MOAR sob stories!
Posted On: Thursday - February 20th 2025 11:44AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Music Media Stupidity
Peak Stupidity's order of posting is often nothing but random "what do I feel like today?" items. Some are from on-the-spot thoughts, but there's usually a back-log of both recently thought-of posts and long-pondered ones. Speaking of the latter we'll get to those thoughts on deflation (along with another example of hidden inflation), and some long-due Climate Calamity™ debunkment, yeah, with graphs and everything.
Our bread & butter, were we making any money here to buy it with, would be the Immigration Invasion Existential Issue for America. We've discussed the Deportation program with excitement, mostly here, but with a little bit more on perfect sob-story target here. Is President Trump just making a show of it right now, albeit at least trying to clean up the violent riff-raff imported most recently?
From the numbers, things don't look promising. They may be on the order of 1,000 a day*, meaning only those most violent and recent arrivals could be kicked out with a year to two. That's not good enough. Even 10x the current numbers, though 10,000 deportations daily would be extremely encouraging, would mean a decade and a half timeline to really take care of the illegal side of the problem. That is IF, and a big IF, the program stays in place.
There'll be sob stories. The Border Tsar** Tom Homan does a nice job making use of the sob stories, from what I've seen. To paraphrase "Yeah, that's sad for them. They shouldn't have illegal entered. You know what's sadder? Emergency Rooms closing, higher housing prices, oh, and murders, rapes, drunk driving accidents ..." Here's hoping Mr. Homan will not be reined or reigned in by Administration cowards or Trump himself, the latter for whatever stupid reason.
Yeah, these guys are focused right now on the DOGE findings which are both financial AND, more importantly, political matters. That stuff has been great. President Trump is also fighting the D.I.E. evil very well. I praise him for all this. However, he CANNOT drop the ball on the Immigration Invasion, or the rest is really for naught.
I wrote the intro. paragraph to explain that the yahoo story captured above is almost a month old. Writers Douglas Magno with Facundo Fernandez Barrio in Sao Paolo of AFP (I dunno.) are sad, as Brazil slams US after dozens of deportees arrive handcuffed. OMG, handcuffs!
Per people I know, some of the worst of the Salvadorans, those with the MS-13 tattoos all over, are shot upon arrival in San Salvador, so, wearing handcuffs for 4 hours kind of pales in comparison. Brazil's government has expressed outrage though.
When the plane landed in the northern city of Manaus, Brazilian authorities ordered US officials to "immediately remove the handcuffs," the justice ministry said in a statement.Well, yeah, that was the problem to begin with - they're Brazilian citizens, not Americans. By all means, take off the handcuffs, IN BRAZIL. Now, some of the problems the 88
Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski told President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of "the flagrant disregard for the fundamental rights of Brazilian citizens," the statement said.
"Things have already changed (with Trump), immigrants are treated as criminals," he said.By Jorge! I think he's got it!
I want to see more and more of these sob stories. There seems to be a lull, which is not a good sign. More sob stories = more serious deportations going on. Not only that, but were the deportation numbers to go up to levels like 10,000/day, the sob stories would greatly encourage self-deportations, easily bringing the timetable down by a factor of 5 to 10!
So please, Lyin' Press, don't listen to Chrissy Hynde!
Yes, we've featured this song before. I realize it was written by the great British band The Kinks, I listened to their version and it didn't compare to The Pretenders', this song being their very 1st single. YMMV.
* As Mr. Hail has noted, no larger than that during Bai Dien's reign. OTOH, I hasten to add that the numbers coming in are way down. That's a start, is all - the incoming numbers could be set to 0 anytime with the military presence Trump has sent.
** Gonna go with the old Russian spelling today - see some background. (Ha! That post of ours has 28 uses of the term, and all of them are spelled with a "c".)
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Sharp Aldi's Employees on the look-out
Posted On: Wednesday - February 19th 2025 11:54AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Humor Economics Muh Generation
Yeah, but it was a White guy this time, one Richard Seeger, who was reported by ZeroHedge to have been passing 2 Dollar bills off at the Monticello, New York Aldi. Monticello is a village of 7,000 people in the Catskill "mountains" region (western portion of the southern part of "Upstate" New York. Yep, they've got an Aldi - Aldi is big now.
Mr. Steger is, or was, a regular there, but 2 cashiers dismissed his phony baloney money as obviously fake. I mean, come on! Personally, if I were to make up a new denomination of US currency, I'd print up $200 bills and put Harriet Tubwoman on the face. ("Yeah, you know, they finally, at long last, pushed this thing through. She build the Transcontinental Railway, you know, pounded in that last golden spike, she did!")
Whoever heard of 2 dollar bills, supposedly with Thomas Jefferson on the front and John Trumbull's famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the back? The 2 young cashiers, per ZeroHedge, were onto this counterfeiting scheme right away:
The cashier claimed the phrase "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" indicated a fake, a clear misunderstanding of its meaning (debatable, we know).Who writes that on the money?! I never ... These young people could have used the method I often explain to people to help detect counterfeit 1's. "Fold the bill thusly. OK, what do you see in between?" "An eye." [of George Washington] "OK. If you see an asshole there instead, it's counterfeit."
More on this anecdote from ZH:
He then handed the bills to a female coworker. The woman asked if the young man had checked the bills with a counterfeit marker.OK, Zoomers!
Steger wrote: “He whispered ‘no, they’re fake.’ So, without even checking them, she rudely and arrogantly told me, ‘We’re not accepting them!’”
Aldi did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.They never do. That is, especially when it's THAT embarrassing.
My friend likes these twos and spends them widely. I think I'll try to get some at the bank and have some fun. Back in the late '90s, I had a pack of Clinton 3-Dollar bills. Hilarity ensued.
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DIMS? - Revenue replacement of Income Tax by Tariffs
Posted On: Tuesday - February 18th 2025 2:23PM MST
In Topics: Trump Pundits Economics US Feral Government Taxes
DIMS is an acronym for Does It Make Sense. Oh, of course, the idea of scrapping the personal, or any and ALL, Federal income tax and replacing that revenue with tariffs does make sense in that it would be a great return to a state of much more Liberty and a return to our country's roots*. It'd be VERY welcome to the Peak Stupidity crowd, and hopefully and likely, most Americans. We listed the Top 5 evils of the personal income tax in our Part 3 of our discussion of the odious Constitutional Amendment XVI.** Believe it or not, "The Money!" did not make it to #1 on the list!
In this post, the DIMS? question applies to the even-keeled, still-too NeoCon, but Libertarian and common-sense-oriented Instapundit. He's, in actuality, University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Reynolds. Besides his famous blog - one of the first I can recall - Professor Reynolds writes weekly(?) columns for The New York Post***, possibly still USA Today, and he also has a substack column. It's all pretty fair and reasonable, but this Law Professor made a simple mistake in his latest, Abolishing the Income Tax.
Much of what Glenn Reynolds relied on for his substack post comes from the substack post DOGE and Military Cuts Could Enable Eliminating Individual Income Tax by one Brian Wang.**** I like the optimism, the attention to the details of what could be cut included in Mr. Wang's post. The discussion of tariffs is an afterthought in his post, with different numbers, but Glenn Reynolds refers to his important number of $1.2 Trillion in spending that could be cut. Then, though, Professor Reynolds says DOGE may cut $2 Trillion, not $1 Trillion, in annual spending. I don't think so.
Peak Stupidity recently murmured "Uhhh, no..." when it comes to the $1 Trillion in cuts. This Brian Wang, along with those doing the work (work?! It must be a blast!), think otherwise. I'd be glad to
If the deficit, the amount the national debt goes FURTHER into the red each year, can be cut in half, I'll be amazed. However, that leaves another $Trillion added to the debt each year, roughly '10s levels of accumulation. Interest due stops for no man, not unless you want to default on the whole thing.
Well, that was pretty pessimistic, but, wait, there's MORE! We discussed in the post Budget Cutting v Austerity that, long-term results would be great, but Full-Retard Welfare-State Socialism has the
Let me finally get to tariffs, Glenn Reynolds, and DIMS? T I'm surprised he made this mistake, but the Professor's contention that tariffs could cover the loss of income tax revenue***** was based on a mistake.
Estimates are that a 10% universal tariff would bring in about $2 trillion in revenues. Under these circumstances, it’s realistic to talk about abolishing the income tax and still paying down the national debt.I put his same link in the excerpt here. The writer Erica York of that Tax Foundation article, uses a couple of rectally-extracted numbers to determine how much money tariffs could raise. I don't mind that bit, but keep in mind, without the elasticity and compliance factors, revenue raised would be even higher. The mistake made not therein, but in Glenn Reynold's (quick, I imagine) perusal of those calculations is this, from right in the beginning:
We estimate a 10 percent universal tariff would raise $2 trillion and a 20 percent universal tariff would raise $3.3 trillion from 2025 through 2034, before factoring in how the taxes would shrink the US economy.Forget the last clause, though it does lead to valid discussion in the post. The $2 or $3.3 Trillion to start with is estimated for a 10 year period. Glenn Reynolds didn't catch that. I would like to inform him, but ...******
$2 Trillion in tariff revenue yearly?! Leaving the couple of factors aside that would make it higher than $2 Trillion, that would mean we are importing $20 Trillion in goods and services, the kind that could have tariffs levied! The GDP, for what it's worth, is only under $30 Trillion. Does It Make Sense? No. Besides my being surprised Professor Reynolds didn't use his common sense there, my point is that the estimate is $200 Billion yearly instead, about 10% of the personal income tax revenue. I know I've stated about this proportion before just using the method of ... you guess it, rectal extraction. Let me refer to his into that can be seen above:
President Trump has talked about ending the income tax and replacing it with tariffs and spending cuts. Most people pooh-poohed that as unrealistic.Heh! Indeed. I'm one of them. First, you've got to get the rough numbers right.
* That post comes from way back, last time around - Trump-45 - written in July of '18. It referred to a Pat Buchanan column, among others. Mr. Buchanan was still humming along in '18.
** See more on the, for the most part, other odious Amendments (past the 10 Bill of Rights ones) to the US Constitution using the Topic Key Morning Constitutional.
*** Note Post, NOT Times. The latter would never have him. The former can be pretty fair some of the time. The Post had its important Hunter Bai Dien laptop story squashed by censored anti-Social media just before the '20 election, possibly making the difference along with the cheating.
**** I think I knew this before, but substack writers are allowed an alias name or slogan to go with their accounts. It may or may not be in the URL. Glenn Reynold's is his full name "Glenn Harlan Reynolds", but Mr. Wang's one is NEXTBIGFUTURE. Then, there is a title too. Prof. Reynolds uses his name, Mr. Wang uses that alias, and Ann Coulter has "Unsafe" as her title.
***** Even the personal income tax system itself could use some reverse cuts, let's call them. It would help to get those millions of illegal aliens that get refunds based on their many dependents, down in Guatemala or made up out of whole cloth, as per my friend who worked at H&R Block (until he got disgusted), by kicking their fake-documemted selves off the rolls, hell, out of the country.
****** I thought about emailing him, but it's not been easy to extract his email address. (His HTML tries to open email clients that I don't have.) One has to join up to comment on his substack site. I'm not doing that, and so far I haven't read a comment that corrects this mistake. That doesn't say so much for the commenters, IMO.
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With spies like these ..
Posted On: Friday - February 14th 2025 9:53AM MST
In Topics: Humor Global Financial Stupidity China Economics
... your country has to die.
Unclassified material follows. (HEY, how are you still reading?! I thought I'd made this clear!)
Peak Stupidity is well aware that just one of the many evils of open or porous borders is the risk of espionage by bad "actors" ... like, who's that guy in Get Smart? No, wait, he's a good actor, but a bad spy. Seriously, you let foreigners, many without even citizenship, work in industry and government facilities, and what would you expect? For whatever reason, likely because the Indians are just not as conscientious and loyal to a home country that sucks so much worse, of the large contingents of H1B (and what-have-you) technical types, it's the Chinese who seem more prone to this.
