Peak Stupidity blogging will resume in the mañana
Posted On: Thursday - May 21st 2020 11:24PM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites
The project that was going to take lots of work indeed took lots of work. Other than the reading of PS comments, Mr. Hail's newest essay (#12 of his series - here), and occasional hit-and-run commenting at unz, I've not had time for anything else on-line politically-speaking.
I'll say here that's its been heartening to see the steady stream of comments on this site. Going back to about 2 months ago, there'd be half and even full weeks with nary a comment. Site "visits" and "page views" went up 25% (along with a normal steady rise) as this Kung Flu Infotainment Panic hit us, likely due to more people having lots of time on their hands. It's gone part of the way back down in May. Commenting is still heavy (well, RELATIVELY-speaking!)
Thank you all very much for the comments! It gives people a chance to read something while posting is light or non-existent.
Comments (2)
George Carlin anticipates the Kung Flu Panic-Fest 20 years ago
Posted On: Tuesday - May 19th 2020 7:40PM MST
In Topics: Humor Pundits Kung Flu Stupidity
The wonderful Mr. Carlin died in late 2011, not from germs, but from heart failure. He'd had heart attacks before and gotten procedures done, but perhaps he didn't have any more heart left for this country.
This bit, which was called You are all diseased, is amazingly prescient of the situation in America over the last 3 months. What would he have to say now? He'd probably not be very funny.
"We swam in raw sewage, you know, to cool off!"
The Wiki page on comedian George Carlin is here.
Comments (12)
Bill Gates as a bug, not a feature
Posted On: Tuesday - May 19th 2020 7:17PM MST
In Topics: Globalists Artificial Stupidity Healthcare Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
I'd heard the line "it's not a bug, it's a feature", said sarcastically by my boss, at a computer job some years ago, and I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard ... at least from the geeks. It'd probably been around, oh, 4 decades already. This immediately brings up thoughts of Windows, then Microsoft, then Bill Gates, for some odd reason.
I've honestly have never heard Bill Gates say anything. Not having a TV signal is a great blessing! Of course, I may come upon him in youtube videos, especially now that he's been apparently playing a big part in the Kung Flu Infotainment Panic-Fest. There is another good anti-panic article out by (per reliable blogger* and PS-Commenter E.F. Hail, big lefty-) unz.com writer Mike Whitney named Is the Lockdown the Greatest Policy Disaster in U.S. History?. In this one, Bill Gates and the Bill/Melinda Gates Foundation is a big part of his discussion. Here is a pretty big chunk of Mr. Whitney's writing on this:
So on whose behalf are these lockdowns being imposed? Certainly not Trump who’s wanted to lift them from Day 1. No, it’s his surrounding cast, like the affable Dr Anthony Fauci who just recently appeared before the Senate and ominously cautioned them against lifting restrictions too soon. His warnings closely resembled those of his colleague and perhaps, benefactor, Bill Gates, whose tentacles are wrapped tightly around the global health network and who, many think, uses philanthropic initiatives as a vehicle for advancing his own malign vision of the future. As for the lockdowns, we’ll let Gates speak for himself:Please go read the article and the generally sympathetic comments underneath. There's lots that I'd have never known about.
“First, we need a consistent nationwide approach to shutting down. Despite urging from public health experts, some states and counties haven’t shut down completely. In some states, beaches are still open; in others, restaurants still serve sit-down meals….Here’s one more from Gates in case there’s any doubts about his intentions:
The country’s leaders need to be clear: Shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere. Until the case numbers start to go down across America — which could take 10 weeks or more — no one can continue business as usual or relax the shutdown. Any confusion about this point will only extend the economic pain, raise the odds that the virus will return, and cause more deaths….
To bring the disease to an end, we’ll need a safe and effective vaccine. If we do everything right, we could have one in less than 18 months — about the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed. But creating a vaccine is only half the battle. To protect Americans and people around the world, we’ll need to manufacture billions of doses.” (“Bill Gates: Here’s how to make up for lost time on covid-19“, Washington Post)“One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID–19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.” (“Bill Gates — Gates Notes)What the heck is he talking about? Gates isn’t a doctor, a scientist, an epidemiologist, or an elected official who sets policy. He’s a rich-guy dilettante who made zillions by ruthlessly dominating the software industry. That’s all. Does that make him an expert on infectious diseases? Does that give him the right to order the summary lockdown of 328 million Americans? No, it doesn’t, but Gates’s tentacles are also wrapped around the media (which helps him to shape public opinion) as this clip from an article at Lew Rockwell points out:“The Gates Foundation gives grants in the hundreds of thousands and often millions to such media organizations as NBCUniversal, Al Jazeera, BBC, Viacom (CBS) and Participant Media …Both Gates and the Gates Foundation are sizable shareholders in Comcast,… as well as….MSNBC and NBC News…In 2009, the New York Times reported that the Gates Foundation was partnering with media companies to write and shape stories to ‘embed’ messages in primetime dramas:”Bill Gates has critical contacts across the spectrum of media, global health care and politics. If he wants to his views widely disseminated, all he has to do is say the word. That said, we may never know if the lockdowns were his idea, but he certainly has the power to have them implemented if he so chooses.
“’It [the Gates Foundation] is less well known as a behind-the-scenes influencer of public attitudes toward these issues by helping to shape story lines and insert messages into popular entertainment like the television shows ER, Law & Order: SVU and Private Practice…..
“His enormous wealth and the reach of media parent corporations seem to exempt Gates from routine disclosure requirements. …. He is given softball interviews in Comcast-backed Vox without disclosure that he’s a major Comcast investor. Because his stake in media companies is laundered enough times, it’s assumed not to merit mention.” (“Bill Gates, HR6666, Remdesivir, Deaths in Italy“, Lew Rockwell)
Yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation uses all that money he made and makes still (she just makes sandwiches, I guess) selling you new versions of Windows and other mal-ware, bundled into the price of your new computers for all kinds of wild stuff around the world. This is not your Daddy's philanthropy! (I guess I'm making a pretty big assumption about the wealth of Peak Stupidity readers here.)
Of course, you'd figure a guy who wants to spend his money on good causes around the world would push for a vaccine for this lates virus, and vaccinations of people everywhere who can't get 'em otherwise (or no canna' refuse) are one of his foundations' big projects. What??! You may be wondering right now, "I thought you DIDN'T like the guy." Yes, that is the case. However, my thinking goes that most evil done in the world is still done by men with good intentions. Bill Gates has a “save the world” complex. If he instead destroys the world, it’s just that he didn’t check his work thoroughly – like a bad version of Windows – happens every other year – it was those .Indian
On the slightly lighter side, Peak Stupidity has noted problems with not just Microsoft's, but all software, it seems, in that we don't like learning new stuff just to learn do to what we already know how to do, OVER AGAIN. That was the gist of our posts Whatever happened to this guy? (asking about that paper-clip guy that used to pop his head onto my screen, just for the hell of it, I think), The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Software as a tool. We're not fans of any of the MS "suite".
MS-DOS and then Windows got onto the PC early in the game, and Microsoft had a near monopoly of the software industry until threats of a bust (who knows what the real deal was? Is all this part of it?), along with the good GNU folks caused a change in the industry. People still use Windows as a habit (I am guilty), though, and it's bundled in with new hardware still.
Does that alone make Bill Gates an evil man? Many serious geeks would say yes to that! I think the money, fame, and this urge to save the World that Mr. Gates has had for 2 decades now is what creates the evil that we're seeing with his Globalist, control-freak Kung Flu influence. Yeah, the guy can program well. He got a lucky break with the IBM PC deal, but yes, he's a good businessman. It doesn't make him God, and it doesn't even make him smart. The crap his foundation has been doing in Africa has created a monster.
No, the monster is not some creature created by some bad vaccine, but it's in what Steve Sailer calls "the World's Most Important Graph" (see "Our New Planet is Going to be Great"). Africa now has 1,200,000,000 people, and since we've been hearing so much about exponential curves lately, does Mr. Gates understand what having 3 or 4 BILLION Africans would do to the world by the end of this century? (I believe he does, per Mr. Sailer, but what's he gonna do, send out a patch?)
This out-of-control-geek has got to be stopped. The first step is for us to resist this Panic-Fest, with extreme prejudice. Just admit you've had enough, and you are done complying. They can't arrest all 200 people crowded into the bar, can they? That'd be a real bad idea. When some Kung Flu vaccine does come out, read for yourself and decide for yourself whether you want to get vaccinated. Are they going to come with the needles and little bottles to your house? Let's just not let it get that far!
