Bleecker Street - Simon & Garfunkel
Posted On: Tuesday - May 21st 2019 7:11PM MST
In Topics: Music
Been writing comments on unz threads and having a fairly busy day. Even with lots of posts on deck and ever-accelerating stupidity in this world, I've not been in the mood ... [Well YOU GET IN THE MOOD! - Ed].
I've got more on economics coming, a month-old story (but an on-going problem) on the feminism of regret, and lots more. Just to get back onto the site, here is some obscure, but classic Simon & Garfunkel music. Peak Stupidity hasn't featured any of their music from their greatest hits (the most famous album) and other compilations. It seems that they are so familiar, that the songs aren't quite as good as fresh ones.
What I've learned on that is to give some songs a rest for a number of years. The trick is to not anticipate the tune in your head. Each next line or lick ought to feel new and not-completely expected, or the listening experience is not nearly as good.
Bleeker Street is from "Wednesday Morning. 3 AM"* in a New York City of the past ($30 a month rent? In Manhattan? Even in 1963, who had to die first?). Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel loved that city**, but it's not what is there today.
* That was Simon & Garfunkel's debut album, after their time as Tom and Jerry.
** See the bottom of that post for The Only Living Boy in New York, another obscure but great song by this duo. See also At the Zoo (not quite so obscure - on the 1999 Best of Simon & Garfunkel album - but that's not the much more ubiquitous Greatest Hits compilation from way back in 1972 with only the classics.)
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1984 - NOT an instruction manual, people!
Posted On: Saturday - May 18th 2019 7:51PM MST
In Topics: Orwellian Stupidity Books
Reveal yourself, Citizen!
This is the kind of depressing flavor of stupidity that I've not written as much about as I should. It's just that there seems no way out of it. The genderbender nonsense, feminism, sky-is-falling-Global Climate Disruption(TM), all that can fall by the wayside once the financial stupidity reaches its peak, and things MUST naturally "get real" again. I don't know if we'll get out of the Orwellian stupidity though. The more it clamps down, the smaller the chance of fighting it becomes.
A ZeroHedge article from a couple of days back, UK Cops Fine Pedestrian $115 For Avoiding Facial Recognition Cameras tells us of a story in what was England (no, there's no England now), in which the authoritah have out-Orwelled Orwell himself. In his book 1984*, the protagonist Winston Smith was careful how to act in front of the cameras at home (part of his TV set, how quaint... too easy!), but I don't recall he had to worry about being filmed outside. It's not only that, but the British, as read on ZeroHedge, don't want people hiding their faces from the cameras designed to keep track of them. (Facial recognition done by software was not imaginable to George Orwell in 1949, when any computers around could barely calculate some prime numbers. He imagined real-time observation of people-of-interest. "Hey, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide, right?"**)
This guy pulled up his sweater toward his nose, had his ball-cap kinda low, and looked away, in a pretty natural move for anyone knowing what this camera was there for, and just sick of this shit. That's apparently not acceptable in what used to be England. Then:
After being fined, the man told a reporter: 'The chap told me down the road - he said they've got facial recognition. So I walked past like that (covering my face).I don't know whose asterisks those are, BTW - they are probably from the Daily Mail, but ZeroHedge used to be a site on which one could read "fuck off", like a normal human being.
'It's a cold day as well. As soon as I've done that, the police officer's asked me to come to him. So I've got me back up. I said to him 'f*** off', basically.
'I said 'I don't want me face shown on anything. If I want to cover me face, I'll cover me face, it's not for them to tell me not to cover me face.
'I've got a now £90 fine, here you go, look at that. Thanks lads, £90. Well done.' -Daily Mail
ZH has very good comments this time. I'd been disappointed as of late with not seeing the old commenters of 5 years back, and 1/3 to 1/2 of the comments being not worth reading. I gotta say, these ones were almost all on point, and there is no divide, as in most political issues. People HATE this stuff. So far, they won't act, though.
Some good ideas come out these comment sections everywhere, while they are still left mostly alone - under this article, a few commenters mentioned the idea of more non-Moslems wearing the Burkhas, face-masks, or whatever that part is. It's a great idea: put the authorities between the rock of wanting to spy on all "citizens" and the hard-place of loving the Moslem dieversity. YES! There are ways of screwing with the system if people wouldn't just lie down and take this out of what, laziness or not caring enough if their children will grow up to be Winston Smiths or Julias?***
I write about this not with any glee or disparagement of the British people in particular, as I don't trust regular Americans to care enough to stop the same thing here. It's not but 25 years ago that I still would have argued that, yes, just as Americans will put buckshot dents in road signs for the hell of it, they would just shoot out or trash these cameras. Nope, the slow boil seems to have been working pretty well on Americans.
The Orwellian stuff is getting bad so quickly. Not many fight back. Keep your guns, and keep stocking up on ammo. What a thought to finish out the blog-week with. I can only cheer myself up with hedonics! More on Monday or Tuesday. Good night, readers!
* Available on
** That needs to be engraved on their gravestones with a big well-used template, if those responsible for the miserable police-state world ever get held accountable.
*** I would hope most of Peak Stupidity's erudite crowd of readers has read this book, but I won't spoil the ending too much, besides, no, the life of Winston Smith and girlfriend Julia is no way for a human being to live.
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Measuring Inflation: Hooked on Hedonics
Posted On: Saturday - May 18th 2019 6:12PM MST
In Topics: Economics US Feral Government Inflation
"LET DEM EAT SNAILS!" - Marqueshia D'Antoinette":
In the process of composing a different upcoming post on the truly low inflation years of the mid-1990's for about a decade thereafter (can't explain now, cause that's an upcoming post), I felt I needed to post some background info. on some of the complications of the measurement of inflation.
One office of the cabinet level US Department of Labor in the US Feral Gov't that has the job of measuring, keeping track of, and publishing info about, inflation, unemployment, and other economic indicators is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (I guess it started out just about Labor, but mission creep happens.) Peak Stupidity has, and shows, no LUV for ANY branch of the US Gov't, but I have a soft spot for the people that just want to do their non-political, non-power-struggle-involved work. There ARE some, indeed, and in this agency, I'd expect to find some Negative-Actioned, green-eyeshade (explained here) accounting types that just like to do what they do, in a nice no-pressure, non-fireable environment, with hopefully a minimum of affirmative action types in odd positions that are somewhat ignorable. It's a life. It's not just all bookkeeping, as complications set in pretty quickly when you are tasked to come up with numbers that show how less far American's money goes for given stuff each year. I would think a creative accountant could really get into a BLS job.
The thing is, people don't purchase the same goods and services that they did a decade ago or a century ago. The "basket of goods and services", a term that was in widespread public use back when there was officially lots of inflation (I only recall late 1970's through early 1980's*), not only changes yearly due to fads and people's desires, but even the "same" items are better or worse so can't be compared apples-to-apples. Hell, even the basket for the goods is not made of wicker anymore but probably out of 2 pieces of molded plastic. Additionally, people tote their goods in the back of the crossover rather than a basket these days and their services (don't get me started) are on their phones.
Nobody cares what the price of a buggy whip** is these days. We don't carry them from the country store in our crossovers. Likewise, there were no electronic tablets in the baskets of yesteryear either. OK, so there must be some substitution now and then of modern goods/services that may simply be new, desired things, for stuff and services we never or hardly ever use anymore. The "basket" must reflect what the average consumer uses, or it will mean nothing. However, is it that people don't want things like steak anymore, or have they been substituting chicken, or, yuckkk!, snails, BECAUSE OF inflation in price of the former?
"Hedonics" is the term used for the re-evaluating of goods and services based on their improvements over time. I would not hesitate to add that I really hope these creative accountants (I don't use that particularly pejoratively here) take ruination of products and services, such as with the ubiquitous Cheap China-made Crap into account in the same way. It can be used to justify high prices of cars due to all their wonderful new features, but then, do we have a choice to not have the improvements? Often the answer is "no".
"Hedonics" says Windows 10 makes an improvement so ...
BTW, the computer above makes a perfectly good example of the use of hedonics, but I had to get that Microsoft crack in anyway, right?
The usefulness and the failings of these two inflation-measurement adjusters will have to be covered in 2 more posts, I think. I find this stuff interesting, but I'm no green-eyeshade guy. There's just a bunch more to say about this, so this will serve as a simple introduction. SAVE THE BLS! (That can be part of the 1% of the Feral Gov't that we leave alone.)
* When Jimmy Carter-appointed FED chairman Paul Volcker put the kibosh on the high inflation by letting or forcing (I'm not sure, so I'll have to read up on that) interest rates to the high teens to clamp down on cheap money creation.