Peak Stupidity has featured 2 stories on government espionage by Chinese people, the 1st about "LA woman" Si Chen and the 2nd about UCLA Professor Yi-Chi Shih, with his accomplice, Pasadena man Kiet Ahn Mai.* Additionally, we told a personal anecdote involving industrial espionage in Chinese grad students and airbag espionage.
This latest episode of spying involves an American, though, who has been passing on US Gov't secrets to the Chinese. It's the old fashioned espionage you got when you didn't let any T'mei, Deik, and Hari into your country. ZeroHedge reports Former Federal Reserve Adviser Arrested For Allegedly Passing US Trade Secrets To China
Holy crap, secrets from the FED, no less! I mean, yeah, these guys made a bunch of money by knowing inside info on when the next rate hike, cut, or quantitive easing (that's PhD-level economics speak for "printing money") was coming. The corruption aspect of this is one thing. It's not what is doing damage to the country. (Which country? I'll get back to you on that.)
I mean, the FED runs our economy. Controlling interest rates by lending recently created money out at specified rates is what made America the solid stable economic power it has become. It's been 112 years now, and look at us! We can't give this secret economic formula away to the Chinese!
Because this latest is just too much, Peak Stupidity hereby petitions Pooh Bear, aka, Xi Jinping in Beijing for mercy. We know you're reading. (Yes, we've connected visits to this site by your advisors to the Forbidden City main IP number.)
Please, please, please Chairman Pooh ("It's XI!" Whatever.), do anything else! Steal the last of our manufacturing technical secrets. Make our trade deficit with China go up to a $Trillion! Condone the ripping and burning of The Office DVDs on the streets of Canton! But, please, Sir, we beg of you, DON'T STEAL THE SECRETS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE!
* "He's a little old Commie from Pasadena (go Yi-Chi, go Yi-Chi, go Yi-Chi, go!)" Not impressed? Look up Jan & Dean sometime, and get back to me. ;-} I know, the Vietnamese guy is the one from Pasa ..... that didn't work for the meter.
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DEPORT OMAR!
Posted On: Wednesday - February 12th 2025 7:52PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity US Feral Government alt-right/MAGA Poetic Stupidity
Peak Stupidity has mentioned a piece of work named Ilhan Omar before, most recently in this rambling post. As the DOGE group has been digging deep, they noted that this US CongressRagHead Omar (D-SO) has used USAID to launder, well, it's just peanuts, $2,300,000,000 to support civil war in Somalia. Well, it's in our best interests as Americans ... apparently.
Since we've been on an MTG (Marjorie Taylor Greene) kick elsewhere today, with great respect, admiration, and a little bit of a crush, we'll show the following video again. It's from out post MTG v IOU from just about a year back. (IOU is Ilhan Omar, Undocumented.)
MTG has a real spirit to her - it used to be called the Spirit of '76 years ago, when quite a number of American politicians still had it. All MTG was after a year back was to censure IOU, which is a pretty big deal in Congress (see Steve King: Walking through the Fire), for treasonous influence on the Feral Government. Even talking about that was as far as anyone would go last year, and MTG is most definitely ANYONE. Of course, this resolution got nowhere with the UniParty.
The Overton Window has been shifted through efforts of the Trump Administration. Additionally, the even more treasonous actions by this Congressional Representative from Somalia linked-to above call for further efforts against her. A Congressman from Texas is just the man to do it. I looked up Brandon Gill, after reading the following headline on The Gateway Pundit: ‘The Time Has Come’: This GOP Congressman Wants to Arrest and Deport Ilhan Omar to Somalia For Treason. Ha! I guessed beforehand that he was from Texas, north Georgia, or east Tennessee! Brandon Gill is from Texas's 26th District, just south of Oklahoma about halfway west from the Louisiana border to the TX panhandle.
So the reader doesn't have to wade through nasty ads on GP, I'll paste in the text of the 2 emails, Rep Gill sent to his constituents. Yeah, they were fundraising emails, so this is not even a resolution subject to vote, AFAIK.
Friend, we should have never let Ilhan Omar into our country.
And frankly, America would be a much better place if she were to be sent back to Somalia.
Recently, it came out that Ilhan Omar is hosting free workshops for Somalians, who are in our country illegally, on how to evade ICE and deportation.
It could not be more blatant: Ilhan Omar is more loyal to illegal Somalians than she is to the United States, or the office she was elected to.
It is an absolute disgrace.
A sitting Member of Congress is facilitating a full-scale invasion of our country…Well, yeah, it's a petition, and I imagine it's one that has an urgent request for campaign donations. I suppose it's a start though.
A normal society would refer to that as treason…
But regardless of labels, one thing is clear: The time has come to arrest and deport Ilhan Omar.
I have had my fill of foreigners storming our border, complaining about and disparaging our country, and then helping more and more of them invade our lands… And I know the American people are too.
If you’re as sick and tired of it as I am, sign my petition and let’s send her back to Somalia where she belongs
Yes, the time has come ...
The time has come,' the Walrus said,(Thanks, Poetry Foundation.) I always imagined a "weather pig" when hearing that poem, like this:
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
Traitor Omar has been advising illegal alien Somalians how to evade ICE and work the immigration racket. She has been a part of this herself, personally, in the past, with actions involving a crooked and weird bromance, so it's not for nothing that her current base of Minneapolis may be re-nicknamed the "City of Brotherly Love". The way things have been going for decades now, Omar would not be deported until pigs fly. We'll see now that the new King has been enthroned - it all depends on weather pigs have wings.
PS: Sadly, those were just fundraising emails. I wonder if Rep Gill has the guts to say just what he wrote there in front of the US Congress, as our MTG would.
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Trust the EXPERTS
Posted On: Tuesday - February 11th 2025 6:59PM MST
In Topics: Humor
Comments (6)
Back to China: That glitter? It ain't all gold
Posted On: Monday - February 10th 2025 5:06PM MST
In Topics: China
It's been more than 2 week since our post about China called Back to China: All that glitter.. Peak Stupidity criticized pundit Ron Unz's view of all that glitters in China based on his viewing of youtube videos by (I'm guessing pretty) young Western ladies living or visiting there. I posted a long comment extracted from the long thread of comments under Mr. Unz's post. As SafeNow wrote in the PS comments, no, just looking at the peeling paint on buildings and stuff like that doesn't say too much.*
The commenter in question had some other good details too that refute the glittery views, but true, it was narrowly focused. Having been to China either 11 or an even dozen times, and, more importantly, having dealings with Chinese people I can trust there, I can say that I know a bit more about the social and economic scene than a guy who has watched a lot of youtube videos of pretty woman narrators. ("The bubble-headed beach blonde, comes on at five ...")
Let me start with that peeling paint though. ;-} The longest time I stayed in China was for 6 weeks. The apartment building we stayed at was OK, but then with concrete construction, interior walls need a lot of decoration to look nice. There was no elevator in this 8-story building. That was not a bad thing for me, on the 6th floor, as I needed that cardio exercise, but for old ladies and movers(yikes!), I don't know. OK, well, I figured the building was 25 or 30 years old from this and the general shape of it, but, nope, it was 8 years old.
All the dozens and dozens of new 35-30 story buildings in this "village" have elevators, of course. The facts that property is only owned for 70 years before it belongs to the government and that the owners aren't responsible for the outside - including the rarer detached houses - means effort is not taken to clean and repair the exteriors. This includes the often rusty or broken burglar bars - wait, burglar bars?! See Cat burglars and entrepreneurship in China.
I read comments such as "I didn't see any trash cans in Shanghai. The Chinese are so neat and tidy." Haha! That's when I realize I'm dealing with a propagandist or a dupe. No, dummy, the Chinese throw all manner of things on the ground and in the bushes, but there are armies of low-paid old ladies continually sweeping, sweeping with those non-American style brooms.**
OK, well, enough of that, because they do have a large 2-D network of high-speed trains, many new airports being built each year, new coal and nuke plants being put on line weekly, and a population smart enough and conscientious enough to build it and keep it running. We've written plenty about this - see our many Planes, Trains, and Automobiles posts with pictures from Summer '23 here. Also, the governments there, no matter how greedy corrupt, and often Totalitarian, are not doing evil things like flooding China with foreigners.
So what's the problem, besides some minor things being shoddy? Aren't the people in the videos right that China would be a pleasant and convenient place to live out one's life, assuming they'd let you do that, which they won't, as I just noted? Or, are the videos made to show that "your country sucks now compared to ours, so nah, nah!!" They've got a point in that our country sucks compared to the old America that none of the young people, Americans or Chinamen can imagine. However, China has its inherent problems, enough that I really think I wouldn't move there even if I could, for life. The future I see for both places tells me that we Americans still have a better chance against the Globalism and Totalitarianism than the Chinese people do. (Maybe they just don't mind all that... good for them, I suppose, but this is part of the reason I don't think so much of the place.)
There will be no analysis of the Chinese economy here. Other than that I'm sure that the Chinese real GDP has surpassed that of America years ago - "P" stands for Product(s) - I have no numbers to give the reader. One can get numbers from the Chinese Gov't that are worth even less than those out of our BLS. (At least, with the latter, we have a good idea about how and where the BS is introduced.) One can watch Epoch Times videos and see that the whole Chinese economy is about to implode any day now. Then, one could read Unz Review propagandists and get a rosy picture about the huge, happy, and prosperous middle class, or look at graphs from one Godfree Roberts*** that show how Mao Zedong greatly improved the Chinese economy, including that Great, but meatless and vegetable-less, Leap Forward even. The truth is in there somewhere. [/Fox Mordor]
I've just got anecdotes of real people, factory owners, Chinese yuppies, single Moms, Mooncake boys, and Fat Boys.
The factory owner is a real piece of work, trying to pawn off a whole rejected (by the German customer, naturally) shipping container full of goods on the Mexican customer, who, dammit, somehow had learned Chinese, and that was that. Enough about her.
The Chinese yuppie has the now-government favored "big" family of a husband and 2 kids. There are 4 grandparents around, along with the hard-working 2 parents, to dote over the 2 boys. The parents still must work long days in their white-collar jobs, for the pay that is not a whole lot more in spending power than some welfare queens here. They do have cars, as do a number of people that I'd seen back in '17 not have any. Then too, so do welfare queens here. This Chinese middle-class family does have an apartment that is worth something like a million US dollars at this point, so that is their big savings account. They're doing OK. For some reason though, rents are cheap enough that they just don't pencil out for any kind of return for a landlord. A month's payment for one place elsewhere was only $300 or so, yet the apartment was still worth a quarter million or so. Is the rent subsidized in places, or is the real estate in a real bubble?
The single Mom has only the one child, as required, though he's grown-up now. When I first met him I noticed he had a wide face, not unusual, but I called him the Moon-face kid, due to that there's no freaking way I could remember a Chinese name, were it not written out for me in PinYin (phonetics). That somehow morphed into his being the Mooncake kid. He dropped out of college that his mother worked very hard 6 days a week to pay for after his 7th semester. (Yes, that's out of 8!) That "Lying Flat" thing that you may have seen in videos is not necessarily a widespread thing like say, the hippie movement in 1967 America, but some kind of national malaise is not out of the question.
The social ills that we see in America are not things that Chinese people are somehow immune to. One would think that jobs should be easy to get, what with all the amazing infrastructure work, the manufacturing, and the AI and Orwellian software and networks being built, with a much smaller labor force compared to the flood of young people 20 years ago.**** Lot of the actual manufacturing of consumer items has been outsourced to Vietnam, Bangladesh, Malaysia and what-have-you though. Then, with their engineering prowess and lack of such things as California Air Resources Boards to stop them, the Chinese have automated a lot of work. I suppose that's what it is.