PS: Regarding vaccinations in general, I am not against them. I do understand the teensiest bit of the science behind the idea and know the history of how many lives have been, and still get, saved by them. However, there's been evidence of various vaccinations here and there causing major health problems (see Michelle Malkin on some of this).
It's also the case that many people will not realize a benefit from all of the vaccinations that are offered and advised for us. People make well-informed decisions to NOT get vaccinated all the time. I have.
I've heard vaccination-for-all advocates write that we must all get vaccinated for the good of society. Wait, though, if a parent dead set against the idea sent his kids to school without the vaccinations, what's the problem? Aren't the kids whose parents got them vaccinated going to be OK? The teachers? They've been vaccinated per school policy. The only people in the school having a chance of coming down with the illness would be those kids whose parents didn't want vaccinations for them. Sure, it'd be tragic if kids die, but parents have to make some tough calls. Is it child abuse? I guess one would have to look at the numbers.
* Mr. Hail has put out an nice long essay as Part XII of his series on the Corona Panic. This one is a description of the Panickers as basically a religious cult - see Against the Corona Panic Part XII: Is Corona a literal religious cult? An anthropological study. (Or, Corona as virus-centered apocalypse cult; its ascent to state religion; the mass-conversion event to the cult; a study of the cult.)Yeah, long title, long essay, and ALWAYS interesting stuff on there. Thank you, Mr. Hail. I read the intro., but will get into this probably not till Thursday - big job tomorrow. (Yes, I spend too much time on unz commenting too!)
Comments (7)
Working from
Posted On: Monday - May 18th 2020 7:53PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Music Big-Biz Stupidity
Peak Stupidity has not had a very good relationship with the Starbucks coffee chain over the years. The recent, well almost 2 years ago now, brew-haha about treehugging nonsense about straws was covered here in Grasping at Straws (see also Part 2). Then there was that whole racial angle, in which the big chain caved to political correctness and threw their employees under the latte machine, noted in Starbucks - fake coupons and raising hell and Nationwide 10,000-Store Barista-Based Synchronized Struggle Session a Success!*. That was 2 years ago - man, stupidity flies!
Not much of that is personal, however, or a function of the individuals in the local branch in or to which I've been lately. Well, LATELY, as in during this Kung Flu Panic-fest, for a while we'd hang out in that general area with our own concoctions, as they've been closed.
That's what this post is (finally) about. A friend of mine had spent many hours of most days for years inside a few of the Starbucks locations near him to do his entrepreneurial type work. He'd purchase coffee, of course, as his being a white guy meant he was perfectly evictable, and was very used to these locations as his offices. He'd even met people who had helped some with the business he was involved in at Starbucks.
After getting a "real job", if I may, one in which the normal rules of going to work and spending the whole day there applied, my friend did have to get used to the old-fashioned office/business setting. He must have missed the more free-wheeling schedule he'd had, and the environment at Starbucks after all those years spent there.
Now comes the Kung Flu. Which businesses were to be shuttered and which weren't was based on the whim of State and local officials. The key word was "essential". Liquor stores - essential (apparently, as they're open), barber shops - not. Big business retail seems to be more essential than small business per ... someone's telling the Governor what the hell he'd better do? Manufacturing, or what's left of it, was not left alone either.
The manufacturing business that my friend works for was told to half-way shutter, letting only a few people stay and work at the facility - so semi-essential? The rest were sent home to work from there. Here comes the ironic part: My friend had missed working from his spot(s) at Starbucks, where he could relax when he wanted to, chat up some girls occasionally, step outside, work at his own hours, etc. Were this work-from-home order done at a time when the Starbucks were open, it'd be a dream come true! They don't care that he's at his very house, but just that he's getting the work done.
But, nooooo... the Starbucks are closed too, so he had to work from his home, which he was not at all used to. He can do some of the above at home, but it's, understandably, not at all the same for him. Will the Starbucks coffee shops open up before he gets called back in to work from the office? It's gonna be close. Man, you can't win for losin'.
Isn't it ironic? Yeah, what kind of songwriter was that Alanis Morrisette, anyway:
"It's rain on your wedding day." That's not irony, you dumb broad, that's Global Climate DisruptionTM!
"It's a black fly in your Chardonnay." What the heck other flies would you expect? That's the normal color of flies, and that's what they do. Enjoy your Chardonnay - it's still better than snails in the food.
"A traffic jam when you're already late." That's not ironic. You should have left earlier, before the traffic. There's an app for that.
"A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break." Uhh, that was probably there before your cigarette break. It was telling you to find a different place to take your cigarette break. Most of us would have gotten that, rather than chalking it up to this "irony" thing.
"It's the good advice that you just didn't take." Like, when the guy told you to look up "irony" in the dictionary before you wrote this song?
Well, that post ended up on a tangent! What are you gonna' do? I'd always wanted to fisk that song. To make up for this behavior, I'd wanted to feature a better song by Miss Morrisette. I had memories of a lot of good songs by her from her time in the mid-1990s. I can't find ANYTHING that I like, at this point.
Instead of a Debbie Downer like that, let's just feature another good band of many out of Athens, Georgia (from the 1970s through 1990s). It's The B-52s with Love Shack from 1989, a half decade before Alanis Morrisette. It's from their album Cosmic Thing. Miss Kate Pierson can really belt out the melody. The guy singer of this "new wave" band seemed to be the Southern version of David Byrne, purposefully (I hope!) acting like a weirdo. There'd have to be a huge overlap on a Venn diagram of Talking Heads and B-52s fans.
* The result of that cave-in to PC is documented in a much-more-recent post called Being a Millennial.
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[UPDATED 05/19: ] What? The Talking Heads are from NY City, so they are, I suppose, American. You still don't need a visa to travel to NY City, so yes, the post has been corrected. Thank you, commenter Ganderson. Also, just in, I can't do arithmetic. The Starbucks struggle session was 2 years back, not 3. Thank you, commenter Hail.
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Comments (17)
Adley Stump advises America on best Kung Flu practices
Posted On: Saturday - May 16th 2020 7:04PM MST
In Topics: Humor Media Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
This young lady has an extremely funny bit on the myriad common-sense pieces of advise for us on the Kung Flu. Much of it is the same joke over and over, but it's somehow still funny - it's all in the delivery, they say. I believe it.
We've got more Kung Flu infotainment winners/losers posts coming, some decent anecdotes, and, of course, the music. However, next week looks to be busier, so it may be only a post a day or so. Thank you very much for reading, and please take the 4 minutes to view this entertainment by this lady I'd never heard of before, Adley Stump:
Comments (5)
Dockin', dockin', dockin' on a river.
Posted On: Saturday - May 16th 2020 12:29PM MST
In Topics: Economics Legal Stupidity Scams
Peak Stupidity will start a series on our guesses about the winners and losers out of this Kung Flu Panic-Fest response. This won't be about stock tips (hey, you should have asked me last month, I coulda' told ya'!). It won't be particularly about politics, just because I think we all know how all that is headed. It's that this major disruption to the economy will change some things permanently, not all for the worse ... I hope.
This will be a start, just because it's something I noticed last week, AND, it's my try at fair use at this blog. I gave the Chinese a hard time about their superstitions on Wednesday, so why not give Americans a hard time about something, other than the normal stupidity that is usually world-wide.
While walking around in a mid-sized city far from my town last week, besides the ghost town of the rest of downtown, I came across an empty riverboat, like this:
Here's the deal with this stupidity. Gambling, uhhh, OK, gaming is bad, mmmkaay? Now, my feeling on that is one thing - see Lotto, tax on stupidity , for example - but I am not the type to deny people's perfectly non-violent desires. Yeah, but governments at all levels say it's morally bad, and therefore you can't do it ... except, I mean, if they get lots of tax money from it. Then, you can do it. (This is the very same thing I noticed with the old "blue laws" about serving liquor in bars on Sundays. It's bad, mmmkaaay, but if you pay $150 for a permit, EACH TIME, then, sure, knock yourself out!)
To work this out, many States have this deal where you can't be on land in the State to have gambling. You must be floating on some body of water. Why this, I have no freakin' clue, and rather than look it up, if one of the commenters could chime in, I'd be highly appreciative. Try explaining it in a way that makes the rule seem to have some semblance of logic, if at all possible. I
kind of wonder if you can do gambling while airborne in some of these States. You wouldn't make money that way off of nickel-ante poker and slot machines (just too damn heavy too), but get 8 high-rollers in a blimp ("excuse me, it's an airship, Sir!" says the fat Captain), and who knows?