** Buggy whips are the item that economists seem most enamored with - what do economists do behind those closed office doors, anyway?
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"Tell me whatchu wantin' wid de White man's world."
Posted On: Friday - May 17th 2019 7:05PM MST
In Topics: Music
Since writing the phrase "white man's world" a while back in the last post, I could not get Island Girl by Elton John out of my head.
It's one line in the lyrics of the song, as Elton John still pretended to be straight (or it was just lyricist Bernie Taupin's lyrics, being that there'd be no reason for him to write as a gay man) still till right about the time the album containing Island Girl, Rock of the Westies came out. (The album name was a play on "west of the Rockies", as the album was made in Nederland, Colorado, which is, of course, NOT west of the rockies but right in the front range, so ... - thanks for the correction, commenter Joe Friday.)
That is a good line for any (as if!) Trump administration new immigration agents underneath our airports-of-entry, though: "Tell me whatchu wantin' wid de White man's world. Sorry, you have to go back."
Well, Peak Stupidity has loads of posts on the back burner at this point, itching to get into pixels. I've just finished up a difficult period in the workplace recently, and want to celebrate it - with a good night's sleep. More stupidity will come in the 'morrow.
PS: More Elton John is featured here, here, here (warning, big boobs), and with great backing vocals for Neil Sedaka here.
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Empire of the Summer Moon - Book Review - Part 3
Posted On: Friday - May 17th 2019 6:49PM MST
In Topics: History Books
Peak Stupidity left off in Part 2 of this review, a couple of days back, with mention of the Comanche-kidnapped 9-y/o Texan Cynthia Ann Parker and her 1/2-blood, full-spirit Indian son called Quanah.
Cynthia Ann Parker was one of the luckier of those kidnapped by Indian tribes. Rather than being (partly-literally) dragged around the plains with the tribe, as her cousin Rachael Parker was (who died before any white men had caught up with her), or having been just gang-raped, tortured and killed and scalped, Mrs. Parker ended up being married to a Comanche chief. This chief, the father of Quanah by way of Cynthia Ann Parker, was like other Indian chiefs - it was not some kind of formal, elected, or even appointed position. A Chief was just an Indian brave who was better at hunting, killing and stealing horses than the average brave. That's all there was to it. Now, had Mrs. Parker been taken as a wife by some average Indian man, perhaps she would not have been as happy with her status, even though Indian chiefs would have multiple wives anyway. The end of the story may have been different though.
After the barely-recognizable-as-white Mrs. Parker was found on a horse, as her Indian husband had just been killed in what was later said to be just a small skirmish with the remnants of a band that had headed away from their army/ranger pursuers, she was not at all happy being brought back into the White man's world. In addition to being in a severe state of grief over her dead husband and lost two boys (one of which died later with the Indians) and the other, the future-chief Quanah, she did not want to go back.
Cynthia Ann Parker did have memories of her time as a white girl, including of the terrible traumatic raid in which she was taken to a different life. A quarter of a century later, she was brought back, first to the frontier, and later to some bigger towns to the east. She was never happy being back in civilization, even after the cessation of her escape attempts.
That to me is the real theme of this book. Beyond the great sweeping descriptive history of this violent clash between the two cultures, the question of how one could want to live like a savage comes up as one reads the book. Life in the plains Indian culture is described well, and not at all in disparaging tones. It just was what it was.
The ultimate freedom of life on the high plains, with the buffalo and warfare being the whole point of existence, with customs and protocols, but no real laws, no courts, no fences, no taxes is really something that takes some imagination to see the beauty of. The downsides are many, and those of us in civilizations (> 90% of Peak Stupidity readers, I would hope) can see those right away. Disease of any sort could simply mean death, with no hope other than in superstition. Months with no buffalo (another reason to have hated the white men - the buffalo sport hunters) could mean death for everyone. Bad weather could kill. It leads to this: It may have been such a great feeling at times to live in that world, partly because there were no changes in the meaning and way of life, but that's just the problem too - there was no such thing as PROGRESS. Life was what it was, and nobody was going to change that. Sure, some years might bring many successful raids and killings and stealing of 1,000's of horses. That wouldn't change life though. Nothing would or COULD ever improve.
With that amazing freedom to live only bounded by the whims of nature, one lived as an animal. I don't mean that in the sense of intelligence. It was just the freedom of life as an animal (with better tools, slightly better...) with the savagery that comes with it - no thoughts existed about "oh, is it really RIGHT to kill these people who've done us no harm?" or "How can we improve life for the more miserable among us?"
See now, people within a civilization have lost that freedom. Though, as mentioned before, the women in Indian society did pretty much all the physical drudge work, Cynthia Ann Parker had gotten used to a life closer to being an animal. True, she had a husband she could be proud of (Exactly, animals don't get married, haha), and that made her happy, along with her children, of course, as is the case for even the civilized "animals". She took to that life as close to the animal world as one can get. As I mentioned, perhaps if she hadn't been married to a chief, maybe she would have hated it more and been glad to have been back in civilization. Her attitude, though, was a mystery to all those back "home", as it was unimaginable, just like the look on John Wayne's movie-daughter's face was when she was found, on The Searchers.
It is unimaginable to us that a life of savagery can be desired over a life in a civilization. The millennia-old ideas of rights, property, the golden rule, and laws to uphold them are the only way a culture can progress. There was no way the Indians were going to progress, though in their culture there was nothing wrong with that. Conversely, there was no way the white man (along with other civilizations elsewhere) was going to let nature take its course on mankind at will, forever, and a lack of any progress has been unimaginable to us. Once the White man set foot on the American continents, it was not possible that there would not eventually be a clash that would end one culture or another. In mid-19th-century Texas, it was no sure thing which would prevail.
That was about a wrap-up, but I did forget to mention Cynthia Ann Parker's half-Indian son, Chief Quanah. I put a big "C" there, as he was the 1st chief to truly speak for most of the Comanche tribe. Unfortunately, this was after his capture, years after his mother's return to civilization, and near the end of the life of the plains Indians, as they knew it. It's only the last 10% (a guess) of Empire of the Summer Moon, anyway, in which Quanah's story of his life as a wild Indian and later political deal-maker and benefactor of the turn-of-the-20th-century reservation life is told. Please read the book, as it has lots of good words for this amazing man, along with all the rest of this long-lost history.
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Empire of the Summer Moon - Book Review - Part 2
Posted On: Wednesday - May 15th 2019 8:58AM MST
In Topics: History Books
Part 1 of this book review ended up with a very short discussion on the amazing horse-riding culture of the Comanche Indians of the great plains of Texas and areas to the north and west. Per the very descriptive writing of Sam Gwynne in Empire of the Summer Moon, within a century after their first acquisition by this formerly foot-bound hunter-gatherer tribe of Indians, horses were not just possessions but integral to the whole LIFESTYLE of the Comanche.
The Comanche men didn't just own small collections of different horses, as Jay Leno owns many classic cars. No, one man might have 200 of them, and a successful (at what? .. more on that in a bit.) chief might have 1,500! Boys would learn to ride at 4 or 5 years old and practice shooting from horseback soon after that. This just gives an idea of how good the men were, though even the women would ride. Shooting arrows at a rate 20 times that required for the firing of one musket round, from horseback was standard, with a 30 yard kill distance. They learned to hang on to the top of their horses, and use them as shields in battle (hey, they could get more), just as in the movies. It was everything about horses though, in which the 5 tribal bands of Comanche were best at, better than any other Indians and better than the white man. Per the author, they "were geniuses at anything to do with horses: breeding, breaking, selling and riding. They even excelled at stealing horses."
That brings up the next point though. Besides hunting buffalo for just about all their nutritional, clothing, and shelter needs, the entire culture of the tribe was about warfare. As the women did all the drudge work with the hides, cooking, packing and unpacking for moving - they were nomadic, of course - and etc., a man's job was to hunt and wage war. A man was not a warrior like a German flying ace or an American GI in Vietnam. Wars were not fought because this treaty of 1909 was abrogated ... the Commies are coming from the north ... we need more living space ... ANY OF THAT. Wars were fought because that's just what you plain did with your life. You went around looking for other tribes that were weaker and swooped in, killed men, captured some children and younger women, and stole all the horses. That was a living to them. This was the mindset of savagery. Now, no doubt, a reader could compare this to the horrors in WWI/II, and thousands of other wars fought by men of "civilized" countries. However, as horrible as things can get, in civilized society, wars are fought for some kind of reason or maybe just an excuse by some people to get other men to fight. In a savage society, the men wage war as a basic part of living, and the Comanche were about as savage as has been well-recorded.