There is much competition for the good jobs now. This Mooncake boy has some sort of job now, but he's kind of dropped out in a way. His single Mom finds it very hard to get hired at new jobs - they say it's difficult above a certain age. The employers must still want that lower-cost and higher-energy young labor that they could get 20 years ago.
The Fat Boy was born during the 1-child policy but he does have a sister. (That caused some trouble for the family.) He was born about a decade after the time of food ration cards, and his Mom could afford to feed him well, if by well, one means all the rice he can eat. White rice has one high-ass Glycemic Index, and so unfortunately, this guy's always been fat. No, he's not people-of-Wal-Mart level fat, but he'd have been called obese in 1970's America. What was he doing hanging around at 3 PM away? I wasn't sure what day it was due to our travels, but... yeah, it was Monday. "Oh, he works for the country government. They've got good hours." His pay is not good though. Back to the "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." thing? Almost.
That same Godfree Roberts*** could show you a poll on how much Chinese people love the CCP and their national government. Firstly, one thing about China is you can get away with quite a bit - drive like a maniac, pop a beer that spews out everywhere at the airport in the morning*****, pop off a bunch of firecrackers outside the restaurant just for the hell of it, and you won't see cop 1. However, you cannot go railing about the government and Pooh Bear up there in old Peking. No, no, none of that. So, as little as I trust polls in America, I trust those social polls in China even less.
China is not as Orwellian (YET!) as I'd thought before my '23 trip, those thoughts having been based on my reading of a book titled We Have Been Harmonized****** back in '20. I've seen videos about the Social Credit system, but I don't have much to report on that unfortunately. I don't think these scores go into effect at all if you're a pretty young White Western lady taking pictures to show all the glitter as gold.
One can still pay for goods and services with cash, albeit with cameras focused for that purpose in the big cities, train stations, airports, etc. The use of smart-phones for payments is very common, and as with the crazy '22 Kung Flu re-Panic documented here on Peak Stupidity in pictures and even video, I think the Chinese will be mostly compliant when the system gets completed and
I'll insert here something about High- v Low-trust societies. America has been changing much for the worse in this respect. China is a place that doesn't have much social trust at all. I had thought for years that this was due to the 40 years of hard-core Communism laid on them. Now, I'm not so sure. The cause may go back a lot farther than that.
A big reason for not wanting to live in the China is not the present but the future. With the Globalist threats and Orwellian AI stuff coming, we've got a few important factors here that will be of help: Guns and Trump. OK, OK, maybe not Trump himself - we'll see - but the kind of people that can and do vote for Trump... and have guns, lots of 'em.
Finally, with all that glitter - the bright lights (and they DO like their colored lighting there) of the city, you go to the Great Wall, the very symbol of the Middle Kingdom, and you still see that they have had to put up a sign that says in Chinese "No peeing or poohing in the corner here". (At least that's what my source says.) The American version is errr, cleaner, but unclear on the concept.
* SafeNow sees a difference in mindset between Western and Chinese people being important, and he linked to an article (just reading today) to explain. I can't get into all that here, today at least.
** They are neither our normal sweep brooms nor push brooms as we know them, but you do push them rather than sweep.
*** ;-} While doing a search to find this guy's writing on The Unz Review, I found a number of comments referencing the guy. This one was by Mr. Unz himself, badmouthing both Mr. Roberts and one Larry Romanoff, both of them near-idiots who Mr. Unz had picked in the past to write for his site! Not a good judge of character, this Ron Unz ... He's got an open mind... scary open ... I quote: "This is an alt-media website, so I’ve published numerous articles by both Larry Romanoff and Godfree Roberts, so I’ve very familiar with their work, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever trust it." Heh! Oh, and there's a comment by our own Mr. Hail there too (2nd page).
**** That 1-child policy was implemented by Chairman Deng in about 1980. That means the number of people under 45 is a lot smaller than those over that age, who are now not exactly ready for hard intensive work, as they look to retirement at 55 - 60.
***** See I had it in my luggage due to having been forced into a 1st-class ticket, wanting my money out of it, and forgetting it was in the luggage for a week. Then there was the Chinese version of the TSA, so, it wasn't going to waste.
****** Our 4-part review: Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 and Part 4
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Rain Forest Music
Posted On: Saturday - February 8th 2025 9:25PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor Political Correctness
Political Correctness, started way back in the 1980s perhaps, at least named such by then, was a bit more innocuous than its roided-up version Wokeness. Back when it was called PC, there really were lots of well-meaning people who thought we could make people feel better by using inoffensive terminology:
Euphemism creep has been going on, the idea being that we need to introduce new terminology to hide whom or what we are talking about, cause... connotations. "Oh, whenever they say 'teens", they mean..." Someone get to work on a new one, stat!
Expert Michael Scott explains some more:
The Wokeness, seen for a decade or so at its worst (hopefully), is much more edgy. Names and terminology are changed to erase history. That's the Communist Way, the Communist Truth, and the Communist Shining Path. It makes one pine for the old innocent days of Political Correctness.
Apparently the word "jungle" has been out of favor for a few decades already. It took me a couple of years to figure out that those people trying to "save the rainforest - like these people* - were talking about the jungle. "Jungle" has certain connotations though, snakes and bugs and such, so who wants to save it? The Rain Forest sounds very nice. We really SHOULD save it. (The check's in the mail.)
Now, for over 50 years, many small airliners have been built in Sao Paulo, Brazil by the Embraer company. There were nearly 500 EMB-110 18-passenger Bandeirante turboprops built, and that model was dubbed affectionately as The Bandit by pilots. Embraer came out with the EMB-120 Brasilia next, followed by their regional jets. There are plenty of the EMB-135 and many more EMB-145 ERJ's flying around still.** Due to the simple fact that they were built in Brazil, and Brazil has a huge jungle, the -135s and -145s have long been dubbed The Jungle Jet. Truly, there was nothing slur-like about this.
Pilots and air traffic controllers have had their affectionate names for lots of airplanes. The grand old Boeing 747 was The Whale - no slur there, as it was and still is a hell of an airplane. The shortest version of the narrow-bodied Airbuses (319/320/321), the 319 has been called The Baby Bus. (Yes, "short bus" for it is indeed a slur, but then the planes do call the pilots "retards" during landings!).
Well, about 20 years ago, my friend was going on a long trip, and I asked him about the equipment. The first leg was to be on an ERJ-135 or -145. I told him about the name, so he'd sound familiar with the lingo. When the day came, he went up the built-in stairs into the plane and commented "Hey, this is the Jungle Jet." Of all things, it turned out that both pilots and the flight attendant were Black!. Remember, folks, if you're in customer service, "The customer is always right." My friend survived the journey unscathed.
The new and very-improved President Trump has been a real trooper by not putting up with the PC/Wokeness name-changing business. Peak Stupidity figures we should get on-board with this and un-rename the Rain Forest. So, we will feature 3 Rain Forest songs with their originally changed names to see how dumb this PC stuff sounds.. These songs go back about half a century.
Run through the Rain Forest was by Creedence Clearwater Revival. This is one of my top 10 favorites from a band that made nothing but favorites. That's John Fogerty with the best voice ever in Rock & Roll.
Bungle in the Rain Forest (too bad that doesn't rhyme!) was by Jethro Tull. That's not a guy - the leader of this great rock band was Ian Anderson. I have no idea who Jethro Tull himself was. This band played some much longer and weirder material, but this was more of pop song. Good stuff! And, what other rock bands had flautists? Marshall Tucker, and I know I've been reminded of some others...
Rain Forest Love was by The Steve Miller Band. This is not the same Steven Miller who works for Trump, though he was also from California. I doubt the immigration invasion mattered to this Steve Miller. It was the mid/late-1970s. He did sing a song about USAID, though. What was it... oh Take the Money and Run. "Whooo, hooo, hoooo, go on ..."
I know I missed Guns & Roses' Welcome to the Rain Forest, but it's just not one of my favorites of theirs.
* That link goes to a movie review of The Green Inferno. There's a Part 2... of the review that is, not of the movie. The latter would be more than I could stomach, pun intended.
** The most recent and fairly successful models have been the EMB-170/175/190s. These things stand tall and look like Airbuses. They could be called "cross-overs", as they are between regional jets and "mainline" aircraft.
Comments (23)
Trump-47 and alt-rec History
Posted On: Friday - February 7th 2025 6:14PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '26 Lefty MegaStupidity History Trump alt-right/MAGA ctrl-left Zhou Bai Dien Karmakarma Kameleon
What is the ctrl-left of the D-squad had not stolen the election of '20? This speculation has been made by loads of pundits since the '24 election and more so since his E.O. Blitzkrieg started 3 weeks back. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds wrote one of his weekly NY Post columns about this, as have many others. Peak Stupidity does not purport to have nearly a majority of original material, so we'll get in on the speculation here too. It's fun, and it's schadenfreudealicious!
There's a genre of fiction writing called "alt-history". Often it has science fiction elements in it. It's very enjoyable to imagine one small event or phenomena having caused the future we live in now to be different, maybe even better. There was "alternative rock" back 35-30 years ago, but we didn't call it "alt-rock", because "alt-" still sounded stupid then, unless you were a Unix geek. There's the "alt-right" now. How about we call this genre of speculation "alt-rec history" for alternative recent history?
So, yeah, what if the ctrl-left Commie radicals had let the election results of the night of November 2nd '20 stand? We remember Trump-45. Besides a few helpful but incomplete non-permanent moves on the Immigration Invasion, he didn't accomplish much. The ctrl-left really didn't have a logical reason to hate him other than was not of the Regime-favorable UniParty. (They had plenty of irrational reasons, as usual.) The worthless Mike Pence was still Trump's vice-presidential candidate. Was the distraction of Russia! Russia! Russia! even over with? If so, there would have been more of them. Trump had not learned that much yet. He'd been harassed and railed against but not put through the fire as he has since then.
4 more years of that muddle-headed bloviating, with that small chance of, whoop-dee-freaking-doo!, Mike Pence now carrying the GOPe torch... we'll he'd have gotten trounced anyway, as the ctrl-left would have had someone more powerful and odious than the Bai Dien crowd and Kamala Kamelion ready to go.
We can be very very thankful that the ctrl-left made mistake after mistake after mistake since the time of Trump-45. First off, they picked Zhou Bai Dien, a former plagiarist, half-century-running Washington grifter to run in '20. No, I guess they didn't know how soon dementia would set in, but still... and then, due to the help Bai Dien needed to win that early South Carolina primary from those old black church ladies, there was a deal with that race-mongering Jim Clyburne to put a black woman in the high positions, VP candidate, SCROTUS judge, or both. Could then not have found someone, ANYONE, other than Kameltoe? Nobody voting in the D-primaries liked her. If they couldn't find their Oprah or Big Mike, how about a block man (but I repeat myself) instead. There are plenty of race-mongering Commies, such as, just as an example, Kameltoe's Dad. (Just an example. He would have been on the old side and lives in Jamaica, but so??)
Then, what'd they do? With the (real, not administrative) Deep State running things, you don't really need the guy to be cognizant. Things still get done. However, in the re-election campaign of '24, you've to to know when to fish or cut bait. They could have kept Bai Dien in the basement again, but like idiots, they put the guy in a debate. Hilarity ensued.
Then, instead of taking some stock in the situation in early Summer of '24 and putting some just-as-odious, but less ditzy, drunken-crack-whore-resembling, person in the primaries and having a contest of meritorious evil, they went with Kameltoe. They thought they'd pull off the My Fair Lady routine, but she was too far out in the weeds. They'd only WISHED she'd had a Cockney accent! That drunken sorority sister rambling thing is, well, by George, I think they were screwed! Again, hilarity ensued.
