled man, so he may not blink an eye. However, were he blackmailed, he would have a different mindset and maybe a look of fear. That'd be the case even more so had he been threatened or had his family threatened.
Rather than make this specifically about Mike Johnson, let me just say that I think at the level of people who have the power to at least stop some of the ruination, their "change of hearts" toward more ruination are due to blackmail and other threats rather than bribery. Granted either way, for the Deep State:
* This is a pseudonym, not the famous Southern General... unless he's been re-incarnated.
** In this case, the immigration component is that the CongressTraitor in question failed to use the power of the purse for leverage on some kind of border control.
*** Sure, Mayorkas would have had to been gotten around or taken out of the picture somehow.
**** Lots of people don't try to. Although very astute otherwise, MTG made a mistake - may have just been a speako, but she didn't correct herself - by saying (in that aforementioned 1/2 the budget bill) the FBI got $200 Billion for their new building. Now, I don't support giving the American Gestapo anything, but that had to have been $200 Million.
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Mania, by Lionel Shriver - author criticisms
Posted On: Wednesday - April 24th 2024 3:56PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Trump Race/Genetics Books Zhou Bai Dien
(Continued from the basic book review and book criticisms.)
Uh, oh, whadda we got, an obsession with author Lionel Shriver here, like Kathy Bates in Misery? Well, Lionel Shriver's novels have been very interesting and pertinent, and it's great to see a reasonably well-known writer rail against the Wokeness, Kung Flu Totalitarianism, and more, from the inside. (Until she moved to Portugal, she lived in Brooklyn, NYC and then both there and London.)
I can't say I've been her "biggest fan" but sure wanted to support her by reading her and blogging here (maybe even getting to meet her some day). By her new novel Mania, I was disappointed.
That can happen when someone you assume seems to generally get things, doesn't, and on some major issues too. A year or so ago, commenter Adam Smith linked us to a few UK Spectator articles by Mrs. Shriver, and I figured out his trick to view a few more. The posts never got written here, but I did note that she was way off, IMO, on some of them.
Mania is the story of a quickly and dangerously growing program of Wokeness, very much a Cultural Revolution, based only one stupid concept, that we are all equal in intelligence. Anything spoken, written, and actions taken, that go against this idea are forbidden. How did this idea and program start in the novel? The author never said. Wouldn't that be really important?
One might think that Mrs. Shriver's whole idea here was to describe a flavor of Wokeness that the reading public would think silly (so far, anyway), but as an allegory of what similar things ARE going on today. The reader could see the story as a recent-past and near-future parallel to what has been going on and what will be. What is going on in reality that this book may remind one of? Could it be the Affirmative Action, Feminism, and genderbender nonsense that has resulted in the stifling of certain speech and the regulation from on high and the minions below that has had universities cancelling professors and no longer admitting people based on merit, employers cancelling good employees and not hiring based on merit? The race and sex aspect of this had been going on for 60 years, with the last 10 seeing a much quicker implementation due to the numbers.
The current widespread D.I.E. madness is having the same effects in the real world as the Mental Parity has in Mania, though slightly less directly. Competence levels are going down. It's no longer a prediction from the alt-right folks, but the worries about crashing airplanes and botched surgeries (in the book - slight spoiler) are big in the mind of the public now.
Yet, Lionel Shriver specifically wrote, in 2 places, words to the effect of "this MP is different from race and sex discrimination, which are real". It's as if she can't see that not only a ban on discrimination, but mandatory discrimination in the anti-White-male direction is having the same effect as the MP program in her story.
Of the handful of students in the protagonist's college English class who actual care about learning rather than goofing and/or trying "struggle against" their teacher, 3 are Oriental women (that's not so freaking likely), and one's a black guy. The worst of the people out to get her, her nemesis in the class, is a tall "smarmily good-looking" White guy named Drew Patterson. (Why not Haven Monahan? He's fictitious too.) That's backwards and a crock of shit, Shriver!
I was disappointed slightly by Mrs. Shriver's failure to continue the brave and nicely-done AA sub-plot in The Motion of the Body through Space. I chalked that up to it possibly not fitting in (as with the Jehovah's Witnesses in this book), but then she did a 180 degree turn on it near the end. With her conservative speeches and writings of late, I was sure she would not be cowed by fellow writers or critics. Did the publisher tell her that any of this race talk was forbidden in this latest book? If not, well she does not get the enormity of the race issue at all. Did she have to explicitly differentiate between race/sex supposed discrimination and the discrimination against the intelligent here?