To work this out, lots of gambling venues are on American rivers, on big Mark Twain-looking ones that probably can't get 10 ft. from the dock under their own power, if any. I don't blame the owners - the government incentivizes gambling only on the water, and you have no ocean shoreline, so that's what you get.
Because of the Kung Flu, though, they are closed, or at least in my visited location. They looked pretty eerie, sitting there. That's got to be a big blow to city revenues, along with the a blow to the owners, of course. There is big money in this gambling business, explaining why it's profitable to build a big 1850s-style riverboat that never goes up and down the river!
When they are allowed to open up, will they attract large numbers of gamblers, still? Lots of these places get visitors from out of town, and people may not travel on business jaunts as much, having gotten used to Zoom or what-have-you. Do pleasure travelers, or the locals, for that matter, have money for this? I suppose some of those CARE checks may get blown in one evening by the many irresponsible Americans who live nearby. Boy, that's not a good thing.
I'm sorry for the city officials who depend on these floating gambling houses for lots of revenue, but people may get used to not gambling, at least in this manner. They say it's addictive though, even though, thankfully, I have nothing in my brain that can understand why.
What next for these palaces of immortality? Well, if I put it that way, I would suggest turning them into brothels. There will always be money in that sort of thing. Then again, it's illegal, but not if governments work out another idea so crazy it just might work. Or, fuel being cheap for now, they could fix them up so they COULD go up and down the river, as riverboats are supposed to do... taking passengers from whorehouse to whorehouse, all the way down to New Orleans, which was the ruin of many a poor gaming operation. Mark twain!
"Big wheel keep on toinin', Proud Mary keep on boinin'"
(Yes, of course, I could not NOT have CCR in here. Why does John Fogerty pronounce the words like that? The guy was from Calilfornia! Still, his was the best voice ever in rock&roll. It's inarguable, as they say.)
Comments (5)
The One they call Desanex on The Non-existent Plague
Posted On: Friday - May 15th 2020 6:17PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor Poetic Stupidity
Low life, high life, oh, let's go, down to Junior's farm where I wanna' lay low
This comment by brilliant commenter the one they call Desanex on unz.com is just another of his very humorous poems. The guy is known (to me, at least) for great limericks, then branched out to other meters.
"The One they call Desanex" has now regaled us with his take on the Kung Flu Panic Fest, using a real golden oldie for the foundation, Junior's Farm by Paul McCartney and Wings. Peak Stupidity does not like to repeat music selections, but we will make another exception, so the reader can listen to this great song with the lyrics of Mr. Desanex in his head.
Do they make this kind of great music at all anymore?
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Non-Existent Plague
sung to the tune of “Junior’s Farm” (Paul McCartney and Wings)
Charmin shortage at the grocery store.
The prices higher than the time before.
Wipin’ with the phone book’s malkin’ me sore.
They told me that I had to wear a mask,
carry disinfectant in a flask.
I said “How about you kissin’ my ass?”
Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.
Non-existent plague gonna take all my dough.
No job, no prob, go let’s go.
That’s the non-existent plague.
GDP is suddenly neg.
That’s the non-existent plague.
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You may find it amazing, but these Millennials and such have no idea at all that this famous Paul McCartney guy used to be in a world-famous band over in England back in the day. Yes, they called it Wings!
PS: Here's another one from this guy:
We went to China for vagina and caught coronavirus. The market crashed, our jobs were trashed, and now no one will hire us.
Comments (3)
Six degrees from Kevin's Bacon
Posted On: Friday - May 15th 2020 5:54PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Humor Kung Flu Stupidity
This post is what I'd really meant to write about in that Kung Flu v VD post of almost a month back. I got sidetracked by the VD part, I guess...
I want to write a bit about one of the assumptions about this current Corona bug that we haven't been hearing that much about over the last month (course, I don't watch any TV - don't want to get infected from the remote). As I just alluded to, it's that extreme contagiousness that people were freaked out about that doesn't seem to have been followed up on that much. After all, as a commenter on unz* noted, all these reports of un-infected people, per Steve Sailer posts to them, etc. would make one think that this virus is NOT so extremely contagious.
I mean, we read of people in the same nursing home dying FROM it, which I can believe. We read of hospital staff getting infected, with most not dying from it. Of course, they have a lot of contact with patients with all kinds of problems. If you're talking airborne infections, hospitals have all manner of crap flying around. Who's to say that those doctors, nurses, and techs that died WITH the Kung Flu actually died FROM the Kung Flu.
OK, well, they say, it's contagious as all hell. It stays on doorknobs for 8 days, rear-view mirrors for 2 days, 5 hours, and 45 minutes, Skil saw blades (this one has a great grip strength), so don't touch them, OK? It remains on toilet seats longer than any other germs, and will in fact gentrify the toilet seat of all other germs, then proceed to the nearest orifice it can find ... or some such scary stuff.
Whaddya' do about this, other than burn infested clothes, spray isopropyl alcohol (71%, mind you) all around the house with a big spray bottle, and then carry around enough gloves, wipes and masks to cover your tracks... till this is over? The kids were playing basketball a month ago at the park, after the time this Corona had become the BIG THING, but before most of the other parents had grounded their kids for "the duration". "Hey, we're playing with different basketballs, so it ought to be OK", said my boy. "Yeah, but let's see, if that kid's basketball hits the rim (he's a white boy so that's no sure thing), then the virus gets on the rim. Then, when your ball hits the rim, you may get those germs on it, and then you'll get 'em off the ball." This was good practice in logic and so forth, but in the meantime, the boys were running around, throwing contaminated dirt clods, and playing tag and what have you.
Thinking of all the ways these supposedly super-contagious germs can go from the air to surface, surface to human, human to surface again, or just fly out into your face on a big sneeze, the old-fashioned way, can make one kind of paranoid, in a Howard Hughes way. You've got people at the store wearing rubber gloves, but those gloves touch everybody's items, and/or cash that came from their hands and then end up back in your bags. Do you wipe every single thing off when you come home? People would need to keep changing out masks and gloves** like mad.
If these germs were so contagious though, wouldn't we all be infected by now? Maybe we nearly are, and most of us are not susceptible to the virus at all. OTOH, if it's really got a 0.5 - 2.0% morbidity rate as people have been claiming, then there really ought to be a big "bring out your dead" 24-foot U-Haul truck running around.
They may not be talking about the Kung Flu, but people say that everyone is at most 6-degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. Hopefully, he doesn't have it, and it's not on his bacon either.
Since we don't have a video with Kevin's bacon, how about a video of Kevin's chili. Talk about your unsanitary conditions! Good luck to the folks at The Office:
* I can't remember where and am quite pissed at myself for not explicitly thinking the same thing.
** Go long face masks and gloves - another valuable stock tip from Peak Stupidity. We've been correct every time, just a month or two late in divulging our picks.
Comments (4)
Targeted for Hysteria - Addendum
Posted On: Thursday - May 14th 2020 7:51PM MST
In Topics: Music The Dead Kung Flu Stupidity
I didn't want to make the previous post too long, so here is just a little bit more, perhaps somewhat repetitive, to explain what I was doing in the target store with the face mask on.
I have not worn a face-mask until today. Let me explain: I do not want to be a part of this hysterical response, most especially now when there is no “flatten the curve” excuse even. I have been hanging out with friends, going to the park with mine and other kids, and going to work without the mask (even with it being required recently – we have our share of rebels).
I did not lie about my not wearing masks to my wife, so she has been getting more and more worried and sleepless about it, just making it worse. She means very well for the family, but this Infotainment Panic-Fest has been a big a problem. In my opinion it is a matter of perspective too, and I am old enough to have seen similar Oriental virae come through without this ridiculous LOCKDOWN crap (a term very recently only used for Maximum Security prisons) and the rest.
Now, it’s either a) lie about it to keep the calm – can’t do this, b) explain my perspective to her – not working, c) keep telling her the truth and get many tears and bad relations, or d) promise to wear the masks at the stores and work. It’s (d) now, but this BS better end soon!
I'm as scared about it as the next guy, if I ever think about it, but we've just got to all remember - we ARE all gonna die. In the meantime, there is no reason for this craziness.
The wheel is turning, and you can't slow down.
You can't let go, and you can't hold on.
You can't go back, and you can't stand still.
If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
Comments (15)
Targeted for Hysteria
Posted On: Thursday - May 14th 2020 7:39PM MST
In Topics: Female Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
(Note that these pictures are supposed to make us WANT to shop there.)