The ctrl-left made ... errrr, even more "mistakes were made" due to hubris, as the ctrl-left did everything they could think of to put Trump out of commission. The massive Anarcho-Tyrannic lawfare efforts could have worked on a less-helaciously-wealth, less-confident man.* All this did, early on, was to get people like me to drop all other candidates and rally around the man, because reasons. This effort did put a drag on the time of this high-energy guy, but the backlash from potential, say, DeSantis supporters , overrode any possible downsides to all the missed campaign opportunities due to court dates. Possible Regime-friendly contenders like Nimarata Haley were all falling by the wayside due to our resolve to not let the lawfare win. Nice going, ctrl-left!
Then, they went all out, going back to their Leninist Commie roots. Trying to shoot the guy dead thing almost worked. It was not a mistake as far as their idea, I gotta admit, but NOBODY expects a blessing of that half-second turn of the head that saved Trump. That was divine intervention, if anything was! Who sees that kind of thing coming, these days?!
Then, I'm sure they tried to cheat again, and very close they came, but we were miraculously unburdened of 4 more years of ctrl-left destruction.
Trump-47 has had 4 years to mull over the mistakes of Trump-45. He HAS learned a lot, and, yes, this has taken me by surprise. You can call some of the moves Trump has been doing revenge, but going after people who've tried to take him down comports with the rule-of-law anyway, as we explained here. He has many reasons to be angry and at a lot of people in the government. These happen to line up very well with what MAGA wants too.
The ctrl-left really screwed the pooch with that '20 cheat-fest. They thought that they had their destructive plans sewed up by that point and would mop things up with the use of old Dark Brandon. Nope, but I guess it wasn't over completely. 4 more years of old-Trump from '21 to '25 would have slowed down their plans, but they'd have been in a good position now. Oops! MAGA is having it's day in the sunshine NOW.
Oh, the fun they would have had, in that alt-rec history scenario. Were it not for those 5 or 10 big mistakes ... Too bad, so sad.
* Hell, they did on VDare, which is a married couple with some help from a few good people, and this was without any even BOGUS charges!
Comments (9)
The pilots of Pat-25
Posted On: Thursday - February 6th 2025 9:27PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Political Correctness Feminism US Feral Government
Just adding a little bit more here to the previous post.
This post is speculation due to that I have no experience in the military. I do know that there are call signs used for different types of missions. The "PAT" one I knew was the label for mission that flew military "brass", i.e., honchos around. I just learned it stands for Priority Air Ttransport.
Whatever the mission was - obviously not a real PAT mission, as the only passenger, per se, was the crew chief (basically, a lead mechanic) - Pat-25 wanted to get south via the Potomac River "Route 4". It was an instructional flight, from everything I've read. That doesn't mean that this Captain Rebecca Lobach was learning to fly helicopters or first learning to fly at night. (I sure hope not, and think not, regarding the latter.) She was getting trained for this mission, maybe just as a one-time check-out.
Here's the part where the military flying differs from civilian flying. In the military there are ranks. Rank is important! Rebecca Lobach was a Captain, but not in the sense of "who's in command of the helicopter?" That was her Army rank, while Andrew Eaves, the instructor, was a Chief Warrant Officer 2. The latter is above all non-commissioned officers but below all commissioned officers, starting with Leutenant, Captain, and up...
In general aviation, I noted in the comments that it's possible someone may be teaching his boss how to fly, so that could get a little dicey as far as what they call CRM (Cockpit Resource Managment - OK, it's really Crew RM now, but I'm not woke so...) In the airlines, there are 2 pilots, the Captain - in charge of the flight - and the First Officer. It IS possible, due to career paths, that the F/O has more experience than the Captain on a given flight, but still, there are no ranks. It's simple.
I don't know how the relationship would have been between a higher ranking officer getting trained and her instructor. I emphasized her, notice, because I can see that being a part of a problem.
I talked to a former Army helicopter pilot today who assured me that, no, there's no big deal about a higher-ranking officer receiving instruction from a lower one. Each knows where he stands. Oh, that was he. I don't know the guy well enough to ask him about problems with the sexes in said situation. Some would say it's a bad idea to have women involved in military combat roles period. I would tend to agree. At this point I'll refer to the wise Unz Review commenter AnotherDad as he explains this whole problem here.
Rebecca Lobach, using her leverage as a member of the IN crowd during the Bai Dien
Diversity, Inclusion, Equity: Live it, learn it, die by it. This garbage does need to stop.
Comments (18)
Did D.I.E. cause 67 people to die?
Posted On: Wednesday - February 5th 2025 9:46AM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Feminism Trump US Feral Government
Likely not a soul reading hasn't heard about the crash of an Army Blackhawk helicopter and a PSA* (dba American Eagle) CRJ-700 over the Potomac River at Reagan Airport last week. There were 67 souls lost, 60 passengers, 2 pilots and 2 flight attendants on PSA, and 2 helicopter pilots along with a crew chief (like a lead mechanic). President Trump immediately called out the D.I.E. madness as a cause, aiming that talk at the Air Traffic Control system. I've discussed a whole lot of specific details elsewhere. They'd make this post 10 ft long, so excuse me if I really don't explain everything in that much detail here.
The helicopter crew caused this crash. I listened to the DCA (Reagan Airport) tower frequency for the period in question, as taken from a scanner and saved for anyone to listen to here. As someone who does know this business, I find no fault with the guy in the tower at the time. (No, I'm not the NTSB, but with this not involving a mysterious malfunction and all the data out there - the recording being most of what one needs, it's a simple one.)
Let me go over the causes here very briefly. There's a "corridor" or route down/up the Potomac River very close to the runways at DCA - 1/19, the longer, main one, 15/33, quite a bit shorter (but with 33 being straight into the wind this night), and 4/22, the latter not used so much. There are not many ways to get out of FS (Federal Shithole) what with all the 9/11 paranoia/Police State style restricted areas all around.**. The route required (past tense now, I think) helicopters, with no airplanes allowed, to stay under 200' above the river right on the east side. PSA flight 5342 was asked it they wouldn't mind landing on 33, on a visual approach, accepted after about 20 seconds of making sure the length was legal for their weight and the conditions, flew from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, about 4 miles south of rwy 1, flew right to belly out a tad, and then made a left turn to land on 33.
Well before this, the Blackhawk, dba (OK, call sign) Pat-25, had asked for passage down the river. (We can't hear Pat-25's transmissions due their using the UHF radio, a common thing. The tower was speaking on UHF and the normal VHF frequency simultaneously, also the norm.). The tower asked Pat-25 if he had that PSA flight in sight, which would be (not yet though!) coming around for 33. Whichever pilot was on the radio must have answered "Affirmative" and, more importantly, agreed to "maintain visual separation" with that "traffic". One only need hear the tower calls to understand that.
I've looked at the geometry for the use of landings on 33, and even that altitude limit just doesn't work. So, did the tower screw up? This is where I can't explain it all here for reasons of brevity, but no. That assurance of "maintaining visual separation" relieves the controller of maintaining separation. If Pat-25 had answered "negative" or told the tower they'd lost visual contact (or never had it) at ANY TIME, the tower would have given the helo a hard turn or some instructions to keep the flights separated. Now, should that corridor have been used with traffic landing on 33? No. What was the procedure though? I imagine there wasn't one - now there will be, or the whole route for helicopters may be shut down even for 01/19 only operations.
Even that was too much, so let me get to the D.I.E. question. D.i.E. was not a direct cause here in terms of tower personnel, that is, the job done that night. However, if it's true that there would normally be one more guy up there - there were a handful, but there's ground control and other positions - and he could have solely dealt with the (many, as heard on the recording) helicopters, than that was a staffing problem.
Is the staffing problem due to D.I.E.? That is Steve Sailer's well-thought-through contention - see Obama's Diversity Push in Air Traffic Controllers Is Eventually Going to Get People Killed and DIE in the Air. His point was that the anti-White-man diversity efforts got people hired who would then wash out at higher rates, causing said staffing problems. I don't disagree that this is a factor and an anti-White travesty anyway, even were we talking art school with no safety concerns.
There is more to it now, though, as I tried to explain to him. (He didn't listen one bit.) I've talked to air traffic controllers about things. One guy spoke of a small/medium sized facility normally requiring 22 total staff having only 13 as of last year. A lady at one of the centers (ARTCCs) told me she was working too many shifts and also shifting-hour shifts due to this. They both told me that training got held up greatly during the Kung Flu PanicFest. It's just not easy to catch up, when it takes 3 years or so for people to become actual productive Air Traffic Controllers.
Then too, both the airlines and ATC along with them, figured the big depression in air travel*** would go on for longer than it did. The airlines caught up by offering pilots big bucks. ATC had people retiring early during the PanicFest, probably with some encouragement that might not even have been needed, as it's a really stressful job for most of them. Along with all that, there was the mandatory jab problem. (I'm personally familiar with a situation in which a sector of Jacksonville Center was not taking traffic due to a one day walk-out to protest the jab. Good people!) Staffing has been behind ever since.
Now, it's possible both of the controllers I talked to did not want to mention D.I.E. Is it possible the problem is solely what Mr. Sailer, and others, have said? Rather than keep using the Edie Brickell approach, I went ahead and looked a few things up. This section of a DOT report written in June of '23 gives some good information, though without as many numbers as I'd have liked. The "Academy" in Oklahoma City closed down for only a few months, they went remote, etc, but it wasn't just that. Controllers have to train at real ATC facilities. You know that masking, Social Distancing, getting all sent home due to one pozzed individual, etc? Yeah, well, Air Traffic Controllers were not immune to this PanicFest either. Check out that easy-to-read report on ATC staffing.
The D.I.E. business was a factor since the Øb☭ma administration. Even before that, someone I know ran into the milder AA version of this more than 20 years back. I don't if Trump put a temporary stop to it - he was a different guy as #45 - but though D.I.E. has been bad for staffing, the Kung Flu PanicFest became a BIG factor in this problem too, and more recently.
OK, that's ATC, but it was the Army helicopter pilots who caused this crash. We know who they are now, after Rebecca Lobach's info was finally given out (giving someone enough time for a scrub of her antiSocial media). Then we find out she was a big-shot in the Bai Dien White House. I have no doubt she was a D.I.E. hire, at least in terms of moving way up the chain. Is this what President Trump was talking about?
However, Andrew Eaves, who was what they call the Aircraft Commander in the military, was still in charge. He was a White man. I don't know where he stands on anything, as I don't do antiSocial media. I can see a host of possible mistakes here. The 1st and primary one was that neither pilots had the actual PSA plane called out by the tower in sight. Yet, they said they did. At any time, they could have told the tower they didn't have the traffic.
Were they busy training on this "Continuity of Government"**** mission? That was a mistake. Take it down the river, and THEN train. Or, just demonstrate. Looking for the traffic comes first, in a tight area like that. They were said to be above that 200', but then the transponders that send out altitude readings are only good to 100' (barometric) and are allowed to be off by more than that. (Again, separation for "visual contact" doesn't work this way.) Did either of the pilots even know the layout of the DCA airport well? They knew where it was, of course, but "where's 33? I don't know - let's just keep to the left side." That wouldn't work, as it turns out, but they apparently were out of the corridor horizontally too.
The Army version of the NTSB will investigate and answer any questions remaining. Will they divulge all this as to the NTSB for its own investigation, especially if it makes the military look bad and diversity look bad? Over a dozen years ago, after a massacre by a nutcase Moslem American soldier (whaat??) at an Army base, one General George Casey said "... as great a tragedy as this was -- it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well. No. It wouldn't. It's be a very good thing, but I'd say President Trump may have spoken too soon. Maybe not.