I know Mrs. Shriver has heard of all the D.I.E. business, and she does a great job taking most of a whole chapter of [Alt-'13] to describe a struggle/apology session with one Dean Poot of the U. In no way does she relate this to the race/sex/alien-status D.I.E. business going on right now in the universities. I guess when it doesn't affect HER career or storylines personally, this writer is having nothing to do with it.* (Later, in Chapter 2 of [Alt-'14] she describes a mandatory D.I.E. class taught by a guy named Timmy with great humor.)
Then there's the pure politics espoused in this alt-recent-history. Lionel. Shriver simply is not so knowledgable about American domestic and foreign politics.
On the foreign policy side, narrator Pearson Converse is pretty much a solid neocon, worried about Putin and Russia as if the Cold War never ended. That just has to match the the writer's opinions too, or she would have no reason to write that stuff. I'm guessing if I go back to those archived UK Spectator articles (thanks, Adam!) those on the subject would have been the ones that got me to realize that this lady simple does NOT get everything.
More importantly, in domestic politics, in this alt-recent-history, candidate Øb☭ma loses the nomination for D-squad presidential candidate in '12 to his VP, old JoeTatoe. To go along with the story line, the reason is that Bai Dien is less literary and intelligent than Øb☭ma, which is a plus for the former. The narrator very much extolls the intelligence and speaking ability of Øb☭ma. He is described as "having class" and an "irksomely inspirational oratory", ("Irksome" to the PM followers, that is.) Also, "However challenging it may be to recall now, in many a previous era having a leader who was outstandingly astute, eloquent, and well informed would have seemed to any country's considerable advantage." Believe me, all this was not written just for the story. That's Lionel Shriver speaking, not just the characters. Most of this above wasn't in the usual conversations, in fact, but could be considered the mind of Pearson Crenshaw... which is no doubt the mind of Lionel Shriver here. She writes of what she "knows", indeed.
Finally, there's that orange-haired gentleman who must not be named, in this book, anyway. To provide plausible deniability for Lionel Shriver, this guy is a Democrat "ace in the hole" in [Alt-'15] (Chapter 5), as David Ruth (Pearson's adoptive father) says:
The Democrats have seized on an ace in the hole, and that's why the party higher-ups are coaxing Biden out the exit.Who else would this be but Mr. Donald Trump? It's not this fictional David Ruth, but Lionel Shriver that doesn't like Trump, because she can't see anything past "having class" and speaking well. Lots of evil liars speak very well - that's how they get to be BIG-TIME evil liars.
They know as well as we do who'd be a shoo-in. The tiny vocabulary? The repetition of the same words over and over? The incomplete sentences.** He checks every lowbrow box in the book. He's crude. He's crass. He's a boor. He has garish aesthetic taste. He's fat. Better still, he routinely wears that slack, brutish expression, and he never reads. It's also a big plus that he has no foreign policy experience. [Actually, it was. It's just that he hired the beltway Neocons] Ditto his never having been elected to a political position of any sort. [Mega-dittos!!] The PR people might need to coach him on that arrogance problem, but so long as you're boasting about how unremarkable you are, you can get away with all the narcissism you like.
That's most of it. I'm glad to have gotten this off my chest. Next, I will write about some more, if not the "S-word" (stupidity), ignorance, by a writer who I'd thought was the cat's meow on a very basic concept. Unfortunately, to do this I WILL have to spoil the ending completely. Therefore, I'll put a warning up. If you want to read this book, just make yourself skip over the post until you're finished. At that point, if you're of anywhere near the same ideology as the Peak Stupidity blog, you won't need to read our coming post.
* This is why in the first post I suggested that she wouldn't be caught dead reading Steve Sailer. Though he doesn't push his luck like the very brave "Paul Kersey", he's pretty honest about the situation.
Regarding other points made here, Mr. Sailer long ago wrote a book about America's Half-blood Prince. It was not meant to be flattering - it was more of a WARNING. I think Mrs. Shriver would neither agree nor understand.
