Governor DeSantis fights the Bai Dien/Mayorkas-run Invasion
Posted On: Wednesday - May 17th 2023 1:22PM MST
In Topics:   Immigration Stupidity  Websites  Zhou Bai Dien  President DeSantis

Florida is, of course not a border State. (There are only 4 on the southern border, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, going E-->W.) The State of Florida has had its own invasion problem going back through the worst of times, the Jimmy Carter-permitted exile of 125,000 Cuban criminals - dubbed the "Mariel Boatlift" - 43 years back, in Spring through Fall of 1980.
Having had the Jewish/Yankee and Midwestern influx too, Floridians know about Population Replacement. Now that the more comprehensive Population Replacement program run by the Globalist elites has been ramped up for the entire country as run by Zhou Bai Dien and Motherland Security traitorous Mother Mayorkas, we are all experiencing this. Governor DeSantis has been fighting back. His Martha's Vineyard stunt wasn't about numbers but about payback, humiliation (if that's possible with those people) and visibility.
Now, the good Governor has done something to help, albeit temporarily, stem the surge of numbers like 300,000/month* that could be coming once Title 42 is lifted by the traitors of the Bai Dien administration.
Title 42 is something Trump talked about in that "Town Hall" the other night. It was put in place to slow down immigration using the Kung Flu as the excuse. Nobody, but nobody, on either side of the invasion question really thinks this is about disease anymore. Plenty of diseases are being brought in, but the traitors have never been worried about that - even during the middle of the Kung Flu PanicFest - as Population Replacement is much more important to them. The Patriots, including Donald Trump, want this program to go on, even in its weakest form (without the "Remain in Mexico" - until BS-asylum-claim hearings are held - program) diseased people or not. Trump should have stated this plainly the other day, instead of bullshitting about it.
In anticipation of the lifting of Title 42, the traitors have instituted a parole amnesty that will let these invaders into the country more easily (better explanation below and in my link). Gov. DeSantis has found a judge in Florida who issued a Temporary Restraining Order on the parole amnesty. That's for 2 weeks. VDare's Federale reports the details in Biden Regime Parole Amnesty Given A Partial Smackdown. That's just for 2 weeks. It may mean nothing, but at least Ron DeSantis is working WITH us patriotic Americans.
Another VDare writer noted that these uses of judges is usually a thing of the ctrl-left, so they should not be SHOCKED, SHOCKED! about it. James Fulford says the left has been doing for decades. From Federale's post:
The Biden Regime has been using a parole amnesty for mass illegal immigration for almost two years. It took another wild step recently when in anticipation of the end of Title 42 expulsions of illegal aliens, the Chief Patrol Agent (CPA) of the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) authorized mass parole of the increasing flood of illegal aliens that the Biden Regime is releasing, instead of serving the aliens with the official charging document, initiating deportation proceedings: Form I-862, Notice To Appear (NTA) or even the lesser version of the NTA, the Form I-385, Notice To Report (NTR), an order to appear at an ICE SVU office. It gives the lie to the claim by visa fraudster and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Alejandro Mayorkas that the border is secure and not open.(VDare has links everywhere.) He included a tweet from our nation's Motherland Security Directorate. I'll just put the text in:
Homeland Security
@DHSgov
The U.S. has & will continue to enforce our nation’s immigration laws. The U.S. border is not open to illegal or irregular migration, & U.S. immigration laws remain strict even as the COVID-19 public health Order known as Title 42 ends.
Explained here ➡️ http://DHS.gov/immigrationlaws


Complete lying sacks of shit, they are. It's very blatant these days.
Thank you, VDare, for providing ALL the news of the immigration invasion, legal and illegal, with all aspects of the problem described, by a crack staff with inside knowledge. The immigration stupidity is America's EXISTENTIAL problem, and VDare is the site that covers this best. I recommend everyone read it every damn day... till it's over ... one way or another.
* As per VDare's Peter Brimelow's 10,000/day number he quoted in a video interview I watched yesterday.
Comments (5)
Cry the DeConstructed Country - Part 4: Anecdote on Anti-Apartheid
Posted On: Tuesday - May 16th 2023 6:17PM MST
In Topics:   Geography  Race/Genetics  World Political Stupidity  Peak Stupidity Roadshow
(Continued from Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3, but this one is an anecdotal interlude.)

(I have an actual photo of the scene I'm trying to represent, from an actual camera, of the Swedish fellow hitchhiker of this story by the side of the road with our sign.)
It was long ago in a Europe full of Europeans and gangs of people like me, young adults having a blast traveling around the continent*, meeting Europeans and each other, carrying backpacks and Youth Hostel and rail passes. I spent a week and a half in Ireland** It was the late 1980s.
It turned out that in Ireland, though my rail pass was valid, the trains didn't go very many of the scenic places I wanted to visit. Due to my low budget and still dormant stupidity, I couldn't and didn't, respectively, rent a car***. Hitchhiking was the only way to get many places, particularly the scenic Dingle Peninsula, etc.
I had met up with a fellow young traveler, a Swedish girl. Ahhhh, no, a) she didn't look like any members of ABBA and, not due to this at all b) we didn't do more than travel together for 3 or 4 days. Here we were, outside some little shop, waiting by the road in the rain trying to catch a ride to Galway. (I only remember that because we made an 8 1/2 x 11 page sign at one point.) Nobody stopped for us for 4 hours.
Finally, a well-dressed Yuppie (well, that was the general term at the time) in a nice Saab stopped for us. He was going the same direction, so we rode with him for an hour or more. We talked about the destination and such, then other things ...
Oh, about South Africa, here's finally where this post is related. "Apartheid" was the system the White South Africans used to keep the Black! residents - who numbered well more than them - under control. Otherwise, something bad might, MIGHT, happen, "those mean racists" thought. That country had been under heavy political pressure by virtue-signaling lefties all around the Western World for some years already to end Apartheid. I'd seen it myself in left-wing areas in this country.
She being a young lady from Sweden in the 1980s, well, you can imagine the political opinions of my companion in the back seat of that Saab. I also figured the helpful man driving us was a Conservative as I was. Somehow she just had to get started on the evils of Apartheid and how it had to end ... I didn't know her well enough to nudge her in some way and shake my head, as in "This is no good. Stop."
We'd been out waiting for a ride for 4 hours, and that was in a good spot. Was this guy gonna stop the car any second and tell us to both get out of the car? I wouldn't have blamed him if he had. You don't get in political arguments (unless it's an Uber driver). She stopped after a few minutes. I think we all became silent for a while. We did make it to Galway that day.
I haven't thought about that incident more that a handful of times since, usually when thinking about the nearly defunct practice of hitchhiking. This Swedish lady is a whole lot older now. I wonder if she's gotten any wiser... not about how to behave while hitchhiking but about the races and the sorry state of South Africa.
That was just an anecdote. What South Africa needs is an antidote, not an anecdote. That'll be much harder to come by.
* Don't take that term too literally. This was in the UK, definitely part of the continent of Europe per Geographers describing the world, but not per the folks in the UK or in individual countries IN Europe , for which they have a good point geographically too.
** I was just in the south. The "Troubles" were still going on, but a young man doesn't care too much. This was just based on time and the problem of transportation.
*** See the footnote and also the post A man's home is his castle, in which I refer to this trip long ago.
Comments (16)
Trump's disgust and media lies upon lies upon lies
Posted On: Saturday - May 13th 2023 9:02PM MST
In Topics:   Elections '16 - '24  Music  Trump  Media Stupidity