Over the long term, D.I.E. was one factor, along with the Kung Flu PanicFest in this crash IF the tower staffing is seen as a contributing factor. When it comes to the Army, it all depends how the blame is spread between Warrant Officer(2) Andrew Eaves and the Diversity-promoted-quickly-to-Captain Rebecca Lobach*****.. How badly was she screwing up? It looks like a lot. Still, why was the instructor, A/C, distracted enough teaching to let the flight get way off, most importantly ignoring the most important task of the moment, spotting the aircraft to stay away from or, better yet, not calling it, so there could have been some tower-controlled separation? Was the young lady that distracting in her flying? He could have taken the controls at any time, but then, just possibly, he didn't want to get "told on" about this, if his student was a grievance monger.
D.I.E. was indirectly involved here, but not really directly involved, IMO. Trump has good instincts though, so he might be doing the right thing by making this a D.I.E. issue. After all, I hate to think about the casualties, 60 PSA/American Airlines passengers, the 4 crew members, and that innocent crew chief, but, "it would be a shame if this crash is not used as an example of how diversity can get people killed."
* They got the name from the old Pacific Southwest Airlines. The name doesn't apply at all now, as they fly mostly the old US Air Express routes out of Charlotte, NC, Philadelphia, Penn, and, yes Washington National, Ronald Reagan Field. Airlines do that sort of thing - they may have just bought the Air Carrier Certificate from that old defunct airline out in California with the smiles on the front of the DC-9s (and such).
** In fact, the Naval Observatory (do they do any Astronomy there?), the residence of the Vice President, has a circle around it that results in take-offs on runway 01 (about north) having to take a very low immediate left turn.
*** I refer to passenger numbers rather than flights, as there was that sweet CARES ACT money. (Passenger counts don't mean much wrt ATC.). Flights were down significantly for a couple of years and may have only just caught up to '19 over the last year.
**** Yikes! That's some serious Potomac Regime imperial arrogance there. Patriotic Americans would have no problem with a Discontinuance of Government mission by, well, anybody right now. It's what President Trump seems to be going for.
***** That's not to say she was a student of helicopter flying itself. She was the student in this Continuity of Gov't (flying some big shots out of Dodge when the SHTF) situation.
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[UPDATED 02/06:] Added helicopter pilots' names.
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Comments (23)
Common Sense courtesy of the John Birch Society
Posted On: Tuesday - February 4th 2025 2:54PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity
I may have mentioned that I am a member. I should have joined 30 years ago. I get the magazine, The New American, but don't always have time to read it. I would say that this meme alone has made good use of my dues.
(Thanks to "Almost Missouri" for posting this in comments on Steve Sailer's blog on The Unz Review.)
Here's hoping Trump assigns ICE agents to round these people up in cities in California and all over the Estados Unidos of A, not M. I swear that would put his popularity with MAGA and a majority of other Americans at a level #NeverBeenSeenSinceTheFoundingOfThisNation! Although, there IS lots of competition from other nice moves he's made from January 20th on. Yes, we'll have some posts....
Comments (8)
Uhhh, no...
Posted On: Monday - February 3rd 2025 6:07PM MST
In Topics: Economics US Feral Government
This is from yesterday on the Gateway Pundit (good for headlines, is about all, for me).
Uhhh, no, don't pee in your pants here, Jim Hoft. Look, I'm as excited as the next Libertarian/Constitutionalist about someone, anyone, since Congress never will, cutting out the wasteful, worthless spending going on in the Feral Government. I'll say it again, even if you paid many of these people their salaries to go to the arcade (are there still arcades?), so that they wouldn't spend time impeding business and progress, that'd be a win.
But yes, cutting the D.I.E. people most deliciously, other dead wood positions, and also the reckless spending they participate in is a great thing. it's the diversity contingent within governments that are the worst, from my experience, in not giving a damn what happens with we taxpayers's money. The black men and women want to play Big Man and luxury goods Imelda-Marcus-style Queen, respectively (see, for example, Dalton, Illinois) the Hispanics just don't care much, and even the White women don't have that "what about our society?" question in their heads. And even most of the White men don't either, so there are not many left to care! I think we did better with the White America of 100 years ago ... just sayin'...
This is great, but, no, as we explained in 2 posts recently, Will the DOGE save our economy? and Budget Cutting v Austerity, it doesn't pencil out. I don't expect President Trump to understand that, but one would think Elon Musk would. He's a promoter just as Trump is, I suppose.
See, they gotten to a rate of $4 Billion in cuts per day. Yes, that IS fantastic. It's about $1 Trillion yearly (they're not doing DOGE on weekends apparently - fair enough, you've got to have a life), which is 1/7 of all the ($7 Trillion in) spending, and it would bring the deficit down to half of what is was going to be... were this rate to keep up. Sorry, IT CAN'T.
This is from that other post, but I could paste in some other more bar- or pie-like graph (no need for a function of time) later, but for now, come to think of it, I'll use the "US Debt Clock"* numbers : $3.14** Trillion is being spent on Social Security and Medicaid/Care. You ain't cutting that without lots of trouble from not only the usual ctrl-left sources. Right now, the defense/war spending (yes, I like these debt clock people) is at $0.88 Trillion. You could cut a lot of that - they may cut the waste, but the only way to cut the meat of it is to actually cut out the wars. Trump leans only partially that way, as we could see the other day in Somalia. The interest payments on the $36.4 Trillion debt are at this point over $1 Trillion. That's only 2.75% - that Trillion is obviously not it for the year, as rates on bonds being paid off are higher than that.
Well, you're not gonna cut that interest being paid without having lower rate bonds redeemed or by actually bringing the deficit to BELOW zero. Otherwise, yes, we're digging more slowly if we were to bring down the yearly $2 Trillion deficits by and to $1 Trillion. But no, they can't.
I could do this arithmetic to get discretionary spending, but since I don't know end-o-year numbers, let me just take '23 numbers from here. Oh, it's $1.7 Trillion, but they count the military expenditures under discretionary (I suppose it is), so in '23 there was only $0.9 Trillion left to cut from. You could cut out half of all the manpower (and womanpower!) and half of all the purchases, rent, whatever, and you're only at $0.45 Trillion cut. I'd love to see it, but that won't happen either.
If it did, where's the rest coming from? If they DID get to $1 Trillion cut this year, that leaves a $1 Trillion dollar shortfall (deficit). What's to cut next year? At the very best, yes, we can go back to 2010's numbers and start only getting in the hole an additional $1 Trillion yearly, instead of $2 Trillion yearly.... AND interest rates will have to rise sometime... AND it's gone!
Elon Musk is an engineer. He understands asymptotic functions. The curve upwards or downwards with a respectively lower or higher slope, approaching some value but never quite reaching it. That'd be the DOGE cutting, slowly getting harder to do, as one gets closer to an actual fairly limited government, but with big Social Welfare obligations to pay and a big interest payment due yearly. This sucks. It's a bug, nay, a feature, of Socialism - it's very hard to back out of it.
That all
Speaking of Somalia, Somalia's representative in the US Congress has got her Halal-approved panties in a wad about this stuff. ZeroHedge reports Hornet's Nest Kicked As Raskin, Omar Throw Public Tantrum Over USAID Hostile Takeover. Ilhan Omar (D- SO) has had $2.3 Billion sent to Somalia to, you know, fight the Civil War and all. She's pissed. So is this Raskin (aka, Ratskin) guy from Maryland. So are a lot of the leftoids, being deprived of their livelihoods of graft and corruption. Peak Stupidity is deprived too, deprived of popcorn right now, that is - they can't make enough to keep up with demand! (Probably also the tariffs on Canada, eh?)
Now that $2.3 Billion Somalia war money is a half day's worth of cuts right there, and USAID itself is 2 weeks, including the weekend in between of cuts. That's no small potatoes, 10 x what a real southern border would cost with normal government waste, but the fun is reading the ZeroHedge comments!
It's a 3-fer, a significant cut, the ending of odious war-mongering and corruption, and the great feeling of seeing the lamentations of the CongressMalians and their significant (br)others.***
PS: I wanted to shoehorn this in here, because it's another case of someone not really versed in economics as much as one would hope. Steve Sailer never said he is, even in this substack post of his. Before I got to the paywall, I ran into:
[In 1896,]because the economy was expanding faster than the supply of gold, the gold standard was causing deflation, which raised the real interest rates that borrowers, such as farmers, had to pay to bankers. Inflation is bad, but deflation tends to be even worse because it’s harder to adjust for.Uhhh, no. Back nearly 20 years ago I clipped out a short article from the Wall Street JournaL that said deflation is bad. Those were real economists writing so... they they were even more full of it... uh, fiat money, that is, full of fiat. I lost that clipping, unfortunately... Mr. Sailer wrote lot more beyond the paywall, but I can't even ...
* Ha! There's a DOGE clock there on the Debt Clock site too now. I can kinda' tell which way these people lean..
** Hey, it IS time for a Pi chart!
*** Yes, that one came from a ZH commenter.
Comments (25)
Bai Dien sics augmented Title IX on NCAA Sportsball
Posted On: Friday - January 31st 2025 5:05PM MST
In Topics: Feminism US Feral Government Bread and Circuses Zhou Bai Dien
From the yahoos at yahoo a few weeks back, come upon the usual way, while logging out of email or "searching" for "Peak Stupidity".
Peak Stupidity has no Sportsball topic key, so we attach the Bread & Circuses one, as always. Sportsball is part of the circuses, together with the Olive Garden's (etc...) unlimited soup, salad, and, yep, breadsticks.
I was not too bent out of shape after reading the headline, I'll let the reader know, first of all. It was the end of the reign of Dark Brandon. What does a soon-to-be-deposed King - I mean, there was no point in beheading him, he's been self-beheaded for a few years - where was ... do, beside wreak havoc as much as possible at the bitter end? This crooked man corruptly pre-pardoned his derelict criminal son and about every evil person he could think of and gave Presidential Medals to other evil people right up through the antiChrist. There was more, and, compared to it all, I'm not all broken up about the coaches of the NCAA.
OK, look, I realize football is a hobby for many American men. The Superbowl is coming up even.* It's the fact that most of these people - most of them - consider their Sportsball spectating hobby more important than doing something, anything, about the destruction of this country that I have a problem with. Sportsball fans lean Conservative, even. Leaning, though, doesn't really cut it in the 2020s.
OK, what IS Title IX anyway? (That's 9 for our readers in Los Villages de Hasta la Vista.) It's just another sop to the Feminists. They DO! NOT! LIKE! men to be able to do stuff that woman don't care to do so much. Women must do it too, cause ... fishing, bicycling or something... As we discussed in our post Peak Stupidity bids Hello to Kings early this week, the Feral Gov't is involved in everything. Since they provide most American universities with funding in various ways, they hold the strings.
Title IX, over half a century old, BTW, says something about having to spend equal amounts of money - or some formula is used - on women's sports as on men's. This means, since football is so lucrative, with lots of money spent (but also taken in), men's wrestling teams, golf, or whatever are sacrificed to spend money on sports women are cajoled into playing. Yeah, it's a crock.
Dark Brandon made the effort via Presidential
Revenue-sharing payments from schools to athletes must be “proportionately” distributed to men and women athletes, or institutions risk violating Title IX, the 53-year-old federal law requiring universities receiving federal funding to provide equal benefits to women and men athletes.Revenue-sharing ... blah, blah... proportionate.... blah... at risk...federal law requiring... blah, blah... equal benefits... further down... escalating, capped pay system... blah, blah... back-damaged distribution system ... [Huh?! Was I snoring? Sorry.] You get the picture. FedGov interferes with everything, including Sportsball, and people involved are pissed at this new bit.
“Way to drop a bomb, huh?” whispered one college leader emerging from the meeting room.Yeah, way to care about your country. If these die-hard sports fans had spent half their energy over the years opposing Big Government, they wouldn't have been at any such meeting to begin with.
