PS: Should be "... only a buck more..."

PS: Good morning, everyone,

Mr. Hail,

If you continue to have trouble accessing PeakStupidity you might consider changing your DNS settings. Not sure if it would help, but it's possible that there is some sort of glitch there.

Anyway... Happy Friday, y'all! ☮️

PS: Regarding the parking meters: This is stuff I'd meant to write in or under that post about the student snowflake who had the one practical concern.

The tickets have been on a buck more than in the early 1990s until last month! I admitted even to the guys walking around, that this was a hell of a deal compared to a big city in which you'd pay almost one ticket here's worth just to feed the meter for an hour.

Well, this is the 2nd time I've seen this sort of thing - I guess if you're gonna go up due to inflation (yeah, or greed) you go big now. The parking ticket price went up 3x. The meters do take coins, but the time per quarter went down to 50%. It's actually the latter that I like even less. Lastly, the time they start giving tickets out went to earlier in the morning.

So, yes, it's a practice for someone to let the people inside know that the meter guy or gal is out on this block. One of the employees will make an announcement - so those speakers are of SOME good - to customers outside. Yes, the meter guy hears it and usually just smiles. This other day, the guy inside was kind of diplomatic about it, making it sound like he wasn't saying it right then just due to the meter guy being there at the time.

No, they don't give me or anyone else any coffee kickback - it feels good not just saving someone money but also a bad mark on their day.

PS: Mr. Hail, about the blockage. One of the 1st things I do nowadays is temporarily make my phone a hotspot and connect to it with that same device. It will be using the mobile carrier's (provider's - I HATE that term) internet connections.

I noticed that whatever I could get to in China (23) using a device using local wifi, I COULD see on my phone. Have the mobile phone companies there gotten over the Great Firewall?

Anyway, I'm glad you're good to go for now. It's strange to see this site blocked. That makes me think the decision is not made higher up - by, say the ADL, $PLC, etc., with their "Hate lists" that companies may unfortunately subscribe to - but by some software that came upon a certain post here.

PS: I hope you will make all that about the economic-political inclinations of various birth cohorts (the term Strauss & Howe used), into a full post on your site, Mr. Hail.

Regarding 1932, I've been under the impression that Herbert Hoover may not have ended up much different than FDR - maybe a milder less blatantly pro-Communist version. Hoover was an engineer and very successful businessman. After he'd saved a whole bunch of Russian (perhaps Ukrainians) from starvation in the early 1920s, millions of *1920s*, dollars being involved he may have changed his idea of charity to include government as the "charitable" contributor. He'd gotten the Fed Gov money spending going during his term.

The character Archie Bunker would have been in that born-19-teens cohort, I figure, 50-60 years old in the mid-1970s. He and Edith (to a hilarious effect) extolled Hoover in the theme song. "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again." Then, just after, the conservative line "Didn't need no welfare state." That would make one think otherwise about Hoover, but it's just a song.

Anyway, interesting stuff. I go with 1964 was MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVAH! - make that in the 20th Century - but also the very worst outcome EVAH!

PS: Mr. Hail, that music didn't sound particularly African, just modern American rap/pop garbage. I don't think I could find the name because I tried not to listen, and that's even if I wanted to. The customers of that place are 95 % White people who, I dunno, I'd figure would really rather hear Enya or something. The management doesn't do things on behalf of the customer any more.

PS: Hey, Mr. Hail,

𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔-𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑔𝑢𝑦, 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑓𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙-𝑝𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙-𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑠...

Hell, I'd do that for free. ☮️

PS: Good evening, Mr. Hail!

I've had zero problems accessing PeakStupidity. (We did have a thunderstorm with some heavy wind today, so windstream was a little in and out for a while. This is not unusual. But as long as the internet was working, PS was accessible.)

Also, My • 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐬: Adam Smith under this comment of yours...
https://www.unz.com/isteve/open-thread-3-2/#comment-7075761

really should be a • 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐬: and an • 𝐀𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐞: but, unfortunately, I could only choose one.