I read a great week-old anti-panic Kung Flu article by one C.J. Hopkins on unz.com,called Virus of Mass Destruction early this morning. I noted that Peak Stupidity commenter Adam Smith had one of the best comments on there, an anecdotal one, that I'll just paste in here, verbatim (I hope you don't mind, Mr. Smith, as I can delete it if you'd like.):
Thank you Mr. Hopkins for another wonderful article…Great stuff, Adam! My comment, to add to this, was an anecdote of my own about the Kung Flu Gap in my family. It's getting old too.
The masks, the arrows on the floor, the barriers at the door monitored by masked employees, the charade, it’s all so surreal. It’s like the airport security theater has come to our sleep little mountain town as some weird religious ritual. At least they’re not patting us down at the door… yet.
A couple weeks ago my wife said that maybe we should order some disposable masks.
Naturally I asked, “Why”?
“So you can wear one when you go to the store”, she replied. To which I answered…
“But I would feel like a total retard wearing a disposable mask to the store.”
So she said… “Oh, ok then, no need to order any.” And we didn’t.
Last week she finally got out of the house to run some errands with me. First we went to the feed store to get 10 lbs of Kentucky 31 and some rattle can spray paint. Everything there was normal. No masks, gloves or panicfest theater. Off to the bank… She had a few small checks to deposit… We went to the drive through window, all normal… No masks, no gloves, just a friendly, helpful girl behind the window… “Have a nice day” she said. And we were on our way.
Then we went to walmart. At first she said… “I’ll wait in the car.” But with minimal coaxing, (I think I said something like “You should see what’s going on in there…”) she came inside with me.
Barriers at the door, orange flagging tape, all the employees obeying the edict to wear home made masks and bandanas, some of which looked pretty ratty. Half the customers dutifully wearing their masks to protect them from our phantasmic unseen enemy. She did pretty well with all the strangeness. She had not been to walmart in about 5 or 6 weeks. Last time she was there things were still normal, except for the lack of toilet paper, lysol and isopropyl alcohol. She had not seen shelves emptied of flour, pasta, milk, etc… By the time we got to the checkout with the newly install plexiglass, she started feeling a little claustrophobic.
Later that night she told me that she really regretted going inside the walmart. She said she hated seeing the bizarre mindfuck taking place. She told me about how she noticed all the people with masks were constantly messing with them, adjusting them and what not, with their dirty hands, and about how most the people with masks were not even wearing them properly. She noticed how a large portion of the masks looked really shoddy and dirty. She said that she thinks the masks were doing more harm than good. She expects that the mask wearers will soon have trouble with face acne and rashes caused by the masks as it is all so unhygienic. She also noticed how completely useless the plexiglass by the cashier was. It’s all for show.
While I’m glad she saw what’s going on with her own eyes, I’ll be doing the shopping without her until things go back to normal. No need to have her feeling uneasy because of all this irrational perversity.
The hysterical little fascist creeps begging for totalitarianism probably love it.(?)
And they probably expect me to be punished for non-compliance.(?)
I hope all this nonsense ends soon.
It’s getting really old.
This thing is surreal, a slow slide into hard-core totalitarianism right before our eyes. Right now is the time to laugh at these fuckers and disobey with disdain, as there may not be a time to do that later, if we let this go on too long.Well, it was Target, today, not Wal-Mart, and to keep the promise to my wife, I had to deal with the stress of wearing the face mask, as much as I could stand, anyway. I went in and got my stuff, well sort of. Though, Corporate Target policy does not call for the "did you find everything OK?", or it's been waived for this "difficult period", no, as it's a problem getting a baseball glove for a kid when he can't go with you to try it on, NO, I sure didn't. BTW, before this promise, he's been all over with me... shhhhh...) I had to buy 2 gloves, one that I have to return, so this deal will costing me more time and aggravation later.
I just put on a mask for the 1st time yesterday, only because my wife, who means well, was almost despondent* about my infecting the family (I do some traveling for work). So, I have this one facemask (because I promised and won’t lie to her) that I will pull out of my pocket, put on for a bit, then put back in my pocket – hopefully it’ll be a few weeks of this. I found out a friend with the same attitude was doing the same due to a job requirement.
Were I to go into Wal-Mart, a place I can’t stand anyway – never could find ammo in stock – I would go through without the mask, walk wherever TF I wanted to and let the chips fall where they may (yes, I’d be eating a big bag of Doritos Cool Ranch…)
Speaking of time, I got pretty worried when I saw the line of partly filled shopping buggies backed up across the first aisle then well into women's lingerie. If this were, I hate to divulge, but let's say 20 years back, I'd have had no problem at all with that last part. As they say, you can learn a lot from a dummy. ;-}
Anyway, they had this one line splitting into 4 or so registers, so that part wasn't too bad. There were marks on the floor. Due to my not being a prisoner at the penitentiary, I have no concern about marks on the floor. I talked to the women ahead of me who turned out to be a nurse. No comment from her on her perspective of the Kung Flu was forthcoming - yes, I gave mine, explaining the mask.
The whole damn environment was bugging me, however. Then, as the checkout girl behind the 2 ft wide piece of plexiglass* (with infinite airspace on the sides), she told me I needed to back up to "behind the belt". That just pissed me off and confused me. I could see "behind abeam the belt", but behind the belt would have put in the middle of a bunch of gum, candy, and magazines about whose butts were getting bigger during the Hollywood LOCKDOWN. I backed up somewhat, and was very very close to just stating to anyone within earshot that this country is now run by hysterical menopausal women. That could easily have offended some of the customers, especially the many menopausal hysterical women.
The fact that I was wearing the mask made this "shopping experience" much worse for me. Were I flouting the convention, as I had been doing, I think it would have been better. Now I gotta go back and return the one glove.
* Could it have been Lexan instead? I thought that was only for the high-end stores like Sack's on Fifth Avenue. Oh, I totally forgot: Peak Stupidity readers, go long Lexan! I don't usually give stock tips here, but this was a no brainer ... last month, I mean, when I meant to give out this tip ...
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Written in Chinese: Fuck off and Four!
Posted On: Wednesday - May 13th 2020 6:54PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Humor China
In the Peak Stupidity post Dashed high-hopes for China - Part 1, we promised at the bottom to post more about Chinese superstitions. That was 10 days ago, so I think this is an auspicious day to write this... it better be, because my ex-hippy astrologer is working from home still, hard to do any palm reading or palming of anything ... OK, what the? The virtual Ouija board she uses seems very buggy.
This post will just deal with the weirdness the Chinese people have about numbers, with a comparison to this type of weirdness in America. Note the following:
That Chinese #4 is in the right order, at the top, as far as numerical superstitions go there. However, "sounds like", or "nearly homophonous to the word "death"", per the Wiki page on Chinese Numerology, may not make the problem clear. There are 4 tones in Mandarin Chinese, and a syllable will usually have one of the 4. Is "die" just a different tone but with the same sound as "four" otherwise? (I can't even write it to help you if you don't know a little bit, because the "s"-like sound has only Pinyin lettering to describe it.) Anyway, 4 is bad, mmmkaaay?
I'll do a little comparing along the way here, with American numeralogical superstitions, Yes, we have our unlucky 13, as noted inauspiciously on a Friday the 13 with a full moon last year. Peak Stupidity asked Doesn't anybody fear Friday the 13th anymore?! Commenter Bill H, a sailor of some sort, noted that the date/day combo is still a sensitive thing for sailors. That doesn't mean the number itself is.
This "13" thing is mostly just a lame joke now. It doesn't even matter in gambling where you've got nothing else BUT superstition to have a system, unless you are the Rain Man. Think about it: neither two dice nor playing cards go up that high (Kings still count as 10, right?)
They didn't all used to, but buildings now have 13th floors, airport terminals have gates with number 13, and there are row 13s in the modern airline cabins. This latter bit really used to matter. My guess on that is that, going back 30-40 years and further, there were plenty of passengers who'd never been on a flight of any kind before. Airline travel was reasonably safe, but less than nowadays, and plenty of people were nervous. You could smoke in the back if that helped, and it sure did! You may have purposefully avoided row 13, so the airlines could fix that worry tout suite(?) by just relabeling the rows. ("Stroke of the label-maker, law of the air.")
Sure, in America, the lucky 7 is still bandied about at the craps tables, but if you take that really seriously, you deserve the all the beating you will always get in the long run. Otherwise, 7 is not a deal to anybody, while in China, the 8s are still lucky stuff. For example, if you were born in 1987, besides being supposedly like a rabbit*, you should turn out bi-polar, I suppose. If born in 1887, you are likely a well-adjusted tri-polar individual, but at 133 years old, that's probably the least of your problems. Again, the astrologers are all working from home, not being essential employees (what a crock, right?!), so I'm just winging it here.