The white man's encroachment on the Indian hunting lands, and the almost-consistent lying involved in any treaties made with the US Gov't to stop it, were indeed good excuses for war - raiding and pillaging, including torture, the usual kidnapping, and so forth. As would be expected, it had the effect of uniting some of the tribes that would have otherwise made war on each other, though some fought WITH the white man and some AGAINST him. Early on during the encroachment of the white settler into Texas, while in the eastern portion, the notorious 1836 Comanche raid on the Parker ranch/fort is well-described in this book. It's not that there weren't hundreds or even thousands of raids as terrible for the lonesome settlers as this one, but it is just very well-documented and there is the famous story of kidnapped 9-y/o Cynthia Ann Parker.
The caption mentions current-day Grosbeck, but that's not too well known either.
The location is 30-odd miles east of Waco, about 125 miles west of the Louisiana Border.
If you know Texas, that is NOT FAR into Texas!
I won't go into the gory details of this raid, but the book has plenty of that involving the fighting over 4 decades, so, that MAY be another reason to read it. Back to the stories of these amazing individuals living in that time, James Parker, patriarch of the ranch shown above, was the uncle of Cynthia Ann, but his daughter Rachael had also been taken (plenty more of the families there had been slain). The book recounts James Parker's sometimes foolhardy and sometimes lucky, search for his daughter in Indian country. It is likely the basis for the powerful 1956 John Wayne movie The Searchers, the ending of which has the same theme as the end of the search for Cynthia Ann Parker ... nope, read on, or watch the movie, I'm not spoiling it now ... ;-} The storyline of that movie is just too close the documented story of these Texas Comanche raids, that I'm sure the writer had to have learned of this history (a LOT more recent back then, 120 years rather than > 180)
Just as author Sam Gywnne did in his writing of Empire of the Summer Moon, this review is bouncing around a bit, not in time, but just from the story of the Indians themselves, the stories of the birth of Texas, and the stories of the individuals raided, raiding, or fighting what became a real war by mid-19th-century. The book has a great description of the formation (if once could call it that, as they started out as un-paid freelancers) Texas Rangers. Their purpose was to take this war to the Indians. Maybe you enjoyed the TV show, but these Texas Rangers were harder, tougher men than that Johnny Walker. The most famous was Jack Hays:
Well, if you can read Mr. Gywnne's caption, you will notice the mention of the Colt 6-shot revolver. With a nice story there too, the author describes how the tactics of riding TO the battle and then dismounting to fight had been getting the white soldiers slaughtered in a great many battles with the agile horse-bound Comanches. Trying to shoot with long rifles was too cumbersome - there were no ARs or AKs yet. The story of Jack Hay's and the Ranger's acquisition of Connecticut Yankee Sam Colt's "6-Shooter" is well-related, and that gun was as important to the white man's ability to stop the carnage of these Indians, as the horse was important to these Indians in the first place.
Part 3 will discuss the life and mindset of Cynthia Ann Parker, her son Quanah, Indian Chief and 1st actual Chief of the entire tribe throughout the conclusion of the Indian War period and the early part of the Reservation life.
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Peak Stupidity avoids a clever scam - Words to the Wise
Posted On: Tuesday - May 14th 2019 6:30PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Salesmen Artificial Stupidity Scams
Peak Stupidity hasn't made any headway, due to lack of effort as of late, on finding out more about that very-likely attempted scam-job relating to healthcare billing, as described in "Healthcare Billing via Rectal Extraction", parts 1 and 2. We will report here if there are any interesting developments. While relating this story to a good friend, I recalled an attempted scam involving computer-software, something I consider myself not prone to, but it was one near thing, I tells ya'.
This was a few years back, as we went on-line to find information on a driver for our color printer for the new versions of Windows we had no choice in buying with a new computer. (Yeah, ain't Microsoft grand, in bringing us all this new stuff to (re)learn, every damn iteration - Cha-Ching!) Come to think of it, we haven't printed a color page since! Anyway, what I'll say first is that, as evil and annoying as they are, these dot-Indian scammers are clever - I will grant them that. "You're clever, OK? Now you can bloody well piss off!" (They speak British English so they should get this.)
Well, you go to bing or duckduckgo and look up Canon Model ABC driver Windows 10 or whatever it was, and you get plenty of hits, at least one with a phone number, as we already had something installed but ran into an error. That was easy! We called up and got some helpful fellow who may not have been physically in India, but, in his heart of hearts was a "tech-support Indian". "Let me just take control of the computer to make this quick." I didn't like the sound of that, and hadn't let anybody do that before. That wasn't the scam though. As our supposed tech-wizard scanned through a few things on the computer, ostensibly to see what the deal was with our printer driver, he opened up the "task manager" showing our processes running.
"Oh, that's not good. You have this hkcmd.exe (I think that was the one) in there running. It's a virus. I really think you have to take care of this first. Your computer shouldn't be this slow." Who knows, right, with Windows? "I'm not sure about that, uhhh, what about the printer?" "Wait, let me show you" As the guy controlled the computer, he proceeded to go to google, typed in a phrase with that hkcmd file in it, and immediately came up with a blurb like the one above. It was right at the top there, telling us, yeah, we have a virus if this file is running. No need to read the whole article, the guy/cursor was moving pretty quickly around the screen.
"We can fix this virus, if you want to take care of it first." The guy named a price near 150 bucks, damn near 1/2 the price of just getting another computer and starting over. "Man, that's a lot. It is running slow though now that you mention it" (Subliminal suggestions were working their magic, OTOH, everything IS slow the more MS loads up your computer with their crap.) "OK, I never buy something on the spot. Let us think about it. Can we get your name, and can we get you at the same number?" Oh sure, that was fine - he had me suitably worried, but I just never buy things impulsively*, unless there was thought put into it sometime beforehand, at least.
It was only about 2 minutes after I put down the phone, when the urgency had gone away, that I had some more thoughts on what the guy had done. "Let me go on google and take a good look." Ahaaa! The article itself said something about 2 instances of this executable file being an indication of a problem, not just the one. That one was supposed to be running. This clever con-man knew exactly what just the blurb said, well beforehand. As a matter of fact, maybe his crew had gamed google a bit to make sure this one comes up first, or even WROTE THE ARTICLE with the fine print down below any blurb.
I then thought about how we came upon this phone number in the first place, with a scam about fake virae, when, if the reader can still recall, we were trying to figure out why the Canon printer driver wasn't doing the job. It's been 5 years or more now, but I do remember looking back at our original search. That phone number didn't appear just the one time. Just dealing with frustrated Canon-printer customers would probably not yield enough phone calls to keep these guys busy enough to quit work at the Quicky-Mart. What they, or someone higher-up, had done was to rig search results in the search engines to pull up their phone number based on lots of different software problem queries. Did I mention these are some clever scammers? (It's a whole lot different than just pulling a large health-care charge out of one's ass and mailing a letter or two.)
I'm really glad I didn't act impulsively, not just due to the money, but the really bad feeling one gets when conned in some way. I made a call back, after I'd gotten my thoughts together. "Hey, your guy tried to scam me - we don't have any virus on this machine." Hahaa, that was still a bit naive there. "Oh, I'll make sure our manager looks into this ... " Hey, it could have been the EXACT SAME GUY - I wouldn't know!
Not only should you not expect satisfaction with this method, but even with a legitimate business, a good boss will stand with his employees, depending on how wrong or unimportant the customer is. Nah, the customer is NOT always right, and I have been the one to hear that from the boss myself. I had one good boss for whom I could imagine this scenario (the job involved some driving, with a van with the company name right on the side - I had driven like mad a few times, cut some guys off on the on-ramp here and there, etc. ): "Hey, I looked up your number. Your driver in the middle of the night yesterday cut me off, then flipped me off when I honked at him. You've got to do something about that." "Uh, yes sir, we'll probably fire that guy later today when he comes in." he would say on the phone, while winking at me and trying not to crack up, as I sat a few feet away. Or, knowing that this boss had already cost us some business due to road rage of his own, I imagine he'd just cuss the guy out on the phone "Yeah, well stay off the road, asshole!". Good times ... good times ... but at least it was honest work.
* Just giving this guy a credit card over the phone could have been the scam itself, but no, that's not clever enough for these guys. They wouldn't be able to face their families at dinner time after a simple scam like that.
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Empire of the Summer Moon - Book Review - Part 1
Posted On: Tuesday - May 14th 2019 5:46PM MST
In Topics: History Books
The title of the book is in reference to the great fear the Comanche warriors put into the white settlers due to the extreme savagery of their raids on their lonesome homes and ranches in the woodlands and later great plains of the Republic/State of Texas. They tended to happen more during the full moon in the warm season, a "Comanche Moon".