While it is quite apparent he didn't appreciate my 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑 𝑊𝑎𝑟 𝐼𝐼 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑠 meme, I think Jack is kvetching extra hard mostly because his holocaust card has been declined. His last comment to me makes it seem like he's about two merchant memes away from an aneurysm.

Cheers! ☮️

PS

Thanks, and until I'm blocked again, godspeed with the many adventures in the high-life that comes with being the Peak Stupidity editor-in-chief, including being "parking-meter lookout guy" in exchange for discounted coffee (if true)

(alt. theory: Volunteering to be parking-meter lookout guy, to deprive the State of funds for ideological-political-moral reasons. PS cannot be bought! Not with discounted coffee, nor with Billy Joel songs, nor any other songs or beverages).

PS

(PS' Adam Smith got in a back-and-forth with Jack D on the Sailer Open Thread. The latter called the former a range of bad names and used his usual invectives to besmirch the good name of Adam Smith.)

PS

"I had to run in and compliment him along with reporting when the parking meter guy was out and about."

What kind of arrangement is this?

Discount for coffee if you inform when the parking meter guy is coming? So that someone can rush out to put in a few quarters, until the parking meter guy waddles his way into the donut shop down the road, he having seen by the humming of the topped-up coin-parking machines and been placated that there are no parking LAW-BREAKERS this day? (How many coin-parking machines still exist?)

PS

(Also RE: being blocked from PS intermittently) I had some old tabs with PS draft-material I never posted, some of which I saved nowhere else. Some of these, if growing to sufficient length, I could use as stand-alone publishable material for HailToYou Dot Wordpress Dot Com. Or so has been my idea. But you tend to forget about things like that.

Now that I have access to PS again --- until somebody flips a "Block PS" in me switch again --- let me put the below here. Witten within a few weeks of the Nov 2024 Trump general-election win but never posted (in response to a lot of the usual talk at the time, "This is the most important election of your lifetime," etc.)

__
_____
_________
_____________


-- On some "most important elections of the century" candidates: 1932 --

We should only be allowed to make pronouncements like "x is the most important election of y-period" after a long time has passed. Maybe even only after it passes out of memory. By that measure, the election of 1964 is now fair-game (even to now-retirees who remember it, they're remembering a time of their youth from some sixty years ago); but the election of 2004 would not be.

I don't have a proposal for an exact cutoff in countable-year terms, but it'd have to be in the decades. Maybe 25+ years should be the minimum

When I think about "most important" or most-consequential elections, this one really strikes me:

1932.

In national popular-vote terms, White vote, 1932:
- FDR: 37%
- Hoover: 25.5%
- Other candidates: 2%
- Nonvoters: 35.5%

This was merely a +12.5 point margin but with important swings in the key regions and demographics that it was enough for a major "sweep," a win of almost every state. The FDR Coalition was born.

______

Hoover in 1932 carried:

- 4 of the 6 New England states (with the then-tradition of New England Protestant support for the Republican Party since the earliest days), plus

- Pennsylvania.

______

Close states (all won by FDR in 1932 but by less than 8 points):

-Massachusetts (a 5th of the 6 New England states, for the same traditional-Republican-support reasons),

- Michigan,

- New Jersey and

- Ohio.

Besides these states, nowhere else was close.

It was a wave towards the Democrats and the FDR people seized upon it, taking full advantage. The world later crafted by the USA, under US leadership and so forth, remained one under the control of the New Deal coalition.

(NOTE, April 2025: My recent commentary on Smoot-Hawley as "New Deal propaganda" comes in here.)

The states in which FDR was weakest in 1932, in that year-of-fate 1932, were those in which the remnants of the classic-era Republican Party's core coalition was strongest. (Voters in 1932 would've been born between the 1850s and 1900s. The absolute-youngest possible voter being born, I assume, in November 1911, having turned twenty-one by election day.)

