Trump v Leticia - Round 2
Posted On: Thursday - April 17th 2025 1:13PM MST
In Topics: Trump US Feral Government Race/Genetics Legal Stupidity
The fatassed (hey, we're just quoting original sources here) Leticia James, Attorney General of New York, is just one of the handful of minions of the ctrl-left that tasked themselves with conducting lawfare against candidate Donald Trump. I have to say here again that Mr. Trump's persistence among all of these distractions of his time, threats to his finances, and threats to his existence as a free man over that long period (not to mention nearly getting shot dead) is very impressive.
For Donald Trump, everything is personal. Sometimes that becomes more important to him than, well, America. However, I can't really blame him for wanting to exact legally-justified (or not!) revenge against this evil fatassed Leticia James. More so, Trump's persecution has come from (she's not the only one) vicious and dull Black! women playing legal eagles in positions designed for intelligent, decent White men, upping the stupidity level and making it that much more humiliating. (Even without this sort, you can get trouble - it IS New York, after all.)
It so happens that, besides our agreeing with the idea of bringing the ctrl-left Totalitarians who've ruled outside the law for the last 4 years to revengeful justice (see The World Turned Upside Down), Peak Stupidity takes the Leticia James lawfare personally too, on behalf of our friends at VDare. For them, it was very personal - when one Totalitarian fatass from New York (where you'd mistakenly thought you'd always see rule-of-law) takes down your whole patriotic Foundation out of West Virginia based on NO CHARGES, only continual harassment by tax-payer-funded lawyers, it's been VERY, VERY personal.*
So, even though President Trump hasn't thought to consider VDare's travails**, any legal action his administration can take against this evil broad will be beneficial to VDare as well. For Trump, it's about revenge and justice, while for VDare it'd be about their ability to start the Foundation and website back up now when we need it more than ever... yeah, and justice in a a cosmic but not physical sense. It's not like they're be repaid their money, their lost years, and their loss of readership. Call it Social Justice for VDare!
Regarding the first benefit for VDare, were Leticia to be put out to pasture, that Mr. Brimelow*** and his organization may very well have indirectly gotten Trump to where he is and the invasion into the spotlight 10 years back is great, but we could use VDare now for news on all things immigration, now that there's a lot to be excited about. (/Fingers crossed]
Therefore, the following story of uncovered malfeasance, of all things ALSO in the real estate business, is very good news. The Gateway Pundit has the story, without even a lot of hype within - yeah BREAKING!], whatever - here: BREAKING: Trump Administration Criminally Refers NY AG Letitia James to Justice Department for Mortgage Fraud as First Reported on The Gateway Pundit. For a change, rather than a bunch of tweets and counts of LIKES therein, GP has some very good plain simple evidence of Miss
Additionally, ZeroHedge has the story too: Bye Letitia? Criminal Referral Filed Against NY AG Over Real Estate Fraud Accusation. Gateway Pundit commenters are pretty good, but ZH commenters are better.
This is a very nice development, though the discovery of cheating by a Sistah in power is almost expected nowadays. All the excitement may be for nothing if Trump fails to follow through, as is often the case - he's pretty motivated, but then, what about this Attorney General Pam Blondie? (I'm not to enthused about some of the women, non-sexually, that is... that's another post.)
I hope Peak Stupidity readers will not assume something here, that is that we feel this story is very important in the big scheme of things (except re: VDare). There should be lots of people getting visited and dragged off by the FBI and arrested already, starting with Allie-Hondro Mayorkas, Merrick Garland, and the list is endless. I haven't seen this happening. It needs to! Then again, the personal comes first all too often with Donald Trump.
Still, all else failing, I'd really like to see a Round-2 knockout by The Donald, putting Leticia James on the mat with dead eyes, wait, she's already like that... and drooling blood. Trump likes the boxing and the TV, so he'd like our metaphor here ...
* Peak Stupidity has written about this multiple times. Of course, VDare had, for the multi-year period all that was going on until they had to cease operations. If you want to know more, see Tucker Carlson's interview of Lydia Brimelow and our review of it.
** It's possible that he does know of this story but is not courageous enough or focussed enough - probably the latter, and what was the first thing again?... to bring it up. It seems like it would have helped his fight against this lawfare to bring up the VDare case with, again, NO CHARGES.
*** BTW, commenter E.H. Hail has informed us here that Peter Brimelow has been writing on this substack site. I see no comments - as with Alarmist's substack site, I've got to work on this. Thanks, Mr. Hail.
Comments (7)
Praise for Steve Sailer
Posted On: Wednesday - April 16th 2025 6:52PM MST
In Topics: Feminism Pundits
Now THERE's a concise, honest, and (somewhat?) entertaining headline!
In our over 8 years of blogging, Peak Stupidity has discussed the writings of, and the opinions of, pundit Steve Sailer far more than of any other pundit. It got to the point early on where we felt obligated to explain to readers that No, we don't worship Steve Sailer. We were, errrr, borrowing, that's the ticket, a lot of material around that time. To excuse that behavior at the time, I will note that reading the NY Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic as Mr. Sailer does still, to point out the stupidity therein would feel creepy for me. I've made other people feel creepy - no problem, it's a thing now - but being a NY Times reader, no, just too creepy... I couldn't live with myself. So... we got a lot of material from him.
It's been great reading Steve Sailer's writing over the years on The Unz Review. (Ron Unz keeps all the archives there, and he's kindly created threads at slightly variable intervals for us former commenters to keep arguing.) Mr. Sailer had definitely moved on, as we noted 9 months back he was in the process of doing. I've given my reasons (time spent and curmudgeonry regarding the format) for not joining up on the SteveSailer.net substack site. However, I read the posts that interest me, especially when there is no paywall.
Why? I've had a few more differences with this pundit than I used to, agreeing with him 90-95% of the time rather than 99%, as I used to. Most importantly I've considered whether this time in American history is no longer the time for a peacetime consigliere?
OK, again, Why? Because he's really a great writer. His writing is entertaining while at the same time being as full of truth as Mr. Sailer allows himself in this time in his life. By that I mean he still writes truthfully about issues that most pundits who worry more about their status will avoid. IMO, Mr. Sailer has trying to fit in a little more to get more young readers to understand these truths without turning them off.
That graphic above is at the top of this recent SteveSailer.net post. This is his thing, seeing and writing entertainingly but also informatively (often with statistics) to show the hypocrisy and stupidity of one of his many well-noticed social goings-on in America. (His book Noticing has a great assortment of these.) To start off, this "wait until paragraph 17 for the actual facts" description of the NY Times is one of his many themes:
Here’s a classic upside down New York Times article that puts the interesting facts way down toward the bottom with practically indecipherable terseness about the cause of the catastrophe after dozens of paragraphs of human interest trivia about the garbagemen’s strike in Birmingham, UK:Garbage Men are called Bin Men in England.
Why is there a garbage strike in Birmingham?(OK, paragraph 24 this time.) Most of the rest of the post is excerpts from the BBC and then the actual story out of some tweeter. Mr. Sailer again:
The answer is actually quite interesting — greedy feminist dogma run amok in Labour-run Britain — but NYT subscribers don’t want to hear that. It gives them Bad Feelz.
So, the most glancing reference to the cause of this disgusting situation is left unmentioned until this masterfully boring 24th paragraph:
You see, bin men, who are mostly men, were paid more by the city than people who held more genteel jobs, which are filled mostly by women, that didn’t involve lifting stinking heavy stuff. That’s supply and demand.The snark is excellent. He's like that a lot.
But in a breakthrough in feminist theory, a judge determined that women in nice jobs should get paid as much as men doing nasty jobs, because women are Good and men are Bad. Or something.
So, Feminism has backfired in Birmingham, England, as (per Lara Brown's tweet-string): Rubbish is piled high, ... Yeah, I mean, the NY Times can be over an inch thick on Sundays, so you get a few hundred copies and ... yeah... I agree it IS piled high. Now, see, Steve Sailer could have done a better job with that joke, is what I'm saying.
This is just one post out of many I enjoy. Unfortunately, a look at the recent posts on Mr Sailer's site isn't a good sample. Golf? Sorry, knock yourself out writing, but it's not for me. Basketball is not either, but I realize there is a bigger point that he's making in these ones on his classic topic, Human Bio-Diversity*. Then, there are a couple of posts in retort to on-again/off-again Sailer nemesis Mathew Yglesias. They aren't so entertaining, because I can tell Mr. Sailer has really gotten pissed at this guy, who is throwing Mr. Sailer under the bus, best some cuck pundit can heave him, in order to virtue-signal rather than tell the simple truth. This is from a guy who borrows Mr. Sailer's material and takes it only as far as is is socially acceptable.
As a very honest guy**, Steve Sailer detests people, whether it's Matt Yglesias or Lyin' Press "journalists" who purposely miss the real story. OTOH, as we wrote recently, SO WHAT, if you're right!
Keep on truckin' Steve! I hope you gather 100's of thousands of reader, no, millions, on your substack site, and get 10% of them to subscribe.
* Believe it or not, I'd read his old site for about a year before I figured out what "HBD" meant, as many times as it was written back then.
** About the only time I remember Steve Sailer not being quite honest with his commenters is during that Kung Flu Panic time. Though I didn't agree with his short-lived but serious pro-Panic stance, that wasn't dishonesty. That's not it. What someone brought up yesterday is that bit about "You don't want to take the jab because you're scared of needles." Yes, I read that from him a few times. IMO, he was pissed off that he had unruly commenters that could be seen as "conspiracy theorists" and even worse, low brow. He had to know we weren't avoiding the jab due to the ouchies from the needles.
Comments (4)
Peak Stupidity Geophysical Research Letter - Sea Ice Albedo
Posted On: Monday - April 14th 2025 7:51PM MST
In Topics: Global Climate Stupidity Science
Peak Stupidity is no scientific journal, so we refer not to our post itself here but to a recent short paper ("letter") in Geophysical Research Letters pointed out by commenter Alarmist under one of our recent posts.* I don't claim to understand the methods within the paper. However, I can read this sort of thing and at least see what kind of science these people are up to.
In Biases in Climate Model Global Warming Trends Related to Deficiencies in Southern Ocean Sea Ice Evolution Over Recent Decades, climate scientists H. Mutton** and T. Andrews noted "deficiencies" in various climate models. These discrepancies, as I'd call them, have to do with the actual versus predicted extent of Antarctic sea ice. Different surfaces on the Earth, or any body, say, plowed soil, forest, rock, ice, etc. reflect energy by different amounts. Ice obviously reflects a lot. The term used in Astronomy is "albedo" (al-bee'-doh).
Well, OK, since the albedo of all areas of the Earth, these areas themselves changing due to changes in the environment, must be part of a model of the Earth's climate, such a model must predict the current and future states of such surfaces. These researchers have found that the prediction of sea ice extent in the Antarctic is not just wrong but backwards. First line from the Abstract (Intro.):
Between 1985 and 2014 observations show an expansion of Southern Ocean sea-ice. This phenomena is not simulated in CMIP6 Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs). Here we quantify the impact of this discrepancy on radiative feedback and simulated global temperature trends.One may note from reading or from a perusal of the paper's Table 1 that 5 different mathematical models of the climate are being studied, errr, really, screwed-with, here. "CMIP6" is one of them, but I'm sure there are thousands outside of the realm of this work.
Sea ice obviously has a high albedo, so if it's increasing in that region rather than decreasing, as predicted by THESE MODELS, then the models must be changed. I'll make my basic points here shortly, but let me excerpt a few parts to show the tone of this paper. There's no science/engineering-style observational data of measured different ice albedos, convection and radiative heat transfer equations, energy balances, etc. here. It's all about the various and sundry factors, "global ensemble means", "regressions", "feedback forcing functions", etc. Now, I can see that the math here is originally based on thermodynamics and heat transfer, but what you read here is playing with math. Of course, it all ends up as math in the models, but, I'll summarize the problems... OK, to get a taste of this:
Using this relationship between and , for each model we apply three values of to demonstrate the impact of Southern Ocean feedback biases on the estimated . First, the estimated from the historical ensemble mean, second, a modified where we replace the Southern Ocean (55–78°S) with values from the amip-piForcing ensemble mean, and third, a modified where we replace the Southern Ocean with values from the amip-piForcing ensemble mean. These values of and the associated are indicated for each model as a dot, vertical marker, and an arrowhead respectively in Figure 3d and are recorded in Table 1. Here the Southern Ocean substitution has been performed for and to capture both the direct impact of the sea ice biases through surface albedo changes as well as any other related local processes such as changing clouds (Cesana et al., 2025).Sorry, the paper's Greek letters, sub-, and superscripts don't show up here, and I'm not up for it - you can read it better there if you care. I have points to make that's not about the details.