The screenshot above is the closest within 1/2 a second I could get to the exact point of Donald Trump's visible display of disgust with "moderator" Kaitln Collins in that town hall the other night. This was after this woman had asked him 4 times to get at whether he would honor the results of the '24 election* without regard to whether he thought it was fair or not. (Start at 1:00:45 for the questioning and 1:01:20 for Trump's look.)
Trump's answer that it would depend on whether the election had been conducted properly is fair enough. This grilling of Trump was not fair. The Lyin' Press would never question a D-squad candidate who questioned an election after a close one with strange discrepancies and a more crooked than 3rd-World voting system. Trump or whoever should just blindly accept the fraud? Screw that!
I cannot sit and watch or read the Lyin' Press for long. I get so sick of lies. It's lies upon lies upon lies. I was picking out a Rolling Stones song for the end-o'-week music, and the album Some Girls (1978) had this song, one I'd completely forgotten about. It's not really that great a tune, but it's good loud rock and roll. There's no way I could understand more that one or two lines of the lyrics until the internet told me just now:
Lies, dripping off your mouth like dirt.
Lies, lie in every step you walk.
Well that was a productive but pretty downer of a week, subject-wise, here at Peak Stupidity. Next week, we'll get to those movie reviews, finish on South Africa, discuss the border invasion surge, and have a little Kung Flu residue (that one is humorous), and we'll call out other a la carte stupidity when it's served up to us by this mad, mad, world. Thanks to all for reading and commenting.
* Assuming he's in it. If he's not, he won't care a wit. It's all about him, or it's nothing to him.
Comments (11)
Cry the DeConstructed Country - Part 3
Posted On: Saturday - May 13th 2023 8:41AM MST
In Topics:   The Future  Race/Genetics  World Political Stupidity
(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2 .)

We're talking about what was a White-run 1st-World country 3 decades ago, coincidentally, just before the people caved to pressure from the rest of the world to go Black!-run, South Africa. Part 1 had some really basic history, and Part 2 was about the destruction of the infrastructure. This post is about the White people still there.
Since 35-40 years ago, a couple of decent-sounding sources come close together at 610,000 or so White S. Africans having left. Right now, there are 4 1/2 million still hanging on there, though.

(Table taken from this '21 article form The South African site.)
From the same long, depressing travelogue by Michael Witkin, SOUTH AFRICA AT WAR WITH ITSELF, here's some more on daily life nowadays:
It was the weekly garbage day. I peered over the balcony from the second floor of the apartment I was staying at. About ten large bins were hauled out to the sidewalk to be picked up. Within less than a minute a deluge of beggars besieged the bins systematically sorting through the detritus, debris and trash. They would neatly empty the bin then would stuff unidentifiable objects into their pockets and into plastic grocery bags slung over their necks and shoulders like bandoliers. This is commonplace as I saw numerous times poor people fishing in trash cans for something to eat. A crust of bread, spoilage or maybe find an item that could be sold.
"Poor Whites” has become South Africa’s “New Subclass”. These are white families who have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty as a result of the policy of “affirmative action”, that is, preferential treatment for blacks. Living in total abject poverty, this destitute group is rarely discussed or acknowledged but is increasing in size. They survive in informal settlements away from the public eye; mostly in tents and hovels. They are mostly the disinherited, outcast and bereft Afrikaners that are bitter and dejected and feel abandoned."Reverse" racism. That's a cuck term that implies normally it's only the White people being racist.
This situation is depicted in TFI Global’s ‘You don’t need to die to see hell, just visit a white slum in South Africa’:“White squatter colonies, where there is little food, running water, and no electricity, live in shanties with rusted cars, ditches and pools of filth, and stagnant water with mosquitos swarming. Over two decades, the number of poor whites has steadily increased. ……Over 400,000 white S Africans are estimated to be impoverished. Reverse racism has been rampant and has ravaged the white population in South Africa. Targeted policies of the government has pushed the country to a near apartheid-like situation and the continued regressive policies have pushed South Africa into an era of subjugation of the people once more.”Published in 2020, the numbers are considerably higher now in 2023.
There have always been people begging on the streets; mostly blacks. Now however, they are joined by ever-increasing white beggars. I did see an entire family including small blond haired children with crude cardboard signs saying “Please help – God bless you” .The country has a Land Reform policy. As is usual in Communist-transitioning countries, "Land Reform" means "we're taking all your shit." In this case it's the Black!-run government taking land from White farmers, who are the only people there (the Boers, that is) who know how to farm. Gee, that doesn't bode well...
According to some reports, over 50% of South Africans live in poverty on less than $2.00 a day. Some have no access to sanitation, water or electricity.
Many of them are the Afrikaners, the descendants of the early Dutch settlers who have become dispossessed and feel betrayed, defrauded and deprived of their rights and of their strong heritage and beliefs. A large number of South Africa’s farmers are Afrikaners who unbeknownst to the outside world have been brutally murdered, their wives tortured and raped; their children shot. The government fails to offer any protection to its white farmers and there was a popular EFP (Economic Freedom Party) song, called “Kill the Boer” that the Equality Court ruled “does not constitute hate speech”. People are free to continue singing it and during a debate in Parliament about the farm attacks and the plight of white farmers, an ANC Member of Parliament felt immune to shout:“Bury them alive.”