The NCAA does not traditionally give guidance to schools related to Title IX, leaving those decisions to campus officials like Linda Livingstone, the Baylor president and chair of the Board of Governors.Have a conversation?! Shouldn't they be lifting, running suicides, and throwing the pigskin? We ARE talking football, right ...?
“We’re going to all have to go back (to campus) and have a conversation about it and see what we think the implications are for what we’re doing,” she said Thursday.
... and HEY, wait a minute, I though I was dreaming that part. What is that whole "pay system". I was under the impression that the football players were college students. But it said
... schools are permitted starting July 1 to distribute at least $20.5 million to athletes annually in an escalating, capped pay system.and
Preparing to share revenue directly with athletes,...Look, why don't we quit pretending? Just call it minor league football already, keep the school names and associations, but quit making these poor bastards go to class and pretend to be students.
Josh Whitman, the Illinois athletic director who serves on the Board of Governors, the NCAA’s highest-ranking governance body, had this to say:
The world has changed over and over just in the last six months.Uhhh, no. Get over yourself, dude. The Russians and Ukrainians don't know about this. Even the Chinese don't know about this. Neither do the Israelis or the Gazans. Neither does Trump and neither do MAGA. Neither do the evil Globalists and Communists who've been trying to replace the White populations of the world. None of them even know who you are. It's just football. Get a life, people!
Anyway, if you do care, be assured that President Trump will reverse-edict this stuff in a jiffy. He may have already.
* I won't be watching. Since I owe the IRS money every tax year now rather than have a small refund coming, I don't do taxes during Superbowl halftime at the bar anymore. I wait until April 15th or later these years.
Comments (6)
Peak Stupidity hosts its 1st TED talk
Posted On: Thursday - January 30th 2025 7:55PM MST
In Topics: Humor Female Stupidity
I don't know if I've ever sat through a whole TED talk... even on the john with my ipad in hand. I don't know what makes the speakers so magically special, and I don't know what TED even stands for, for another thing! Who ARE those people? They look and act like what we used to call yuppies, though they seem to be more like Globalist power-wielder wannabees. The Elitist Dupes, yeah, that's it.
Well one Mr. Dale McLendon, to be featured in our 1st non-sponsored PS-TED talk, is a Franklin, Tennessee lawyer and city Alderman. The Tennessean has some background on our speaker, so we can save on writing. He sounds like good people, which is more than I can say for the people in the clips of the Non-PS-TED talks.
Mr. McLendon's, sorry, Alderman McLendon's, TED talk today is on women and the hot v crazy matrix. He presents his information graphically with cartesian coordinates, so it's basically science. With no further ado and neither applause, shirts, nor shoes required, here is the entirety of the talk:
This is totally unrelated, but with the humor topic key already attached, I will relate this story before I forget it.
I've been so exited about the great work President Trump-47 has been doing on immigration, that I decided to buy one of his books. The bookstore in question is a leftie joint (are there any others?), with the expensive lattes and prominent displays of books by Oprah, Big Mike, Dr. Phil, Dr. Gupta, Bill Nye, the Science Guy, Lennon, Lenin, Trotsky, Castro, Castreau, and, worst, Anderson Cooper. I was still hoping they'd have Trump's latest book on immigration though.
Politely I asked the
Thank you, thank you, we'll be here all week. Try the 7 dollar lattes.
Comments (8)
After 6 decades, Trump, aka Mr. Blue Sky, finally kills AA
Posted On: Wednesday - January 29th 2025 6:33PM MST
In Topics: Music Political Correctness Trump Race/Genetics
Peak Stupidity likes to put time durations in terms of decades and centuries. It shows how much of history we have been taking up in this steady ascent to the peak. The odious Feral Government designed program called "Affirmative Action" has been around for 6 decades, 60% of a century now. This purposely anti-White male program has been in place so long that there are nearly no working people who would remember anything else in the workplace.*
The image above is from 2 1/2 decades after scumbag** President President Johnson excreted Executive Order 11246. (Note that, just as in the beginning, White people, including lots of men, had a big part in creating and maintaining this anti-White-man program. Were they stupid or evil?).
I suppose I should have looked more closely into it, but through all these years, I'd thought that AA was encoded in established law passed by Congress. Nope, per wiki the order to favor Blacks! and 2 years later, women, and later on, ANYBODY who got into it besides White Men, in US Feral Gov't positions was just an
The thing starts off reading as pretty innocuous, as it simply prohibits discrimination in hiring. What in the world have you got against that, racist?! Then, one gets to the Affirmative Action language:
It also required contractors to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin."Wait, so, you take no regard for all these properties(?) of your prospective employees, but you take action too? How does that work? Let me show you:
Executive Order 11246 also required contractors with 51 or more employees and contracts of $50,000 or more to implement affirmative action plans to increase the participation of minorities and women in the workplace if a workforce analysis demonstrates their under-representation, meaning that there are fewer minorities and women than would be expected given the numbers of minorities and women qualified to hold the positions available.See?
First, keep in mind that from direct Fed-Gov employees to contractors first, even for private industry, in this semi-Fascist ("Crony-Capitalist" sounds less ranty) economy, when Fed-Gov says "Jump!", you say "How high?" Before long, AA was everywhere, even at 1000W Country Music radio stations in the 1970s!*** With Feral money involved, and likely even without, due to fear, Universities got onboard with the AA program early on too, in their admissions, in addition to hiring of Professors and staff.
Wait, but what has been the deal anyway, as we asked already, do you just not discriminate, or do you take some kind of action? That last excerpt shown explains very well that someone must do some math and come up with some quota numbers. "No, these aren't quotas! It's just Affirmative Action!" We heard that obvious lie for decades. It's an obvious lie because anyone can logically deduce that if you must get to this "participation" rate, and you don't have it yet, you're gonna have to direct your hiring. You don't know that denominator of people "qualified to hold the positions available" though. Do you test all the applicants? Nope, SCROTUS said that was wrong a few years later (March of '71) in Griggs v Duke Power. So you had to just discriminate in favor of Blacks, women, and Black women (a real score!) without consideration for merit.
Besides that AA negates hiring based on merit, for some reason, if you have a too-low participation rate of White people, men, or White men, as compared to those that might be qualified, you don't have to do ANYTHING. Regulatory relief, some might call that. I'd call it 6 decades of being screwed by "our" own government and Big Biz cowards.
Because the race demagogues and the feminists claimed long-term prejudice in the past, Blacks and women were first to "right past harms". (Never mind that, as with the call for reparations for slavery, even it the claims had been true, we're not dealing with the same people! Here, I'd though that whole sins of the fathers dealio was an Old Testament thing...) However, when the immigration invasion brought all manner of others to America, for some strange reason, they required Affirmative Action too ... unless they were the rare White men ... who don't get to immigrate so easily, legally or not, anyway.
Having gone way beyond the original post scope here yet again, let me say that I've been disappointed in otherwise Conservative pundits, talking these two (Sailer and Coulter), who still would not completely renounce AA. We still had to right some wrongs to those ADOS, DOAS, or something. Then too, the focus, including of the mostly-ignored recent Students for Fair Admission v Harvard SCROTUS decision, has been college admissions. The pundit types care about university admissions but don't seem to realize how much harm AA has done to all working White men in job hiring and even the fulfillment of entire careers they otherwise would have... for most of a century now!
Above I noted that I'd thought this AA was all a mess of Civil Rites era laws. I'm sure others have too. Back in 1986 President Reagan talked about reversing AA. He had big margins of (D) reps in Congress the entire 8 years, so nobody figured anything would pass. Nothing did. We can go to 1990, in the campaign for one of the North Carolina Senate seats to see the last time I remember the ending of AA being seriously considered.
Jesse Helms was an old timey Southern Conservative Senator from N. Carolina. In that 1990 campaign he came out with the ad above with a White guy balling up some a rejection letter sent to him due to quotas for "minorities". In 1990 N. Carolina, that generally meant "black". Maybe the Senate would take up the matter, and then the House, and magically it could pass and the GOPer George H.W. Bush would somehow magically have the courage to sign it. Yeah, right! That was the last hurrah that I remember. We'd just have to live with it until, oh SCROTUS AA hire Sandra Day O'Conner told us in 2003 (Grutter v. Bollinger) that AA should be ended... in 25 years. That's 3 years from now! Things weren't heading in that direction though, not hardly...
There's a part of the huge field of stupidity called Wokeness that is an amped-up version of AA. Instead of quotas based on population and supposed qualifications that we're not allowed to test for, lately it's been pretty much "Remove the White man - we can run this place!" However, it didn't take long to see that they can't. Too many people have seen this, and they've been getting antsy. I mean, news reporters, TV-commercial actors, Oscar winners, what harm can they do? Pilots, surgeons, engineers, managers... oh, wait. Bad things could happen.
Still, nobody was about to do anything. Did everyone think like me that there was no way the UniParty Congress would ever take this problem up?
But, WE! DIDN'T! KNOW! It's just an E.O.! This has been like a life-long bad dream for lots of White Men. Our new King, who's on our side, can just make a new E.O. to reverse the 60 year-running old one!****
Oh, there will be much anger, gnashing of teeth, rending of undergarments, and pushback! I don't think the ctrl-left will just accept that "Oh, AA and Wokeness were wrong. We get it now." They will raise holy hell about this, but right now, in this E.O. Blitzkrieg, we've got the momentum. NOBODY saw this one coming... out of the blue sky.
Jeff Lynne's short guitar solo starting at 01:30 is sublime. It's got to be the amps, and it sounds very much like the lead part by Brian May of Queen on Killer Queen.
In 1977, when the wonderful Electric Light Orchestra came out with the 2-record-set album Out of the Blue, with this one as one of the "tracks", Affirmative Action had been the
Mister Blue Sky,
please tell us why
you had to hide
away for so long (so long)?
Where did we go wrong?
* There are plenty of people old enough to remember the mid-1960s of course and the Bills passed to enact this travesty, but I doubt many would be at "the workplace" still or were in 1964. Others may work on their own, which is one way to avoid the whole thing.
** We are probably being too kind to Lyndon Baynes Johnson by calling him that. After knowing of the 3 massively destructive programs, Civil Rites (this AA included), the augmented Welfare State, and the anti-White Immigration Bill of '65, we just found out that Johnson, back in Texas a decade earlier, was one of the supporters of illegal alien cheap labor at the time of Operation Wetback.
*** That post is an anecdotal interlude as Part 3 of our series Harvesting the Fruits of Affirmative Action. See also Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 4 and Part 5.
**** A big question bugging me is "Why didn't Reagan or any other President simply rescind the E.O. as Trump has?!" In that Jesse Helms campaign ad, a "racial quota" law signed by U-boat commander Ted Kennedy was mentioned. What gives?
Comments (18)
Enter the Year of the Snake
Posted On: Tuesday - January 28th 2025 7:28PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor China Bible/Religion Holiday from Stupidity
I don't know, I see this coming year more as the Year of the Honey Badger. Remember all that Honey Badger meme stuff from a decade ago? The Honey Badger can do it all, and we hope President Trump will be that Honey Badger.
The whole "Year of..." 12 repeating animals is a load of Chinese superstitious crap. Here, we go by months, the 12 Zodiac signs are not all animals, and then there are lucky numbers too through which one can win cash at convenience stores and support lower education, so... The meme above is from an outfit called Building Beautiful Souls who seem to think quite a bit of the lowly snake.
Primordial wisdom, you say? We'd be in lots better shape if that one snake had not suckered Eve into biting that apple way back. Peak Stupidity has our Female Stupidity and Feminism topic keys to cover some of the aftermath, but there's no snakes topic key. Suffice it to say that we are on the side of Riki Tiki Tavi and our house cat.