The zonal mean of and over the Southern Hemisphere higher latitudes is shown in Figures 3b and 3c respectively, where black vertical lines indicate the region over which the amip-piForcing values have been substituted when modifying the historical . In Figure 3b observed values of have also been included, using observed values of and and taking from the ensemble mean of all CMIP6 models analyzed. This was done given the effective radiative forcing used for the IPCC AR6 is only provided as a global mean timeseries. A clear negative feedback can be seen in the observed estimate, confirming that in this region the amip-piForcing experiment is able to capture feedback processes consistent with those seen in the real world.
We see that had the coupled historical experiments simulated the observed changes in sea ice, assuming all other feedbacks remain unchanged, this would impact the global temperature trends by approximately 0.04 0.03 K (multi-model-mean). For HadGEM3-GC3.1-LL, this accounts for just under one third of the bias in historical temperature trends compared to observations. We see that depending on the model, when substituting in just the Southern Ocean , 12%–29% of the total disparity in global is accounted for between the historical and amip-piForcing experiments. This increases to 18%–57% when other local changes are considered and the Southern Ocean is substituted (Table 1). In the multi-model-mean, substituting all local Southern Ocean processes changes global-mean by 0.25 , whereas substituting just changes global-mean by 0.18 (Table 1), that is, contributes 72% to the total difference over the Southern Ocean.OK, here are my problems with the shear hubris of anyone who claims to have made a working model of the entire Earth's climate***, with this paper as an example:
1) These models have been wrong in predicting the changes in Antarctic sea ice. How much confidence should we have in the rest of these model's predictions?
2) The effect of higher albedos over larger areas (more ice) would have made those models wrong. Is that the one and only input factor in the models that was wrong? Not bloody likely! (Hey, the writers are British, so just trying to relate.)
3) We see the vicious (maybe viscous too) cycle here. The models predict wrong climate changes, somehow.. Those changes result in different conditions for the models to be based on. The models were bound to be wrong from the start. Here, different sea ice extend means higher albedos for certain areas, which would certainly affect the results of any model that took albedo into account, out of hundreds, I'd say, processes that must be modeled VERY PRECISELY for a model to have any chance in hell of predicting ANYTHING!
4) Note the very wide ranges of the values for conclusions here. 0.07 W per square meter per degree K to 0.23, 0.01–0.06°C per decade, 12% to 29%, 18% - 57%, come on! OK, I'm glad the guys are honest with their error ranges, but then don't pretend anyone can predict what's going on.
5) The corrections being made in papers like this are not going back to the basic science and even the real math, the calculus derived from the science. These writers are only using the statistical techniques and fancy functions to fudge the originally derived math to make the models work better. This is not really science - it's fun with math.
6) Five models are compared. I've said this before: If they don't match, one should figure out why. It's what I don't like about "Meta studies", besides that they are a way to avoid doing science/engineering one's self. "On average, the studies yielded value x." OK, but what's wrong with the ones that are not close. Without seeing the errors in the "off" models, how do we know they're not ALL wrong?
... which they ARE, because, again, there is no working model of the entire world's climate!
This Geophysical Research Letter seems like a difficult read on a complex subject, but what I get out of it is that fudging of mathematical climate models is a science in and of itself. Knock yourselves out with this stuff, guys. Just don't go ruining the economies of the world with it. (They don't need your help.)
* Unfortunately NOT under our 2-Part series The melting of Antarctica: More Alarmist Trickery See Part 1 and Part 2. This got me going though, so, thanks, (non-Climate) Alarmist.
** A British name if there ever was one. I really didn't see much on the authors, but the words "Centre" and "Programme" spelled so, gave it away..
*** Peak Stupidity has a series of short posts from over 8 years back, early in our blog history, titled very clearly and adamantly There is no working mathematical model of the world's climate, dammit!: Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - Part 4 - - Part 5.
Comments (10)
Tariffs! Tariffs! Tariffs!
Posted On: Saturday - April 12th 2025 8:22PM MST
In Topics: Trump Pundits Globalists China Economics Big-Biz Stupidity
The Trump tariffs have Americans and foreigners affected in a tizzy. Regular Americans see their 401(k)s dropping and may be fooled again by the "tariffs cause Great Depression" civic mythology. The Globalist elites here have no problem with bad trade deals for America and Americans - they just want to keep the China-made Crap flowing in, shoddier and shoddier by the year, to keep the Big-Biz bottom lines increasing.
There are foreigners, and there are foreigners. Most of them, the Canadians and the Euro's, don't like Trump to begin with and surely don't like him exposing the one-sidedness of our trade with them. America has been a patsy, due to our thinking that we'd be that sole economic superpower forever and our benevolence in lifting up the world won't catch up to us.
Then there are the Chinese foreigners. It's at a whole nother level with China. We have given so much up for China (and Globalist Big Biz profits), our manufacturing and our trade secrets, and experienced a big decline in human capital with absolutely no gratitude given in return. (The CCP doesn't do gratitude.)
One thing that makes Trump helpful to Americans is that he knows bad deals when he sees them, and he doesn't like getting screwed, and he doesn't like America getting screwed. We've been getting screwed for 3 decades by China. Even if we leave behind the revenue aspect, and the most important attempt at bringing manufacturing back, tariffs are a way for us to stop getting screwed.
One may look up numbers on tariff rates, etc., but what the Chinese do is use their bureaucracy to greatly discourage imports from America. I've written about one example (a mistake by said bureaucracy, but a perfect example anyway) from personal knowledge. You're not going to get far getting the Chinese to admit this, but Trump knows, and the Chinese HATE HATE HATE that the President of the US is on to them. Peak Stupidity supports Trump's tariffs for many reasons, but this reason alone is good enough.
Instead of ranting on though, I will point out more reading from pundits the Peak Stupidity readers (commenters, at least) will know, along with a long debate video. Firstly, let me note that I'd forgotten our post from nearly 7 years ago, Tariffs in American history. Yeah, Ben Stein was in it, as one might guess, but it was just a still picture. Our very basic quick take 7 years back:
Pro Free Trade - If you protect industries, consumers will miss out on better deals, like all the cheap China-made crap, but also American industry will find parts and raw materials from abroad more expensive. With the overseas competition stifled, there is definitely an incentive for American manufacturers to make junkier stuff (think US auto industry pre-1980).(There are links in the original post.). If he hasn't already, the reader may want to read E.H. Hail's post Alfred Eckes on the Smoot–Hawley Tariff of 1930 and its long-lasting civic mythology, along with the important chapter of Alfred Eckes book on tariffs presented therein, or the whole book*, for that matter. Mr. Hail pointed out a Pat Buchanan article, but let me point out another one that we've missed, Did Tariffs Make America Great?. Our commenter "The Alarmist" here has a good post on this matter - Trump to Stock Markets: “Drop Dead!“ on his substack site. I love the title, and Alarmist's very readable and enjoyable essay is pro-Trump. I agree!
Pro Protectionism - American consumers can't buy a whole lot when they don't have good jobs to begin with. As Mr. Buchanan quotes many of the Founders and historic American icons of industry saying, along with what I've been saying for years, the wealth of a country is very related to how much manufacturing it does (vs. service industries, including F.I.R.E. ").They'veWe've also said, just based on the country's security, that essentials for the country's existence and prosperity should be made here.
A couple of go-to pundits for Peak Stupidity and readers are John Derbyshire and, of course, Steve Sailer. The former admitted, in his latest (Zman-hosted now) Radio Derb podcast, regarding where he stands on the issue:
Uh, nowhere very firmly. I don’t know much about Economics and am not ashamed to admit it. In fact I have argued previously in this podcast that Economics is a pseudoscience, not to be taken very seriously.I like the honesty, and the same came from Steve Sailer, to be noted shortly. No, Economics is no science at all, by any definition of science. From the little he did write, Mr. Derbyshire is generally in favor of tariffs and also in favor of what Trump in particular is up to. He excerpted a Trump transcription (that's NOT easy!) Speaking of China:
People took advantage of our country and they ripped us off for a very … for decades. I’ve been thinking about this for decades.Steve Sailer admitted in a recent substack post, Procrastination Rules! that he procrastinated about writing about tariffs because he hasn't though much about the subject. He wrote quite a bit to explain how building back manufacturing is no short-term process. I agree. I understand Mr. Sailer's concern about Trump's flip-floppery on tariffs not helping said long-term process. Trump is very much the opposite of a "long-term, slow-burn getting things done"** guy. OTOH, Trump is really fucking with the Chinese, which to me is a very good thing. Mr. Sailer has a hard time praising Trump for anything.
I’ve been … If you ever saw me on television, I was young like these guys. And, er … Those were the good old days, I’ll tell you, Roger. But I was like these guys — young. And I was talking about it. Nothing, nothing changed and nothing was done about it.
Then I did it; in my first term I did it, and did it well. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China — and others — and I started the process.
I have only read about 1/2 the comments under that SteveSailer.net post, a few days back - there are 120 now. I feel I must correct an error written by at least one commenter, that this tariff idea is new to Trump. No, as I wrote up top, and per the clip above, this one IS a long-term concern that Trump has been talking about for many years. Additionally, to correct the error, I'll add that Trump did institute one phase or two of what was to be a multi-phase program of levying tariffs on Chinese goods during his last term. People forget, but Peak Stupidity noted this in praise of Trump-45 at the time.
After writing all that above, I ran out of time to even attempt to continue watching the pro/con tariff debate I present here. I did watch the last 30 minutes or so of it live on ZeroHedge*** the other day and then the first couple of minutes of it on youtube.
Peter Schiff, anti-tariffs here, has been a feature of 2 gold v bitcoin debates here.**** The other, pro-tariff, gentleman is one Spencer Morrison, who, hilariously, makes sure in the introductions that the narrator stops mistaking him for an Economist. I get it. Among this ZH crowd, Steve Sailer (though he majored in Econ), John Derbyshire, and your Peak Stupidity writer(s), as much or little as we write about the subject, Economists themselves don't get no respect!
I gotta get those radio diaries filled out, but next week there will be time for plenty of more on, yeah, one more point on tariffs, more on Trump, Steve Sailer (in a good light), eventually that post on Deflation, and whatever stupidity presents itself. Have a happy Sunday, Peakers. Thanks for reading and writing in.
* Thanks again to Adam Smith for providing a few links the whole book online, which can be found under this post of ours.
** If you can guess to what song that line is a lyric, WITHOUT the internet, you ought to win something, I don't know what... a [REDACTED] album?
*** It's not that wow, live! means much for something like this, but ZH had it up, and after it ended it was - pooof! - gone from the site.
**** The 1st one (with our discussion here) is fun, but you won't learn very much on the pros/cons. The 2nd one is a lot better.
Comments (11)
Radio Daze and the Nielson Ratings.
Posted On: Friday - April 11th 2025 11:27PM MST
In Topics: Salesmen Media Stupidity
Look, I am pretty much the opposite of an "early adopter", of anything new. So, if I haven't been listening to radios stations for the last 15 years, who else has? We've got all our iCrap, well, most of us. If these can be used as small-screen TVs, I know they can be used as radios. Hmmm, anyone see any guys in the hood carrying these iPads on their shoulders. That'd be a lot easier on the muscles than ... where are the ghetto blasters of yesteryear?
If we can pull up obscure 1970's Gerry Rafferty, no, even the Humblebees, songs off the internet, of what use is the radio? I have heard of satellite radio in cars and of all the very specific genres or themes they've got. That sounds good, but the subject of my post here does not even include that as "radio".
"How do they know who's watching what on TV?", we wondered, as kids. Our parents explained. I'd heard of these Nielson ratings for TV and radio but never heard FROM them until a few years ago. People have been sending back these "diaries" for over half a century now, so that's how we know. Now, these Nielson people think I'm some honest diligent guy who will report my viewing and/or listening habits. Sure, I am, but I CAN'T!
I wanted to be honest in the TV diaries they sent me a while ago. Would they believe me if I left the whole things blank or figure I want my money for nothing? (They put a few bucks cash in their envelopes each mailing.) I put down a 5 minute stint of watching the weather radar on each of those for one time during the diary week. Now, because I do send stuff back, they have sent me a women's survey which my wife won't fill out, and now 5 radio diaries. What am I to do? Each log entry row has a column for the station ID, frequency (If you're not sure just go ask Kenneth), and check boxes for AM or FM. This is some antiquated, antiquated stuff, people! I think that's what I like about this.
I can, at least, fill out a poll with data that might influence something, but, again, what to write? I have one idea, but I can't put it on all 5 of these: "3:35 PM: Pulled up in my car by some thug with his windows down at the red light. Heard some nasty hip-hop crap yelling at me. Rolled up my window. Listening time: 8 seconds. Station ID unknown.".
Any other suggestions?
PS: Wouldn't all the new "smart" TV's that take expertise to just turn on, keep track and report what we watch? (How about a smart boom box? Do they have those?). Doesn't this make Nielson Ratings even more obsolete?