** Hey, wait, those ones were incomplete sentences too!
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A Day at the Masters
Posted On: Wednesday - April 24th 2024 6:47AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Artificial Stupidity
The post is not about a Queen album.* Also, it may be a welcome change from our fixation on Lionel Shriver and her book. (I'll get back to that very shortly.)
I talked to a guy while traveling who had been to the recently held big "Masters" golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. This is maybe THE big one when it comes to American golf tournaments. It's also supposed to be one of the great golf courses, although I wouldn't know - I'm not a golf course architect. I've never even wanted to pretend to be a golf course architect.
The man and his family of golf enthusiasts had had tickets for that Saturday, the 2nd-to-last day of the 4. I was interested in how one watched in person - to me it's more of a thing (like football) that is easier to watch on TV, if you're going to watch at all, which I'm not. He told me about the particular location where they'd been situated, with a good view of the green of one hole (15th, maybe?) tees to a couple more, and so forth. I asked about pictures he may have taken.
No, sirreee. What was very surprising to me is that not only do the tournament officials not allow mobile phones to be on, with good reason, of course, but mobiles, cells, handies, whatever you call them, were not allowed there, period. You'd get kicked out if they found you having one on your person.
That seems kind of cool. I remarked to the guy that it might be very pleasant to be forcibly without these things and also around others who are forcibly without them for a day. That Saturday had been a nice day there, and even I, a non-golf-enthusiast - I'll be glad to drive the buggy around** - would have appreciated the beautiful greenery and the relative peace and quiet.
So, nice job, Augusta National. [Golf clap.]
* Too many old boomer music references? Sorry. The first is from The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's American Dream - great song! The second is in reference to Queen's Night at the Opera and Day at the Races.
** That was a bigger thing for me before I had a driver's license.
Comments (4)
Mania, by Lionel Shriver - book criticisms
Posted On: Tuesday - April 23rd 2024 7:24PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Books
(Continued from the basic book review.)
I wrote in our general review of Lionel Shriver's new novel Mania that the post would have been too long were all the criticisms I have to have been mixed in. (That sounds ominous!). This post has some relatively minor criticism of the book, but the next part will be a criticism of the opinions of the author. That I feel the need to write the 2nd part is a real shame, considering what I thought about her 5 days ago, before I picked up and read Mania. I will address the comprehensive comment by E.H. Hail under the basic review, as I write more tommorrow.
Here is some minor criticism involving this book. Firstly, I used the word "section" in the review to describe each alt-year (one of them a period) portion of the writing for a reason. Within each of those 8 - there's also something very interesting at the end - there are chapters, labeled as such, Chapter 1, etc. Well, that's downright confusing, as, while I was flipping to find my place I wondered "Wait, I've already read Chapter 2. Why is Chapter 1 over here?" Yes, I've heard of bookmarks! How about label them by alt-months within each alt-year to help with the chronology, or label them "Alt-'14 - Chapter 1", or at least at the top of each page, have the alt-year next to each chapter heading page?
OK, that's a really small thing, so let me get to the content of the story. That section [1972 - 2010] with all the background of character Pearson Converse's life has a long sad story of her being brought up by serious Jehovah's Witnesses. (I guess there aren't too many unserious ones.) This seems very important to the story, as it goes on for a while.
I had to go check the internet about "Lionel Shriver Jehovah's Witnesses" and came out with nothing in the author's background. However, she WAS brought up in a religious family, as her Dad was a Presbyterian minister who by one point become president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York. OK, fine, but I cannot see that childhood resembling the life of a JW child the way it was described in this novel. Has she written about anything like this in other novels or in her Spectator articles? Perhaps the author had friends who told her about this upbringing and the other side of the story of these folks that appear regularly on porches around the nation.**
The problem I have with this is that it never ended up having anything to do with the rest of the story. I can imagine it COULD have, in 2 ways: 1) IIRC, this writer did compare the Mental Parity movement to a religion, maybe later on in the story. However, I'd thought she would connect that up with the story of her JW upbringing from that 2nd section. 2) As Pearson Converse suffered more and more troubles when she stood out as the movement got worse, she mentioned that during trying times like this, one seems to go back to depend on one's family. - back to her roots. Yet, the character does nothing of the sort.
Was the only reason for this whole part of the story that Mrs. Shriver could use with the great joke about her having escaped her family to her friend's family, seeing this as "The Witness Protection Program"?