It was the proprietor himself, Ron Unz, of the unz.com site who wrote one time (I think to me) that Americans have just as much superstition as the Chinese. That there is a guy who knows only what he can gather from his ivory tower. It's nice to read both the good and bad about the place from someone like John Derbyshire (pronounced Dar'-bi-sher), but not the hate-America, kiss-CCP-ass Ron Unz. I've told the dude to take a trip to China, well after this Kung Flu, when they'll let him in.
No, the Chinese are superstitious about lots of things. That is what happens when all religion is beat out of people by Communists for 40-odd years... well, and still counting, to some degree. (Peak Stupidity has a little more on that in our Part 3, paragraphs 7-8 of the series Russians and Chinese and Bears, oh my! (and Pandas) from September of '17.) The fear of number 4, and a tad bit of worry about 14, is still a thing there:
In that Part 1 of our 2 "high-hopes" posts, linked-to above, I noted the fun with SIM card phone numbers way back when I first visited China. There are lots of Chinese people in America now, so some of this superstitious stuff may be seen by Americans and appropriately laughed at. Still, perhaps we should be more sensitive, as, I mean, if you are red-blooded Chinaman arriving at the Charlotte Douglas Airport, would you set foot in this cab?
No, no, no, not because there's a black driver! Of course not, as only white Americans can be raciss. I'm referring to the phone number. Can't you people be more sensitive to the wishes of our esteemed
* Are all 33 y/o's nymphomanics? Something to check into ...
Comments (6)
Stop Resisting! Start Distancing!
Posted On: Tuesday - May 12th 2020 7:39PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Anarcho-tyranny
Sometimes, you just don't know who to root for, such as while reading the headline of the recent VDare article Culpeper, Virginia: Twice-Deported Illegal Infects Police with COVID-19 and Gets Released . "You go! You're both losers!" No, but low-keyed anti-cop attitude aside, Peak Stupidity notes that the content of the article is more of the prevalent egregious immigration stupidity.
Long-time VDare correspondent Allan Wall has a story of how ridiculous the anarcho-tyranny is in this country, in this case, in Culpepper, Virginia. From his intro. about this town:
The town of Culpeper (formerly known as Culpeper Courthouse and before that as Fairfax) was originally surveyed by a young surveyor by the name of George Washington, and was occupied by both sides in the Civil War. So there's a lot of history there.
Now, Mr. Wall should have some of the most adherence of all the writers on VDare to their attitude of "don't hate the immigrant - hate the immigration", as he lived in Mexico for a long time, is married to a Mexican lady, and has 1/2-Mexican kids with her. As is also the case with all the writers on the site, he is very civil in his writing. He does come off kind of pissed off in this one, when I read between the lines.
Now it’s a town where a foreigner can flout American law and infect American police officers, then be released.Yep, I was thinking of the word "anarcho-tyranny" already, when Mr. Wall asked:
From Fox 5 Washington, D.C.:Two Virginia police officers have coronavirus after they physically detained a man accused of assaulting his girlfriend. Police in Culpeper said the suspect, who is in the country illegally, also tested positive for the virus. Police said even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement was contacted, the suspect was released the same day he was arrested. [2 Culpeper police officers have coronavirus after detaining a domestic violence suspect who tested positive by Lindsay Watts, FOX 5 Washington D.C., May 5, 2020]The video accompanying the article says the perp was previously deported twice. And that’s backed up by this WJLA article: Virginia cops contract COVID-19 after 'hands-on' arrest of twice-deported assault suspect, by Elliott Henney, WJLA, May 5, 2020.
Yet here he is again, flouting our system.
Look at the privileges the perp enjoys:
1. In the country illegally
2. Deported, returns
3. Deported again, returns again
4. Commits an assault
5. Has COVID-19 and infects police with COVID-19
6. Gets released the same day
7. Has a protected identity, his name isn't publicly mentioned.
Americans have gotten in trouble for much less in the Age of coronavirus. Is this an example of anarcho-tyranny?Yes, yes it is, Allan. In fact, the whole alternate system of justice for illegal aliens*, since they are alt-documented, you know, with their altered documents and all, is a prime example of structural anarcho-tyranny. (See, I can use that word "structural" as well as the next man.)
Back to the Fox 5 article:Two of the guys had mild symptoms and the other is hanging out in paid (I'm sure) quarantine. This is not your great32-grandfather's Black Plague.Maj. Chris Settle, with the Town of Culpeper Police Dept., said three officers responded to a domestic violence call around 2 a.m. on April 28. He said the suspect was assaulting his girlfriend even as police responded. “Long story short, we had to utilize use of force to get the male in custody,” said Settle.And after that…[Major Settle] said a few days later, two of the officers tested positive for the virus. “As of today [May 5], they have mild symptoms at home in the early parts of this, and we’re hoping for the best,” he said.
The third officer is in quarantine.
To its credit, the Culpeper Police Department did contact ICE. Not that it helped.
Settle said police contacted ICE to notify them of the arrest. He said typically immigration officers would pick up the suspect from jail, but that didn't happen this time. “ICE did not come get him, and I think for obvious reasons,” said Settle. “I think because he had covid-19.”
After that, the guy is released.
There is only a little bit more of Allan Wall's article that I haven't excerpted. This kind of thing goes on all the time, but it's just the Kung Flu infection angle here that makes it very timely. We are, after all, to keep proper Social Distancing, per our elites and experts who are there to tell us what to do, other than cower in fear of the CORONA. So next time the cop beats you about the body with a stick as he warns you to "STOP RESISTING", you should ask him to please keep some Social Distancing, or you'll start infecting. We're gonna need a bigger Crown Victoria.
* One I tried to explain to Ron Unz one time - nope, no comprendo, it's a riddle.
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The Spin Doctors - Little Miss Can't Be Wrong
Posted On: Monday - May 11th 2020 8:09PM MST
In Topics: Music
From the 1970s band The Spinners, we move to the 1990s band The Spin Doctors. Instead of being from Motown, this next band is from New York City.
This is not a one-hit-wonder band either, but I think I'd call it a "one-album-wonder" band. That album was Pocket Full of Kryptonite, recorded in 1991. There were a number of hit songs off of it, once they got more publicity in 1992, including Little Miss Can't Be Wrong. There were a few more albums from the band, and like a lot of them, they played way past their prime, but from the Wiki discography, I don't know songs from any of the others.
What a great beat and bright sound! The early 1990s were an era of "alternative rock", and no, we didn't say "alt-rock". I don't know if you would consider this part of that alternative rock, but it reminds me of some of that - see the 10,000 Maniacs, with Hey, Jack Kerouac , Lilydale , and Like the Weather.
I don't think I've ever seen this video, stated by youtube to be their "official" one. I know I had a TV in 1992, but I doubt I had a cable hook-up. Anyway, it beats watching a vinyl record go 'round and 'round at 33 rpm, right?
The Spin Doctors:
Chris Barron – lead vocals
Eric Schenkman – guitar, backing vocals
Mark White – bass
Aaron Comess – drums, keyboards
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Richard Nixon and The Greatest Comeback - Pat Buchanan
Posted On: Monday - May 11th 2020 7:36PM MST
In Topics: History Pundits Books
(Well, they won't let me return it to the library, so I may as well review it.)
After a recommendation by one of the unz.com commenters, I slowly read through this Pat Buchanan book, one of many he's written, while travelling. The Greatest Comeback is mostly about just a 2-year period of American political history, 1966-1968, with a smaller amount of background going back to 1964 and a little bit back to the 1950s. There are a lot of interesting small points on this history that will be some separate smaller posts. I've got the book with the pages bookmarked even still for these points, as hey, "I ain't agonna pay no
Before I get into those details let me make this just a short review of the book. Though Peak Stupidity has discussed his recent punditry a few times - see Peak Stupidity single-question, single-side-informed interview by Pat Buchanan , Pat Buchanan on American political history - 50 years ago (like a small excerpt of this book, in fact), and Happy Birthday to Pat Buchanan (his 80th), I note there are no other reviews here of any of his books. I remember reading his Death of the West when it came out. He's a very decent writer, maybe better in this biographical-type history than in his polemics. The book will keep your interest, though the suspense may not kill you, if you know the least bit of history. (Spoiler Alert: Nixon won.)
The book is about the Richard Nixon Presidential campaign for the 1968 election. Peak Stupidity has no love lost, as we never ever found any to begin with, for Richard Millhouse Nixon. We read this book through the lens of one of his then closest associates, though, Mr. Buchanan, who, if not in agreement with him, was a loyal associate. He still has much appreciation for the man who hired him for his first political operative job, in 1966. You wouldn't expect him to badmouth the man, even about issues in which future true-conservative Pat Buchanan would no doubt disagree with Nixon on.