Comments (13)
EXCUSEs: Means and Motives - Example, JFK, Jr. - Pt 3
Posted On: Friday - April 11th 2025 9:36AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity History Science
I know the Peak Stupidity readership has been on pins and needles, waiting to know what REALLY happened to John F. Kennedy, Jr. Likely he died in his plane crash due to an all-too-common pilot error, but otherwise I don't know. What a let-down that was... but, again, that wasn't the point of this series of posts* (Part 1 and Part 2). We'll get to the point THIS POST, as promised.
Let me note that I added one more point (8) to the list in Part 2 of how a writer with a supposed EXCUSE (our acronym to replace "conspiracy theory", a term is not used accurately, as a friend recently pointed out) for Kennedy's unnatural and untimely death ruins his theory by being very ignorant of the subject. That subject for this speculation is aviation, specifically single-pilot General Aviation. (I also modified 2 other points re the logbooks and the seats.)
That point (8) was something I'd meant to mention and plain forgot, but the other 2 corrections came from my reading of the Final NTSB report of Kennedy's accident. Why hadn't I read it already? Good question. As I read this Laurent Guyenot's article 6 years ago, I already knew enough to want to correct a lot of ignorant points. The NTSB report is pretty thorough, so I learned a few new things, but nothing that changes my story here. Did Mr. Guyenot read the NTSB report? No, he never linked to it directly - he only referred to people who did read it. He put his trust in those people and made an attempt to sort the many discrepancies out on his own. He failed at that due to his not knowing the subject. He personally CANNOT get the real picture out of the NTSB report, so instead he turned it all into supposed contradictions, subterfuge, and cover-ups. Aviation is most certainly not his specialty, but politics is. Therefore he did a nice job with the motives at least.
I didn't mention the "Israel killed the Kennedies"** section, but I'd lean toward the Clintons. The Hildabeast was (may still be!) one ambitious broad. There are many strange deaths in the Clinton's past. In their style of politics, sometimes you've just gotta off a few folks. However, what kind of complicated assassination would they have done with Mr. Kennedy's Piper Saratoga? Mr. Guyenot freely admitted that there was no evidence, other, of course, that what he figures must have been covered up, which is not real evidence. Were there a corroborated story about some strange guys in the hangar or out on the ramp - it's not easy to be out of prying eyes outside - that might lead to something. Why not just get the usual goons to off JFK, Jr. somewhere in NYC where one might very well get mugged? Maybe, the Hildabeast already had a plan in place, but Mr. Kennedy's unfortunate accident saved her goons the trouble.
Instead this speculator concludes:
In the final analysis, it is the explanation of the crash that is strikingly implausible. As Anthony Hilder [one of Mr. Guyenot's sources who he does not completely believe anyway!] put it: “A finely-tuned, well-kept first-class airplane doesn’t just drop out of the sky and head straight down into the ocean unless it’s blown out of the sky or the pilot deliberately sends it into a dive to kill himself and his passengers.”No. It most certainly can come down fast in a tight "graveyard spiral", a structural failure due to that, or a resulting stall/spin from an attempted recovery. It's not so easy to calm one's self and "make the gauges your world" and go back to that important lessons from the instructors and the reports from the many times this has happened before.
Laurent Guyenot also admitted:
In this whole affair, we cannot prove directly that JFK Jr. was murdered. What we can prove, however, is that federal agencies and mainstream media conspired in a massive fraud, including the concealment of key evidence (the 9:39 call and reports of an explosion), the distortion of facts (visibility and pilot’s ability) and false testimonies (Kyle Bailey and Bob Arnot being the most likely). That can be taken as indirect proof that JFK Jr. was murdered.The rest is bad aviation speculation from someone who knows nothing.
There is evidence of an accumulation of deliberate omissions, lies and false testimonies from the NTSB investigation to mainstream reporting, in order to blame the plane crash on the pilot alone, regardless of inconsistencies. And so, between accident and assassination, I lean strongly toward assassination.You didn't READ the report, and you CAN'T read the report, so I lean strongly toward your being full of it. You can't claim omissions, lies, and false testimony, if you haven't read the report and don't understand the subject yourself.
Let me broaden the point here. A lot of people have some really good motives to "off" a lot of people. As Exhibit A, I present the institute of Marriage. It's often on some lunar cycle of some sort, but there are times the motivation and full moonlight are strong. Usually nothing happens though. When a spouse does die of unnatural cause, when there's some substantial evidence of nefarious means, that's one thing. If not, very realistic motives or not, we figure an accident is an accident, but, also, why go through so much trouble? They got poison, you know. Mostly we try to get along.
For some of the historic events like assassinations of big-time politicians, there are usually a plethora of realistic motives to be considered. Without some solid evidence of wrongdoing though, the next step writers/pundits/podcasters make is to try to throw shade on the "official", but often most likely, story. Contradictions are pointed out. That's a good method if you know the subject matter well. It's all garbage if you don't.
It's highly likely that John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law, died due to Mr. Kennedy's having inadvertently gotten his airplane into an unusual attitude and not successfully performed a recovery. It's too bad, as I wrote in Part 1, as, just from what I've read, he seemed like one of the more decent of the Kennedies.
Just to get an idea that JFK, Jr's accident is not some strange phenomena, I screenshotted just a couple of days' worth of accident reports off the NTSB site. The field, hobby, or business of General Aviation is now not nearly as big as it was in the 1990s. I didn't look at any current month in this easy-to-use search-by-month feature on the site, but I can tell you there used to be on average 5-6 accidents per day. To guess, 10% or less involve fatalities.
From a ground loop of a tail-dragger on landing to an engine-out landing in a field, to a graveyard spiral like this, things happen, well, every day. It's not often to famous people like John John. People shouldn't get so surprised and suspicious, unless they've got something solid.
Next on the docket - whenever I feel like it - Paul Wellstone and the King Air crash in Minnesota.
* I should have written these last Summer, as it would have been right at a quarter of a century later.
** Doesn't quite jive with the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil lyrics though...
Comments (7)
Further thoughts from the coffee shop ...
Posted On: Wednesday - April 9th 2025 8:13PM MST
In Topics: Lefty MegaStupidity Music Muh Generation
... as continued from our thoughts from the coffee shop on March 2nd of '18. Wow! I guess we at Peak Stupidity don't think about the subject of "the coffee shops" too much.*
It's been a beautiful couple of days with my schedule allowing me free time in the mornings. There was time to spend, an hour to two, in the sunshine with friends at the local coffee shop sitting.
This place makes a mean hot chocolate, and it's convenient, but yesterday the non-service-oriented staff had me thinking about not coming back. They will often blast the music - this is on the outside, on the sidewalk. If I ask them to turn it down, sometimes the guy will, and sometimes the other guy or girl will only act like he will. It stayed loud after my twice asking yesterday - it didn't help matters that the music really sucked, and probably that I also told the guy that the music really sucked.
Maybe you all know this tune. There's a guy singing and some black woman repetitively chanting "hey motherfucker" as the chorus. No, this isn't my chronic lyricosis flaring up - that's the "song". I don't need some Black! woman chanting that to me ANYWHERE, much less outside there where we wanted to be able to hear each other.
Let me back up a few years. This is the place where I almost got into it physically with one manager type about the face masks back during the PanicFest. I asked him if he was pushing this on us (you had to put one on if you got up from your table) because he was worried about the City getting on him or because "you're really scared about this thing"? They're going to be lefties running and working at these places, with very few exceptions.
Therefore, I did feel a bit miffed when the kind of people who would be worried about "killing the planet" leave the front door wide open in mid-winter. It was pretty cold on the inside near the door of course. However, they told us that they were hot behind the counter from all the coffee-making apparatus. Apparently, at this place customers don't come first anymore (same regarding the music) over the staff, and even over THE PLANET! There's a different attitude going around in this generation of tatted-up nose-ringed lefties.
I will now jump from 5 years back, then this winter, and yesterday to THIS morning. It was a different guy running the stereo today, and he had classic Billy Joel songs playing! I had to run in and compliment him along with reporting when the parking meter guy was out and about. This music was vintage, obscure stuff, starting (when I got there) with New York State of Mind from Turnstiles, a little before the Piano Man came back home from Los Angeles and got famous. Another one was an album cut from the more popular album The Stranger - it's embedded in our recent post Vienna no longer waits for you. How appropriate was the song though, I thought, as I remembered the old PS post Starbucks vs. the Viennese Kaffeehaus.
The music wasn't blasting this time - it IS a coffee shop, after all, but just as importantly, this music did anything BUT suck. We've already embedded that 2nd favorite from Billy Joel here, but as the Go-Go's song Head Over Heels was playing a little later, my friend mentioned that band's lead singer Belinda Carlisle's solo hit Mad About You. I really like that tune, and, sure enough, the music aficionado played that one too.
What a difference the music makes, the day makes, and a more decent employee makes.
We'll dive back into that John F. Kennedy, Jr. story tomorrow, though probably not deep enough into the Atlantic Ocean to find that dang squid who ate his logbooks.
* We had a different attitude about the places even longer ago, and then we had posts about Starbucks stupidity here -- here -- here and here.
Comments (16)
Fake History Rhyming Over One Century
Posted On: Tuesday - April 8th 2025 9:57AM MST
In Topics: History Movies Trump Pundits Economics
They say history doesn't repeat, it turns out, but it sure does rhyme. I believe we may see fake history rhyming too, with this story being an example. I really hope not - you'd think the internet would be of help this time around.
Our commenter and the illustrious pundit E.H. Hail has a new post out that is right in Peak Stupidity's wheelhouse. We like the basic Economics (Econ 101, turns to garbage by Econ 102) discussions here.*
When it comes to tariffs, a big subject as of late, to put it mildly, I'd say I changed my mind away from the half-century long free-trade, anti-Protectionism, anti-Nationalist mindset only in the last decade or two. I'd agreed with Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in the 1990s, but it still didn't sink in that America may really get screwed by free, but especially non-fair-free trade. At this point, I've been even been disagreeing with the great Ron Paul, which does make me wonder ...
Mr. Hail's post has commentary on, and includes a nicely presented (yellowed pages even - I like it) full chapter and more from a book by one Alfred Eckes on, tariffs over American history. The Peak Stupidity Community discussed this book, after Adam Smith kindly provided links to on-line copies under this post.
The entire book, Opening America's Market, is worth reading. Of particular interest, of course, is Chapter 4, as the entire chapter is about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs enacted 95 years ago, celebrated in notoriety in civic mythology** and even fun 1980s John Hughes movies. The post is Alfred Eckes on the Smoot–Hawley Tariff of 1930 and its long-lasting civic mythology. Mr. Hail would welcome more comments there, I'm sure. The interesting commentary by Mr. Hail is something I won't repeat, but I'll add what I can here.
Smoot-Hawley is named after the 2 sponsors of that tariff bill, Mr. Reed Smoot in the Senate and Mr. Willis*** Hawley in the House.**** One might notice that tariffs being discussed and ranted about now don't have said 2 sponsors, hence no 2 names either. Hmmm, don't all bills normally have the 2 sponsor's names like that? Oh, wait, there IS no bill being discussed. These new tariffs are simply being accurately called the "Trump Tariffs", as, since the UniParty Congress had been weak and unhelpful - at least for Conservatives - as of late (meaning, say, 30 years), Trump has taken on this power to levy tariffs himself. I don't blame him one bit. Peak Stupidity has discussed his being akin to a King or El Caudillo Yanqui (per Mr. Hail), but that's nothing new anymore...
It's been 5 years short of a century since President Hoover signed the not-particularly out-of-line Smoot Hawley tariff bill. Though it passed after the FED meddling had already greatly exacerbated the fallout from the crashes of 1929, somehow Smoot-Hawley! has become the bogeyman for the entire Great Depression. Never mind Roosevelt's Socialist policies ... ahh, too long a subject for this post.
I like Mr. Hail's term used in his article, "Civic Mythology". Indeed, and we may as well abbreviate it, SHCTGD, is century-long civics myth. I remember it from my HS history. Though I didn't drool on my desk, we were not much more excited to hear about the causes of the Great Depression than the absent Ferris Bueller's classmates - SAVE FERRIS! - as seen below. I imagine the clip below has gotten a lot of views lately (just noticed that a search starting with"Ferris Bueller..." has "tariff scene" as the first completion - bet that's new), and Peak Stupidity would not be ourselves if we didn't feature this Ben Stein scene.***** from that fun 1980s movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
This is a slightly longer excerpt of the Ben Stein as boring HS Econ teacher, as anyone who remembers the Reagan/Bush years will enjoy the ending. Anyone? Anyone? Mr. Hail? Anyone?
This near-century-old fake history reminds me of another piece of civic mythology, the use of the term "McCarthyism". Peak Stupidity has been all over that myth afterreading Ann Coulter on the subject but more so after reading and reviewing the thorough and informative M. Stanton Evans book about Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy Blacklisted by History. It's been only 70-odd years that this one has been in use. I'm about beyond the point of correcting people anymore when they use the term. It's a myth, but it's sticking. No, Joe McCarthy was NOT the guy the term connotes, personality-wise, and he was RIGHT - there were (still are) Communists in the US State Department and elsewhere in the Feral Government.