Next, I think any reviewer or reader would tell you that the author's 2 or 3 page section in which she (Pearson Converse, but really Lionel Shriver) tells the story of the cancelling of all movies, TV shows, and books that have any mention or display of stupidity versus intelligence is too much. Yeah, I know she was having fun with this. She may have had too many good examples in her head, Gilligan v the Professor on Gilligan's Island, Maxwell Smart, etc, to pass up. She's old enough to go back a long ways with this too! Regarding Maxwell Smart for example, part of her point is to show that even arguments to the effect of "the idea is to show that even stupid people can do a great job" and such would not fly. This does relate to the modern "Tom Sawyer has the word "nigger", but he's one of the good guys. I was just pointing that out." Nope, too bad. Logic does not count with these kind of people. Though this went on too long, that was a good point to make.
I will add another small point, this one involving the writer's possible cluelessness about real-world household finances. In the Peak Stupidity review of The Motion of the Body Through Space (para 13) it seems that the writer went one way with the free-spending yuppie couple. With both out of jobs due to (yes) Wokeness, she painted too rosy a picture of their financial state, though, granted, neither of us about their 401-k's and debt, because, well, they're characters in a novel!
In this book, at one point only Pearson, the college English Instructor, has lost her job. Wade still has his tree business. Pearson doesn't think they will be able to afford the mortgage on the house. Let me tell you, tree guys can make LOT of money. He can make a mortgage payment with one tree. The loss of the adjunct faculty money is, what, $30,000 a year before taxes? (Wade can take cash. I sure would!) The picture of their family finances is wrong in the other direction here.
Here's one more very small point on grammar [Added, 4/25] only to included because the story involves the decline of literacy. Within the conversation (page 200), Pearson the character and Lionel the writer say "Of course I'm not okay. That's like asking someone who's jumped off a forty-story building if they're okay." Excuse me?! This is not the modern gender-bending pronoun stupidity but just the old lower-stupidity level feminist pronound stupidity. Still...
Finally, the reader of Lionel Shriver's novels or previous Peak Stupidity reviews of the same will know one particular element of her writing that is a bit off. She likes to use conversation between the characters to tell the story much of the time. That's fine in and of itself. However, these conversations, as I've written before, simply don't sound realistic, as high-level grammar and fancy words are used by most people in the conversation. I know, the narrator character in her novels is usually in a literary field, which is Mrs. Shriver's keeping it real (writing on what she knows). No matter how highfalutin, the characters in her novels and the characters in her life may be though, sorry, people simply don't talk like that in conversation. They don't talk with words from an Atlantic article. This is something one can get used to.
OK, I'll get to what I really wanted to write tomorrow.
* ... that is, along with writing you back there too. I wanted to get going on this post first.
** I'm pretty sure I mentioned the following somewhere, but this is kind of funny, so ... We had (usually) the same 2 nice black ladies come to the house for a period of 4-5 years, I think. Because I'd not early on treated them nicely but firmly with "We're just not agonna join. Sorry.", we were on the hook, or maybe we had them on the hook, but definitely not intentionally.
1) This one time I heard the knock and saw the silhouette of the 2 hefty ladies through the window blinds. With the lighting the way it was, I knew they could peer in and see someone moving easily, so I had to do an Army Basic Training style belly crawl below the window line around to another room. "Don't move! We gotta stay here for 5 minutes!"
2) This time I saw the maroon-colored American sedan parked in front of our house from a block and a half away while riding my bicycle home. I diverted to a cross street and got out the (see?) handy mobile phone. I called the wife to tell her to stay put until I told her the coast was clear. I had to get to a vantage point far enough to where I could get out of view in case they left in my direction.
Perhaps I should have been more forthright ... ;-}
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[UPDATED 04/24:] Added paragraph on the pop culture cancellation section. I'll add one more very small thing when I get the book back in my hands.
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Comments (16)
Mania, by Lionel Shriver
Posted On: Monday - April 22nd 2024 10:37AM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Books Totalitarianism
In the interest of laziness, I'll leave it to the reader to go to either this post or our Books topic key to find links to Peak Stupidity writing/reviews on other works of Mrs* Shriver.
This always happens! I can't do this review in one post. However, as opposed to writing a 6-part review along the sequence of the book as with The Mandibles, this post will be a basic review without the major criticisms. I'll leave those for the 2nd post. Then, I'll get to the political stuff. Oh, boy ...