As has been the case lately, the recommendation of this book came from a commenter on a web site somewhere, most likely unz.com. Empire of the Summer Moon by Mr. Sam Gwynne, is about a number of mostly-forgotten parts of the American history of "manifest destiny". As the eastern portion of the continent had been settled for quite a long time by English settlers (at least what is now the US portion), the ever land-hungry settlers had moved well west of the Mississippi River by the middle of the 19th century (1800's).
This book relates the engrossing story of the push of the white man into eastern, central, and eventually northern Texas, while the horse-riding Comanche tribe of Indians fought for "their" land, along with more specific stories of the kidnapping (one of thousands) of Texan Cynthia Ann Parker at 9 years old by the Comanches, her having gone native, and her Indian Chief son Quanah, who was an adult during the end of these fierce Indian wars and the final settlement of the tribes in Oklahoma. The specific stories are interesting in themselves, but it's the general theme of the book, which, to me, is about the unfathomable divide between those desiring ultimate freedom as savages versus those desiring civilization and progress that is its best feature.
Mr. Gwynne writes well, and he relates the many individuals and organizations, such as the real Texas Rangers, in an entertaining way, often flipping back and forth between the Indian life and the white settler life. He gives a nice compact history of the settlement of the (at one point) Republic of Texas, and a history of the Comanche Nation of Indians along side it. As for Texas, we learn of the amazing bravery and individualism of these settlers, mostly from the East, along with many Germans of course. They wanted their own big pieces of land, no longer an easy/cheap deal back east anymore, along with the freedom that comes along with not having a neighbor anyway in sight. In eastern Texas, still well-wooded and not that much different from Louisiana, Arkansas, etc there were plenty of troubles with Indians already. It was the move onto the high plains, land that was so foreign to white people that it both awed and scared them, that put them squarely in a no-compromise position with the 5 tribes of Comanches. For the Texans, these largely-unmapped, treeless expanses of grassland went on virtually forever, but they had been the home of the nomadic Comanche tribes for a full century.
The Comanches did not just magically originate from some Indian Adam and Eve in the high plains, which is why I put quotes above around "their" land. Nobody particularly owned any of the land per our 2 or 3 millennia-long Western understanding of ownership and property rights. That was kinda a big part of the problem between the white man and the Indians even back east and and as far back to that shady Manhattan Island deal. Back to the book now, the author described how the " Nermernuh", "the people" in Comanche-speak, morphed from a poor hunter-gatherer tribe up in present-day Wyoming around the headwaters of the Arkansas River in the Wind River Range, who hadn't advanced a damn bit in 1,000 years, into fierce, mobile, bands of warrior in 125 years (1625 - 1750). What happened? Horses. The Spanish introduction of horses into the New World resulted in their slow dispersal to first northern Mexico, then what's now New Mexico, where the Apaches started riding, and finally up to present-day Nebraska where the author reckons the Comanches were introduced to horses by the mid-1600's or at least by 1680. That allowed them to become mobile, and it was likely the huge buffalo herds of the southern plains brought them farther south.
There was something about that particular group of Indians, but they took to the horse like no other had and better than the white man ever did. (Keep in mind, with no science, no literature, no construction, and so on, what else WAS there to do over a century's time?) Mr. Gwynne describes the particular best practices that the Comanche used to make use of their many horses and also their extremely agile ridership, ability to hunt with arrows from horseback, and their ability to make war using the horse to great advantage. The latter ability outmatched all other Indians and the white man until the Texas Rangers and their own special advantage they came upon.
I'd like to give even more background here, but the reader can go to that amazon.com link above and read 1000x more information than I could possibly give in some of the > 2,600 reviews. Why this review-post is even here on Peak Stupidity is just to explain some of the fairly negative posts on the Indians of the pre-Columbian Americas that appear (here, here, here, here, and here, for example) and, of course, because I spent the time to read the book, so I may as well put a coupla posts up on it - time is money, or something...
I will recommend the book highly right now, but for more on the stories of the savage Indian attacks on the white man (per the author, much more brutal even than those back in the East), the individual story of Cynthia Ann Parker, her "searchers",and her Indian Chief husband and son Quanah, along with comments on the really basic important theme here, there will have to be 2 more posts, I'm guessing.
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On Schools, Race, and Billboards
Posted On: Monday - May 13th 2019 8:41AM MST
In Topics: Race/Genetics Educational Stupidity
There is a big intersection a couple of miles from our house that has a certain big billboard, always advertising for one particular expensive K-12th private school.
(Note: This is a file photo - not the school in question.)
Now, I imagine the school and the advertising company that owns the billboard have a nice working arrangement, as the billboard stays covered, literally (see kids, that's when you use "literally"), and the school can keep their nice spot - it should be a good deal for both. The school changes up the image up there once a year or so, I suppose, but it's the latest iteration that has me writing this post.*
The newest ad up on the billboard reads "It's time to start thinking about middle school." That's pretty simple, straightforward, and innocuous, right? There's nothing wrong with it, but I really think Steve Sailer's writing, along with my knowledge of the neighborhood(s), has given me an understanding of the real thoughts behind this simple advertisement.
Firstly, here are some details: One of the nicest neighborhoods in town is about 1 mile from the billboard. In fact, it's too nice a neighborhood to HAVE a billboard of any kind too close by (understandably, Not In My Backyard! - unless you've REALLY got a good deal...) Besides being, by my guess, one of the top 10 busiest intersections in downtown, it's about where you'd want to put it to attract the eyeballs (as those ad people say) of people from that nice neighborhood.
This well-to-do neighborhood has a couple of good elementary schools, though one is slightly better than the other. What do we mean by good? What do most people mean by good? The students are mostly white with a few Oriental kids, and not many black and Hispanic kids (not too many of the latter around this particular area, on the census-tract level). That's just the truth of the matter, and even diligent black parents would have to admit that, if none of their friends were listening. Keep in mind, I'm writing about ELEMENTARY schools here first. Middle school starts from 6th grade. Even if your Kindergarten - 5th grader is NOT at a good school, especially toward the beginning thereof, it's not like the disruption and violence are much to speak of. Sure, your kid may pick up bad habits and ways of talking, and he may have a few more stories than if he were at the good elementary school. He may get picked on, even, but the kids are still little enough to where it usually doesn't amount to much but tears. The disruptions from the bad kids are smaller and less worrisome.
The kids at the middle school are bigger, as it goes through 8th grade. Trouble can be more serious. In the neighborhood in question, there is one middle school, formerly known to be one of the best around. It's changing, as the bad neighborhood, pretty close to a ghetto is not even 3/4 mile away from the heart of the good neighborhood. As I drive by often, during the recess times, I notice that there are loads of black kids. Sometimes, the kids are mixed up, sometimes there are 50 white kids grouped up, and sometimes 50 or more black kids. Any white or Oriental parent driving by there with kids in the district is going to get just a little, uhhh, concerned, if I may. The Moms will just get a bad feeling, while the Dads may start counting and calculating.
Nowadays, of course, the information is all out there, on websites like Great Schools and School Digger. The parents will get these numbers and start musing about how life may be for their kids once they get to middle school, maybe next year. That's where the billboard comes in.
The school in question was built long ago, within a couple of years after school integration, along with a whole bunch of others that still play each other in football, basketball, and baseball. They no longer have any de-facto discrimination against certain crowds that their schools were built to get the kids away from. However, the high tuition does the job pretty nicely. The chances that the few high-tuition-paying black parents have real thugs as children is still fairly small. Since they do have a few Non-Asian-Minorities (the ones they don't want) here and there, until this latest billboard, which is more words than photo, every other billboard up there would have one token black kid to show "hey, see, we're a great school, and it has NOTHING, NOTHING, I TELLS YA, to do with what kids go here... NO, NO, NOTHING AT ALL!" (Of course, they can't fit that on the billboards, hence the smiling kids' faces.)
To put this all together, the ad seems focused toward parents in the nice, richer neighborhood that may have kids for whom middle school is coming up, this year, maybe next. Yeah, the two elementary schools are pretty good, though even your bad ones can be tolerable, but hey, have you looked at the middle school they are slated to attend? You may want to think long and hard, look us up, and get some money together, some real money. "Start thinking about middle school." With my new Sailer-induced thinking, it also has that "dog whistle" at a frequency that good parents can hear: "You'd better WISE UP, JANET WEISS!"**
* This is something right up our favorite unz.com blogger Steve Sailer's alley, involving race, schools, and even marketing (his former profession, though he was not an "ad guy" at all).