These Trump tariffs are being said to be the 2nd Coming of Smoot-Hawley. The Chinese are mad. Good! The Europeans are mad. Good! Consumers will have to pay more for that Cheap China-made Crap, or even be unable to afford it. Good! In fact, that's the point. The stock market is way down. Good!
Americans' main claim to wealth, other than their granite/marble counter-topped-kitchened houses is their 401-k's. They're down. Wait, what? Yes. Peak Stupidity's newsletter, had we one, would have told you long ago to get your money out of anywhere the Feral Gov't has control of. I've been officially losing my ass personally, but ZeroHedge people got me worried years ago that the Feds may someday require portions of that money be in Treasury Bonds to prop up the system. We'll see about that or other rules that may change one's access to "his" money, but I'm not playing. Tough luck, people.
Peak Stupidity has featured dozens of posts about the financial doom caused by a century of financial stupidity. "What can't go on, won't go on., some dude said, and the music may stop during this Trump-47 term. The Trump tariffs are LONG LONG overdue. He is in the right. However, depending on timing, will the coming crash be blamed on the Trump Tariffs? Why wouldn't it be? I wouldn't be surprised it there are Globalists in the market right now purposely selling off to help version 2.0 of this myth keep going, maybe for another century.
Will this fake history rhyme stick? Anyone? Does anyone know the term for what's going on? "Civic" something ... anyone? "Civic myth-"something... Anyone?
PS: Yeah, I know, that movie was somewhat juvenile, but that and Fast Times at Ridgemont High are classic 1980s Americana. I will point out here that Mr. Hail, in a more serious vein, has a great discussion on the long mid/late-20th through present-time push for Free Trade as an economic given. I got suckered into that like most other people that think about economics. Pat Buchanan never did - he's mentioned in Mr. Hail's post too. Go read, man!
* We WILL get to that post on Deflation. Amazingly, last week I found that old news clipping on the subject out of a Nov. 2001 WSJ, with my writing "WTF?" on top in pen. It's a little yellowed but readable. I'm even more miffed by the writer's stupidity than I was 23 1/2 years ago!
** A GREAT term, that I will credit to Mr. Hail, unless I hear otherwise.
*** It's been said that Congressman Willis C. Hawley originally wanted to levy high tariffs on vacuum cleaners, but President Hoover nixed this, saying, "Whatchu' talkin' 'bout, Willis?!"
**** I wrote in the comments in our discussion 3 1/2 weeks ago that that Alfred Eckes spent a couple of pages in the chapter explaining whose name SHOULD have gone first and why. It was kind of esoteric but fun. Note too that Ben Stein***** in the movie called it the Hawley-Smoot tariff bill. Maybe there should be a debate on this between the two economists about it.
***** Ben Stein was an academic and political wonk himself before becoming an actor. I tried to find his actual views on this tariff issue but had no luck so far. Though he started out working for GOP Presidents, Mr. Stein's views have been all over the map.
Comments (12)
Student Snowflake concerned about normal things
Posted On: Saturday - April 5th 2025 9:43PM MST
In Topics: Student and other Snowflakes University Humor Cars
This quick post, ‘I F***ING HATE YOU’: Student gov candidate at UNC Asheville destroys pro-life table, yells at pro-lifers, came across our desk by way of Instapundit this morning. It's the typical University behavior you'll hear about daily now, with the student snowflakes that can't handle anything different from their well-brainwashed-in world view. I thought that was what they were there.... never mind.
This story was not worth a post - or we'd be running these day and night - were it not for one unexpected small part of the statement by the protagonist in defense of his snowflakey behavior. His name is Adrian Miguelez, and we've got to give him a chance to justify his actions.
Miguelez is running to be a sophomore senator at the school’s student government.No, that's not it. You've got to be a much bigger politician to get away with acting like this much of a jackass.
He lists his pronouns as “He/Him,” [A true student of letters and Litratoor*, Mr. Miguelez is] and adds: “Unfortunately, due to compliance with the assaults on diversity and cultural programs by UNCA, an emerging student mental health crisis, and the over-ticketing of students who rely on personal transportation in their everyday lives, there has been profound negligence by the school’s administration in dealing with our very immediate concerns. As someone passionate about true justice within our community, I will fight to right these wrongs.”This sounds personal, especially his mental health crisis. Wait, what else did he say in there? This stood out for its being a more mundane, hence unusual, concern for a student snowflake: the over-ticketing.
Ahaaa! Is that what set this guy off, getting too many parking tickets? If that's the case, I want to head to Asheville (next train I can ride) and shake this guy's hand, never mind his table-overturning behavior, and the mental instability, oh, and the pro-D.I.E. stupidity. He's absolutely right! The city of Asheville and UNCA have probably been doing the same as elsewhere, raising the fines and raising the meter requirements. They know they can ream those students this way.
Does Mr. Miguelez not have an old out-of-state license plate connected to no extant vehicle, you know, with slots in it to slip over his current plate, under the 2 screws left out by 1/8", while he parks? You just rip up the tickets and leave the pieces on the street, with no worries, greatly increasing your mental stability... I mean, until you see the tow truck backing up one day. Even then, all
These modern student snowflakes, they were never taught how to handle adversity. This is how we did it in my day... well a little earlier. The young people would probably write mean tweets instead.
Not to spoil a 58 y/o movie or anything, but, good point, it didn't work out so well for Cool Hand Luke in the long run either. Going by his surname alone, any stereotyping purely unintentional, this Miguelez guy may end up being deported.
* That's how the good Professors say it - I figure it's spelled like it sounds.
Comments (38)
EXCUSEs: Means and Motives - Example, JFK, Jr. - Pt 2
Posted On: Saturday - April 5th 2025 1:18PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity History Hildabeast Science
(Continued directly from our last post.)
Over 6 years ago, a writer named Laurent Guyenot had an article published on The Unz Review titled The Broken Presidential Destiny of JFK, Jr.. The subtitle, Israel's "Kennedy Curse"? really made little sense, as the writer concentrated elsewhere in trying to EXCUSE this unnatural death.
We've discussed the likely cause of JFK, Jr.'s death and that of his wife and sister-in-law more than enough in the last post. We'll still have to refer to that explanation a bit here, but Let's get to the possible motives for a more nefarious explanation.
Yes, there were motives to support the idea of foul play in the death of JFK, Jr. I (sounding like Ron Unz here some more, haha) had no idea of any of them until reading this article This writer did a very nice job relating something of this John Kennedy's upbringing (very close with his mother Jackie (then) Onassis) and his rise into a man considered a big rising D-party star and very-possible not-too-far-off eventual Presidential candidate.
When it came to immediate consideration of Kennedy for US Senator from New York, Patrick Moynihan having just retired, it turns out there was one other contender. That'd be one Hillary Clinton, known locally (here) as The Hildabeast. (We REALLY don't like her, and that goes back well before Trump v Hildabeast in '16.) Of course, I followed the carpetbagging entry of the Hildabeast into national politics via the NY Senate, but what I hadn't known, long since caring about New York, is that Mr. Kennedy had been a more-likely candidate. Mr. Guyenot's article says that multiple sources had Kennedy about to announce his run, first time in official politics, a few days before his fatal plane crash.
Kennedy was an actual New Yorker with personal, business, and political ties to NYC. The Hildabeast was, again, a carpetbagger out of Arkansas. (Well, a reverse carpet-bagger, I suppose.) The ctrl-left wanted its man, someone much more to the left than old-school leftist Patrick Moynihan, in this US Senate seat. The Hildabeast had to do, in the end, though nobody really had to like her. However, the NYC crowd (too big a proportion of the State, unfortunately) loved them some JFK, Jr. I believe he would have won a primary election. Time for another Sirhan Sirhan deal? I could see that. The Clintons had been known to off some folks in their day.
This alone is a good motive, and Mr. Guyenot had more than that to say. As you'd expect, with his father having been murdered when he was a toddler, John, Jr. wanted to investigate what really happened to his father. His uncle Robert got into that and was dead himself 4 1/2 years later. Were it a more nefarious thing than the official story - and talk about motives! (as we did). whoever was responsible would not want to let John, Jr. get too far with this, one would think. So, yes, there are plenty of reasonable theories of a motive to kill this guy.
I had a real time with the rest of this article though. This is because the writer went into the possible means with details to try to match his suggested motives. This caused great exasperation with the whole attempted EXCUSE for me, including trying to correct the record in both the article and the comments. Laurence Guyonot does not know enough about the subject of flying to write an article like this. By claiming to see unexplained discrepancies in the story as some sort of good evidence of nefarious deeds, he fails at his theory.
I will refute the errors in this article, not to point out the writer's stupidity, but to show that all these pieces of supposed evidence of a doctored-up story are untrue. Some of my exasperation is with the commenters*. Since their claims are not, of course, Mr. Guyenot's fault (though he chimed in a few times but refuted none of it), I will leave them out. A couple of my points come from a video that the writer embedded, recommended, and used for support. It is garbage, at least the part I was led to watch. Here's a non-exhaustive list of my problems with this supposed conflicting and damaging evidence:
1) The last portion of the flight path of N9253N, Mr. Kennedy's Piper Saratoga: Evidence claimed for the idea that the plane was shot down or bombed was not much more (I'll get to the other part) that its path was nearly vertical as seen on the scale used by the NTSB investigators. Yes, the airplane didn't go very far horizontally as it came down. The writer's problem is not understanding how the approach/center radar works. Each sweep takes a while, 5 to 12 seconds - you can see the antennae rotating as some airports that have the radar on site. A normal "standard rate" turn of an airplane is 2 minutes, but when you're in that tight spiral, in a spin, or at the very worst, broken into pieces**, it's a lot quicker than that. From radar returns, you're not going to see any kind of coherent horizontal path, or know which way the plane could be considered heading. So, this is not evidence of a bomb or shoot-down.
2: The weather reports conflicted!: Even back in 1999, the fairly new at the time ASOS (Automatic Surface Observation System) weather broadcast from Martha'a Vineyard airport had the local weather which was clear and hazy with light winds. The tower was still open at the time Kennedy was coming in, and, after the fact, the controller reported that this visibility as higher than the ASOS reported more like 10-12 miles. That does not mean Kennedy did not have lower visibility where he was. Still, it was VFR. As we wrote last post, there would not be much of a horizon, so basic instrument skills, something Kennedy was reported good at, were needed.
Local news reports gave all kind of reports of what the weather had been, as Mr. Guyenot considered these as evidence of discrepancies, cover-ups, and the like. Yes, as if the hype days after the crash from local news sources is what you can trust. He even noted erroneously a difference between "clear" and "5 miles visibility". See, discrepancy! NO. "Clear" means no cloud cover (sometimes just below 12,000 ft). It WAS clear. It can be "3 miles in clear skies" Lower than that visibility, there must be "haze", "fog", "smoke", "snow" etc, associated. In flying, "visibility" is a different parameter of a weather report or forecast than cloud cover.
Since I'm getting into this, the writer saw Kennedy's long delay on the ground at Caldwell airport, waiting for his 2 passengers. as some kind of sign of something. I can imagine this still fairly inexperienced pilot's trepidation, as he was used to having an instructor with him. That's not a good thing, but, being cautious enough, Kennedy was worried about both that it was nighttime, and that with the temperature and dew point trending very close together at the other end, the weather could come down way down. Fog could form quickly. He had a reason to want to get going, and passenger delays, even though one of the advantages of having one's own plane, can mess with one's plans when weather is involved.
3: Kennedy's altitude and call to the Vineyard Tower: It's maddening when the guy calling out "unexplained" happenings to bolster his theory doesn't bother going to obtain an explanation. The writer wrote a bit about Kennedy's having descended a few hundred feet then back up to 2,500 because of the tower airspace. This made no sense. First of all, the tower airspace goes up to 2,500 ft above the ground ("agl" is about the same as "msl" (altitude above mean sea level) on these islands and over the, well, sea) only within 4.2*** nautical miles from the center of the airport, not 15 miles out where Kennedy was then. (He'd started a smooth descent from his cruise altitude of 5,500 ft from about 35 miles out. That's about right, maybe a little early. 500 ft./min. is comfortable, and he'd be doing about 2 1/2 miles/minute in the descent. 4,500 ft to lose until the pattern = 9 minutes = about 22 miles.)
There's nothing wrong with calling the tower at 15 miles out, but Kennedy was nowhere near in his airspace yet.
4: A boater saw/heard the whole thing!: When I first read "A trial lawyer in a ...", OK, that's about it. I kept going and noted that the supposed sight of an explosion that the author mentioned from some other eyewitness wasn't corroborated, but the boater heard a bang. In the middle of the calm water at night, you're going to hear a bang, for either the break-up of the airplane, but more likely from it hitting the water hard. But, let me get back to flying stuff...