The story in the dystopic novel Mania is of American and White-Western society being in the grips of a hard-core flavor of Wokeness** and the end results thereof. While one might associate Wokeness with race/ethnicity, sex roles, genderbending stupidity, and whatever else they can come up with, the story in Mania is of one particular flavor, intelligence. "Mental parity", per the novel, is a form of Wokeness in which the whole concepts of stupidity and its converse, intelligence, are anathema to polite society, in order that nobody be offended. As I'll get to in the criticisms, this is not really a separate flavor of Wokeness from what we have now. It's well connected to the racial flavor, so the concept, rather than being read as an absurdity, is something we all see presently to a degree. Whether the author meant to use the seemingly ridiculous MP (Mental Parity) as a "dog whistle" - haha, a term she destroyed early in the book - for race/ethnicity wokeness or just a stand-alone extension of what she sees around her is a question I think I know the answer to. (Later.)
Instead of a near-future dystopia, as in The Mandibles***, Mania is mostly alt-recent-history with just 4 years of the near-future. I don't know why it was necessary to do it this way, but my guess is that Mrs. Shriver wanted to show that this style Wokeness has been building since 2011, per her story, or per her own noticing, and this way the ending could end up being pretty much NOW.
The first section, [Alt-2011****], has an introduction to all the main characters. The narrator doesn't have a funny foreign name this time, for a change, just a funny American name: Pearson Converse. She (yes, again) is a mother of 3 kids, Darwin, Zanzibar, and Lucy. Wade is her long-term live-in "partner", although they had their youngest, Lucy, together, they'd never gotten married.
In this beginning, the Woke program is already well-developed. The story starts with the bright son Darwin having gotten in trouble in school for his use of language. Words like "stupid" (yeah, this site would be in TROUBLE), "dumb", and also the converse, "bright", etc. are offensive by this point. The quickly growing mental parity movement, the "last great civil rights fight", says that people should be treated equally regardless of their intelligence.
I can see that Mrs. Shriver could have picked up on the idea from seeing the recent dropping of SAT/ACT requirements and other standards for university admissions recently. (Some have been reinstated.) It's almost as if Lionel Shriver has been reading Steve Sailer. Here too, regarding the "new rules", as expounded by Emory on page 8:
Don't ever mention, or fish for, IQ, obviously, but also SAT and ACT scores or grade point averages. You're even meant to keep your trap shut about how well you did on newspaper quizzes on the major stories of the week. And forget asking about a performance on Jeopardy!Haha! That's quite uncanny, but it must be canny because, as I'll get into, I'm starting to think that Mrs. Shriver wouldn't get caught dead reading Steve Sailer.
In the '11 section, it's still OK for this family and (some) friends to make fun of and decry the stupidity of this MP Wokeness at home. However, they've already realized that careers and other prospects can be ruined if one isn't extremely careful to go along with it in public.
I'm going to skip most of the narrator's, Pearson Converse's, background as described in the (note, NOT "alt") section [1972 - 2010], because it seems to me unrelated to the whole rest of the story with the exception of one point. I'll get to that also in the next post.
I will mention here the important background, which includes Pearson's story of her 2 older kids, Darwin (boy) and Zanzibar (girl) having been conceived by sperm donations.***** Both were from a high IQ Japanese man. This, with Lucy's normal procreation from Wade and Pearson, serves the story of the book very well. Lucy, being not all that bright, is extolled for this - well, this gets worse - and the very bright older kids have their bright prospects dashed.
Moving along finally, in the sections that cover Alt-'12, Alt-'13, Alt-'14, Alt-'15, Alt-'16 and the retrospective Alt-'23, this Wokeness program builds, affecting all of American society, as the story covers the plight of our narrator, the 3 children, Wade, and Emory. I think Communist style programs like that CAN move very quickly, as described here. In the novel the PM movement goes from watching what one says and the cancelling of all kinds of books, movies, and TV shows due to the antics of anyone stupid or bright, or who can be seen as such, to more sinister things like the removal of children from the home for offensive speech. Anyone who is not completely down is suspect. This sounds eerily familiar...
In this novel and in reality, most people try to get along in life without trying to fight the movement, whether true believers or not, and it's often hard to tell. The latter point is a major part of this story, involving the bright, beautiful, and composed, NPR/CNN reporter Emory. Careers are ruined, and careers thrive, depending on whether one has the innate desire to fight the movement or to go along like a Red Guard.