At the end of the Apartheid, and the end of racial discrimination in 1994, there was joy and optimism and the promise of a unified society known as “The Rainbow Nation”. [ Heh! ]It doesn't work like that. Everyone can prosper, possibly, but White people have to be still running the place! Did he not get that? I don't know if the Archbishop was actually that stupid to believe all that. It's more likely he just wanted the power, making him kind of evil for an Archbishop.
This expression was coined by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu describing post-apartheid South Africa with the assurance of a total multi-racial society and a country where everyone has the chance to prosper.
Well, not exactly and Nelson Mandela must be turning in his grave witnessing what has become of the ANC. A caricature of itself, this ‘movement for change’ has itself ‘changed’ having morphed into an organized criminal conspiracy, eviscerating the country of everything it had, and gutting its citizens of all they have left. Today, South Africa is a country of “74 murders and more than 100 rapes a day.” (Business Tech Feb 17, 2023). The police chiefs are corrupt and they do not care for the sanctity of life but rather how much they will collect from another bribe. Of course there are those that do care passionately, and those that give to the country and their communities.No, that's not it! Just as Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, got it wrong in Animal Farm*, thinking that Socialism on the animal's farm didn't work only because the wrong animals (spoiler alter: The Pigs done it!) were in charge, this writer has it all wrong. It's not just that they've had the WRONG Black! leadership. It doesn't matter who they may have had. It doesn't work like that!
The irony is that the Rainbow Nation does not exist. “Equal opportunity” for whites does not exist. In fact, the abused minority of whites are discriminated against rigorously.Yeah, I bet. There's probably a shortage of people who "ever want to let him cut on me" too.**
Blacks get preferential treatment in employment, education and other areas. A white male is less likely to get a job over a black male. In fact, employment equity laws make it harder for whites to get work. Jobs in upper management go to blacks further ostracizing whites, and in a sense, sentencing them to more menial employment with the inability to use their talents to further themselves. It seems that today, whites feel that they are being punished for something they did not do.
The government has introduced an odious Quota System, a race-based policy that goes against the norms of society in this day and age.
While “Strict quotas are enforced for the degree in medicine and surgery. The intake of white students is capped at 2%” (Solidariteit Mar 26, 2022), there is a huge shortage of doctors and qualified medical personnel.
The racial quota admissions into universities, across the board, favor blacks over other racial groups. If you are a white student, it is increasingly difficult to get accepted into a university even if you matriculated with distinctions. Those of a darker hue with poor school grades are favored instead. If you did manage to graduate with a degree, you would then again be subjected to the quota system to obtain a Masters.Wait, payback? We've been trying to help. "Revere discrimination with quotas of 2% White? So, wait, you mean Affirmative Action doesn't end when all the quotas are met or exceeded? But, but... they told me this is just a hand up. Nope, we who are not stupid know the reality of it all, whether in South Africa or America. This is about power. The South African Whites gave up all power to the Blacks!. The White man in American has been giving power up gradually (for now!) to, well, pretty much everyone else.***
Why would a white pursue a degree (even if they could get into a university) when there is little future for them; being excluded from society and discriminated against? Today, they are the downtrodden marginalized scapegoats of South Africa.
There is a sense of this is “payback-time…..”
More polemic indignation to explain how this destruction could possibly happen, or be LET TO happen, will be in the next, probably final, post on this distressing story. We'll also explain why this is important as a lesson for us in America.
* That's our review, titled Animal Farm: Some allegories are more equal than others.
** From one of my favorite obscure Jimmy Buffett songs.
*** In California, right now, in fact, they are doing this some more, to the point of abject ridiculousness.
Comments (14)
Kung Flu Fever Dreams
Posted On: Friday - May 12th 2023 2:44PM MST
In Topics:   University  Kung Flu Stupidity

I'm gonna write this post now before the last image left from a dream last night is gone. This was not one of those weird dreams at all - everything was pretty normal...
I was talking to 4 roommates who were renting a house from me. I've done this in the past, but I'm not now, and the 4 guys in the dream were not people I recall.
They were telling me nicely that I owed them just over $800. They'd had to stay in hotel rooms for a couple of nights. Why? I figured that my property manager/ friend forgot to tell me something happened, such as he had to cut off the water or something like that. OK, well, not good, but stuff happens... no, wait, what?
"No, we had to move out for a couple of days because of Covid-19", the one guy told me.
"Uhhh, oh ...", I was trying to get a handle on this. "You guys got nothing to worry about with this thing though. You're young and in good shape."
He agreed, but informed me "Yeah, but we're gonna graduate soon."
Then, I realized "... oh, you guys have to make sure you don't test positive in order to graduate?" (This somehow all made sense in the dream, and, sadly, in reality too a couple of years back.)
"Yep, that's it."
"Oh, I see. Alright," (Somehow I owed them another 900 bucks too, but that part of the dream is gone. The $900 wasn't Covid-19 related.)
"That kinda sucks", I thought, while I was already gone from talking to them. Finally, it came to me: "This is bullshit! I'm not paying for this crap because the University is part of this PanicFest!"
This dream - OK not exactly normal because the times are not exactly normal - was right at the end of the official "emergency", but it's not like I've put much thought into the PanicFest in a long while. Oh, yeah, this dream could have been induced by my seeing some young guy at the Starbucks drive-through wearing a face mask in his car the morning prior. Yes, with the windows up. You're freaking me out, man!
Comments (11)
The 3-year-long Emergency is Ovah!!
Posted On: Friday - May 12th 2023 11:19AM MST
In Topics:   Humor  Kung Flu Stupidity

No. Just don't! Did you learn NOTHING about Social Distancing?!!
It's over! We have won, people! The World has conquered the Kung Flu at long last!
It's been a terrible, terrible dea...[/Trump] long slow slog. Thanks to the Globalists who've been fighting for us,