What would Confucius have to say, for some real wisdom? Woman who handle snake well, get inject with venom of Biblical pro-portion. (Still working on this.) What would Al Stewart have to say, is the important question. There is no Year of the Cat in China, unfortunately, but we are pretty sure that this great song is about somewhere in the Orient at least. This song is a half century old right now! I guess it's not been overplayed for me, as the sound and lyrics are still moving:
I was going to write some Year of the Snake lyrics, but this song's too good to mess with.
Comments (12)
Peak Stupidity bids Hello to Kings
Posted On: Monday - January 27th 2025 10:52AM MST
In Topics: Trump Liberty/Libertarianism US Feral Government
NOTE: More discussion on China was supposed to follow, today. It's not like the discussion, as per SafeNow in the comments, is just about shoddy Chinese building practices. There's a lot more on the economics and social life of China that must be said in rebuttal to those who think China is paved with gold.
However, this Trump stuff just can't wait! I hate to sound like the guy himself, but it really has been a week like "you haven't seen in the history of the world." (Almost?)
At the time ex-President George H.W. Bush died, Peak Stupidity had already been well annoyed with the constant flag half-masting business. The same drawn-out display for the death of an ex-President I noticed then, when I wrote I'd thought we'd bid Farewell to Kings (with the obligatory Rush song, of course!), is still going on for Jimmy Carter. I think a blurb in the news and some nice word of remembrance, the good and the bad, would have sufficed. A couple of years later, we wrote The Farewell to Kings didn't take*.
The US President is supposed to. be an administrator, not a King. We noted in Trump v Bai Dien and 2020s v 1980s that it's not 1980 anymore, much less 1924!. The Presidential election CAN be a life-changing even for the everyman now, not just other high-office holders and the bureaucrats.
We are as Libertarian and Constitutionophile here as
Otherwise, other than as a constraint on Trump-45, G.W. Bush, Øb☭ma, and even more so, Dark Brandon, ruled as Kings to implement the Invade-the-World/Invite-the-World/In-Hoc-to-the-World program. That whole "Stroke of the pen, law of the land, kinda cool" thing (mentioned mentioned here, and that was end-o'-last century even) is what Executive Orders are all about.
Just an example, no existential issue itself, is the continual bouts of forgiveness of student loans by Brandon, even after the SCROTUS spent the effort to rule he had no such power. "Attention you peons, I decree, if you've been a deadbeat on your loans, by the power of Brandon, you are hereby free of your financial shackles. Spend, spend, people. Enjoy your new rims. So let it be written, so let it be done!" It's like that, all the freaking time. The Founders' graves are full of vomit, as nauseating as it is to spin so fast in one's old age.
The Old Testament of the Bible, in the book of Kings conveniently, described warnings to the good people of olde times about the rule of Kings. The people wanted a King though anyway, and, to quote another King (of Curmudgeonry) from a century back, they got that rule good and hard. We Americans didn't ask for rule by Kings again, but we've been getting them fast and furious.
However, something strange has happened. We've gotten a good King. Should we take this opportunity to bring up the US Constitution and chide President Trump that "no, you can't do that."? Haha, obviously not, but let me get down to the point here.
It's not just the Presidency that has been running way off the Constitutional tracks. We can go back a lot farther than that, to just under a century ago. Going back to FDR and the Congress at the time and that "Fair Deal", later the "New Deal" under the odious LBJ and THAT Congress, and from there on we can see violations of Amendment X come faster and more furious by the decade. It's too far gone. Most Americans wouldn't understand an argument against it. That the Feral Government is involved in almost every aspect of their lives is something that they were born "being OK with".
Well, OK then, if THAT'S the way it's gonna be, then the US President can be involved with every aspect of our lives. Thing is, the US President now, as of a week ago, is one Donald J. Trump, and he's on OUR side, and he's royally (get it?) pissed. Everything the Feral Gov't is involved in, via regulation, taxes, financial support, whatever, is fair game for more strokes of the pen. Yes, come to think of it, it IS kinda cool! It's been the coolest damn week in a long time!
See that graphic above off of yahoo? "Wait, what??" was my first thought. Oh, yeah, right, Federal money. The President is administrator of such monetary payments though some department or agency, so, yeah, there's no reason he can't threaten the Governor or whole government of California with the withholding of it. Sorry, Newscum, you live by the sword of the Feral Gov't, you die by the sword of the Feral Gov't.
Though we do consider what was said in that one book of the Bible, Peak Stupidity today bids Hello to Kings!
PS: Yes, as Ann Coulter, VDare writers, yours truly, etc., have noted, any and all E.O.s and deals can be negated on Day 1 of the next
This very move in my one example here is indeed a good part of a strategy for changing elections, hence, a possible future non-UniParty dominated Congress.
PPS: Maybe, just maybe, some States like California will hate the rule of this King so much that they will quit taking Feral Government money, and Federalism will make a comeback there ... Naaaaahhh!
* Heh, the post number fit nicely, as, if converted into a year AD, it was at a decade after Americans fought a war to say Farewell to Kings.
Comments (21)
Back to China: All that glitter.
Posted On: Saturday - January 25th 2025 4:13PM MST
In Topics: Pundits China
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I wrote this post, everything below, yesterday. Just now I noticed that Steve Sailer has a post on his substack site - Forget it, Jake. China is Chinatown. - with an interesting question about China. He doesn't normally write about the place, so, since Peak Stupidity does, let me answer that he's on the right track, as one could read here:
Fireworks from China (about eminent domain)
A China story and Chinese vs. American police states.
Both have comparisons between our countries. The latter has a personal anecdote and also supports Mr. Sailer's conclusion that there's much local control in China.
However, what a lot of people don't get is that the CCP is more fundamental than the Chinese Central Government.
***********************************************************
No, not physically. I'm probably not going there again. We at Peak Stupidity are just wheeling around from the wonderful Trumpian Executive Order news toward China for just a post or 2, maybe 3.
See, since I've backslid into commenting on The Unz Review again, I got sucked in by this one title about China written by Mr.Ron Unz, the site proprietor. American Pravda: China vs. America • 1h54m ▶: A Comprehensive Review of the Economic, Technological, and Military Factors. Note that Mr. Unz kindly recorded himself so that one can listen to the post. I've heard him before, and he comes across well via voice, but reading is much faster. I didn't read the whole thing either though. I only read some of the stats, which I don't argue with, but when it comes to UNDERSTANDING China, Ron Unz is a complete dupe.
I get that America has fallen far in many ways, as China has risen in many, over half a century, but, for both, with an acceleration over the last quarter of one, meaning THIS 21st Century alone. What does Ron Unz know about China, and why is he writing about this?
Firstly, let me again state that Mr. Unz is a real stalwart for free speech - take a look at the writers on his site - and he has done some political good in the past regarding bi-lingual education in California. He's been digging into all manner of political shenanigans in American history. What he doesn't seem to get is that ALL Governments do all manner of shady things. America's very limited Federal government of a century back was the best the world had ever seen! Yet, Ron Unz gives no credit. He gives no credit for the Americans that understand what this country WAS and want it back. Right now, with Trump doing some amazing things, will he credit Trump? No way. (Steve Sailer is very hesitant himself on this, for a different reason. There'll be a post ...)
Ron Unz has never had anything good to say about America and Americans. It's clearly not in him. Therefore, if he can see the amazing shiny new Chinese infrastructure and stats that show China in a much better light, well, there's an American Pravda article. His contention is that American politicians are all warmongering against China and are economically against China for no reason. Regarding the former, not all are (take Trump, for example!), and, yes, we ARE in an economic war, one we've been fighting with hands tied behind our backs for 30 years.
By the sarcastic "Pravda", here, we are to believe Mr. Unz has discovered this beautiful wonderful country that Americans have been trying to hide the news of. That we're all badmouthing the place due to nothing but jealousy or ignorance, seems to be his contention.
We've shown lots more pictures in the "trains, planes, automobiles" posts.
Ron Unz has never been to China. Your PS blogger has been there either 11 or 12 times.* Our "Dispatches from the Middle Kingdom" are all here, with the China topic key. I counted 19 of them just now. Most of them show that I AM impressed by some of the shiny new amazing stuff. It doesn't mean I think the place is wonderful, and that's partly because I have trustworthy Chinese people who can inform me of more than what meets the eye. This results in my having a better picture of economics and social life, and a little more about the politics.
In the meantime, Ron Unz has been watching youtube videos by young Western women! Do you see why I say that he's a dupe? We're talking young women, first of all. We've written about this before (as has the great commenter AnotherDad, who writes much in the Steve Sailer threads on Mr. Unz's own blog). Young women should be concerned with nurturing babies much more than politics. Their emotional state and complete lack of perspective on the world does not lend itself to good work as politicians, even as voters most of the time, and as experts on Chinese society. Yeah, Ron Unz is impressed with China from young ladies' youtube channels. OK....
Regarding the post then, because I had this morbid curiosity, I couldn't help but go through the 500-odd comment thread. By "go through", this time I was not about to read them all. The usual "10-centers"**, one LittleRedDot and one Mulga Mumblebrain***, commented 50 and 36 times, respectively. I don't mind some good arguments, but I can tell when I'm reading from a propagandist when there is never ever any admission of an agreement on anything against his benefactors.. IOW, if I were defending Americans, and the subject of "The People of Wal-Mart" came up, I'd have to admit that, yes, generally, you don't see Chinese people in that terrible shape. These commenters don't admit anything, even something trivial, so I know who they are.
I skipped those guys.**** I do get obsessive about finishing, and in doing so, happily I ran across a well-written and very realistic long anecdotal comment by a guy with the handle The Seventh Shape. He's lived in China for 7 years so far. It's way too late to even ask permission, so I'll just paste the whole thing in, unedited. The comment was not intended to refute everything Ron Unz thinks erroneously about China, but just about "all that glitter".
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I have lived in China for the last 7 years and will give my 2 cents. I think that Ron and others here, including some who claim to live in China, have presented a overly rosey-eyed picture of China and a more nuanced view is called for.
Architecture and urban design is an interest of mine and I have explored numerous Chinese cities. Things can look impressive from a distance in those drone videos but there is an element of Ptomkin village here: when you get up close you see that in many cases, buildings are built to a low quality compared to other countries and workmanship is lacking in a lot of cases. You’d see a building that seems to be made of stone or brick but when you get close you realise it’s just a facade, with thin slices of stone put on steel frames or over plaster. Or you’d see a flowerbed and you’d get close and realise they are plastic flowers. Or you’d see a fancy skyscraper but getting closer you’d see it’s unoccupied (some of these eventually get occupied). Footpaths are generally of a very low quality in Chinese cities. They typically don’t cement down the stone tiles they make the footpaths with, and then because ebikes routinely drive on the footpaths the tiles get easily broken.
In Europe it is normal to see stone and brick buildings that are over 100 years old, but it’s very rare to find buildings of that age and stature in China. They rarely build with lasting materials like stone and brick. Almost the only stone buildings that one sees in China are ones built by Europeans over a century ago, like on the Bund in Shanghai or those built by the Russians in Dalian and Harbin, even though China has plenty of stone mines. They just prefer to build things cheaply and quickly. Chinese, and many Asians more generally, have a different attitude and less scruples about fakery, for instance, Chinese women routinely use beauty filters on their dating app pictures and think there’s nothing wrong with it, while Chinese men routinely dye their grey hair.
In Chinese cities they often do not maintain their buildings well and do not build them to last. I will give an example. When I first came to China I was wondering why the paint seems to peel off the buildings so often, even buildings that are new. Even in my apartment I noticed that the paint would flake off the walls with slight impact. Then I found out why: they don’t use primer before they paint!! Or perhaps they use inferior paint-and-primer. And this is typical of the Chinese attitude: get the job done as quickly and cheaply as possible; why use primer when it will cost more money and time and by the time the paint starts flaking off the apartments we’ll have the money in the bank.