I suppose a literary person would be most concerned about the speech/writing aspects of the new movement that prevent discrimination ANYWHERE based on intelligence. (An employer will get sued otherwise.) However, this movement includes, of course, the hiring of, say, engineers and doctors, the latter being another sad part of this story. All of this is a slightly different explanation for the crisis of competency in our reality today that Peak Stupidity has written about many times.****** As one would expect, a country under a Communistic mindset like this would not last very long economically. The high-level domestic and foreign political aspect of this is something that the author is simply not very good at, as this was NOT writing of what she knows.
The big struggle in Mania is also within Pearson Converse's mind, as she tries to understand the part of her personality that makes her resist the madness to the detriment of her job and family. Don't get me wrong - I'm with her. I also see, as the character does, that small acts of resistance often accomplish nothing and just get us into bigger and bigger trouble. That doesn't stop us.
Should our goal be just to hold on until we get to the other side? Who will determine what the other side looks like? Will our souls be in one piece when we get there? These are questions generally posed in this novel.
Now, as to the readability of this book and such, I'll just write a little bit here with the rest in the next post. It's a fairly short book - 4-8 hours should do you, unless you are "the S-word". With the author being a woman, just as with The Mandibles being a prepper novel with only the female view - nothing on rigging up electrical generation, etc. - this one has way, way too much of that feeeelings, deep womanly conversations stuff that is a big part of the story. It was too much for me. I hadn't come up against this while reading the other 3 Lionel Shriver books I've read.
Still, there are good plot twists even as the mental parity Wokeness goes inexorably in one direction... well, I won't spoil the story for you here. Mania is worth reading, especially for those few non-Peak-Stupidity-reading folks who really don't know what we're in for with these Communist movements. They don't just stop when they've reached some advertised "goal". Societal destruction is the end goal. This is usually unadvertised.
In the next post on this book, my criticisms will go from quibbles to important failings. The latter will show that I am no longer the Lionel Shriver fan I was, I'm really sorry to have to say.
* For the record again, Mrs. Shriver's first name Lionel does not indicate that she has transitioned, unless one means a transition from Brooklyn, NY lefty to Brooklyn, NY lefty who at least sees the light in some places. She was Margaret Shriver until 15 y/o or so, when, considering herself a tomboy, she decided she wanted to be named Lionel. I don't know if this had anything to do with n-gauge train sets or not.
** Peak Stupidity describes Wokeness as Political Correctness on steroids with the long arm of the law behind it.
*** What I really liked in that one was that the financial stupidity story showed a century-metered rhyming of history. The full title is The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. The actions of the US Gov't were something of a repeat of the Roosevelt Great Depression 1.0 era, but Americans were no longer the self-sufficient, hardy, and united people they were a century back. Things went much farther than last time.
**** I'll continue saying this until HALF the century is over, I guess, but we're one quarter way into this one. Can we drop the "20" now, dammit?
***** I also mention this to note that, coincidentally, a week before I read this book, I thought of writing a post on this same topic of sperm donations and nature v nurture. It'll be here eventually.
****** See Hotel Haiti - on Competence - - Harvesting the fruits of a half-century of Affirmative Action - Part 5 - - Demographics to DIE
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John Cougar Menstrualcramp?
Posted On: Saturday - April 20th 2024 8:47PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor
A Peak Stupidity favorite rock musician, John Cougar (as I knew him in the day) has been on a viral video due to his having gotten mad at some of the audience at a recent show in Toledo, Ohio. You can see the one, but I hate to leave it here with someone else's commentary, as I think I won't agree with most.
Mr. Mellencamp had a tantrum of sorts when a guy in the audience yelled out to him, in nicer words, to "shut up and sing". I can understand that attitude. I don't need to hear about politics I don't particularly like*, rather than what I came for, the music.
However, contrary to the assumptions inherent in articles I've read about this, he did not make a political rant that day. It was one of his stories he likes to tell between songs. Back in the late 1980s, I saw a great show by John Cougar, already Mellencaomp, and he told us of his musical beginnings for a few minutes. I still remember his telling us how he tried to impress his girlfriend by playing a cassette tape of his new song on the car player as they sat in the parking lot. Afterwards, she was all "well, yeah, it's OK, I guess ..." (I guess you had to hear it the way he told it.) Then he went back to his great music.