The new "New Deal" coalition had major influence for the rest of the 20th century, its direct-successors and variants running much of the whole show for at least a few decades. Thirty years later, the 1964 election's result was another triumph of the New Deal coalition, against a strange-seeming dissident-force that somehow popped up (but was swatted away).

The New Deal coalition navigated through rocky terrain of the race problem, incipient feminism, and incipient Third World immigration, each of which really started to 'bite' by the 1970s but have their origins towards the tail-end of the New Deal coalition's era. There was, by then, generations-worth of institutional capital. There was a lot of slack in it; things plodded along.

Some like to claim the Nixon era signaled the end of the New Deal coalition -- although a core plank of the coalition, the Southern states, began the hard process of breaking away from their traditional party, D, earlier than 1968.

THEORY: A lot of the talk about "Boomers" in our time, while highly non-specific (and generally non-helpful), actually is not about a specific group of specified-age people. It's really that 1932 election and its legacy, the New Deal coalition and the society it shaped.

It's widely known that the FDR people, within a few months after being handed the keys in the spring of 1933, proceeded to double the size of the "federal government." These "Boomers" of the b.1940s and b.1950s cohorts were born into that system (literally and figuratively).

These b.1940s and b.1950s people among us (the earlier cohort including Mr SafeNow and Mr Blanc and probably a number of others) were born into prosperity, true (true non-artificial prosperity roaring into being, in the late 1940s after military demobilization).

On the other hand, all generations of Westerners, back two centuries now, and arguable earlier, have been born into relative prosperity. "Relative" prosperity is the important thing, the feeling of your generation being chosen for greatness, an intoxicating kind of feeling that relative prosperity tends to feed. I think it's easy to find examples across the world, which generation it is that gets that feeling varying by local circumstances.

What is equally as important is that these b.1940s and b.1950s Americans were born in the shadow of the 1932 elections and its repeated electoral successes over coming years.

"World War Two," which is at least partly a product of the FDR people and their geopolitical ambitions of the time, also points back to the 1932 election (a decisive election in late 1932 or so in Germany happened about the same time, giving a huge share of seats to Hitler). Given the alternate-history of a series of Republican presidents in lieu of FDR, some of the dramatic, destabilizing, globe-changing aspects of the 1940s conflicts may not have happened in ways recognizable. Is it possible there'd even not have been a "World War II" as we understand it?

A lot of people have said the 2008 election was a similar landmark moment. It's far too close to us to judge that. What the legacy of the Trump period of the mid-2010s to late-2020s will be, it's completely impossible to say -- and given the media's track record, there may be "far more heat than light" generated.

PS

(note on PS being "blocked" to me:

For the past 72 hours, about 90% of my access-attempts to PS failed through my main ISP, but 0% failed through alternate ISPs (i.e., different/unrelated wifis). I don't know what's going on and I wonder if anyone else has likewise been banned. Even through the normal ISP, which seems to be blocking PS, I could access PS through proxies, confirming it's still available on the open Internet.)

PS

The kind of "Black" song you describe. I wonder if it is common in Africa itself. If you show up at several cafes in Ghana's biggest city, would they have such music?

PS: I am no so enamored with Belinda Carlisle, even in this video - I may not have even seen it, but this is a really good tune. I especially like the backing vocals.

I will try again to comment on your substack site, Alarmist. There was one recently that I really wanted to compliment you on. I'll get back to that.

PS

“Mad About You” was probably Peak Belinda looks-wise. I never got the imagery of the globe girls in “Heaven on Earth,” but the overhead shots of Belinda’s quick turns in that video were epic. Boys will be boys ... no, wait, that was Gloria Estefan.

I’m still working through Mr. Hail’s post on tariffs before I do a sequel on my substack. Glad you pointed his article out.

I went to a funeral in Germany pretty much one week after they dropped the mask requirements, so I attended unmasked. By the looks on a couple hundred masked faces, you’d have thought Death had walked in to the chapel. Those were sad days indeed. Nobody pestered me, though, because the government had told people it was then OK to not wear masks. Sheep led by donkeys.

🕉