** Sorry, obscure Rocky Horror Picture Show reference there. Janet Weiss was actually a reasonably-hot Susan Sarandon, going back, well,yeah, QUITE a ways.
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Monty Python's Commie Quiz Show
Posted On: Saturday - May 11th 2019 1:55PM MST
In Topics: Commies Humor
I'd wanted to put a longer, more serious, post up that has solidified in my head. However, the historical ones take a lot outta ya', so I'll just present this fun video.
Video of the Monty Python group of 5 or so British comedians is funnier to me now than at the time. I think I missed so much of the humor somehow, probably too young to get it. One could put of 10 or 20 great scenes from each of 2 of their movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail from 1975 and The Life of Brian from 1979 that are stand-alone humor. Peak Stupidity has already embedded videos from the latter movie here and here, with maybe a coupla others I can't find just now.
This is outta nowhere, with a young Eric Idle, and whoever those other 4, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao T. Tung(?), really are:
I'll get to some more serious, current, and original posts on Monday. Thanks for reading or laughing.
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They (still) shoot congressmen, don't they?
Posted On: Saturday - May 11th 2019 9:29AM MST
In Topics: Commies History US Feral Government Dead/Ex- Presidents
That was some line from some movie that I don't really care to look up, except with the word "horses" where Peak Stupidity placed "congressmen". It still rings true for America just as whatever its point did in the movie, I guess(?). Anyway, I did want to follow up on my promise at the bottom of the 3rd Peak Stupidity post on the Jonestown Massacre of 40 1/2 years ago. (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 of Drinking the Kommie Kool-Aid - 40 years back.) I had written in a footnote under the 3rd part that US Congressman Leo Ryan of California, from the Frisco* Bay area district that "housed" the People's Temple Kommie-Kult, was an interesting character himself.
(Gotta love that 1970's hairstyle on her!)
"This was 1978... it was a different time you understand..."** Really, 40 years ago, the US Feral gov't, along with that of the various States, indeed had a different kind of people. Was it that we had almost twice the representation (one congressman for maybe 60% of the constituents as now based on that barely 200 million population)? I think the quality of Americans themselves was so much better that not only would it randomly result in better men (usually) as representatives versus the modern-day psychopaths, but voters wouldn't fall for the total douche-bags so easily.
What's striking about the biography of Leo Ryan is that we read of a representative of the 1960's - 1970's, pretty representative (get it?), though well left of, I'd say, most congressmen at the time, who spent his time for the benefit of the Californians of his damn district! What a concept! Just think of the people in that office today and what they care about most.
Let me back up just a bit. Leo Ryan, born in 1925, was a submariner in the US Navy, for 3 years, during WWII and a bit after. Nowadays, military veterans are a much smaller subset of the people in high office. You'd think Congressman Ryan would have been one of the conservatives, but, for his time, he was a fairly far-out lefty, as would be expected from that specific part of California. (Southern California, other than in the Hollywood area, had many millions of strong Conservatives back then, hence the election of Ronald Reagan as governor twice, etc.). He was a far-out lefty, but that's for the late '60's and the '70's. Reading through that biography, he was not just some spouter of Social Justice Bullshit - the guy practiced what he preached. As a CA State Assemblyman, he was concerned about education in California after the Watts (S. Cal) riots in 1965, so he became a substitute teacher to see what went on. Colleagues called his method "experiential legislating", and it sure beats running one's mouth with no experience like 90% of the fuckers up in office today (most now were lawyers).
In 1970, Assemblyman Ryan took on a pseudonym (this was a different time, you understand ... there were no cameras/facial-recognition every damn where...), got himself arrested and thrown into Fulsom prison ("Hey, I'm
As a US Congressman, one of Leo Ryan's interests was in reining-in the CIA, trying to put it more under the oversight of Congress with his Hughes-Ryan Amendment (to the "Foreign Assistance Act" of much earlier). I'm sure it was already too late to stop the Deep State from metastasizing, even in 1974, but do you think any congressman of either color-squad gives a damn about this stuff now? (No, Dr. Ron Paul has been out of office most of this decade.)
About the only thing, at least from the Wiki biography, that sounds like today's typical non-constituent-related, typical California-lefty BS, was Leo Ryan's trip to Newfoundland, way on the other side of the continent, to study the killing of the seals. Hey, if you care about seals, you can see them right in the late Congressman Ryan's district, in the Pacific freaking Ocean. I'd like to think otherwise, but that stuff sounds like the modern way of our "representatives" and I imagine Leo Ryan did not pay his own money for this seal-cation.
Let's converge toward the material of the 4 Jonestown posts now, as this brave (for a congressman) man headed down to (at first) Georgetown, Guyana. I know, I know, it sounds like a Rush song, but Leo Ryan had to go serve "the People, of the Temple ...", as along with a decent contingent of them still in his district in San Francisco, there had to be 5, 10 thousand close relatives/friends of the 900-odd Californians in, and trying to get out of, the now-Kommie-Kult work Kamp down in the jungle. Word did not come out via emails, tweets, and facebutt posts, as "it was a different time ... you understand ..."[ENOUGH - Ed]. Would a representative do this now, or just have his favorite General call in airstrikes and then the Army Corp of Engineers to bury it all?
The farther-away plane is the DeHavilland Twin Otter. The one in the foreground looks like a Shrike Commander.
After bucking the Jimmy Carter administration, who seemed to LUV those Kommie-Kultists (1st-lady Rosalyn had met Jim Jones before), Leo Ryan arranged to head down there, finally taking a flight*** with a delegation to Georgetown, the Guyanan capital, on Nov. 14th (of 1978). The group had a hard time making headway, Jim Jones refused to communicate with his group on the radio from the camp 150 miles away. It was 3 days before the small delegation from California and 9 journalists, a coupla Guyanans, totally 15 or so, took off in a Twin Otter to the airstrip at Port Kaituma. The rest of the story is in that 3rd of the 4 Peak Stupidity posts, but also in the Wiki article on the congressman linked-to above.
(Again, I love those '70's sunglasses too.)
I'd written in Part 1 of the series on Jonestown about the lack of perspective of a very young person on the news. I didn't realize how much of a huge deal this was, and I also didn't realize that the shooting of a congressman was not a monthly or yearly, uh, habit. That was my excuse then, as I would not have wished any harm on this lefty (for the time) California representative to the US Congress. Nowadays, I have no such excuse. There are probably a majority of them for whom I wouldn't feel at all bad about, were they riddled with bullet holes in some shithole jungle somewhere. It's a different time .... you understand ...
* I'm not sure if anyone really said "Frisco" even back in the time of Jonestown, other than in the movies.
** OK, I've got more humor off youtube coming, but I'm not sure anything yet has topped the Not-Ken-Burns-narrated 10 minute video on the "Negro American Space Society of Astronauts, NASSA", where this line came from.
*** There was a Day the Music Died-type situation involved here, as Leo Ryan's friend, Congressman Dan Quayle from Indiana (later VP of the US for 4 years with the elder Bush - 89-92) was invited to go, but couldn't make it. I bet he felt later like Waylon Jennings did, who did not get on the single-engine Beech Bonanza with Buddy Holly, the "La Bamba" kid, and "the Big Bopper" that cold night 2 decades earlier in Clear Lake, Iowa. No shooting, of course, just a VFR pilot who though he could scud run and lost control quickly in the clouds.
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"I fell over a burnin' Richard Pryor..."
Posted On: Friday - May 10th 2019 4:09PM MST
In Topics: Humor
From what I've just read, other comedians dub him one of the top stand-up comics of all time, but I'd never really liked Richard Pryor a whole lot. I came upon the video below, which reminded me of Mr. Pryor's setting himself on fire* right around 39 years ago. I apologize for just getting around to blogging about it, as I was in no position to do so in June of 1980. ;-}
A guy by that goes by the name of "Marty McFly" (yeah, I get it), who seems to live in or know the Northridge neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley of southern California where Richard Pryor lived for a long while, wrote an interesting post about the background comedian and specifically the running-down-the-street-on-fire incident that lots of people like myself heard and laughed about.
Well, this version of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire just cracked me up, after a commenter named Reg Caesar posted it in comments under a Steve Sailer article. I was going to go for a Monty Python embed, but that'll have to be tomorrow, along with more serious posts.
Now, who's funnier, the writer of this parody, or Richard Pryor? Sorry, Pryor fans, but I vote for this guy:
I'd completely forgotten that here was another fire incident with Michael Jackson and a Pepsi-Cola commercial (1984). Man, I hate to LOL at this one, because it was completely accidental (special effects explosions went off early) and the man got 2nd and 3rd degree burns. I'll just put it here anyway, due to a hell of a good crack about the both incidents.