5: Kennedy may have had an instructor onboard, and he took seats out.: I just looked back at this, and this is one I've got to excerpt as an example of abject stupidity:
One question has been the focus of much attention from independent researchers: was there a flight instructor as co-pilot in the plane? Officially, there wasn’t. No fourth body was recovered in the wreckage. But strangely enough, one seat was also missing, and conspiracy theorists such as John Hankey have speculated that it might have had a flight instructor’s body seat-belted on it, which might have been spirited away for the sake of building up the story of an incompetent and reckless John. For if John had flown with a flight instructor, then the whole argument of his recklessness falls.And he wouldn't have augured in either, so no need to hide any bodies. Why would this instructor have not saved Kennedy? Was he a suicidal maniac sent to kill them all? Why not find another way ... I'll get to this. The evidence of his body was "spirited away", sure, and I guess nobody missed the guy either. Just another flight instructor, ... well, it was kind of like that in those years. ;-} His death would have helped out another pilot trying to get a job, so there's that.
One neat thing about the Piper Saratoga/Lance/Cherokee 6, as with its twin-engined sister the Seneca, is that is can be, and is often configured for "club seating". The two rows of seats behind the front two face each other. Conversation can be made more readily, cards can be played, liquor can be drunk, and so on. Seats can be taken out easily, and if there was anything going on with seats, it was likely to take out the middle 2, leaving the one back passenger with lots of room facing forward. Did Kennedy's making conversation with her - I assume the SIL - become the start of his spatial disorientation? That could easy be the case. I think THIS, if anything, was the "missing seat" story.
UPDATE from NTSB report: The plane was arranged with club seating and all 6 seats were in the plane. I hate riding backwards, and if the 2nd passenger felt the same, she'd have been facing forward 5 ft or so behind the front 2 seats.
6) The logbooks were missing, meaning... something. Yes, that meant something. That meant the JFK, Jr. was not stupid. Bringing along airplane or personal logbooks (especially the former) is generally stupid, unless one wants specifically to get them to point B. There are 2 reasons for each type, overlapping for the 2nd (C):
A) Airplane logbooks - it is said, with numbers pulled out the rear, that losing one's A/C logbooks will reduce the resale value of a plane 10%, 25%, who knows? The records of how the airplane was kept up and often improved are important for any buyer. Otherwise, he will have to assume the worst, at the very least requiring expensive inspections that might have already been done, etc. You don't want to lose them, so you keep them in a safe place at home.
B) Pilot logbooks - These have great sentimental, maybe even historical value. ("Remember when we landed here and met, ohhhh, John John!" "Let me look up when that was.") You would hate to lose them for this reason.
C) Airplane AND pilot logbooks - After any kind of accident or a known violation of rules (usually about airspace), the FAA will want to look at both pilot and aircraft logbooks (both especially after an accident). If they are in the airplane, then the FAA can get them easily and quickly. This is a case in which you might WANT to "lose" them. I'll say no more...
That was too comprehensive****, I know, but it completely refutes Laurent Guyenot's idea that the lack of logbooks found in the wreck of Kennedy's plane means something strange.
UPDATE from reading the NTSB report: The mechanics back in New Jersey allegedly said Kennedy did keep the logbooks on him. Hmmmm, I hate to impugn the guys, but that's what a lot of mechanics might say to avoid trouble, knowing the logbooks would be smudged gibberish under the sea. That would sure keep things simple.
7) Aviation vs. Navigation: This is another attempt at an explanation by Mr. Guyenot that is not helpful to his cause, if one understands flying. He doesn't get what flying "by instruments" is even about, as he supports his theory that Kennedy's competence would not have let this loss of control happen:
So, even if the visibility had been very bad — which it was not — John could have guided his plane safety to the airport, using his autopilot if necessary.We're not talking navigation here. Even by the mid-1990s' small aircraft owners could afford basic non-moving-map GPSs - one hell of a change too! In 1999, JFK, Jr. would not have felt a dent his budget from such a purchase. Yes, he could GET to Martha's Vineyard. You just can't follow the GPS to get there when you're in a graveyard spiral is all - Kennedy's problem was controlling the airplane, not navigating.
The writer did bring up the autopilot here again. At least from more reading since yesterday, I do think that Mr. Kennedy relied way too much on the autopilot. One should not NEED it in a plane like that, period.
8) The alleged CVR: I can't shake the feeling that this writer cannot picture general aviation aircraft. This is not some jet with those big "black" but actually orange boxes attached to the airframe in the "aft equipment bay". It's a little plane as the public would view it. It did have that foot-long (mostly battery) ELT (Emergency Locating Transmitter) that is required for cross-country flight - technically over 50 nm flight. That wasn't a point here.
What Kennedy did have in his plane was something pretty new at the time, an in-line with the microphone digital recorder. The idea is mostly to help someone who's not great with the radios to playback a clearance. (It can also get one out of trouble, were it the controller who made a mistake and some pilot violation was alleged.) So, the battery was missing, the writer says. Listen, Mr. Guyenot, this wasn't airline operations - it's the one reasonably diligent aircraft owner and private pilot. I don't think something like that would have survived days under the sea either.
That's it for today, on this old story. If the reader has gotten this far, I thank you for wading through all this. Since you're here, I'll also let you know that Part 3 (I swear it!), the conclusion, to be posted on Monday, will be a lot easier to read. The reader may already surmise that I don't agree that there were nefarious acts that brought the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. in his airplane. However, that's not actually my main point in writing all this. Come, Monday ...
* One commenter claimed a pilot must be on an instrument flight plan ("clearance" is what he meant) to fly at night. That is the case, from what I know, in Europe, and in Canada, one must have a separate rating above the Private Pilot certificate to do that. In the US it's always been perfectly legal to fly VFR at night.
It's one thing to ignore my correction. I've been back-and-forth with commenters who, when they finally realize I'm right, just stop replying. This guy, though, didn't reply, and then repeated his mistake (at that point a lie, because neither listened to me nor looked it up.)
** A good question is THEN what would the radar show? Primary radar - reflection off the metal, is pretty poor, though possibly the scope would show a few faint primary returns. The transponder (designed to help show aircraft on radar) would have remained with the fuselage, so ... that's about all the depth I want to go into about that ...
*** This is a weird one, Everything else is in nice round nautical mile numbers. This one is 5 STATUTE miles, hence, just over 4 nautical miles.
**** Let me add here that I refer to 1999 here, when this accident happened. Before then, one could have electronic versions, but paper was still favored. From about that time on, pilot logbooks could be put online, and nowadays save the latest flights in the cloud and what-not in real-time. It's just that, no Kennedy didn't have a Read/Write CD on him. Why would he? It was still 1999.
Airplane logbooks are still on paper, but as of late, mechanics/inspectors surely have electronic back-ups... most of them.
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[UPDATED 04/08:] Added point 8. Modified points 5 and 6.
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Comments (5)
EXCUSEs: Means and Motives - Example, JFK, Jr. - Pt 1
Posted On: Friday - April 4th 2025 10:24PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity History Science
(EXCUSESs is my acronym to replace the oft-derogatory expression "conspiracy theory". It stands for EXplanations of Causes of Unusually Suspect Events.)
We're really trying to follow up from posts that promise more of a conclusion coming. Rather than lots of other stupidity to cover, we'll follow up here on our post from 2 weeks back EXCUSEs: Means and Motives - Example, JFK. Note that very small difference in our title, "JFK, Jr." rather than JFK.
Everyone's got something to say about JFK's murder, though all Peak Stupidity could come up with is that there are over half a dozen, maybe a full baker's dozen, reasons that people would have wanted to kill President Kennedy. There's more hype now, with the release of dozens of reams of paper (in digital form, I guess) by the Trump Admin., but we speculate that the REAL KILLER might have had the means to get rid of the incriminating evidence over the last, what, 52 years?! Ya think?
So that wasn't much of a post of ours, without this follow-up to explain what we think of speculation on motives that don't understand the possible means.
About the Kennedies, some say there is a curse or they are just highly accident prone, explaining some of the other deaths of this so-called American Royal Family. I'd guess the naming of the band The Dead Kennedys [sic] back in 1978, only 10 years after RFK, Sr.'s murder, signified that Americans (no, not New Yorkers, but Americans) were already sick of that Camelot crap. That whole deal is not American - we really shouldn't be hearing about dynasties* outside of Chinese Buffet restaurants.
JFK, Jr.'s death was the most interesting of all the Kennedies' unnatural deaths. Skiing into a tree, ahhhh, boring. Getting drunk and choking in one’s own vomit – not sure any of them actually have, YET, but we’ll be the first not to know about it. ("We found a 2nd puddle of vomit behind the grassy knoll!") Plus, they're not Rock & Roll stars - that'd be somewhat culturally appropriative - not cool
The reader may detect a little disdain out of Peak Stupidity for the Kennedy worship and Camelot business. It's there, but I have more respect for President Kennedy than I used to, and though I barely knew who he was at the time, the assassinated President's son John sounds like he was one of the better of the lot.
A man-about-town, magazine publisher, and businessman who'd kept up with politics - particularly in a quest to eventually get to the bottom of the events of 1963 - I suppose I was supposed to know about him. Simply putting 2 + 2 together, that there was that sad little boy saluting at his murdered Dad's funeral in that iconic photo, and that I'd not heard anything about any unnatural death out of him - his would have surely been noted - would have told me this guy was around in the 1990s. It was one episode of Seinfeld really, that jogged my memory. Elaine Benice was all hot and bothered about his being in the same gym there in NYC. (The show had an occasional big shot on, such as Mayor Giuliani, but I wouldn't have known "John John" from an actor.)
John F. Kennedy, Jr. was one big city eligible bachelor or eligible non-bachelor, and he was going places, as they say. Sometimes he got around in his Piper Saratoga, a retractable-gear 6 seat single-engine plane. That's not a RICH RICH man's plane. He probably could have bought a business jet and hired pilots - I don't know his state of wealth at the time - but, flying can be a great hobby for people like JFK, Jr. and for those with much lower means too.
Rather than say, with the hobby of fishing, fun and relaxing but not really paying off unless one catches a LOT of salmon, flying would pay off in time saved for a guy like him. The story in question here is a great example, minus the unnatural death part, of course. Anyone who knows anything about Camelot (ha!) knows that this whole Kennedy Klan had a compound**** in Hyannis Port and spent time on Martha's Vineyard Island. Kennedy was in NYC a lot, and a car trip from there to "the Vinyed", including the ferry too, would have had to have been around 6 hours. Once he got to his plane at Caldwell (now called Essex airport) in northern New Jersey (no way I'd go out of the big NYC airports either - closest in NY would be Republic- Fairchild in Nassau County) and did his preflight, he could fly nearly in a straight line to Martha's Vineyard airport in an hour and a half. From Caldwell, one can stay under the NYC airspace with a little maneuvering to stay away from both LaGuardia and White Plains, and once level, that thing would do about 140 knots true airspeed on a 170 nm straight shot. Time was worth a lot of money for a guy like JFK, Jr.
Along with that great convenience would come the pride in being able to pilot one's self and up to 5 others, in an endeavor that requires some dedication and diligence to master. Practically speaking, if Mr. Kennedy was not a spendthrift, having a nicely kept Saratoga was a very good decision. (There are airplane owners that don't have quite the money to keep everything just about perfect, but that wouldn't have been a factor for him.)
I found out more about who this guy was on July 17th of 1999, the day after Mr. Kennedy's Piper Saratoga, with he, with his wife and her sister aboard, augured into the Atlantic Ocean just west of Martha's Vineyard airport. Because I didn't know any of the possible motives for any foul play, my neither really caring about the antics of these types nor about NY City, I and the people I discussed this wreck with didn't even consider it. This was also because the official story was VERY LIKELY all that COULD have happened.
As I will get into the article that purported to tell us how nefarious the death of JFK, Jr. was, let me agree with this part. From all I read, Kennedy took flying seriously and was competent at it. There is competence in the actual flying and competence in good decision-making. All I read has me agreeing that he was certainly competent in the latter. I can't get into everything here but his having possibly waiting for one of his flight instructors to go with him, then going anyway without him, was not a bad decision in and of itself.
Mr. Kennedy had to have gotten the required few hours of simulated instrument flying (using view-limiting "foggles") during his training for his Private Pilot license. Then, too, he'd been working on his instrument rating, so he had practiced, IIRC, a dozen or so hours at that with an instructor (more on this). It was both perfectly legal for him to fly VFR (Visual Flight Rules) that night and safe enough to, per Mr. Kennedy's confidence in himself. He should have probably already known from experience and been warned by his instructor and the books that night-time flying over water in 5 miles visibility, i.e. without always enough ground lighting to perceive the horizon, can require good reference to the instruments.
Still, bad things can happen if you don't pay attention. By that, I refer to what probably did, inadvertent***** entry into a "Graveyard Spiral".