Our Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the Flu Manchu, Anthony Fauci, has left for Italy for a position as Strategic Advisor at a Bio Lab, hopefully giving him at least enough free time to sit on a Fellowship Chair in Panic Studies at the nearby university.
It's been more like 3 years and 2 months since the PanicFest was implemented in earnest. (I call it at the middle of March '20.)
Someday, we'll all get together at the nearest Chucky Cheese, drinking jello shots and coming together to help each other re-live and make some sense out of these dark years we called Covid-19:
"Michigan was bad. We stayed inside for 6 months straight the first time, with nothing but Ramen Noodles, 18 cases of wipes, and a slow internet connection. We wore face masks for 2 years, even when riding alone in our cars. The Governor told us.... Where were you for the duration?"
"I was at the parks and the beaches, and I didn't get fired for not taking a shot, because Big Biz was desperate for manpower. I wouldn't wear face masks in the grocery, but they were too polite to stop me. Where were you for the duration?"
"I was shoveling shit in Louisiana. That beats the hell outta the first guy!"
PS: Sorry for the autoplay. I should have warned you ... could have, in fact, but ... hahahaa!
* Globalist Mean Time
Comments (5)
Trump Townhall - A time for bullshitting...
Posted On: Thursday - May 11th 2023 6:54PM MST
In Topics:   Elections '16 - '24  Trump  Media Stupidity  US Feral Government
... a time for the facts.
A time to hate,
a time to debate.
A time for the truth, I swear it's not too late.
Yes, there is a time for bullshitting, and Donald Trump is just the man for it. I don't meant that this bullshitting has to necessarily conflict with the truth always either - it just means that I don't expect any follow-up action after the excellent points Trump made in the hour-long "Town Hall" held last evening in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Peak Stupidity readers (at least the commenters) are on the ball and have probably seen more of this than we have. I'll go over my one or two highlights, but I also would say this about the entire thing: What a breath of fresh air it is to see an American come out with the truth that the Lyin' Press HATES, in front of millions and millions of American viewers!
I was especially encouraged by Mr. Trump's forceful pushback against the over 2-year-long narrative of lies about the J6 riots and Political Prisoners. He DID note the anarcho-tyranny of it all as compared to antifa and BLM riots. He also did not hold back in calling out the "thug" who murdered Ashli Babbitt in the Capitol that day. I still don't know why nobody important will ever mention the thug's name, Michael Leroy Byrd, the Capitol Cop who committed murder and did not even get arrested for it. Trump talked about pardons for most of these protesters and gasp! trespassers on Federal property. The host was not amused by talk of letting these people out of that Washington, FS hell. (Yes, Trump went there, too.)
I was very impressed with Mr. Trump's answer, repeated multiple times for the Miss White-Outfit to a question about the Russia/Ukraine war. The host - more on this piece of work after the video - kept asking the juvenile question "who do you want to win?" Even with his egotistical take (Mr. Wheeler-dealer here) and simplistic language, Trump tried to get through that he wanted the war, hence the killing, to stop, period.
I used Rumble this time for the video, but I cannot get to work the simple "start=t" feature. ("t" is starting point in seconds from the beginning.) The part about J6 and Ashli Babbitt is at ~13-14 minutes in. One could go to 45 min, 46 min, or 47 min in to see the original Ukraine question, the beginning of Trump's actual answer, and the best part, respectively.
From that 1 hour, 2 minutes, there's lots more one could discuss about DonaldTrump's opinions, personality, and (yeah, right!) plans. I may not get to it, due to my wanting to go back to other subjects. However, that CNN interviewer deserves a post of her own. Bikini pictures would be the only good news I'd have for you, as she is a real Regime Media piece of work!
Is that how you moderate a "Town Hall"? I don't think so. Introducing the questioners and keeping an eye on the clock is her job. Instead, this extremely annoying Lyin' Press sycophant figured her job was to interrupt Donald Trump anytime she saw that he was off the Regime Narrative, on some kind of tangent toward the real truth. She acted as a prosecuting attorney would doing a cross-examination, but without the wit, logic, patience, politeness and general intelligence.
These are Rumble commenters (the first 2 on there), I had to remind myself, but I like it!
Teresa_64Cow? No. I agree with the rest, but she's quite hot. I think that'd be good for a few nights, but that's ALL.
13 hours ago
wow....she is quite the rude, obnoxious, moronic little cow huh.
Jaaybee89True, dat!
13 hours ago
She was a disgrace, she kept on trying to cut him off from making his point. She kept trying to lead him into saying something that could be used as ammunition, she kept saying he was wrong. The job of an interviewer is to ask a question and listen to the answer. I honestly don't know how he can sit there at take it. Compare the questioning to how Joe biden gets interviewed, questions like his favorite ice cream. What a disgraceful interview.
Just about half a minute before the end, Trump's expression showed exactly what he thought of this lady and her detestable performance. Then, he said a standard platitude - that's his thing.
Were I in the audience, I'd have been booing this woman loud and long enough to be pulled out of there... hopefully not as a Political Prisoner.
Finally, what do I mean by a time for bullshitting? I don't pretend that voting for the one "Mr. Right" is going to fix the country. (OK, sometimes I do, but readers and I know better...) I don't take any of Trump's talk about he'll be a great President and fix things in '25, as he still says he was and did in '21. No, but having all this truth be told in front of a large TV and internet audience is what we need sometimes. Nobody else well-known I could thing of could have done this better!
For every season, turn, turn, turn ...
Comments (29)
Inflation in trees and log splitter rental
Posted On: Wednesday - May 10th 2023 5:23PM MST
In Topics:   Inflation

I can do this because I've kept records - checkbook "registers" - of my spending for a long time. This first data pair goes back to 1990. I'd bought a bunch of the same trees at one time and logged the quantity and price. Leyland Cypress trees in the 3 Gallon buckets cost $7.50 in 1990.* While shopping around for some other trees recently at the Farmer's Market, I saw these trees in the same size bucket for $20. That works out to a 3.0% average inflation rate on 3 G Leyland Cypress trees, with compounding.
(I wish I could check the Peach tree next to it, as I saw them now, bought them way back, but could not find an entry with one by itself from back in the day.)
Well, you plant these things, and they get huge and you have to cut them back down. That wasn't the case with the Leyland Cypresses though, but that was the case with the Sycamores. (Just don't do it! You get quick shade, but you'll grow no more grass, and those balls they drop will grow into the roof shingles.)