This was a great opportunity for both men to give back to their people as they later came together to support the IGNITED NEGRO COLLEGE FUND.
Thank you, thank you ... I'll be here
* We'd always heard accidentally via free-basing cocaine (I honestly don't know what that means, which is a good thing). However, from my reading just now, he WAS doing cocaine, but he wanted to end his life and purposefully poured 150-proof (75% alcohol) rum over himself like a drunk Buddhist monk - or this fool. I just remember hearing that his hair was on fire, as funny as that was (yeah, sometimes he was funny), but, no, his polyester suit, soaked with rum, burned him pretty badly. As I wrote in the self-immolation post linked-to just above, that's about the most painful thing there is.
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[UPDATED 5/13:] I just had to add a line from unz commenter "AceDuece" about a Michael Jackson hair-on-fire incident. LOL, Indeed!
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"At least he made the trains run on time!"
Posted On: Friday - May 10th 2019 1:52PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Race/Genetics World Political Stupidity
That's what the supporters of Italian WWII-era Fascist Benito Mussolini would say about him. Now, over in France, they need a leader (doesn't specifically have to be a Fascist) to make the trains even stop at the stations!
(Hey, that's a tweet. Did I just make a tweet then? I am SO proud of myself!)
To add to Peak Stupidity's post back on Tuesday, Italian Media "Property" roughed up by ungracious guests of the country, we wanted to explain the part of the story regarding what this lady was in this no-go/no-stop zone reporting on to begin with. It has to do with thousands to millions of what they call "migrants" in Europe. I suppose they were invited, after all, by some
It's the usual immigration stupidity story here, so rather than discuss the same stupidity as has been been covered quite a bit here, I'll lead this post in a somewhat different direction. That is, do any readers remember talking to Europeans 25, maybe 30 or 40 years ago? You may or may not have gotten into any discussion about American race relations, but European people I talked to back then did not understand what America has gone through with this. I don't blame them - they wouldn't know with no experience. If you wanted to discuss history, no, Europeans knew (and know) even less about the causes of the War of Northern Aggression and that sort of thing than most Americans do. Hey, that's to be expected, no problem.
What would bug me is the arrogant attitude that many had about things that they could not understand. American white people had put up with a lot and tried a lot of things to help, and to get along with, black people over the last 50, but arguably 165, years. Not much has worked. Yet, you'd hear from English, French, or German visitors (or talk to them on that trip overseas) that "your country is great, but what's the deal with all that racism stuff?" "Why do you have all those deplorable racists treating black people so mean?" It came often in with the English condescension (because, just with that accent, they SOUND smarter!), the French snootyness (nose in the air - "you ave to treat zeeez people nicer, like we would in Fronce") or the German air of authority ("We haff no Nazis now. You are zee racists.)
I kind of wonder what some of these, now middle-aged, volks haff to ... [Stop that! - Ed] say about the situation, now that they have a large unassimilable crowd of un-like people in their midst. Would they think back to their words of yesteryear and understand they were wrong? Maybe they would tell me that their situation is different, that these Moslems and blacks in Europe are just not assimilated yet, but in America we are still just racists, sticking to the narrative. I don't know, but it's another case of schadenfreude for me, as some of them must be wondering if their situation matches large portions of American cities, and I'd like to head over there just for a quick "I told you so".
At least here in America, no matter how bad the violence and destruction of society has been, the trains still will stop at all the stations! It may be simply a matter of lots of places where trains stop being places in which the non-violent Americans may be packing concealable .380s*.
* New York City, with the biggest (and oldest) of the subway systems in America is a "gun-free" zone for anyone not a criminal or politician. That doesn't stop everybody, such as an old hero of mine, Mr. Bernie Goetz.
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Peak Lunacy or Peak Stupidity?
Posted On: Wednesday - May 8th 2019 6:33PM MST
In Topics: Music Movies
Which will come first? Of course, this very site is your complete resource for all things stupid, so we will lean toward Peak Stupidity, to align with our business model.
However, just staying on the internet and reading the daily stupidity here in America makes me think that the lunacy may indeed be peaking along with it. The root "lune" is from Latin, meaning something to do with that moon up there, which is known to bring out the crazies when full. I always liked the scenes in Cher's/Nicholas Cage's 1987 movie Moonstruck with the talk about the full moon. (Yeah, it's a chick-flick, but a favorite nonetheless, even with the lunatic Cher in it.)
Pink Floyd is not really in with the style of Peak Stupidity's normal music, but Brain Damage/Eclipse, which I always thought was called Dark Side of the Moon (till just now!), written way back in 1973, fits these current times pretty well. What with the outsourcing of the funny farms, this stuff hits even closer to home.
Dark Side of the Moon was one of those "concept albums", as most by this unusual rock band were. Back when there was this thing called "the charts", this album remained in the top 100 of the rock album charts for something like half a decade(?)!
The lunatic is in the hall.
The lunatics are in my hall.
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor,
and every day the paper boy brings more
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon,
and if there is no room upon the hill.
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too,
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear,
you shout and no one seems to hear.
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes,
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
Pretty much, that's present-day America, minus the paper boy. Posting will have to be fairly light again through the weekend.
Pink Floyd:
David Gilmour – vocals, guitars, synthesizers
Nick Mason – drums, percussion, tape effects
Richard Wright – organ, piano, electric piano, vocals
Roger Waters – bass guitar, vocals, tape effects
PS: There is no dark side of the moon, as this body rotates at the same rate as its revolution around the Earth, ~ 28 days. There is a Far Side though, 90% of which could never be seen by man, until American and Russian space probes photographed it in the mid-1960's.
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Italian Media "Property" roughed up by ungracious guests of the country
Posted On: Tuesday - May 7th 2019 6:28PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Media Stupidity World Political Stupidity
Breitbart today posted this story, reporting that:
An Italian TV reporter and her cameraman were assaulted during a live broadcast whilst covering the living conditions of African migrants hoping to break into northern Europe in search of higher welfare payments.Explain to me again, Lyin' Press, why there is anything of benefit for the people of Europe for taking in people like this? I had though Chairman Merkel had explained this to us, but the reasoning of that evil Commie broad eludes me yet again.
What this reporter was doing at this no-go-zone subway station* was reporting on the mess there from these newcomer "Italians", and that would be another good post for tomorrow, with some points that VDare (especially writer Brenda Walker, on the human factors side) has been pointing out for years. The lady pictured above got roughed up by the unwelcoming and ungrateful newcomers, pissed off about not enough welfare, you know, after all they've paid in over the years and stuff.
Just after the reporter told viewers that she and her team “don’t want to disturb [the migrants] further”, the camera was visibly shaken and appeared to have been turned on its side, causing Parisella to alert the Matrix host Nicola Porro that her party was under attack.I hate to say it, but the Lyin' Press really needs some of this treatment. What else will it take for them to quit being the sackhangers of the Globalists who want to eliminate the European and traditional American peoples?
Following Porro’s warning to the TV journalist to “get out of there”, Parisella could be heard running from the station before the assailants caught up with her.
“What do you want? You’re crazy!” she said, and emitted screams of terror.
“Oh God, Francesca, get out of there,” said Porro, before instructing the Matrix producer to alert police to the attack.
From the Matrix studio a few minutes later, the presenter explained that “Francesca is upset but well. [Assailants] destroyed the camera and beat up the cameraman ..."
According to local media, a 37-year-old man hailing from the Ivory Coast has been detained in connection with the attack. The alleged aggressor was known to police for a list of crimes including domestic violence and was ordered by the prefect of Rome last September to be deported.Yeah, WTF is new? Nobody seems to follow those deportation orders anymore. It's not much different from getting a parking ticket, I suppose. They're not going to come looking for you unless you kill a few people or cut the heads off of the parking meters, in the latter case.
* I mean NO-STOP, really, as the "Metro" train drivers say it's not safe to stop there. That is amazing! They may as well fill in the whole platform portion with fill dirt, so you don't have to clean it.
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Healthcare Billing via Rectal Extraction - Part 2
Posted On: Tuesday - May 7th 2019 10:05AM MST
In Topics: Healthcare Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity Scams
(continued from Part 1.)
Let me back on up here. The 1st incident of the healthcare billing via rectal extraction was in a way even more vexing, due to the monetary amount, yet more benign-seeming afterwards. We made a deal with a hospital for delivery of a baby (not the Doc's fees, mind you, but just the delivery room, baby and Mom care for 2 days, etc) for over $3,000 to be paid ahead of time. We paid them. Our kid was born, we stayed till the last coupla' hours, and we went home. Deal? Deal!