Let me back up. The need for "blind flying" (the old term), or instrument flying as it's been called for half a century, to begin with is due to the biophysically determined limitations of our sense of balance. That stuff in our inner ears is very good in helping us know our attitude (in the flying sense), and which ways we are accelerating, etc. However, that's only for a short while, something like 15, 30 seconds or so. Pilot trainees get to learn just how much that short time is by flying in a bank for longer than that. Our bodies fail us here - we have not been built with Sperry's or laser-ring gyros. Smart inventors like Sperry going all the way back to the 1930s developed what we needed to safely keep attitude, so that flying could be accomplished without visual reference to the outside.
Here's what can happen, if one is not good at flying instruments. The plane enters a bank as the pilot is not spending enough time scanning the gauges. Vertical lift is reduced in a bank, so the plane starts descending too. Then the pilot continues to be distracted, and by the time he sees that the aircraft is in a fairly steep bank and losing altitude to boot, and the speed's headed toward the red line, he might unfortunately not recover from this in the way he was trained. That would have been - after the instructor has told him to close his eyes and then maneuvers the plane all kind of ways to mix him up and finally say "OK, your airplane - recover" - to first roll out of the bank before pitching "up" for altitude. ("Up" is not up, see? It's toward the top of the plane which might be inclined 60 degrees from actually up.) Some altitude is sacrificed, and one may have to pull power to keep speed under control, even though headed for the ground. After the wings are close to level, one can pitch up, get the plane climbing, add power, and switch seats with the passengers to change his underwear in the back seat.
The problem with pitching up while in a steep bank, especially at high speed, is that 2 very important limits can be exceeded. The airplane can stall due to the angle of attack required to increase lift, seeing as (for example) at a 60 deg. bank, it takes twice the lift just to stay pitch level. If the wing stalls at a level altitude, recovery is simple, but here we are in a steep bank, which will lead to a spin after a stall. In many planes, one can recover from that, but a lot of altitude. When you've already dove down toward the ocean for a while ...
Worse yet is a structural failure of the airplane as the g-loading is high enough to bend or break off the wings. That's it, then.
I just got done writing that it sounds like JFK, Jr. was probably a good decision maker as a pilot. Those who say he shouldn't have been flying that night are wrong. It's just that he screwed up this time. Was he distracted by the passengers for just too long? Was he too used to using the autopilot?****** I've heard a theory that he may have accidentally turned off the autopilot instead of pushing the "push-to-talk" switch. Both switches would be on the left side top of the yoke (steering wheel?) so that one can use them while manipulating the controls still, the right hand being for other functions. The ability to turn OFF the autopilot is very important for safety. Usually there are multiple ways to do it (including, worst case, turning off electrical power for a bit - the engine will still run), but one usual method is with a switch right there. Did he not realize the autopilot was off and spend too much time off the gauges? Were this speculation correct, it was still no excuse for getting the plane into this state, but it might explain it.
I have considered the relationship between Mr. Kennedy and his flight instructors. I imagine he hired the best around. However, were one to be teaching a guy like this, said instructor would not be inclined to be a hard-ass. 1999 was still a tough time for aviation jobs, and having a "sugar daddy" like JFK, Jr. who would bring you along on trips to ritzy places with expenses paid was a good gig. Of course, you teach as much as you can, but you wouldn't berate the guy, and if he just let you fly when he's not in the mood to, you'd just be his corporate pilot, a pretty nice deal. Mr. Kennedy may have unintentionally used his flight instructor as a crutch. That can happen.*******
The Graveyard Spiral has killed pilots before, and even with all the training that the FAA has pushed for decades, this will still happen. If this fatal accident had one benefit, it was to bring more awareness of this to the pilots that somehow had never read about this danger. (Not likely, though.)
What else might have happened? Why is there speculation that this likely interpretation by nearly everyone who knows about flying is not a good enough EXCUSE?
We'll delve into the article that I am using for example of how not to make EXCUSES - conspiracy theories - next post. This one got WAY too long!
* Then there were the Bushes, of course, hopefully a defunct dynasty, and the Clintons, even defuncter, thankfully.
** Unz Review commenter Ralph L. kindly informed me that Ted Kennedy has been in his own aircraft wreck, a pretty bad one too, with serious injuries for him, in a Rockwell Twin Commander back in 1964. One wonders, had he died, how the Hart-Cellar immigration act he supported in '65 would have fared. I AM sure that Mary Jo Kopechne and her family would have been much happier.
*** The Cherokee 6 (for 6-seater), the Lance, and the Saratoga are basically the same plane.
**** The one example I know of Democrat's huge properties being called "compounds". Usually that term is reserved for rich Conservatives and Preppers, who really would like to have compounds. (Is Trump's Mar-a-Lago ever called a compound? Maybe the term has come into disuse.)
***** You may exclaim "no duh!" here, but one might get into the beginning of that on purpose, in training.
****** IMO, it's a crutch. For a plane like that, it shouldn't be a problem to go on 3-4 hour flights without one. Use the trim!
******* One thing not enough pilots training for instrument flying do is to fly with a "safety pilot" - just there to keep you out of trouble - looking outside for other planes, and keeping you from entering airspace you shouldn't be in and from hitting the ground. You can make bigger mistakes and learn more quickly, than with an instructor who's likely to give hints.
Comments (3)
Canadian and Ukrainian flags flying together
Posted On: Thursday - April 3rd 2025 7:09PM MST
In Topics: Music University Trump The Neocons World Political Stupidity
I really need a couple of solid hours to finish the JFK, Jr. post. No, posts don't usually take nearly that long, especially anecdotal posts like this one.
Has anyone else seen this? It's only one house (so far) that has the flags of The Ukraine and Canada hanging on poles off of the porch supports. It's the same house mentioned in this post of last summer in which we noted that these people bought a brand new Ukrainian flag. (Gotta support the team!)
Why the Canadian flag? I'm sure the PS reader has an idea, but let me go back to many, many years ago for an anecdote. I visited a friend in our college's dorm room one time and noticed he had a huge Canadian flag on the wall. (It might not have been THAT big, as the rooms were really small.) The guy didn't sound Canadian, though I may have never met a Canadian at that time. He sounded, well, normal.
"I didn't know you were from Canada." "No, I like Rush." This wasn't about the late jolly Conservative AM radio personality but the band out of Toronto*. (In fact the former may not have been on the radio yet.) Whaaaa? "But, but", I thought, "Rush is from Canada. You love Rush. (Who didn't?) Does that necessarily mean you love Canada, enough to have its flag on your dorm room wall?" We'd both taken the SAT's, so I mean...
He was just a big fan. I'm glad for his fandom too, as he did turn me onto this band, one I regret having never seen in concert.
The deal with the flags at this nearby house is something like the opposite end of that. "We HATE Trump! Trump HATES Canada." (No, not really, as his levying of tariffs is strictly business, deal-making, and influencing - without the Making Friends and ... part.) "So, we LOVE Canada. Oh, Canada, Oh, Canada, thy candles shine so brightly... , wait, no." These people don't love Canada. They have no reason to. Flying that flag is just a stupid ridiculous gesture, designed to impart to us the information that President Trump is a bad guy.
We already know the house is full of anti-MAGA warmongering NeoCons from their Ukraine flag.** What's next? Thankfully, Trump got us out of (again) the Climate Calamity™ based Paris Accords. How about the French tri-color flag next? Does NATO have a flag? If so, surely they need that one. It's a must-fly.
One day on the campus at some outdoor event that Rush fan, named Jeff, I just recalled, put his walkman headphones on my head and said "You gotta listen to this!" It was a tape of Moving Pictures from some years ago, and I got a taste of Tom Sawyer and Limelight. Wow! Even without Geddy Lee's bass guitar - these were no modern Bose headphones - that was some great stuff ... but it didn't induce me to buy a Canadian flag for my dorm room.
We've featured Red Barchetta already more than once, so here's Limelight:
I can't do it - I can't listen to this on small computer speakers! I hope you can play it loud somewhere.
* Hence their instrumental song YYZ for the IATA code for Toronto Pearson Airport. I had no idea what that means for many years too - there was no internet! Since we have it now, I just learned this:
"YYZ" is an instrumental titled after the IATA airport code for Toronto Pearson International Airport; its rhythm is that of the letters "YYZ" in Morse code. ( ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ; ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ; ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄)Pretty cool!
** By the way he's been acting in foreign policy, they may want to reconsider.
Comments (9)
Monty Python - The Watch Smuggler
Posted On: Wednesday - April 2nd 2025 6:00PM MST
In Topics: Humor Anarcho-tyranny
Man, I got about 2/3 or more through the follow up EXCUSES post, with no other excuse other than I'm tired right now. That one, about the possible Motives and Means for foul play in JFK, Jr.'s death will have to appear tommorow.
I did have this hilarious Monty Python skit in a tab that's not helping my speed here at all, so... enjoy this one. I know most of these guys (excepting Michael Palin, I believe) have been lefty 'tards that we really didn't need to hear from in that regard. However, funny was really funny, back in the day. The customs man is Graham Chapman, and the smuggler is Michael Palin.
We have been discussing tariffs lately, so this take on the Custom's man is somewhat, errr, timely.
PS: I had to add that Anarcho-Tyranny tag for that ending (of the actual skit).
Comments (6)
Hooters going Tits Up
Posted On: Tuesday - April 1st 2025 7:30PM MST
In Topics: Humor Female Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity
Best post title EVAH! It's stolen though. ZeroHedge already had one pretty good title for their post yesterday regarding the financial problems of the Hooters chain of breastaurants - Going Bust: Hooters To Re-Jiggle After Filing Chapter 11 Bankruptcy In Founder-Led Buyout. Yeah, I see 2 good ones in the title, and one more in the 1st paragraph.
However, the best of the many fun comments there, BY FAR, was the succinct line that is Peak Stupidity's post title. It turns out, that was Tyler Durden's title of this post back in February. Nice job, all involved!
The stupidity is pretty in your face here, as the Hooters MBA's have decided to go family friendly. Yes, that's the ticket, overpriced chicken wings and beer WITHOUT the hot ladies. I'm sure these MBA's have this all worked out in their re-org plans, with spreadsheets, Gantt Charts, and all good stuff, perhaps thinking of M&A's instead of T&A.
With Hooters on the verge of bankruptcy, the legendary restaurant where you can eat mediocre food and check out tits (and pay in cash so your wife doesn't find out) is getting rid of Bikini Nights and skimpy outfits, and hopes that an improvement in the food will stave off doom.An improvement in the food. I just don't think that's gonna get enough support for the sagging sales.
Comments (11)
Iron Curtain 2.0
Posted On: Monday - March 31st 2025 4:56PM MST
In Topics: Commies History Globalists World Political Stupidity
From Stornaway in the northeast Atlantic to Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean, with a small cut-out for Hungary, Iron Curtain 2.0 has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the Woke states of Europe. Dublin, London, Paris,
A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by Cold War victory. Nobody knows what Globalist Brussels and its Totalitarian international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and prostituting tendencies.
Four score minus a year and 3 weeks ago, 2 States away, summa y'all prolly heard this same story from a guy named Winston Churchill. He was talking about the Communists. This time it's the Globalists enacting Totalitarianism and Oppression.
- Peak Stupidity, from address to the student body of Meridian Community College (for extra credit), via Teams, March 31st, 2025*
We discussed this oppression of Europe by the Globalists in a recent post, Defeating Globalism: Europeans v Americans. The UK and Germany were more than mentioned, with the aspects of Orwellian speech control and the abolition of opposing political parties, respectively. I can't say I've been following it heavily, but at least I've read headlines and a few stories about Romania and the Globalist-implemented Do-over after the rightful election of Calin Georgescu last November. The problem was Tic-Tok, apparently ... or something. Now, he can't even run in a Do-over, as, per a court ruling in mid-March, he has been banned from running again. Didn't the Communists do this sort of thing 80 years ago?
We didn't discuss France in that "Defeating Globalism" post, but there's big news there. Rather than just banning her party or awaiting election results in anticipation of a possibly-needed Do-over, Marine Le Pen has been arrested and sentenced to a 4 year (2-years of suspended) prison sentence. No, but she can't win an election from prison, as we thought might have had to be the case for Donald Trump. Miss Le Pen has just been banned from running in elections for 5 years. (That ought to cover it.)
I no longer put any credence in reports of charges of election interference, embezzlement or any other accusations.*** We've learned quite a bit over here over the last 4 years. Whether it's politicians or not, Totalitarians will say whatever they need to. The old Soviet Union would have charged any "enemy of the State", aka, non-Communist, with online child pornography (as the FBI may do here) had they had the internet then, and computers, and pornography, and enough cabbage even to fulfill the bottom of that pyramid of needs.
Whatever the charges are, prison and/or fines ($100,000 or so for Miss Le Pen), how do they come up with "not being allowed to run for election" as part of a sentence?
The Soviets or the Red Chinese would have done the very same, that is, until they had complete control, at which point nobody will be stupid enough to run for ANYTHING.