OK, that was just an attempt at a segue into the rental of hydraulic log splitters. A few years ago, I rented one from the very same outfit that I'd rented one from in the mid 1990s. In this case, I will say that it may not be completely apples-to-apples due to quality going up! Up? Whaaaa? Yeah, well the new ones are designed to tilt 90 degrees to let the user split logs right near the ground, in a vertical position. In the '90s, we used a 2 x 12 to roll them up, but I was not so keen on doing that more recently. Perfect timing!
The first time, the rental was $55, and 24 years later it was $125. That's 3.5% average inflation on (24 hour) log splitter rental, with compounding.
These 2 show an average inflation rate slightly below the 4.5% to 5.5% I've been getting a lot. One could get into the reasons here, fewer employees and illegal aliens at that, at the plant nurseries, relatively cheaper labor at the rental centers, I don't know.
I just post these ones because I don't trust that BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) "basket of goods and services". I don't know if that much of the difference I've seen is nefarious, but there are lots of ways to get creative with this accounting. (We have a number of posts on this, discussing "hedonics" and "substitution".)
We'll get back to South Africa and get in a movie review, and some D.I.E. fun. (Yes, that one will actually be fun.)
Comments (12)
The old Split Shipment Scam...
Posted On: Wednesday - May 10th 2023 2:24PM MST
In Topics:   Cars  Economics  Big-Biz Stupidity  Scams
... 2nd time I fell for it this month!
I'm not really singling out the huge* on-line auto-parts company and website Rock Auto in this scam report. Shipping costs, ground and air, went way up back in the peak oil price days of early '08. They never came down. That's usually the case, and that's not the scam here. Now that fuel is up again, and inflation is probably in real double-digits yearly, 11 bucks to ship a small box by ground to another State is a reasonable deal, I suppose.
I haven't shipped anything of my own in a long time, so I don't know if some of what's dubbed "shipping" is handling/profit. They've got to make money one way or another. In this case, my stocking up on oil and air filters for a couple of vehicles, these parts were 1/2 of what they are at the store, and I can't get certain FRAM oil filters at the store (LUV that hand grip - excellent idea!), but then there's the shipping. The lesson there is GET A LOT OF STUFF... stuff that ships together.

(Note for doxxers: Have at it determining my vehicles, but ... well, do you know what a primrose path is? Guess what? You're on one!)
It's a much better deal to get 5 or even 10 of some regular maintenance part like an oil or air filter.** A multiple count of the same item will ship together. I would also think that FRAM oil filters would be in the same warehouse, and common sense things like that. Here's where the scam starts. Note that in the above image from Rock Auto, of the 4 part numbers, they are coming from 3 different places, [A], [B], and [C]. The FRAM filters (2 part #s) are coming from location [C]. That makes sense, but at first I had a [D], meaning I was paying a separate same shipping charge on all 4. I had to delete all items and then mess around a while to save one of those charges.

Maybe that was my fault. An auto mechanic friend says no - he has to play around with the orders too, to bring the shipping charges down.
Then, I received all the air filters for both vehicles together in one box, and the oil filters for both vehicles together in another a few days later. (Nothing was in any kind of hurry, making this easier than it would have been otherwise.) I just now looked at the packing slip for the latter. It all came from the same warehouse in Carson, California. Yet, right there on the slip, it shows my 2 vehicle models and reads "Shipping Separately" OK, now this last part is just a lie. That's the real scam here, being screwed out of 11 bucks (never mind what's on the image). One package came from one place. That's not "shipping separately" where I come from.
You've gotta watch this kind of thing. I'm still used to a little honesty, even out of Big Biz.
* I write "huge" to refer to the website database, but not necessarily the company itself. This rockauto.com site has SO MANY parts listed - they must number in the high 100,000s to millions. The company Rock Auto, OTOH, has no real-time human-interaction customer service. It wouldn't take my debit card for a while, and I spent half an hour digging up a corporate phone number in Cleveland or somewhere. The lady was miffed I was calling her, and there was no way for any live human to help me, she admitted, including her. That's the way Big Biz wants it - no human interaction.
** This goes for anything with a good long shelf life like these filters. They are only going to go up in price (see Inflation and Prepping), quality will go down if anything, and this is the other reason, shipping. What could go wrong? The car gets totaled, that's one.
Comments (7)
Blue Jean Inflation
Posted On: Tuesday - May 9th 2023 6:22PM MST
In Topics:   Music  Inflation  Taxes

(Perfectly inflated jeans here. Yeah, we need to bring in some readers ...)
Peak Stupidity has got 2 solid accurate price points for Levy's 505 blue jeans. This is really close to an apples-to-apples comparison with the exception of the question of quality. I know the quality hasn't improved, and from holes in the knees of my blues*, I would say they are of lower quality.
Changes in quality of products and services were discussed in the older inflation posts, such as the one paragraph in the post Tire Inflation by Deflation. Were these changes known well, as far as good useful life numbers, then they could be numerically taken into account, getting us accurate results on average inflation rates. I could have been logging "days worn", but unfortunately I don't have that regarding my blue jeans because I'm not that much of an obsessive economic geek .
Anyway, same size, same style (505) and even same color. The reason I know the price in '05 is due to a nice memory, and the expense is right with me in my records. I'd made a trip to a nearby State, one without sales tax, to buy 6 pairs of jeans. Wait, OK, there was a girl involved who I wanted to ride there with - the trip being paid for, as it was part of the work. (Buying blue jeans not subject to sales tax was the excuse.) Nothing came of it besides a nice hike... oh, and yeah, 6 pairs of jeans, long since ripped and retired, but logged at $162 even. That's $27/pair,on sale, as I recall, and remember, there's no tax to take into account.
My wife helped me shop for more recently. We looked around a while.
I rounded down to the even year - '05 to '23 is 18 years. MoneyChimp says, with compounding, that's just under a 3.5% average inflation rate. Whaddya' know? This is a little lower than the 4-5% I seem to get on long-term calculations.
Due to the first lyric line written by Bernie Taupin, you may already have this song in your head. From 52 years back and the album Madman Across the Water, this is Elton John's Tiny Dancer:
This song was written well before the gayness of the artist was announced. ~ 6-7 years afterward, he "came out", but that wasn't pushed on the audience as it was in the recent movie Rocket Man. TMI, dudes!
* Mr. Ganderson, you've got 5 seconds: Name that Dead song.
** I wrote "non-stretch ones" for a reason. I found them for $50 on-line. That's quite the price difference (when you buy in quantity), but I simply don't want anything different. More relative to the inflation picture is that I looked up info. on these, and they are not as durable as the normal stuff due to the elastic material wearing out faster than the denim. That's per this info.
Comments (22)
Cry the DeConstructed Country - Part 2
Posted On: Tuesday - May 9th 2023 1:52PM MST
In Topics:   The Future  Race/Genetics  World Political Stupidity
(Continued from Part 1.)