Two weeks later a bill for also about an order-of-magnitude higher - as I recall, about $23,000 dollars itemized to the penny - came in the mail. OK, that was about 7 X, plus we'd already paid that first amount. I was beyond livid, thinking that these jokers had me believing the whole thing was 3,000-odd bucks, but maybe I'd missed some fine print! This stuff WAS itemized, including all the stuff that was supposedly already paid for before the birth. I had some very bad thoughts at this point, involving burning shit down and so forth. My anger was enough to where I simply tried to forget the whole thing for about a week. Then, I went as far as to get a friend to record a conversation with them with questions about this deal of theirs, as if his wife were about to have a baby too. The deal they told him was exactly as it was explained to me. Then I called the people finally.
"Oh, no, you can forget that bill. The computer just sends that automatically." Fuckin' bloody hell, lady - you call yourselves "health professionals" and you then piss people off enough to be in the mood to come to the office and beat the shit of your whole group?! How's that on the diastolic pressure, bitches? What is wrong with people? I don't care what a computer did, someone made or let it do that. Please see Send in your payment - STAT! (more doctor stories) for a story of my chewing out a Radiologist, at his hospital, on the phone. Yes, I'm dating myself, as that was back when you could get a live person on the other end of a phone and, indeed, figuratively rip him a new one. It didn't even involve false billing, but just a nasty bill that was not warranted, seeing as how it was the first one from the guy.
Now, back to the current case, 1st letter, that 12 large or so was just told to me upon my call-back to be what I owed them, period, no explanation necessary. "We'll discuss your case in a meeting" I was told near the end of the conversation. "No, there's nothing to discuss. I paid my bill that day, beforehand, and I don't owe anything!" See, same thing: I was afraid there'd been some fine print that the nice lady a few weeks back made an effort not to tell me about.
Well, come the 2nd letter, saying that my charity case (WTF?!) had been turned down, so sorry, I was even more angry on the phone. The lady was pretty obstinate about the whole rectally-extracted amount of money and the "Fuck you, pay me!" bit. That's what brought out the L-word. As I explained that possibly a lawyer would be necessary to sort this out, things quickly morphed somehow into a whole different conversation. "Oh, that amount is an auto-generated thing." "What do you mean? I'm not paying any money!" "Oh, no sir, it was just auto-generated - you don't need to pay that."
First of all, is that going to be the new "dog ate my homework" excuse for the 21st century (as dogs really can't eat our auto-generated homework anymore)? "No, no, sorry, you got upset, that big-ass bill was just auto-generated." "No, sir, I know you were told that you owed $50,000 for the neurologist, proctologist, endocrinologist, and 2 aspirin that showed up while you were sleeping* and are slightly upset about this sudden charge. It was just auto-generated, so calm the fuck down, Sir."
OK, finally, as to my suspicions of a real scam here, I thought later: Now wait, do they just associate with hospitals and doctors' offices, rectally-extract** a large number, "auto-generate" a letter, and then just hope that they fool 1 in 10, even just 1 in 50 patients? "Oh, I'd better get on the payment plan" (for this number that came from I-don't-know-where). People are indeed scared to have their credit ratings lowered, as they live on debt now. "Oh, yeah, we can probably do $150/month, though it may go up slightly next year. It'll be OK, Sir."
Possibly a big fraction of recipients of these auto-generations just throw out the mail, possibly lose some sleep, and just figure they don't want to hear about it. Others call up and raise hell. When things get nasty and the L-word comes up, handling of this is a simple as "oh, you can ignore this letter. No, it was just auto-generated." Now, the recipient is so damn glad, he thanks the scammer profusely on the phone, throws out this paperwork, has a few beers to celebrate his relief, and never thinks anymore of it.
It's good work if you can get it. Some of us may investigate some more. I happen to know the Doctor well and I remain pissed off, though at a much lower intensity. I really want to know who caused this computer somewhere to send me a letter saying I owe 12 grand. That's the guy I'm looking for.
* Again, please read that - humorous, I promise you - other Doctor post.
** In case you haven't caught on to Peak Stupidity humor here, that means pulling numbers out of one's ass, or anal cavity in the less-vernacular.
Comments (2)
Modern Auto Stupidity
Posted On: Monday - May 6th 2019 6:34PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Music Cars Curmudgeonry
(The picture here is from a complaint about windows not rolling all the way down,
another valid criticism.)
Cars today are not built very much for "cool" looks or fun of any kind. People just don't want that stuff anymore, especially the young people. That's fair enough, as good gas mileage and reliability are more worthy goals, IMO. Reliability HAS gone WAY up since the 1970's and gas mileage increases would have been a lot higher but for the new heavy mandated safety features.
Fine, but could you not have made these new designs for riding with the windows down, occasionally ... ever? I know that people are spoiled and they want the heat at 73 F on this side, A/C for the passenger, both want their asses heated up, the kid in the back wants it cooler and his DVD turned up ... etc. Electronics can do a whole lot now, until ... well, around the time the warranty expires, and all kinds of troubleshooting and workarounds must be done. You should have sold it by then!
Anyway, it's just that these modern cars must have been tested in the wind tunnels or on the road with windows up ONLY. The kids really wanted the windows down on this long trip, and they can do it with a switch push rather than a crank. Man, the car is NOT made for it, especially for the back ones being down. It was OK at 30 mph, but once near 60 mph, the turbulence became kind of intense. It was a buffeting to the point where I felt like I was under a sudden depressurization in the SR-71. Bang, bang, with a period of about a second or two, it went, ... "we're breaking up, Houston ..." The kids could not hear us tell them to "crank" the windows back up with the effect of this buffeting in all our ears, probably eventually to induce nausea and headaches. Oh, you can do it from the front. Don't panic! Find those switches before tunnel vision sets in!
Even riding with the front windows down above 50 mph has a similar effect, though of slightly lesser intensity. Hey, can't I just take in some fresh air and hear better? (The better hearing makes it much safer driving with windows down too, unless you follow gravel trucks!) What the heck are you supposed to do once you finish your banana anyway?*
It's about the side-mirrors, isn't it? Those things are 4 or 5 times bigger in area than they used to be on those 1980's cars. They've got 2 motors, a defogger, a built in signal light, a glued-on super-convex mirror for more visibility ... geeze, don't break one of these - you're in for $200 USED now. Sure, you can see more in 'em, and you need to because otherwise visibility through the narrow windows sucks in the new cars. Anyway, I believe those big-ass mirrors are what causes the turbulence when windows are down, but the manufacturers don't worry about it.
What a world it is now! Things are built for comfort and (what they think is) for safety, but not for any fun.
Johnny Cougar, from his melon camp somewhere in Southern Indiana, complained about it, but I think riding in the rumble seat would be a lot more fun than being cooped up in the modern boxy constrained contraptions of today.
"I could have a nervous breakdown, but I don't believe in shrinks.
I should be drunker than a monkey, but I don't like to drink ..."
It's just plain old rock-&-roll from Mr. Cougar's mid-80's album Scarecrow, which was chock full of great songs. As for car songs, Peak Stupidity has already featured Rush's Red Barchetta, Paul McCartney and Wings' Helen Wheels, and Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.
* I think it would be interesting - annoying, but interesting - to get pulled over for throwing something organic out the window. Is throwing an apple core out into the woods littering? "How so, your honor?" (Course, the cop can just lie about it, if the county needs the money that bad ...)
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[UPDATED 5/7 Afternoon:] Added opinion on mirrors.
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Comments (12)
Healthcare Billing via Rectal Extraction - Part 1
Posted On: Monday - May 6th 2019 11:37AM MST
In Topics: Healthcare Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity Scams
Here is the long-awaited post (Enjoyed your weekend? Good. Prepare to be pissed.) alluded to in the previous post last Thursday that had raised my blood pressure bigly.
Peak Stupidity has not had a post about HealthCare Stupidity in quite some time, but this one just cropped up. It's the 2nd time I've been through this simply outrageous form of stupidity, and unfortunately probably won't be the last. Lest the more Socialist-inclined reader start off right away in retort to this post with "See?! It's that Capitalism! These people don't care about you. The GOVERNMENT needs to run Healthcare, as they will do everything right and fairly, like in, uhh, with Affirmative Action, Taxes, all that shit ... Oh, but we like to use the term "Single Payer" as not to raise peoples' blood pressure and all as we eeeaase into the wonderful new system", let me pre-emtively let you know how full of shit this idea is.