Here's a much more recent example from a San Francisco show:
That's part of the show. Mr. Mellencamp's reaction and tantrum in Toledo was likely due to his being a little crotchety with a few aches and pains. Also, he doesn't need to take any shit, or I sure hope so. I hope he's playing for the love of it and doesn't need the money.
He's no young rebel who jumps around on the stage and fights authority in the videos. Everyone get old. Maybe he didn't need the cusswords, but I'd have enjoyed his fun words of wisdom in the San Fran show.
The albums that I know well from Mr. Cougar Mellencamp are American Fool, Uh Huh, and Scarecrow This song is from the first one, from 1982. It's Close Enough for Rock & Roll. Yeah, 42 years makes a difference, in all of us.
John Cougar Mellencamp is a lefty, as one might expect. However, I apologize to him here for having watched the viral clip and having considered writing a quite different post. OTOH, a commenter on youtube came up with this post's title, and I could not resist!
Next week, we'll try to get the Climate Calamity™ (with a review of a whole documentary) in, along with the review of Lionel Shriver's book. (I'm just finishing the latter now.) There'll be plenty more than that though. There has been an unceasing amount of stupidity coming to us, so, enjoy. Thank you all so much for reading and writing in.
* Back in the 1980s and for quite a while afterwards, this Hoosier musician was concerned about the loss of family farms in the midwest, with a great song about this, Scarecrow, title song to that album. Now that support of Americans and America is something you don't see too much. I appreciated his efforts at the time.
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Circular firing squad Exhibit B
Posted On: Friday - April 19th 2024 11:38AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Race/Genetics Socialism/Communism
Peak Stupidity noted another example (call that one Exhibit A, as this could go on a while) of this problem with the (Steve Sailer-coined) Coalition of the Fringes 2 posts ago. The weakness in this Coalition built only upon hatred of the White Man in America shows up especially under Socialist circumstances... more so when there aren't too many White men around either.
That's my usual source*, and the article is here. Here are the monetary figures the City Brothers reckon they need to take care of the Chicagoland
On Monday, the Budget and Government Operations Committee of the Chicago City Council voted 20-8 to send Mayor Brandon Johnson’s request for $70 million in additional City funding to care for illegals to the full Council.The debate on this money got heated because ... GDLOS!**:
CBS News reports that the request is part of a spending plan announced by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in February. The State of Illinois and Cook County pledged a combined $250 million to help fund the crisis, which is anticipated to reach at least $321 million for shelter and services this calendar year.
During the heated debate, Ald. Chris Taliaferro of the 29th Ward said, “We are not taking care of our own. We have all but forgotten the residents on the West Side and South Side.”The South Side, former home of one Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, has long been known to have many black people, many who need a hand-
Will the long-term black residents spend their money more wisely than those Venezuelan criminals newcomers? Here's what they need those hundreds of millions from the (largely White, I assume) taxpayers for:
9th Ward Ald. Anthony Beale added, “We don’t have money for after-school programs. We don’t have money to help our kids get off the street. Yet, we would just blow money left and right. That’s a fundamental problem.”More basketball courts = fewer shootings. Note that Chinatowns would be violent ghettos had the basketball courts not been built for the little ones, so they could sit on the benches in the sunshine and study for their SATS.
“And when we talk about this money, and as important as our children are to us, a place like Ogden Park, the field house is to the Inglewood community, where shootings take place, where every economic indicator, health indicator, everything, everybody should be jumping to that to protect our children and give us the things we need,” said 17th Ward Ald. David Moore.
I'll just sit on the porch swing reading circular firing squad stories like this and eat my popcorn. I took the SATs long ago, and I don't care for basketball.
* My problem with getting posts off news from The Gateway Pundit is that there are so many posts added daily, and they are very current. The stupidity flows quickly these days. I end wanting to write 2 or more a day from there. It may be time to get back to some of the less timely, but possibly more interesting stuff.
I will be ready to write that review of Lionel Shriver's new book by tomorrow, time permitting, and then I want to write about Steve Sailer's latest post on Jews and Progressivism. The latter will take some time...