How's it gonna go this time, assuming America still stands against Globalism? NATO won't do us any good against all the rest of the membership of NATO. Rather than the Warsaw Pact, we may see the Brussels Pact this time, with even more countries in the West Bloc than the old East Bloc had. At least we've got a whole big ocean, so we don't need to guard any new Fulda Gap. Let's hold onto that Triad though (ICBMs, bombers, and the subs).
Here, people have been telling us that this Ukraine thing is part of Cold War II. It doesn't look that way. Iron Curtain 2.0 may even be closer, passing just west of the Acela Corridor. Richmond can be our new Capital... hey, wait a minute ...
What I'm looking forward to this time around is the coming Budapest Airlift, to supply a whole city stuck behind Iron Curtain 2.0. We'll have much bigger Lifters this time.
Peak Stupidity Disclaimer [added per PS Legal Dept.:] Plagiarism is perfectly fine. Everybody does it - our last President did it as did the new Prime Minister of Canada. Sod off about it, already.
* The whole original "Sinews of Peace" speech. Churchill pushed the UNO, now UN, pretty hard too.
** On the 1st page of search results for this Mr. Georgescu of 9 blurbs, 7 of them have "far-right" in the title, the blurb, or both. One of the other 2 calls him an "Ultranationalist" (NY Times) and the other brings up money embezzled or something. (What's new?)
Comments (2)
The melting of Antarctica: More Alarmist Trickery - Part 2
Posted On: Friday - March 28th 2025 8:11PM MST
In Topics: Music Global Climate Stupidity Geography Science
OMG! Remember that last graph in Part 1. Where are the Polar Bears? You've killed
Where'd we leave off. Oh, yeah,I noted something about the vertical axes of the graphs that the somewhat alarmist (but not too bad) commenter in our conversation linked me to (also for Greenland and the sea ice stuff). This was a decrease from the horizontal axis representing 0 ice mass lost/gained.
OK, well, someone who was not quite so gullible to alarmism might well ask, hey, -2,700 Gt, out of, well, I wonder how big the whole ice sheet is.
The units on the vertical axis are Gt – Giga Metric Tonnes, i.e. 1 x 10^9 tonnes, with each tonne = ~2,200 lb. I will use English units till near the end, because I like 'em.
It should be easy enough to look up “mass of Antarctica ice sheet”. No, not really. I don’t chalk this up to conspiracy, but it’s just that the alarmist “ice loss” blurbs kept on going till I gave up. No worries, wiki up top give the volume as 6,400,000 cubic miles.
There are 5,280 ft/mile, so 5,2803 ft3/mi3 = ~ 1.5 x 1011 ft3/mi3. I will assume zero compresssibility of ice (for now) and the usual 58 lb/ft3 density (remember, it floats due it being slightly less dense than water). That’s 8 x 1012 lb/mi3. We’ve (they’ve? “We’ve”, if Trump claims the place) got 6.4^106 mi3 of ice, so that’s 5.5 x 1019 lb = 2.5 x 1016 metric tonnes / 1 x 109 tonnes/Gt to match the units, so ~ 25 million Gt. Note, that is already in GigaTonnes, so we can compare to that ghastly -2,700 Gt decrease on the graph, before they changed the methodology in ’18 (more about that too).
That lowest loss means 2,700/25,000,000 = a .011% decrease in ice mass. That’s 1 in 10,000! Now, I realize that if the entire ice sheet on Antarctica were to melt, well THAT would be a crisis! It’s an easy calculation I’ll do another time to see how much that would raise sea levels (spoiler alert from simple judgement – it’s be a REAL calamity).
Wait, let's go back and think about how they measure this ice mass, or at least changes in ice mass. This has been done using 2 different methods, each via satellites.
The GRACE satellites use the very minute effects of changes in mass below on the orbit of satellites. Note that the GPS satellites are used to ascertain a very accurate position of the GRACE satellite. The system is more clever than that though. The mission uses a pair of satellites in an almost polar orbit that fly 140 miles apart. The distance between the 2 is measured, so that changes in orbital velocity that reflect very slight gravitational differences through the orbit can be detected.
This system was used from '02* through Oct. '17. (I wonder if the end date was due to one of the satellites dying.) Note that this date matches the end of the first, bigger, portion of the data.
To determine changes in ice mass, we must compare differences in the gravitational field to the whole. Can they really determine not only 1 in 10,000, as that was just the total decrease, but 1 in ~200,000 - the data shows changes of at least as low as 1/20th of the whole drop. Yeah, well, I don't know enough to argue with NASA or the German Aerospace Center (partner), but when you read:
The highly precise accelerometer that is needed to separate atmospheric and solar radiation pressure effects from the gravitation data...... you know it's pretty complicated engineering.
Sometime in late '18 or so, they started using the JASON satellites for this research.
The JASON series of satellites uses radar altimetry to get significant wave heights, sea level averages, and for the latter part of these Antarctic ice mass measurements, ice cap height.
Radar altimetry has been around for a long time, but knowing the exact height of the satellites above the Earth's center of mass or fitted perfect sphere (whatever they do) still sounds pretty complicated. I'll not argue any of that either. If they can get "significant wave heights" or see sea level rises, we may be talking about inches here (for the latter). To determine changes in ice mass, they must compare differences to the total, hence radar-alt height to total thickness. Just using that average ice pack thickness of 1.4 miles - say 7,000 ft. - that 1 in 10,000 is nearly a foot. However, that 1 in 10,000 is the TOTAL change. I see in the graph changes of about 1/20 of that. Can they really measure half an inch?
I am not in a position to argue the purported (by yesterday's graph) 1 in 200,000 resolution of ice mass measurement. During my time looking into this stuff, I came upon something very fortuitously. When using that 58 lb/ft3 density of ice, I didn't see a reason to get into more detail as I didn't need the ice mass value very accurately +/- 25% would have been fine. However, I did think about compressibility of ice and whether that'd be a factor in that 2nd, JASON-based radar altimetry method. Lo and behold, the 2nd blurb I found was a link to Density matters: ice compressibility and glacier mass estimation from Cambridge University, a short paper ("communication" vs. real paper, in the British tech-journal lingo) from '22. Not only was I very lucky to ever get to that, but I found I COULD READ IT! (The whole thing.)
This short paper got right to my point:
Ice flow models typically assume that ice is incompressible, a reasonable assumption because ice density changes are indeed small and have a correspondingly small effect on the overall mass balance of glaciers and ice sheets. Given the immense volume of the ice sheets, however, even relatively small changes may influence global mean sea level to a degree that severely impacts humanity (Hauer and others, Reference Hauer2020). Here, we quantify the role of gravitational compression and thermal contraction in estimating ice sheet mass.My bolding there, as I want to show that there are 2 factors. I hadn't though about the thermal effects. The paper uses a linear T-profile, from 0 C right on top of the actual land down to mean annual surface temperature at the boundary with the air above. Quick conclusion, and note the honesty, mostly 2 significant digits of precision, in these values. (Oh, and they did Greenland too - let Trump worry about Greenland. He's got that.)
We calculate that gravitational compression deforms the surface of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets by up to 5.8 and 11.3 m, respectively. For thermal contraction, the corresponding values are 2.9 and 6.2 m, respectively. The corresponding ice sheet-averaged values are 0.5 and 0.7 m for thermal contraction and 0.8 and 0.7 m for gravitational compression.Even the lower of these numbers are larger than what the 1 in 10,000 even, much less 1 in 200,000 purported precision must be from radar altimetry. Using the whole-ice-sheet-averaged differences from these two effects we see that the top of the ice sheet could be up to 2.3 ft (0.7m) lower due to compression of the ice (change in its density) and the same amount additionally lower to thermal compression effects. (The 2nd of these guys' pairs of numbers are for Antarctica.) That's 4 1/2 ft total, which out of 7,000 ft average ice thickness, is over 6 in 10,000. This error is larger than the whole ice mass decrease reported!
Now, that bit of simple math is something I came upon out of sheer luck. These effects shouldn't effect the GRACE numbers, because that system relied on gravitational force, hence mass, directly. Then, note though, that after the gap in data, the JASON data, for which two means of compression override the purported precision, there is no drop in ice mass. I'm beginning to think that this graph is complete garbage.
If the Peak Stupidity reader has gotten this far, you deserve our congratulations. I really like this stuff, is all.
However, even if I hadn't come upon this significant source to show me how much in error the data could be, there's the very basic deal that I imagine most readers WOULD be onto already. I did not purposely make the units on the vertical axis hard to read, but that is all I am getting to. The numbers are in GigaTonnes. (Billions of metric tonnes.)
I kind of blew the suspense up top but, again, what is the denominator for that 2,700 GigaTonne drop? That's what I calculated very simply above - a number a www search could have probably spit out easily 10 years ago - 25 Million GigaTonnes. Let's look at a graph over these 25 years of total ice mass to see that big loss due to the Climate Calamity™:
This is the SAME GRAPH as is on the last post.
Peak Stupidity confession here: It didn't take LOTUS 123 or even the latest version of whatever spreadsheet program is hip now to make that. I simply drew a horizontal line with underscores! What kind of lazy behavior is this? I'll tell you why there was no point in using a spreadsheet:
If this graph shows up as, say, 4″ high, on your screen, then the decrease of the line would be .0004″ = one hundredth of a millimeter. Let’s say, cause you’re a gamer or porn addict – not (some of) you, Peak Stupidity readers, but the general “you”, you’ve got a 100 pixels/in screen. The decrease in my line above is 1/25th of a pixel. Sorry, man, I can't show that, and you couldn't see it.
That's the answer to the question posed in the last post. This form of graphical alarmism (hey, I like that term!) is not the same as picking a data range (of years). This one involves showing changes alone without showing the base number. Yes, it's a big scam, and you ain't
So, in conclusion, Penguins and Polar Bears alike, chillax, dudes! Nothing's gonna change your world. Nothing's gonna change your world...
Kangaroo Days, ohhhh, Ohm...
Hey, listen, there wasn't always the internet to look up lyrics on. "Kangaroo Days" is the lyric, and that's final!
* Launched by Russian rockets, BTW.
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The melting of Antarctica: More Alarmist Trickery - Part 1
Posted On: Thursday - March 27th 2025 3:39PM MST
In Topics: Global Climate Stupidity Geography Science
Here's the 1st trick. Antarctica CAN'T melt. It's a continent, though it does have a thick ice cap and sea ice in the surrounding waters. I guess the alarmists know that, but I wouldn't put any stupidity past them...
The last 2 posts, discussing the race and sex problems, respectively, involved in long stays in close quarters in Antarctica, reminded me to write this post and its follow-up. This comes from a big discussion I had last Summer* here on The Unz Review with commenter ePebble.**
With all the seemingly-randomly-generated talk by the
That's what these 2 posts are about, the claims by Climate Alarmists that the ice at the Earth's poles is melting, so we'd better DO! SOMETHING! I will concentrate on Antarctica for now, as that's what I ended up looking into.
What's going on with the sea ice down there? You'll see 2 graphs below, and I had to look up the same thing: What's the difference between ice "area" and ice "extent"? From the National Snow and Ice Data Center (does DOGE know about these people?) we read off this page:
Sea ice area is the total region covered by ice. Extent is the total region with at least 15 percent sea ice cover.OK, thanks. Take your pick, as they seem to go together***:
This kind of graphical display reminds me of housing price graphs. They also vary on a local yearly cycle in addition to longer-term changes, so this works well. Note that the band that encompasses these yearly curves, after throwing outliers '15 for Summer and '14 for winter (both with extra ice) and '22/'23 for winter (lower ice) both extent and area are in the neighborhood of 50% and 15% of their absolute seasonal averages respectively. Yearly changes in this sea ice area are very significant, but is there a solid trend.
We can look at the small inset graphs. One can see from them, or the bigger graphs here too with more effort, that whether there's a real trend depends on the range of years one uses. It can be MADE to be a trend, which was the subject of 2 of our recent posts showing this simple method of Alarmism, as explained well by Toby Heller or Tony Flenderson, depending on how mixed up you get with the HR guy at The Office.
How about we look at it from slightly farther away? No not spatially farther away, as from a satellite (though we'll get to them) but farther away from the time scale. In these 2, the curves represent decadal averages:
A few single years of the past 2 decade are in there too, either for strict alarmist purposes or else, I don't know why. There sure is no trend with the 2 outliers of '14 (more ice) and '23 (less ice). Going by decades makes for much tighter graphs. Very obviously, there is no trend over the last 4 decades, or call it 5 with '22 and '23 in there.
We're talking frozen water (a mix of mostly salt water, but some fresh water off the continent) in a layer an average of a few yards thick. It's a lot, but it's nothing compared to the mass of ice on top of the continent of Antarctica itself. That is over 20 Million GigaTons versus the sea ice at very roughly 50 Thousand GigaTons at the end of Winter. It may have some other effect on the climate, but any long-term melting of sea ice is negligible compared to the melting of that ice cap, but:
OMG! This is terrible! "I’m melting, melting…!" – Wicked Witch of the South, calling (in transit) on (Radio Free Antarctica)****
This really does look bad. The Antarctic Ice Cap was shrinking steadily for the 1st 5th of this century. Woe is us.