"How did your nation get destroyed?"
"Gradually, then suddenly."
The formerly 1st World Nation of South Africa - that'd be only 3 decades ago - is in the latter phase of the famous answer in that passage from Ernest Hemmingway.* Here's the article, as mentioned in Part 1 and discussed by VDare's Patrick Cleburne: SOUTH AFRICA AT WAR WITH ITSELF. It's a personal account by S. African 1976 emigre (to California and then Michigan) Michael Witkin of his visit to his ex-beloved country very recently**, 10 years since seeing the place the last time.
This is a hell of an account, as things are truly going to hell there.
Hovels, hoks [slang for makeshift dwellings] and hellholes line both sides of the national road to Cape Town from the airport. Corrugated tin, cardboard, black trash bags, petrol drums and burlap hobbled together with string and wire are used as building materials. Cape Town has always had shanties but now it was overwhelming and extended as far as the eye could see. This slum makes the favelas in Sao Paulo look luxurious by comparison. Smoke oozes out from a shanty saying, “this is my home, someone lives here.” A stray cow walks on the side of the road while an African child strolls with a herd of goats.Well, I mean, this IS Africa. No, but that's not it. It was Africa in 1976, when this writer left the place. It might be that they ARE Africans... as in, not White Afrikaners or ex-Brits.
“Danger–Gevaar–Ingozi” These are the words in English, Afrikaans and Zulu on signs with a red background and a crudely stenciled skull and crossbones that are now part of the urban fabric. Angle-iron bayonets affixed at an acute angle to the walls that support twelve strands of electrified wire, add further anguish to the painful broken glass crown and sinister cloak that safeguards, protects and shields those that are held hostage unto themselves. The streetscape and thoroughfares in residential neighborhoods have been transformed into hostile environments, devoid of people.That's the urban landscape. This article is pretty long, so let me put in excerpts about the failing infrastructure. (I will skip important parts of this article on the politics and the poor Afrikaners, as they will be discussed in subsequent posts. Oh, and we'll have more on the airlines. If you read, you'll encounter that stuff first or mixed in.)
Besides no airlines, no postal service and no trains, there is a dwindling electricity supply. They have rolling blackouts, euphemistically called “load shedding” which can last as much as 10 hours per day in Cape Town. Johannesburg is worse. People survive by always keeping their thermos flasks filled with hot water, using small gas camping stoves and using rechargeable lanterns for light and a healthy supply of batteries and candles at all times. Food rots in refrigerators so one needs to purchase small amounts of groceries just for a day. Few people can afford to have a generator, let alone the exorbitant cost of diesel fuel. Without electricity there is no viable economy. Retail stores, restaurants, businesses and factories cannot operate. The employees are idle and cannot do their job. As a result they are unable to earn a livelihood."This ain't no party. This ain't no disco. This ain't no foolin' around!" Rather than Life During Wartime***, this will be no temporary situation. The country will exist like this, as the rest of Black! Africa does, other than when interrupted by colonization or famine-relief airlifts.

(Image from a different article.)
One portion of destroyed infrastructure leads to more destroyed infrastructure:
The sick irony is that the trains that transport coal to the power plants which are their life-giving arteries, no longer operate and cannot deliver coal because the rail lines were stolen off the tracks.It's not irony. It's Africa, taking back what is rightfully its.
The cartels also sell the best quality coal to China and the inferior coal with “rocks and metal” has to be used.
In the agricultural sector, including processing plants, the lack of electric power has led to the culling of poultry, some 10 million chicks in January of 2023, the wastage of fresh milk without refrigeration and the inability to irrigate crops.
With South Africa being a large exporter of fruit to the UK and the EU, this sector of its economy is now also in serious jeopardy due to inadequate refrigeration.
I will get into the very obvious reasons for all this, the state of the White population in S. Africa, and how its doomed future foretells a fairly likely future for American in the next parts. I just want to explain how that Hemingway line may be in operation over there now.
Peak Stupidity has noted the increasing incompetence seen in many aspects of American life recently - Demographics to DIE
From 3 years ago, the article I got the 2nd image from is Theft and destruction of railway infrastructure continues unabated. From that article in South Africa Today:
The continuous damage and theft of infrastructure within the rail environment has far reaching consequences to the Grand Economic Strategy of this country. While the value of the actual property damaged or stolen may run into 10s of thousands of rand, the impact of this on the other hand runs into hundreds of millions of rand.It's a cascading thing. It's one thing to have some previously unheard-of destructive happenings on occasion, be they costly and annoying. That's still the gradually stage. We notice more of the incompetence, more of the criminal activity, more corruption, and so on.
The lives of our people are actually brought to a standstill as many millions of people rely on the rail environment to travel to and from their places of work. This is a situation we as a country cannot afford to continue given that we are all trying to rebuild the economy from devastation of the Covid-19 we are currently experiencing.
How does a nation's ruination rate go from gradual to sudden. It's a continuous function but with an inflection section****. The inflection section is when the damage to infrastructure that affects our daily lives starts to cascade, as per that last paragraph excerpted above. It's not a matter of one's commute being interrupted by protestors on the road, or seeing closures due to overturned trucks driven by incompetent drivers monthly or more anymore. What if we can't count on regularly getting to work? What if, rather than receiving more and more shoddy parts for our manufactured assemblies that can be picked out or reworked, there is no guarantee anymore we will get any good ones each day, if they get delivered at all?
White, Black!, colored, what-have-you, they can no longer live normal 1st-World-adjacent lives over there in South Africa. It's not that one remembers how lots of small stuff and a few major things used to be better. All of life has gone from a decent existence to a struggle in this newly founded shithole. .
On that high-note, let me advertise our continuation of this series in a few days. I want to first get in some short posts with inflation piece-wise anecdotal data.
PS: A difficult but interesting project would be the creation of a mathematical model of the destruction of a nation, starting with the state of the economy and with the best human functioning models (based on race) to see if one ends up with this 2-slope "Hemingway Curve".
* "How did you go bankrupt?" was the question, in The Sun Also Rises.
** He didn't say exactly when, but the article is from this March ('23) and he says his last trip was in '12.
*** I am shocked that PS has not featured this Talking Heads song as of yet, but there'll be a time and post.
**** "Inflection point" is mathematically incorrect, I think. The slope of the curve changes, but it doesn't change at a point. That'd make it a piece-wise function, which I don't think is the case. Plus, they're harder to deal with.
Comments (7)
John freaking Kerry and the Lost & Found
Posted On: Monday - May 8th 2023 8:54PM MST
In Topics:   General Stupidity