** Gimme Dat, cuz Legacy O' Slavery!
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Steve Sailer on future elections
Posted On: Thursday - April 18th 2024 7:24PM MST
In Topics: Commies Pundits Global Financial Stupidity
I wanted to make sure and write the previous post first, as it was coming anyway, and I didn't want readers to think Peak Stupidity is down on Steve Sailer in general.
I got to 20:45 in his interview by Peter Brimelow, as Mr. Sailer was giving an overview of the support of Trump and Trump's flaws. He then talks about future elections (after '24) and "...hopefully there's new generations out there that can kind of square the circle for Republicans ..."
I'm sorry, but I don't know how to address that kind of talk without telling someone to "open your eyes, man!". This talk about getting improved GOP candidates together is all very Pat Buchanan-esque, the Pat Buchanan of the 2020s, stuck in the political mindset of the 1980s. This is not (American political) business as usual. It's very late. We're not dealing with Tip O'Neils and Jimmy Carters. The US Gov't is filled with American Communists bent on destruction.
There are Political Prisoners rotting in FS dungeons, the election process is Banana Republican, and the treasonous Motherland Security Chief has enabled an an invasion of 10-15 million foreigners in the last 3 years. It's really, really late in the game.
I will hate to actually see it when it comes, but the demise of the US Dollar ("It's the economy, stupid.") at the end of all the Financial Stupidiy may cause a disruption that forestalls the complete transition of America to a Totalitarian Communist Police State.... or, we'll go straight to it even quicker, I dunno ... Future elections?!
OK, fine. I'm calm and collected now, though not as much as Steve Sailer is. I'll watch the rest of the interview now and Ann Coulter/Peter Theil later or tomorrow.
PS: No offense intended with "It's the economy, stupid." That political expression comes from over 30 years back with Bill Clinton. I would like to know if Peter Brimelow, formerly a Finance writer and pundit, sees what's coming a little better. He does, at least, see who the enemy are.
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Steve Sailer's concepts in action
Posted On: Thursday - April 18th 2024 6:37PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Pundits Race/Genetics World Political Stupidity
I'm over here watching a video interview of Steve Sailer by VDare's Chief Peter Brimelow.* Between my reading of (about 1/3 of the articles so far**) Mr. Sailer's book Noticing and this interview I can see all of the many great concepts that Mr. Sailer has either originated or brought to the minds of Conservatives.
A couple of them are the Coalition of the Fringes and the Circular Firing Squad that can form from the former. I won't define these, as I think most Peak Stupidity readers know this illustrious pundit. (If not, look here and here, respectively - there's overlap, of course.)
Lately, it's the latter concept that has been coming to mind, as I've been seeing the protests by pro-Palestinian/pro-Gaza people, blocking roads to airports, getting in the faces of politicians, etc. Peak Stupidity does not take the side of either these would-be=ragheads or the leftist Jews (too large a share, unfortunately) who may be SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I TELLS YA! that recently their (other) homeland has not been completely supported by the US Feral Gov't and the Establishment.
What is going on?! Well, it's been arguably a century that you've had these stupid worries about a near monolithic White American population somehow being threatening to you and the other stupidity about some old plaque on a statue meaning America takes in all the refuse of the world. Here we are now. You all have pushed hard for this. You've had the Establishment on your side for 60 years to enable this project. Ooops, some of the folks you imported don't like you at all.
That Coalition of the Fringes that is supposed to include everyone but traditional American White people has a rift you can drive a Mack Truck through. (Well, except when the road is blocked.) I'm not sure how you thought this would hold together. This portion of the Coalition hates your guts.
This portion that hates your guts has got some political power now. Heckuva Job, ADLey!
PS: Heh! One of the first Steve Sailer posts I'd read, on The Unz Review, at least, had that sarcastic "Heckuva job, Brownie!" line which I see he's used a bunch of times. Mr. Sailer being the big movie buff, I thought for sure this line was from a Clint Eastwood Western movie. Guess not ...
* I've got Ann Coulter and Peter Theil lined up too, on Dieter's Twitter. Yes, "Dieter's Twitter" would indeed be a great name for a band, some sort of band...
** I'm about 1/2 way through Lionel Shriver's Mania after 3 hours or so, so that review will come first.
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How dare you, Hunter?!!
Posted On: Wednesday - April 17th 2024 8:16PM MST
In Topics: Humor Environmental Stupidity Zhou Bai Dien
Presented without comment:
Comments (2)