Well, is this another case of that optimum-range-selection deal? The nominally-Christian satellites made to measure this, JASON and GRACE, haven't been up there longer than this. Note too, there's a gap, and then things have leveled out, at least, for the last 5 years. (Once can still run sled dogs.)
What the REAL DEAL is has probably got the Peak Stupidity reader in stitches right now. You know that there might be more to it, but WHAT? We'll get to it tomorrow. The penguins will be OK for another day until we settle this.
* Antarctic Summer, that is. (Of course! Different latitude - adjust your attitude.)
** Though I surely don't agree with him on the Climate Calamity™ issue, ePebble is a reasonable fellow.
*** I don't know why they wouldn't, but it could be interesting to speculate why not.
**** I doubt one could get this station to come in any clearer than the VMS (Voice of Michael Stipe)
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Antipodal Diversity: Someone snaps in close quarters - the sex(ual) angle
Posted On: Tuesday - March 25th 2025 7:39PM MST
In Topics: Music Geography Science Female Stupidity
To continue our simple analysis of "what went wrong?" - when 9 S. Africans of mixed races and sexes spent many months in close quarters in hostile Antarctica and sexual harassment "happened" - we'll move from the race angle to the sex(ual) angle. I realize this post will offer nothing but common sense that should already be obvious to anyone, but then, note the title of this blog please.
One could forgive some people, not the South Africans arranging this mission that had to have known better, but some people, for not understanding the problems of race. "We're all green* down here in the SANAE-IV living and research quarters... so, just remember.. yeah, be careful about those dark green guys - they can be a little, errr, forward..."
The differences in the sexes, well, you've got to be purposefully stupid to not see the problems that will crop up, no matter what the races.
It may look "brutalist" architecturally and be damned brutal outside, but this SANAE-IV base in Queen Maud Land is a paradise compared to anything experienced by geographic and scientific explorers of a century ago. For one thing, one can stay warm. Food is there for the taking. Years of entertainment are there for the off times.
To go to the other extreme, I have been remiss in not posting anything so far about the truly amazing job Ernest Shackleton and his (White!) men did in just surviving and getting all the way home to civilization after their ship The Endurance got jammed and eventually destroyed by the ice in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica a century and a decade ago. This story is so amazing that Peak Stupidity will have to write a post on it.**
However, we can thing of any serious effort done before the modern age after which most of the difficult discovering has been done and see why there was NO FREAKING WAY any women would have been brought along. Life or death hangs on the decisions made and the hard work done and endurance of the (yes, ALL) men, and were women to be brought along:
1) As the fairer and weaker sex, they would simply not pull their weight. Everyone must get fed, conveyed, and kept from freezing (in these cases) - with limits to the resources - so you'd want the most capable people PERIOD. Those would all be men. Otherwise, people, men and women, will die.
2) Even among men with the most self-control possible, the women would be too much of a distraction, causing special efforts to protect them, jealousies, and various behaviors that occur when
3) Sex in the form of a verb. What else would you expect? What would ensue i not always hilarity.
These 9 South Africans, and other crews like them, might fancy themselves explorers doing dangerous work. Nah, read about the expeditions to the North and South Poles and other sea-faring expeditions of the old days.
Below is The Endurance before it succumbed to the pack ice.
Leader of the expedition Ernest Shackleton saved his 27 men after the crushing and swallowing of their beefy ship by the sea, the spending of 4 months on the ice in the Antarctic Summer - with still way below freezing temperature - a multi-day voyage in icy seas in 3 small boats to an uninhabited island, a mission of 5 of the crew in one small boat 800 miles followed by mountainous land crossing to civilization, leading to the rescue of all those left. It was amazing. Nobody involved would have EVER thought of bringing women with them, except in his dreams at night.
Back to modern reality in the comfortable S. African modules with the crew of 9, the only problems really are the long-term close quarters and the dealing with the usual unadulterated crap of 2025. Even without sea-faring being much involved in this story, Jimmy Buffett lyrics will appear a total of 3 times in these 2 posts (see footnote **** of the previous one).
The late would-be pirate (born 200 years too late) Jimmy Buffett sang in the song Landfall***:
It's not close quarters that would make me snap.I guess it's been a little of both down there. Finally, to get in the mood (well some weren't!) of the 9 folks on the current SANAE-IV mission, we bring up the 3rd Jimmy Buffett song, one titled Boat Drinks****. All Jimmy and his band had to deal with was being holed up in a hotel somewhere up north, as opposed to the people in this story. This is likely how they feel though:
It's just dealing with the daily unadulterated crap.
20 degrees and the hockey game's on.OK, Parrotheads, you're right. We've got to embed something. Too much writing is giving me cabin fever. I've got to fly to Saint Somewhere...
Nobody cares, they are way too far gone.
Screamin', "Boat drinks"
Somethin' to keep them all warm.
This morning,
I shot six holes in my freezer.
I think I got cabin fever.
Somebody sound the alarm.
I'd like to go where the pace of life's slow.Great lyrics! R.I.P. Jimmy Buffett.
Could you beam me somewhere, Mister Scott?
Any old place here on Earth or in Space,
you pick the century, and I'll pick the spot.
* Old Bill Cosby routine.
** I've read the book long ago and seen the movie a little less long ago.
*** That one is an obscure song from his well-known Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes album. The rest of the lyrics of this song are great too!
**** That one is from his less-well-known album Volcano.
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Heart and Soul - T'Pau
Posted On: Saturday - March 22nd 2025 9:50PM MST
In Topics: Music
(Not to be confused with Heart and Soul by Huey Lewis & The News.)
This song came out of nowhere into my head a few days back. I didn't realize until I just now looked it up that the song is 38 years old! I don't know if I'd ever known the name of this British band, T'Pau and definitely I didn't know the singer Carol Decker. The band was from Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Now THAT was England, then.
Heart and Soul is from T'Pau's debut album Bridge of Spies. The melody of the verses is not so hot and kind of proto-rap, but the chorus is very catchy. You heard it here first... or something. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, Peakers. Thanks so much for reading and writing in!
Oh, well, I've got Huey Lewis's song in my head now too, so here's there one. These 2 together give out quite the '80's vibe.
Written and first recorded by the band Exile in 1981, this song was released by Huey Lewis & The News in 1984, 3 years before the T'Pau song.
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Antipodal Diversity: Someone snaps in close quarters - the race angle
Posted On: Saturday - March 22nd 2025 4:06AM MST
In Topics: Geography Race/Genetics Science
Note: This post may as well have been lifted directly from The Gateway Pundit. All 3 images come from their article. I'm over that site generally - just too much hype and gossipy "Watch so-and-so DESTROY so-and-so in this tweet! He got 1,800 LIKES!" stuff, and then there's the Hispanic "outreach".* They do have some useful headlines, especially for Peak Stupidity purposes.
I don't know how many different Peak Stupidity posts one could make out of the this story: South African Antarctic Expedition Still Stranded With Out-Of-Control Crew Member Who Sexually Harassed and Beat-up Colleagues – Authorities Monitoring the Situation Remotely. There could be quite a few, I reckon. If Steve Sailer doesn't get to it, he's lost his way, man.
Queen Maud Land is the sector of Antarctica, officially owned by Norway due to a Norwegian being the first man known to have set foot there, 95 years ago, upon which sits SANAE IV. (That's South African National Arctic Expedition, version 4.) This base is on the edge of the continent ~ 70 S latitude and just a couple of degrees west of the Prime Meridian - so due South of London, but more importantly, closest to S. Africa.
Contrary to popular perception**, it's STILL cold down that way - the Climate Crisis has done nothing to help. In fact, it's getting colder right now, even as April approaches! So, if you ever get to go down there on a scientific mission, keep in mind that it's no easy thing to go for nice long quiet hikes in your leisure time to get away from any annoying colleagues in your small group. You'll die. Either way, you might.
Now, seriously when I first read the headline (I think it was one for was a previous story), I imagined the group of scientists, engineers, and a doctor would be comprised of mostly White men with just a couple of diversity hires. That was the old AA. You use the White men that can think clearly, run things sanely, and solve problems, but you throw in a couple of bright diversity people that won't screw up the show, for show and The Law.
Wokeness is a different level. You have big diversity numbers, no matter what the situation. What would we expect to see in the group from S. Africa? I realize that South Africa is only a single-digit percentage White now, 7.3% in '22 and dropping steadily. I also learned recently*** that even at that ratio, the D.I.E. madness has the government requiring that only 2% of spots in medical schools be allotted to White people.**** Still, this is brutal, freezing-assed Ant-freaking-Arctica. Mistakes and turmoil can get people killed. Would you really want to settle on this team?
Note that there is not a White man in the crew there. That must have put the fear of God in, well pretty much all of them. One wonders if there have been any Tic-Tok videos made of the non-White group in the Great White South, made before, after, or during the trouble going on in the small research station on Queen Maud Land.
Well, they're calling it part of "an adjustment period", the story of someone down in there being physically harassed, with death threats involved. As opposed to the old days of Jim Jones down in Guyana and his close cronies being the only ones to be able to communicate with the outside world, via shortwave (HF) radio, they got the internet there. That means there are likely varying stories coming out, as the colleagues back home try to figure out what's going as reported by the group leader, Kelcey Maewashe. What if someone destroys the antenna(e) used for the internet signal? As Gateway Pundit has well noted, this could be like a horror/suspense movie. I am surprised by this, but even in this day and age, these people are stuck together until the summer. (December, that is, 8 months away.)
Gateway Pundit reckons, since Mr. Maewashe is the contact at the base reporting this story and trying to deal with it, the culprit would be one of 5 people - the men. Wait, what? I've been told the sexes are equal so it could be any of the rest. Nah, but when things get real, you drop all that BS, of course. So it's one of the
BTW, a picture in this UK Daily Mail article of Miss Van Tonder and 2 of the black men all in big orange suits out on the ice is captioned:
Geomarr van Tonder (center) and two colleagues hold alcoholic beverages outside Sanae IV. There is no indication that anyone in this photo was involved in the incidentNo, no, of course not. It could have been Miss Lawana and/or the other (non-leadership) black guy, or Colonel Mustard in the orange coat closet with the, errr, you know.
An NBC News article states:
Previous problems have been reported at another of South Africa’s remote research bases on Marion Island, a South African territory near Antarctica.I imagine all of the 9 crewmembers are pretty intelligent. (Double-diversity hire Miss Mabope is an instrument technician, so not exactly a rocket scientist there.) However, I've been in White neighborhoods and I've been in diverse neighborhoods. In that tiny neighborhood, those very close quarters down in the SANAE IV, diversity has not proved to be a strength. It could be anyone that snaps, but you'd be better off with a Western White crew. Continuing from the same article:
In 2017, a member of a research team there smashed a colleague’s room with an ax over an apparent love triangle, according to a report to South Africa’s Parliament. Lawmakers said it appeared the researchers were living in highly stressful conditions.
The National Science Foundation, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. Antarctic Program, published a report in 2022 in which 59% of women in the U.S. program said they’d experienced harassment or assault while on research trips in Antarctica.... and that's exactly where we'll pick up in the 2nd post on this story, the sex angle, or lack-thereof angle.
PS: Why is this such a big story if this sort of thing happens regularly? I may have just missed other stories. For one thing, the reports of "sexual harassment" from Western women don't always mean so much. OTOH, in one of the articles I read, it discussed a woman at one of the S. African stations reporting having to sleep with a hammer in her bra. Science! The big factor is that, communications ability being where it is now, "human interest" story reporters can keep up with this real-life suspense movie in nearly real time.
PPS: 1st Gateway Pundit comment under their post: “13% of scientists cause over 50% of Antarctica’s violent crime.” Heh!
* I'd thought it was to be certain Hispanic-specific articles, but now over 10% of their posts are perfectly American stories that one might want to read had they been in English.
** We will have a more sciencey/mathy post soon on Antarctica and the Climate Calamity™, one we meant to post months ago.
*** This links to part 3 of the Peak Stupidity series Cry the De-Constructed Country. See Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 4: Anecdote on Anti-Apartheid --- Part 5: Cold and Hot Wars, and the Commies, of course --- Part 6: Africa Wins --- Part 7: 1st World Memories of Suid Afrikaanse Lugdiens and Part 8: As Falls S. Africa...
**** This gives real meaning to the Jimmy Buffett lyric (in Miss You So Badly) that "I don't think I wanna ever let 'em cut on me".
***** The New Delhi news is interested because "their" woman is on there, Dr. Lawana. I learned of her ethnicity this way. Kinda' tribal, that kind of thing...
****** ... in two senses of the phrase.
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[UPDATED 03/23:] Added PPS with GP comment.
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