The Greatest Comeback is about Richard Nixon the politician. The man who'd been called a loser by the press after his loss to John Kennedy in 1960, and then his loss to Edmund Brown (Jerry's Dad) in the California Governor's race in 1962, did become the consummate politician with a lot of hard work, and well, politics over those 6 years leading up to November 6th, 1968. By "politician", though, I don't mean a man who represents the voters wishes to get into government to change the system. I don't mean a guy who is a leader for a cause. I just mean a guy who was (finally, for him) good at getting enough votes to get himself in high office. The book is the story of Richard Nixon's comeback from loser to winner of the 1968 US Presidential election.
As I wrote already, Mr. Buchanan was not about to disparage the man who hired him (for 1 1/2 the salary he'd been making as a newspaperman in St. Louis, a whopping $13,500!*). The author does, however, tell the insider truth about Richard Nixon's stand on the issues, which was "whatever will get enough votes from enough groups of people to elect me". (Those are not Mr. Buchanan's words exactly, but the gist of them all.) Lots of the 2nd half of the book, with the suspense-filled primary campaign and then general election campaign against Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, tells the story of how Mr. Nixon would work out exactly how he'd make speeches, answer questions, or treat other candidates, such that he'd minimize the pissing-off of people and maximize the support. Of course, it's not like that's not part of getting elected for any of these guys, and you've got to get elected first in order to implement any policies to change the country for the better. It doesn't sound like Richard Nixon really cared about the latter, though.
Mr. Buchanan relates the story from an era in which the press were not so monolithically one-sided, compared to today, no matter how they treated Nixon early on, through the "you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" period. It's amazing how close the politicians and print news media were, per this book. Some were on your side, and some weren't, but Mr. Buchanan would arrange for memos to be sent to newspaper editors to explain Nixon's position on such-and-such, and some of these editors would have a big influence on how he stood on the issues.
Mr. Buchanan gives a good description of the big divide among the Conservative, Goldwater/Reagan wing of the GOP and the non-Conservative Rockefeller/Lindsay/Romney (yes, Mitt's Dad) wing. This is a theme throughout the book, with Mr. Nixon being the expert politician who reconciles these wings while not letting any of these people get the nomination in the meantime. The author also brings up the big issues of the mid-1960s that haunt us today (because they were almost all decided wrongly) - the Vietnam war, the Civil Rites BS, Federal Gov. interference in housing, and the "Great Society" Socialism of Lyndon Johnson in general. Some of these will be discussed in relation to this book in future posts, as there are many interesting, but very easily forgotten points.
A few odds and ends: The Nixon campaign, or I guess, Nixon himself, had one weird quirk. The memos back and forth were written with "RN" as the stand-in for a pronoun or the man's name, even when written by Nixon himself. There are quite a number of names thrown around, some of which make the reader think this book would be better in electronic form, with that ctrl-f type feature ("Who TH is Huston again, and where have I seen Dirksen character"). A piece of American political history I didn't know is that President Eisenhower tried to dump Richard Nixon off the VP ticket for his 2nd term a couple of times.
It's a very readable book, as I wrote, for anyone interested in recent American history. Mr. Buchanan regales us with a general description of life in campaign mode, the traveling, high-pressure life of his for those 2 years, and a few funny stories. He almost got his ass beat by some cops who thought he was with the left and then some of the hippies thought he was an FBI guy. Another time, Mr. Nixon asked Mr. Buchanan to be his press secretary, but that lasted about one day! We learn of the more civil and more intelligent world of American high-level politics of the 1960s compared to today's, and one can see from his current weekly columns that Mr. Buchanan seems to think we are still in that world.
How about 4 out of 5 stars for this one?
* From newspaperman to political insider/wonk to TV talking-head to Conservative Crusader politician to unz.com blogger, what a life-cycle. (OK, I know he's all syndicated - I just read him on unz in case I want to make a comment that he's not at all likely to read.)
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The Spinners - Rubberband Man and Games People Play
Posted On: Saturday - May 9th 2020 7:13PM MST
In Topics: Music
I heard something with this same beat and a funky bass like this today, which reminded me of The Rubberband Man from a black "Rhythm and Blues" band out of Detroit, Michigan called The Spinners. Before the time of this song, they had been known as The Detroit Spinners or the Motown Spinners. I would call this one "funk", not Rhythm & Blues, but what do I know? I do know I like that fuzzy bass funk sound.
This is from 1976, back before there was any MTV, and yes, we did just watch these vinyl records spin around at 33 rpm, and WE LIKED IT!
Lead vocals: Philippé Wynne
Background vocals: Bobby Smith, Pervis Jackson, Henry Fambrough and Billy Henderson
Additional background vocals: the Sigma Sweethearts (Barbara Ingram, Carla Benson and Yvette Benton)
Instrumentation: MFSB (Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers, a group of 30!)
Thom Bell: keyboards
Tony Bell, Bobby Eli: guitars
Bob Babbitt: bass guitar
Andrew Smith: drums
Larry Washington: percussion
I was about to write that the band was a one-hit wonder type, but wiki reminded me that that was NOT the case. Here's a hit from a year earlier.* It's not funky, but it's maybe an even better tune. The excellent smooth lady's voice is one Evette Benton.
This Games People Play is not to be confused with a song of the same name by The Alan Parsons Project from a half decade later, which was of a whole different style of music.
* Then they had another hit, Working my Way Back to You, in 1978, but it's not nearly of the same caliber, melody-wise and sound-wise, IMO.
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Gold found on an asteroid? Should I buy, sell, or hold?
Posted On: Saturday - May 9th 2020 6:33PM MST
In Topics: Economics The Future Science
The Russia Times, for what it's worth*, touts The golden asteroid that could make everyone on Earth a billionaire . Yes, and there are a lot of Zimbabwean Billionaires who would feel lucky to eat the roaches that our cat doesn't get. (But, damn, you people sure showed the White men of Rhodesia who's boss!)
The asteroid that the RT title alludes to is Psyche-16, one of the bigger and earliest-discovered ones, is 100 to 200 miles across based on space infrared telescope imaging. Because it is large enough to perturb the orbits of smaller asteroids, it's mass was determined, allowing density calculations, which, along with albedo measurements cause astronomers to figure it's made mostly of metals. It is not at all proven to contain the precious, as that headline states, being thought to consist mostly nickel and iron. RT maybe is no better than the National Enquirer (though it's still GOTTA beat the NY Times):
The discovery has been made. Now, it’s a question of proving it up.Whatever the fuck is that supposed to mean?!
No matter about that, were a minor planet like that, or even a 10-mile wide body to be part gold, it doesn't take a big percentage of gold to make a bigger find than there exists in human hands on earth!
Of course, says veteran miner Scott Moore, CEO of EuroSun Mining “The ‘Titans of Gold’ now control hundreds of the best-producing properties around the world, but the 4-5 million ounces of gold they bring to the market every year pales in comparison to the conquests available in space.”Take just a cubic mile of gold, please! [Uhh, joke doesn't work here - Ed] I get 2.5 x 1015 , or 2,500 Trillion ounces of gold there. It's enough to give every American a million dollars and still finance a Micheal Bloomberg primary campaign. [What an incredible way of putting it! - Ed] Now, be careful, that is in troy ounces, so don't get ripped off by anyone making you deals on asteroid-mined gold in avoirdupois ounces.
Either way, dammit, we're gonna be rich! More on this in a bit....
The article is kind of interesting, even with the completely exaggerated title, as it's about the exploitation of solar system bodies for minerals in general. The task is arduous, I tells ya'. The article spells out the need for gravity to even do the mining, of which a 200 mile diameter asteroid made of pure gold has only 1/11** of the Earth's gravity (~ 1/2 of the moon's), so is it going go work? It's not an absolute need, this gravity, but otherwise fuel would have to be burned for a reaction force for any initial drilling done to lock the the robotic miner to the surface, where I suppose it could go on from there.
Then what? You'd need a good-sized payload to make the operation worthwhile. With that low-gravity body, at least much less fuel would be needed to leave the body's gravitational field, and all this mass could be slowed down with a very accurate entry to Earth's atmosphere. The gold doesn't burn, so there's that ... Yet, you'd need enough fuel to get a good acceleration to the 'roid, a somewhat equal deceleration for the rendezvous, and then good acceleration from the 'roid back home to get the mission accomplished before, well the price of gold went down, down, down, like a robot miner with a busted retro-rocket and tangled-up drogue shoot.