In America, we have nothing resembling Capitalism and free markets in the Healthcare "Industry". Yes, we did 60 years ago, and yes, China is a whole lot closer than we are right now (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and a Postscript of Peak Stupidity's award-winning [Here's your plaque, bitch! - Ed.] series on healthcare in China.) What we have here is government control, via Medicare, Medicaid, Øb☭macare, and other government regulation, that has created a huge bureaucracy with an arcane, unfathomable, and asinine system of how medical care is charged and billed. Let me put it this way: A doctor friend has 3 offices with 50 +/- a couple of employees and 11, yes ELEVEN of them are working in billing. That's 20% of the workforce in this non-medically-servicing portion of the business just to wade through the complete bullshit and get the doctors, nurses, and techs paid, and to keep the business running.
OK, now what happened the other day to piss me off enough to make me not fit for blogging (and that takes a lot!) was the receipt of a 2nd letter of 2 so far discussing a large amount of money - something like $12,000 dollars, but exact to the penny - due for a procedure that I'd already paid for. No, I did not need to use insurance, and (Thank the Lord) this was not for a problem, but just a routine every-few-year thing that cost money. I discussed it with the nice billing lady, and the fee was in the right ballpark for what I had to get done. Things had to drag on for a few hours, just the way it worked, there were 4 people (none doctors, but professionals none-the-less) involved, so the ~ $1,500 fee was reasonable. I signed on the line, wrote a check, ipso facto, there's your money, I'm done, see ya!
That was all fine until a few weeks later when I got the 1-order-of-magnitude larger bill, with no specific itemization, just "hey, I pulled this number out of my ass, now, FUCK YOU, PAY ME!" I made the 2nd call, based on a 2nd letter, to this billing company on Friday, in which I invoked the L-word. No, it's neither a four-letter word nor a racial slur. It's much worse than that - I used the word "LAWYER". Things kind of changed after that with my and the nice customer service representative's relationship.
OK, I have not gotten through the whole story in a reasonable amount of time here. This is pretty interesting stuff, though, because now I am under the impression that this may have been a true scam, that is, not a scam like all government/crony-capitalist/Big-Biz con-jobs, but an actual unapproved scam that could be both clever and lucrative. I will expound on that possibility, along with filling in the rest of this story, in Part 2.
This is the modus operandi (they like to use Latin still in the medical field, just to screw with people) of Current-Year billing departments. First, there's the rectal extraction of a large random number, denominated in US dollars. Then, there's the computer-generated* letter with no itemization, from the nice customer service representative named Pauli:
"Don't know how you coulda' had a hysterectomy without ever having a uterus to begin with? Fuck you, pay me! Wondering what the charges are for, since you already paid in full for the ingrown toenail? Fuck you, pay me! You say you've never heard of a Dr. Gupta? Fuck you, pay me veddy much!"
* More on this in Part 2 - "The Peak Stupidity Ultimatum".
Comments (4)
Minor Economic Points / Slow rest-o-week
Posted On: Thursday - May 2nd 2019 3:24PM MST
In Topics: Economics US Feral Government Taxes
I had something in my personal/financial life today that raised my blood pressure so high and rapidly that a blog post out of it is a given! However, I was more in the mood to settle the matter on the phone than write the post, so it'll be forthcoming. There may be no more posting for the rest of the week after this one due to business (busyness?), so this short piece of additions to 2 previous posts will be it for a bit.
Let me put this graph up that I found I'd saved but not included in the post About the Public and Private "Sectors" of about a month back:
I meant to include this graph along with writing I'd completely forgotten to include about pay in the private "sector" vs. the public one (i.e. - see that post - the actual economic SOURCE vs. the economic SINK). You have to go back to before the beginning date of this graph, obviously, which is the year 1999 A.D. to get to the time many remember when there was a trade-off between government jobs vs private jobs. The deal back then was that the real economy paid better because it could, while the gov't jobs paid low but were stable. Yeah, Government DOES NOT DOWNSIZE. That's not all, as it's damn hard to get fired from a job in the government. You have to work very hard at being incompetent - just being an ordinary deadbeat WILL NOT CUT IT.
Therefore, there was that trade-off, and if there were to be some of these UnConstitutional positions to begin with, at least we could poke fun at these low-paid deadbeats. It sure looks like a different story now, as America becomes pretty much as Socialist as the next country.
The 2nd quicker economic point I wanted to make today is on Federal Income Taxes, so you can refer back to Peak Stupidity's Comparison of '15/17 US Government Budgets from tax day, ~ 2 weeks back or just look at the repeated pie chart below:
Just look at the one little slice of spending pie (tastes like mint cheesecake, with all that green) that says 6% for "net interest on the debt". Yes, that 6% is the same number (rounded to the nearest 1 percentage point) as for 2015. No, that's not holding the line or anything like that. That 6% is payments on a number right around $22,000,000,000,000 (22 TRILLION bucks) vs. 2015's 6% of only $20,000,000,000,000 (20 TRILLION bucks). It's 6% of a higher spending number, $3.982 Trillion in '17 vs. 6% of $3.688 Trillion in '15. Therefore, spending (getting out of ass-backwards Wall Street Journal mode now) on interest has gone up from $221 Billion to $240 Billion. These are rounded just due to the imprecision inherent in that 6% (in fact still more precise than we really know). That doesn't seem too bad, as it's only an 8 1/2 % increase. It's near the same, but slightly lower than the increase of the total debt by 10%.
What does that mean? It means the US Gov't is still paying those LOW, LOW interest rates of between 1.0% and 1.1%. Man, I wish I could get a loan for 1.0 to 1.1%! I'd even pay an origination fee for cheap money like that. What would happen if interest rates were let to rise to the natural cost of money right now, say 6%. I'll leave that answer to the reader, as the math is trivial, as our Calcuseless professor used to say. If you like living in solvent countries, uh, maybe you should not do this math until after you've digested your suppers.
Good evening, readers! More Stupidity will appear first-o-the-bidness-week.
Comments (1)
"My My, Hey, Hey ..."
Posted On: Wednesday - May 1st 2019 7:45PM MST
In Topics: Lefty MegaStupidity Music
"... that homeless man is here to stay ...."
"Is this the story of Johnny Rotten ....?"
("Johnny Rotten! ... Rotten Johnny!")
A few days back, Zerohedge posted Wealthy Elites Freak Out As Homeless Hordes Take Over West Coast Neighborhoods. In this story, the rich man of the establishment with the complaints (don't they all?!) is none other than former punk rocker of the Sex Pistols, one Johnny Rotten.
No city on the west coast has a bigger problem with homelessness than L.A. does, and many in the homeless population enjoy camping out on the beautiful beaches in the L.A. area at night.Heh! Heh, heh, heh, heh! [/Butthead] Yeah, the Germans have some good, multi-syllablical words for stuff like this ... not hypocrisy, no, we all have a lot of that, so we need that word, but it's like Schadenfreude on Steroids, SchadenFreudenRoid perhaps? Yeah, it makes me feel good that Johnny Rotten is stressed out about homeless people on his property on the beaches of Los Angeles. It's not just that, though ... let me pinpoint it. It makes me want to stick a finger in his face and say "Hey, Rotten, I must have missed your Sex Pistols song about property rights and the Constitution! Haha, yeah, man, young people or the downtrodden homeless should be able to go anywhere they want, right? Screw the man! I remember you young blokes knew everything and hated the establishment. You're the man, now Johnny Rotten, and I'm gonna go piss all over your front walk! Right!"
But of course many of the elite that paid millions of dollars for beachfront property are not too thrilled about this. Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten was a key symbol of anti-establishment rebellion in the 1970s, but now he is freaking out because homeless people are making life very difficult for him and his wife in Venice Beach, and what he recently told Newsweek’s Paula Froelich is making headlines all over the nation…
He told her the homeless situation in his swanky LA neighborhood is so bad that thieves are tearing the bars from the windows of his multimillion-dollar home, lobbing bricks, setting up unsightly tent cities and littering the beach with syringes.
“A couple of weeks ago I had a problem,” the former punk prince opined. “They came over the gate and put their tent inside, right in front of the front door. It’s like . . . the audacity. And if you complain, what are you? Oh, one of the establishment elite? No, I’m a bloke that’s worked hard for his money and I expect to be able to use my own front door.”
Yeah, I've got SchadenFreudenRoid from this news item tonight. I would also like to ask Mr. Rotten, if Neil Young was right, when he said "it's better to burn out, then to fade away ... My, My, Hey, Hey!"
This is the acoustic song, the 1st cut on Neil Young's and his band Crazy Horse's great 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps, fully-entitled My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue), while the same album ends with the high-distortion-electric-guitar number Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black). I hope that doesn't confuse anybody.
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