There are a lot of very nice cities in China and also a lot of industrial hellholes, but I wouldn’t say China’s best cities outshine other countries’. They are not better or worse but just different. Ron’s article hyped up the urban planning but there is good and bad here. Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province for instance, is the worst planned city I’ve ever seen: in the city centre at every intersection there was railings preventing you from crossing the roads. You are forced to go either under a tunnel or over a footbridge to cross. Imagine doing that every city block! It is a city planned for cars, not pedestrians, and this is a common bias in Chinese city planning. There are cities in China with some wondrously designed areas, impressive skyscrapers, and things built on a massive scale. It should be noted though that most of these are designed by the big Western architecture firms like SOM and Zaha Hadid.
Also, though crime is relatively low in China, there are very high rates of PARKING crime, as I would call it, with people routinely parking their cars along the curb at zebra crossings and the authorities doing nothing about it.
You get the full range of stuff here from tasteful classical Chinese elegance to the tackiness of buildings covered with blinking, incoherent lighting displays. It’s rarely boring. The transportation infrastructure is often impressive but there are negatives too. For instance there are onerous security protocols that create bottlenecks in metro systems and train stations, for instance, all passengers must put their bags through a scanner and then walk through a scanner. Further, the high population density leads to very crowded buses and trains, and people can be loud on public transport. Luckily taxis are cheap.
Contrary to what the article suggested, Chinese university campuses and schools are not so attractive looking for the most part. There are no grand old university campuses like one finds in Europe or the US. There’s almost nothing that can be dated back beyond a century. There are some beautiful campuses and the best I’ve seen is Xiamen University.
Ron’s article also suggests that Chinese cities seem really futuristic. I’m not sure what people mean when they say this; maybe they are referring to how you do everything through your smart phone over here. I don’t necessarily see this as a good thing however. If you happen to lose your phone you can’t function and are in big trouble. I heard of one man who lost his phone and then committed suicide. I can relate, as I left my phone behind in a taxi once and felt seized by panic, though luckily I got it back later that day. I don’t necessarily see this ‘futurism’ as progress. It’s overdependence on technology. People here look at their phones way too much and about 50% of people who you will see here in parks or at urban lakes stare at their phones WHILE WALKING, often watching a drama or silly tiktok videos instead of enjoying the often beautiful surroundings.
Let me say a little about Xingjiang. I agree with Ron that the stories of genocide are most likely total rubbish. That said, things are not fine and dandy in Xingjiang and it’s clear that there is a serious security operation going on there. I know one American who is an adventurous traveller who went exploring there. He said there are certain places where foreigners cannot go. He tried to travel to a traditional Uyghur town in the far West and he had to pass 4 police checkpoints. He got through 3 but on the 4th was driven back by police to the train station. He saw hundreds of PLA men at one train station. He also said he took a bus trip that got stopped at checkpoints 14 times. At these checkpoints, all the Uyghurs on board were checked for their ID, but not the Han Chinese. As a foreigner he was questioned at these checkpoints and at one was kept for over an hour, as the bus waited. The bus journey took over 40 hours because of these delays. I don’t say this in judgment and I’m sure the CIA would just love to stir up trouble there given the slightest opening, like they did in Chechnya for the Russians.
Life in China is getting better in many ways. 7 years ago when I arrived in my city it had one metro line under construction. Now it has a fourth line opening in a few months time. Many new recreation facilities have opened, new malls and shining office towers, and old temples and buildings have been renovated. Some of the old-timers however-foreigners who have been living here for 20 years plus-miss the old days. They reminisce fondly about the Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin era when China was more wild and fun, albeit more corrupt, and you could ‘do whatever you damn well pleased.’
Mr. Unz, if you read this, I recommend you visit China to see things for yourself. I’d by happy to show you around my city, Xiamen, which is one of the nicer ones here.
**********************************************************
I suggested Ron Unz go to China back in '19 sometime to see the place for himself. He's got the money and the time. Alas, the PanicFest "happened".
I have a few comments on Mr. Shape's long comment, but this post is long enough. A little bit more on China will be coming in 2 posts or so.
* I'd thought it had been 11 already, before I went in Summer of '23. However, I can't seem to recall more than 11 right now. I don't know if I can dig up the records or not.
** No, I don't know if they really get paid by the CCP 10 cents per comment, but it ought to be up to about 5 RMB now, about 70 cents, what with inflation and all.
*** This guy takes the cake. He's a Chinese guy who lives in Australia, yet he badmouths Australia and Australians incessantly. I don't know why it is he won't move back to China then, other than that they don't want him back. (Hey, they aren't stupid!) Mr. Mangledbrain is also a Climate Calamity™ fool.
**** One more, going by d dan, must have left his pager somewhere for a couple of days - he came aboard really late. I don't know if he is the same as another 10-center, one "D.B. Cooper" who, when asked by me about hijackings and such, had no clue what I meant. See, it was the old "Who won the 1939 World Series?" trick.
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Deportations: Trump, News, History, Humor, and Music
Posted On: Friday - January 24th 2025 9:38AM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '26 Immigration Stupidity Music Humor History Trump
In late November, with our white pill prescription filled and in use, Peak Stupidity was very excited about The Trump-47 Administration and the Existential Issue. It's January 23rd, 3 days into Trump-47 with his Blitzkrieg of Executive Orders, and we are again pretty exited, even without having downed a white pill in days! Things are happening this time... NOW. The whole atmosphere is nearly opposite of that 8 years ago. It's like the guy really HAS learned something. It's like he's pretty damn pissed at things too.
The duo of Steven Miller, the Staff General, and Tom Homan, the (more-like) Field General, have been at it. The ZeroHedge article I referred to in the previous post said President Trump Takes First Steps To Stop Migrant Invasion on the 21st. Today, on can read from "Tyler Durden" himself that "Just The Beginning": Trump Plans 10,000 Troops On Border To Restore National Security.
First, let's note that initial number of 10,000. That sounds familiar to me. Oh, yeah, that was our estimate for how many would be needed to man the southern border - see Border control maintenance vs. defending some Koreans from other Koreans - but once there is an actual serious border barrier to man. For now, it will have to be more of a wartime situation on many fronts, hopefully with enough shots fired to show we mean business. At the same time, there's no reason we couldn't bring in another 10,000 "SeaBee" engineering corps types to actually build that permanent border. As that old (early Trump-45) post title above alluded to, how about we have American soldiers defending America for a change? Koreans, Southern or Northern, will be just fine. Here's a good soundbite for a President who LUVS him some soundbites: Move the DMZ! or Bring Home the DMZ!
Deportations have started, according to Mr. Homan. The first of the ZH articles linked to above shows these "migrants" with their now-worthless Mayorkas-created CPB (Customs and Border Protection) apps. This picture, I gotta assume, shows them outside our country or in detention here. Their appointments have been cancelled. (Hey, think of it as your version of America's swamped ERs) Those millions of illegal aliens who've used this app to get into the interior already - and I've seen them myself on airplanes - aren't worried about this cancellation at all. They've got that one page letter with a B&W photo that the TSA let them onto the airplanes with, they are gone, and they were never intending to go to any appointment in 18 months. "We don't neeeed no steeeenking appointments, Senor!"
However, along with lots of Americans by now, Trump has seen that turn-illegals-into-legal-parolee scam for what it is. The millions that got in this way must be sent back.
About deportations, then: I really hope that Trump won't be satisfied with sending back just the large bulk of the most violent 5 - 100 fold* Mariel Boatlift 2.0. That's half a million. His anger at the destruction wrought by Dark Brandon and minion Mayorkas must have him aiming to send those 10-12 million recent illegal aliens back too. Then, how do you know who broke in when - they are, after all, "undocumented"? (Some Americans, who have spent time working for H&R Block, might call them "The False Documented.) In this case, that's a good thing! Don't worry about when they arrived. If they are not citizens or foreign Nationals**, out the door they go.
However, I could see Trump, after too much wanting to be liked by Washington, FS (or is it, hopefully, a lost cause), calling it "Mission Accomplished" after booting out the violent gang members and the like. Let's hope not.
Next, as Peak Stupidity noted in those two posts regarding the cost of building and maintaining a serious border barrier, the money to do the job will be peanuts among the $6,000,000,000,000 Federal budget. I'm gonna do some posts on the Climate Calamity™ discussing the same purposeful numerical stupidity, but Trump and MAGA have got to ignore the "worrisome" cost estimates. For one thing, they have no idea. For another, you need that $6 Trillion denominator to compare to. (For example, back-of-envelope calculations contained in the post above show costs in the range of a couple of hours to half a day out of the 24/7/365-366 Gov't spending.) For another, which we'll get to next, you don't have to physically deport them all. Finally, if it made the country broke... OK, in 2 years instead of 5, I would say saving the nation was worth it. You will never be the same nation again if you replace the population. OTOH, you can always declare bankruptcy:
It may have been way too Politically Incorrect to talk about until this past Monday, but the history of President Eisenhower's Operation Wetback is now under discussion. The ZH 1st post has some numbers:
The numbers in the main tweet-text are for California and Arizona in that summer of 1954. There is more about Texas*** in the smaller text - hopefully the reader can zoom in. What was that larger political resistance implied for Texas? I'll tell you what. His name was Lyndon B. Johnson. As if he wasn't enough of a scumbag, he was part of the pro-cheap-labor lobby. (~9 years before Pres. LBJ). That aside, when the work was done, one can see that the self-deporting to deported ratio was 9 3/4 for CA and AZ, and 6 1/4 to 8 3/4 for Texas.
For Trump and other non-VDare-readers: Self-deportation a real, important, and even overwhelming phenomena. Don't let the ctrl-left and its Lyin' Press arm tell you otherwise. Peak Stupidity has noted for a completely different reason - being a prepper - why one might want to "walk before they make me run." That's from an obscure, but very good Rolling Stones song, with its lyrics applying to yet something else. Yet, sure, why wait to be arrested and put on a
After all is said and done,That's 6-9 TIMES as many self-deportation as forced ones. That would mean only 3 - 6 million or so illegals would have to be forced home, or across the Mexican (and even Canadian, yes) border to bring the huge numbers - 40 million or so - down to very low ones. I say "would" here, because the deportation program must be done seriously and with lots of visibility. Yes, the sob stories will flow. Tough shit. There's lots of sobbing that goes on during the ruination of one's country - imagine if you were a 50 year resident of Springfield, Ohio, and they up and did this to you. Let the sobbing be done by the criminals-by-definition, every one, who made the decision to enter illegally. We're finally sending you home - get over it! More sobbing by the ctrl-left and Globalists who WANT ruination of America is welcomed.
gotta move while it's still fun.
Let me walk before they make me run.
Well, that was quite a lot more than I intended to write. I did want to insert some humor here from one Harrison H. Smith, who noted that some "migrants" down in ole Juarez will not get in so easily:
Heh! No, it's enough already, what, with the rapists, murderers, home invaders, and ID thieves. Now, they're bringing in procrastinators. Tell you what, let's deport the procrastinators first. That'll really screw with their heads. "¿Self-deportation? ¡Oye! ¡No hoy! ¡Manana, senor, manana!"
OK, I got the song in my head, so you may as well too:
That's guitarist Keith Richards singing lead there!
* I'd written 100x before, but this depends on how one defines this repeating (more like rhyming) of 45 year-ago history. I can't say all of Castro's exodees were Tony Montanas, and not all the 10-12 million - 100x as many as left Cuba on boats in the Spring of 1980 - are violent gang members either. Apples-to-apples, it may be 100x the violent ones or it might be a much lower ratio, due to much more than 1 in 20 of the Cubans that came having been violent criminals.
** If the Steves, Miller and Bannon, can get it into Trump's head that but-LEE GULL immigration is a big part of the PRP, perhaps most foreign Nationals can be sent home too.
*** I think likely due to comparably rougher terrain at the border, New Mexico seems to be left out of a lot of numbers, discussion, and political action.
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