Of course, that massive engineering project, the precision manufacturing, and all that fuel would be affordable, you know, with all that money you'll have up front from selling a portion of that gold ahead of time to ... well, a bunch of suckers, because that's the point the entire OilPrice.com article by Joao Peixe (ahaa! that explains it!) missed. No, nobody will be rich, not even the man who sponsors the mission, thinking he's the modern Ferdinand and/or Isabella of Spain, who, come to think of it were already rich, but probably didn't come ahead on that whole Cristobal Columbus venture.
If a serious amount of gold could be seriously planned to be mined on an asteroid or moon and be brought to Earth, than that inflation of REAL MONEY itself would bring gold's value down accordingly. That part is pretty obvious to most of us here, I'd guess (unless you just come for the Kung Flu coverage). I don't think it would go that far either, however. The more the calculations on cost of the mission were solidified, the more that the new near-future value of gold would be understood, making the mission that much less worthwhile until some equilibrium were reached. That equilibrium would be reached at a point at which the mission wouldn't make any money!
Am I wrong about how this would go down, or up, I should say? Think back on the Spaniards' big rip-offs of the Incas, Aztecs and what-have-you other savages' gold back in the 1,500s. (Well, I mean, they weren't using it as anything but interior decoration anyway, so ...) If you were on one of the first ships to bring a load back to the Old World, yeah, you, maybe a few of your non-mutinous crew, would have been rich (shhh, don't tell the Queen yet!) This is due to the lack of information flow back in that era, with no tweets such as:
"@Carlos I: yur majest-E - got 2 mil oz of la precious for U. 1,500 Az-teks put to sword. we are rich as fuck. c. u. back in old world. #GoldLosBitchez!"However, as information did get out, as to how much more gold (and silver) was available for use a money, it was one of the few or only periods in history where there was inflation in this money.
It's a similar scenario, but 2-3 orders-of-magnitude worse, when the FED makes dollars out of nothing. Those who get to spend them first, such as the big banks, before the information on the increase in the money supply is felt throughout the economy, get the most value out of those dollars.
An asteroid mining operation would be hard to keep secret. I know, it's so cool, that I'd likely run my mouth too. The information would be out there, and the value of the gold would reflect that.
This ain't no Robert Heinlein book we're living in, 'cept that Crazy Years part. He forecast that one like a real Nostradumbass!***
* A lot more than the New York Times in dollars, rubles, gold, and truth. However, the article is originally from the OilPrice.com article.
** The mass turns out to be 1/18,000 of the Earth's, but with the radius being only 1/40 of Earth's, the gravitational acceleration and force on an object on such an asteroid's surface would be 1/11 of that on Earth. I did a 2nd check on this math by using Newton's law of gravity directly, and got 0.85 m/s2, so feel very happy to have done this math right with a simple idiot-phone calculator (doesn't even have a square function!). There goes 20 minutes of my life I'll likely never get back!
*** I just had to use that one, a handle of one of the ZeroHedge commenters from a good while back. I liked the Heinlein sci-fi I read as a kid very much.
Comments (17)
E.H. Hail on the Numerator
Posted On: Saturday - May 9th 2020 4:22PM MST
In Topics: Websites Kung Flu Stupidity
... that is, the numerator of the ratio Deaths FROM the Kung Fllu / Cases of the Kung Flu. That ratio is the mortality rate for this virus. As Mr. Hail estimates some rough values for the errors in determining the numerator, the denominator remains even more uncertain. I may have gotten the Kung Flu already, and you may have gotten the Kung Flu already. We are both here, blogging and reading, respectively.
Additionally, besides being the numerator of this very important ratio (to one's perspective on the seriousness of this crap), it's the number of deaths FROM this disease that is the key number touted by parties involved in this Infotainment Panic-Fest. Mr. Hail, in Part X of his series of articles on the Kung Flu "Coup d'etat", discusses some rough numbers to figure the ratio of deaths FROM the Kung Flu to deaths WITH the Kung Flu.
I should note that the estimates in Mr. Hail's article are for the situation in Sweden, not America. This is due to his having concentrated on that country due to its lack of any LOCKDOWNs , the tailing off of the epidemic there, and the death and illness numbers being so far lower than the "experts'" numbers as to be laughable. He has been reading, learning about, and discussing the situation in Sweden in many of his other parts of the series, so this also provides continuity in his discussion.
The article (and associated graphs) include ICU (hospital Intensive Care Unit) admissions and death rates in ICUs in general along with death and recovery data for Swedish purported COVID-19 patients to arrive at the following:
This leaves us with 20% of corona-deaths as absolutely-definite “Deaths From,” against 80% being either “Deaths With” or ambiguous.Now, I'm guessing myself here, but it seems that these last 4 categories involve a good bit of guesswork. I have some questions that Mr. Hail is welcome to answer here, but I should probably ask on his site. I'd say the same for the Peak Stupidity reader. I'm just the "lookie here" guy on this, not the estimator.
Of the ambiguous category, how many might realistically be “Deaths From”? Given that half died at nursing homes, places with short life-expectancies anyway, it’s possible that a fifth of the remainder (80%) are true Deaths From, three-fifths are “Deaths With,” and one-fifth are a coin toss, cause of death at examining doctor’s discretion. This gives us:
* 20% of deaths being those taken into an ICU who died there,
* 15% being genuine-virus-caused deaths outside ICUs,
* 50% are “Deaths With” who definitely died of other causes, and
* 15% Coin Tosses, those with severe health conditions whose cause of death is arguable.
This gives us 35% “Deaths From,” possible 40% or a bit higher. While some might say this may not be a perfect way to estimate “Deaths With the Virus” vs. “Deaths from the Virus,” the one-third figure happens to also be the estimate reported in early April (Fraser Nelson, The Telegraph, April 3):
The pressure is hard on people in the know in the medical field, say Hospital Admins., doctors, and nursing lead, etc, to keep the COVID numbers up - see just one example of ours on the motivations for this. It would be nice to get some numbers from these types on ICU recovery rates for any respiratory diseases, death rates in nursing homes from the same, and, most importantly, their own estimates of how many cases are logged as "FROM Covid-19" when the cause of death could be a myriad of problems. (Mr. Hail may have some videos or statements on this that I have not gotten to yet.)
OK, I was going to avoid the Kung Flu, and discussion thereof, for 2 days, but I blew it with this one. How about something about gold on an asteroid next? Sure, why not?
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Trayvon II - The Media Empire Strikes Back
Posted On: Friday - May 8th 2020 6:51PM MST
In Topics: Media Stupidity Race/Genetics
Deja Vu, anyone?
Due to my my household being what some may dub an Infotainment desert, I had not even heard of that this Sequel to Trayvon had come out yet, as produced by
A link there led me to what could have been a new site to peruse daily, called Information Liberation, but for the "article" in question being mostly a series of tweets.** It's just me, I guess, but that's not my favorite format for reading material. However, I like the ideas presented in Mr. Chris Menahan's 'The Trayvon Hoax' Gets A Reboot With The Shooting Death Of Ahmaud Arbery . It's his idea to compare this latest racial brewhaha to the Trayvon Martin self-defense effort of (Wow!) 8 years ago, as with a movie sequel.
There are lots of similarities between the two widely publicized incidents: (First let's just call George Zimmerman white for a bit here, not to go along with the Lyin' Press' narrative, but to make this easier to write.) Both started out with white citizen's trailing of a black man suspected to be up to no good in his/their neighborhood. (Yes, someone 6 foot tall, 200 lb at any age should be thought of as a man in the realm of self-defense.) Both of these black guys, instead of handling the situation like a rational human being (likely because they were guilty of something or about to be) went into fight-or-flight mode and picked the former. In neither case was that a wise choice.
In both cases the white guy(s) were doing nothing but inquiring and warning black guys who, in their view, were up to no good. In both cases, they were probably right, we find out later. In both cases, the black man got shot and killed for being the aggressor in an act of self-defense.
In both the cases, the media have gotten the American public, at least those who still believe their one-sided narrative, and almost all black people (because, black), up in arms. This behavior by the Lyin' Press will again motivate the law enforcement and justice system to do the wrong thing. If they were to do the right thing (which they never do) and not press new charges on the white men involved for the legalities involved that obviated that in the first place, riots would probably ensue. So, they give in to media-instigated pressure and sacrifice another white man or two in the name of diversity and temporary peace. Then, the jury gets the case, and it's the same story except with more of a chance of a good person doing the right thing, ... which will ... cause riots.