Anyone remember the John Kerry Blue-Squad campaign against Red-squad leader George W. Bush for President in '04? Yeah, it probably didn't matter who won that one, as it would have been the SOS with Kerry
During that campaign, the Vietnam War was brought up. For men of their their ages, the 90-10 years during which America was heavily involved in war in Vietnam was a part of young adulthood, whether via their participation or non-participation. That's been the case for Presidents starting with Bill Clinton and ending with GW Bush. Well, then too the current President was of age then, but that's because he's extra-old for a President.
During the Vietnam War, George W. Bush was Stateside in the Texas Air National Guard, doing basic training, then flight training - 2 years active duty and 4 years part time duty. There was criticism of his non-participation in the war, but this was unwarranted. Bush had inquired about being deployed in either Europe or Southeast Asia but didn't have the 500 flight hours required. You'll likely recall that CBS TV anchorman Dan Rather himself doctored-up a memo to disparage Lieutenant* Bush's service. That was the Lyin' Press in action, but it was still kind of a no-no to be so blatant about it in '04-'05, so he was fired or resigned. Also, I don't call anyone a slouch who could fly the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger* fighter/intercepter. Those "Century Series" fighters all are big rockets with men on top. (Ever seen and/or touched the wings of an F-104? They are thin little appendages, is all...)
Part of John Kerry's campaign's touting of his leadership ability involved his having been in the military as a Navy (Reserve) Swift (river) boat commander. There was plenty of controversy regarding his being awarded a Bronze Star, Silver Star and 3 Purple Hearts. You will likely remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They questioned the missions and the medals, the 3 Purple Hearts all given to Kerry for minor injuries (piece of shrapnel in an arm, another small one in his thigh, and contusions to the forearm. "Contusions" are deep bruises.) I won't get involved here in whether Lieutenant* Kerry deserved his medals.
Kerry left Vietnam to go back to the US to start campaigning for national office. Though he'd been in the war, as a veteran he demonstrated against it once back home, leading protests in 1971. I have no problem with that either.
In the Presidential campaign of '04, John Kerry wanted to demonstrate his leadership ability - when he accepted the Democratic nomination, he saluted and said, "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty." - and at the same time get support from his (still, then) anti-war squad of the UniParty by touting his participation in anti-war demonstrations. That included talk of his tossing his medals away.
That's the interesting part and point of this post. The picture above shows John Kerry, sent by I don't know who, really, to be the American emissary at the recent coronation of the new English King.*** He's got his left chest decked out with ribbons and medals. Right now, John Kerry is the "Climate Czar" (more on the Era of American Czars), but you can't earn medals fighting the Climate Crisis™, can you?
Regarding the coronation of not-so-Bonnie King Charles, Spencer Brown at Townhall reports that Viewers Noticed Something Strange About John Kerry at King Charles' Coronation.
Dressed in a suit, the former Secretary of State was weighed down with service medals from the United States military...the medals he previously was publicly proud to discard as a show of his allegedly strongly held convictions.Well, what do we mean by discard. The veterans against the war talked in terms of "giving back" the medals to the country.
When asked whether he'd returned a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts he received for his combat service, Kerry replied that he had and "above that, [I] gave back the others."For more on this, I refer the reader to the fairly reliable and not-so-biased New York Post and a story of theirs from 2004, 33 years after Kerry's protests - it's now been over half a century. Ed Robinson wrote the article: TALE OF TAPE SHOWS KERRY DID TOSS MEDALS. There's confusion in there, but no matter what way you look at it, John Kerry has done some lying, one way or another.
Kerry was a leader among anti-war veterans and led them in a protest in Washington, D.C. According to news reports in 1971, "many veterans were seen throwing their medals and ribbons over the fence in front of the U.S. Capitol," and a handful of outlets "reported that Kerry was among these veterans," according to ABC News.
Is it possible those medals, tossed into the big crowds in 1971 were not lost, and John Kerry just found them again on ebay? Is there some sort of Lost & Found for stuff like this? You know, it's always best to try to get misplaced items back by searching intensely right away, as I wrote about in a post on Lost & Founds 3 summers ago. Even if there is no theft, the "chain of custody" of an item can get broken pretty quickly. 52 years later, I wouldn't have much face the Veteran's Lost & Found would have my medals.
I kid there, because, as you may also figure, that's not what happened. This politician John Kerry lied. He may have lied in '04 or earlier about his having "tossed" the medals. If he didn't lie about that, then what are these new ones for, and where are they from?
You know, after the election 18 1/2 years ago, I didn't want to hear about John Freaking Kerry again. I know you probably didn't either. So sorry!
* Lieutenant was both of these men's highest attained rank.
** Yeah, that's where Jimmy Hendrix got his song title from.
*** This British royalty stuff is a subject that Peak Stupidity not only makes no effort to know about, but actively tries to avoid. I don't care about the politics, and I don't care about the celebrity aspect. As I recall, those damn people have been in the tabloids and People-style magazines since I was a kid.
Comments (19)
Site note, more on OSF, future posts, and music
Posted On: Saturday - May 6th 2023 5:39PM MST
In Topics:   Music  Websites
As you may have either seen while trying to view Peak Stupidity or read of in the comments, I'd forgotten to renew the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) digital "certificate". Therefore browser gave scary warnings. I know you all can get on here if you want, but was proven 2 years back to be discouraging to new readers. (I'm not sure how I could take your money, since there's no place to pay, but then, a prospective reader would not get to find that out..)
I'll tell you that I didn't have my notes from 2 years ago on how to do this thing more on my own, so I had to shell out a few bucks. Time is money though, and I'm not enamored with that kind of work. OK, I'll set a phone alarm for next year.
Next, in that same thread I linked to in the previous post, commenter Wilkey and others, starting here had more info on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and its woke director, as we wrote about here and here, and Mr. Hail wrote about here. The woke Black! director, Nataki Garrett, has been fired. There will be no honest reason given - that'd be a bridge too far.
BTW, I do usually link to here from TUR when appropriate. However, most of what I did in the 2 posts was paste in material from the commenter Wilkey. I did look at a couple of additional stories and give some opinion. In a recent thread on that site, a couple of commenters got on my case, albeit semi-sarcastically, I think, about continually linking to Peak Stupidity there. Sorry, that's what I do. That won't change unless it's forced, but I write this to explain that those remarks aren't why I didn't link this time. I had nothing extra to add really.
For a few days, I'd had a country music song from long ago in my head. If you'd have told me it was a Kenny Rogers song, I wouldn't have believed you. It was/is, and I really like this one. Kenny Rogers got pretty sappy about the time he got famous* - it worked for him, so I shouldn't knock it. This one seems pure 1970s country to me though. It's Love or Something Like It, from 1978.
BTW, that line about "she even had a name we could sign" at the motel reminds me a lot of the lyrics from The Amazing Rhythm Aces in their great song Third Rate Romance. They both are pretty country-style lyrics.