How is this even a sequel, as it's almost the same story? The Lyin' Press and race hustlers (as described in Michelle Malkin's column) are hoping to have a different outcome this time. Last time the truth came out, and the good guys (George Zimmerman and The Truth) won, after one hell of a struggle. They are hoping for a different outcome with this next innocent young black kid Ahmaud Arbery. Let's get the truth out there.
That Information Liberation page linked-to above does present a lot of good information, so I highly recommend it to our readers. In addition to focusing on the incident in Brunswick, Georgia, Mr. Menahan also brings up the many horrific white-on-black murders that never get presented on 24/7 Infotainment. This is the stuff discussed by Paul Kersey on unz.com on an almost daily basis.
This new blaxploitation flic has not been finished yet. I don't see how they can give it a happy ending, unless riots or injustice are considered happy endings. It will premier this summer at a venue (hopefully nowhere) near you.
PS: One of the tweets in the Information Liberation article was from one LeBron James, an athlete who tweeted out nonsense to support the
* BTW, right across from the Glynn County (GlynnCo) Airport, outside of Brunswick, there lies the FLETC, where Federal employees of all sorts of agencies train to shoot, many of who make one wonder what they are doing with guns. They are not allowed to be involved in this, and rightly so.
** I don't dis-recommend the site just based on this one article. I'll have to see if I come to like it over a few days.
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Peak Constitutional Amendment - XVII
Posted On: Friday - May 8th 2020 12:25PM MST
In Topics: History Liberty/Libertarianism US Feral Government Morning Constitutional
(Continued from Amendment XI, Amendment XII, Amendment XIII, Amendment XIV, Amendment XV, Part 1 on Amendment XVI, Part 2 on Amendment XVI , and Part 3 on Amendment XVI .)
Here's the entirety of Amendment XVII to the US Constitution, proposed in 1912 and ratified by the final state to get 75% of 'em in April, 1913:
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.This seems, just as with Amendment XI (passed only 6 years after the Constitution took effect), to be nothing but an Administrative change or "housekeeping" if you will. No, but nobody goes through the trouble it takes to change the US Constitution just for a bureaucratic rule change. Amendment XVII, providing for the direct election of US Senators by State residents, rather than State legislators, is another State's rights issue that has gone the same way as always, in favor of the Big Central "Federal" Government.
When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.
This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.
I went to my standard source, Constitution Center to see if their interpretation had anything enlightening about the history/background of this Amendment. There's a pretty good back-and-forth argument on their Interpretation page over whether putting the choice for the 2 Senators with the people versus their State legislators is a blow to State's rights or not.
This Amendment did not come out of the blue. American history had a lot of discussion going back to 1830:
However, starting in roughly the 1830s and then more dramatically after the Civil War, the vision the Founders had—in which state legislatures would deliberate over the selection of Senators—began to fray. First, politicians seeking Senate seats began campaigning for state legislative candidates in a process known as the “public canvass.” The result was that state legislative races became secondary to Senate races. The most famous instance of this was the race for Senate in Illinois in 1858, in which Abraham Lincoln faced off with Stephen Douglass despite neither being on the ballot. In 1890s, many states started holding direct primaries for Senate, reducing the degree of influence state legislatures had over selection. Some states went further and began using something known as the “Oregon System,” under which state legislative candidates were required to state on the ballot whether they would abide by the results of a formally non-binding direct election for U.S. Senator. By 1908, twenty-eight of the forty-five states used the Oregon System or some other form of direct elections.That's some history I had not known about. Many of the State Legislatures themselves were in favor of direct election, something that boggles my mind.
The push for the Seventeenth Amendment occurred both in state legislatures and the House of Representatives. Between 1890 and 1905, thirty-one state legislatures passed resolutions either calling on Congress to pass an amendment providing for the direct election of senators, to hold a conference with other states to work on such an amendment, or to have a constitutional convention such that the direct elections for Senator could be included in a newly drawn Constitution. Amendments to the Constitution providing for direct elections passed the House in each session between 1893 and 1912.This was a great shift of power away from the State legislators though. These people are pretty local. Unlike your 1 in 454 Congressman, whom you only get to see close up right near election time without an appointment and lots of time on your hands, most Americans don't know their State Senators' and Representatives' names. If these were the guys and gals that were going to decide who were the 2 individuals to go to the US Senate as 2 in 100, you'd better believe Americans would know their names. We'd make an effort to meet with them, rather than in this era, where the most important thing on their agenda this week might be to vote on the State Insect.
Much of this is due to the even greater number of powers the Feral Gov't has taken from the States, with not a whole lot of resistance, I might add. Nowadays, the point of being in the State Legislature is likely to move farther up than that in politics, not to do a whole lot for the State.
Now, as some of the argument in the Constitution Center's interpretation page goes, the idea of having direct elections for US Senator was to get the corruption out of the process. One might say that now, at least the people themselves can decide the matter, so how can it be as corrupt or arbitrary as before? Yeah, that was before TV and the women's vote (by a p-hair, it turns out). I don't know, read the arguments there, but keep in mind there were the Progressives pushing their agenda even back a century ago:
(Ironically, however, big city party machines supported the Seventeenth Amendment, largely because state legislative apportionment gave greater representation to rural areas due to districting decisions in the absence of “one person, one vote” and because machine-controlled cities could more easily mobilize voters. Many big special interests supported it as well.) William Randolph Hearst famously hired muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips to write an expose, “The Treason of the Senate,” which played a major role in debates around the Seventeenth Amendment.There were the BS excuses too:
Further, supporters of the Amendment argued that races for Senate swamped interest in state issues in state legislative races, reducing the accountability of state legislatures on any issue other than the identity of Senators.Yeah, that's it. It was taking too much of their time. Sure... letting them keep too much power, more like. One sentence in the middle sums up the good-intentioned (if I am to be charitable here) reasons for Amendment XVII:
The popular perception that Senate seats could be bought in backrooms of state legislatures fueled support for direct elections.That sounds very much like the argument for party primary elections (not a Constitutional issue) over the smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear. How's that working out for us? Really, I'd rather have these Senators picked locally, no matter how it can be corrupted. At least a player would have to buy off a majority of 100 or so of them, probably not so easy, versus just throwing money at the media. (Of course, if most Americans paid attention to substance over style, well, again there are those TV and women's vote things again...)
In the old system one could go see his local Rep in the neighborhood and at least have some influence on a guy who lives in his State, rather than the Senator working solely for a gambling magnate who lives in Las Vegas. From the time of the Hildabeast in New York, this has gotten really out of hand. US Senate candidates are picked often from far away places and just plain placed in the race in a State that they have absolutely no ties with, hence these Senators will work for the Party, not their States. Talk aboutcher corruption...
Yep, this was no simple administrative change, this Amendment XVII. It was another abomination in the cause of greater power in the hands of Big-Gov, no matter how they tried to sell it, though a lower-profile abomination than Amendment XVI on the income tax. This survey of the Constitutional Amendments past the Bill of Rights is not going well at all!
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COVID testing and free chicken
Posted On: Thursday - May 7th 2020 7:12PM MST
In Topics: Humor Kung Flu Stupidity
Peak Stupidity mentioned in Government School Welfare Still Operating that whether learning/indoctrination goes on or not, the free school meals don't end. As I drove by a high school in a bad side of town*, the other day, closed along with the rest of them, I saw about 8 cop cars and lines of other cars up toward the front.
Can that be all for the picking up of a week's worth of school meals? I wondered this, but it was a Wednesday or Thursday, not the start of the week. Later that day, I learned that this line was for COVID-19 quick-testing. Interesting.
Why the big lines and the cop cars, though? Oh, yeah, cop cars were there because whatever the hell is going on, this is the bad side of town, after all. The line was due to the fact that these COVID-one-niner test-takers would be supplied a free meal for their effort in showing up. I expect fried chicken was involved, but Peak Stupidity has not yet confirmed that with our sources. As a friend noted, just in general, most parents will not attend public school events unless some kind of free food is involved.
This Chicken for COVID deal was not just for parents. The idea was to get a large sample of residents of the county. Is is a random sample? I'm no statistician, but I'd say it could be a random sample of fried-chicken lovers. Perhaps, blood cholesterol data should be obtained at the same time, as I'm guessing that the Kung Flu will not end up being as big a cause of the death of these people as clogged arteries.
Clogged arteries don't bleed though, and remember, "if it bleeds, it leads".
Well, that was my quick anecdote that I'd forgot at the time of yesterday's post. Hopefully tomorrow Peak Stupidity can get back to it's more active routine, including our Morning Constitutional.
* Maybe not the baddest, but that's arguable ... usually by dudes with custom Continentals, El Dorados too, and razors in their shoes.
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