I'll continue on that sad, but to be expected South Africa story, an important one if nothing else due to that things may go that way here. Also, it'll be inflation data-point week - I think I have 5 of them built up. There are also 2 1/2 movies to be discussed. Have a happy Sunday. Thanks for reading and writing in!
* He was what they called a "cross-over artist". That was one who was big on the country music charts only - not nearly as big a deal as being on the Pop charts - but turned to writing songs somewhat more in the pop vein to cross over to the big-time and big bucks, from both audiences.
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[UPDATED. 05/07:] Added reference to the Amazing Rhythm Aces.
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Comments (17)
All flew out of the Cuckoo's Nest - an Unforced Error?
Posted On: Saturday - May 6th 2023 4:54PM MST
In Topics:   General Stupidity  Movies  Liberty/Libertarianism  Healthcare Stupidity
NOTE: Ahaa, we've had a fairly similar post on this subject already, called Outsourcing of the Funny Farms - the first portion of it, anyway. I kinda hate when that happens (I remembered the old one from 4 years ago somehow about an hour after finishing this one), but they aren't complete dupes. You could read them in either order.
unforced"Their", not "his? Seriously, Cambridge Dictionary?
adjective SPORTS
(of an error) caused by a mistake a player has made rather than as the result of their [sic] opponent's skillful play.
There's yet another good Steve Sailor post up on VDare and The Unz Review titled Rounding Up the 500 Most Dangerous Psychos in NYC Could Make the Streets and Subways a Lot Less Chaotic. The point he makes is that the people that do various kinds of street crime in places like NY City include a large contingent of the mentally ill, those probably accounting more for the violent offenses, and that criminals in general don't do just one or a handful of these kinds of crimes. You read of these incidents when there finally is an arrest and maybe even some punishment, and their "judicial involvement", as a commenter put it, turns out to of have been long-lasting and intricate.
Mr. Sailer gives a few examples, and then, as this relates to the often danger-fraught activity of riding on the NYC subways, and just walking the streets, he writes:
My impression is that the number of egregious random attacks on pedestrians and transit passengers in Manhattan could be lowered significantly just by rounding up a few hundred of the most well-known psychos and putting them in a lunatic asylum.That could go for the sane criminals too, in general, I'd say, for other street crime. By definition, though, the sane ones are not doing these repeated violent random attacks - hateful mobs of Black! "teens" and race-warriors excepted. What I'm trying to get at is that the crimes of the sane criminals are ones that can be foreseen and hopefully avoided more easily. The violent nuts on the train are constant stressors for the NYC population, even if they don't do a thing that day.
The comment thread has some good discussion of the change in American society due to the release of most of the mental "patients" from the 1970s on. The end of that move coincided - no surprise here - with the much larger number of homeless people encamped all over America's big cities.*
In this post, I won't get into the political details of the wide-spread program to simply kick people out of "State Hospitals", the simple, slightly euphemistic term that was used for the big State run mental hospitals.** I think, as usual, people put too much blame on President Reagan. OK, enough said, as lots of people who know more than I do on this.
Commenter Alden, very astute on certain history and on the criminal justice system, wrote this comment about this 40-50 y/o history. As usual, her personal experience is from the San Francisco Bay area in California - the original land of fruits and nuts. In it she mentions the Supreme Court and the ACLU, and the case O'Connor v Donaldson. The reliably more-astute commenter Almost Missouri corrected Alden a tad and added a bit on the political history here in this comment. A quick bit of it, with a defense of Reagan too:
De-institutionalizing the mentally ill was the pet project of Robert Kennedy (D-NY), Geraldo Rivera (D-TV), Mario Biaggi (D-NY), the ACLU, left-activist Supreme Court judges, and Supermobster-turned-federal-judge David Bazelon long before Reagan ever turned up in DC.Back to the Supreme Court case that both mentioned. The quick gist of the principal argued, from Wiki:
O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563 (1975), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court in mental health law ruling that a state cannot constitutionally confine a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by themselves or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.That was fine, as it went, but it didn't stop there. This ruling was about those who are involuntarily confined. Well, we Libertarians (as the left in those days was, or often pretended to be too) can see the point here. There is a history of Totalitarian governments (USSR, anyone? Cuba too. Cambodia, hell they just killed them all.) dubbing those who don't agree with the system "the mentally ill". Then, those mentally ill must be "put away". It's pretty hard to fight the system from the insane asylum while all drugged up. I can surely see this sort of thing happening in America, and there have been signs of it having started, with the "Red Flag" gun laws***.
I get this. Then too, I know some mentally ill people. If they are not out on the street, and their treatment - aka, medication is working, most do not want to spend any time confined in those places. How many people in State Hospitals over the many years have been kept drugged up to where they are in no state to even think of getting better, much less getting out?**** That's definitely easier for the staff.
That's pretty much the theme of the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This one starred Jack Nicholson, who has no problem playing a nut. (He actually was an agitator, not a nut, in this movie, having put himself inside to avoid prison time.) The story in this movie, though, is that, though they were weird in their various ways, none of the mental patients under the care of Nurse Rached*****, were randomly violent. Many mental patients are - that's specifically why they are IN THERE, for many. This movie didn't show any of that. The nuts, led by Jack Nicholson, got out and went on a field trip - a fishing trip even. It was a feel-good movie, up until the sad ending.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was not just a piece of entertainment but one with an agenda, one that was pretty timely. One might speculate (as one commenter in that thread did) that this one movie was a big part of the impetus to close down the State Hospitals. That may be a chicken & egg question. Note that I gave the timeline as 40-50 years ago above, as big changes like this take time. The mid-1970s to the mid-'80s is a good range, though. I was personally inside one of these in the mid-1980s... but not as a patient. (A patient sold me one of those Tandy leather-kit wallets for a buck. It wasn't a quality job, I gotta say...)
Here's my main point here though: Political issues of Liberty aside, many of these people had nowhere else to go. Not only did those who wanted out get out, but EVERYONE flew the cuckoo's nest! That included those who were, and maybe still are, violent nuts by nature and should have been in prison. It also included those who didn't want to leave. They had no family read to care for them, even being with their families would have worked as a lifestyle. What were they to do out in the world?
It was timely for me reading that comment thread, as it was within the last week that an 80 year old man at the coffee shop - no he didn't hit me on or about the head - this is a friend - told me of that time period in our State. The gentleman was a hospital Chaplain at the time, IN the State Hospital (or one associated with it). This was the early 80s. People were being told they had to leave very soon. My friend talked to a number of them who were scared of leaving. There was no life for them in the outside world. One killed himself soon after being sent away. Another threw a brick through the window of a business, I guess in order to get back into some confined safe(?) space.
It's been roughly 40 years since this experiment, as one might call it, has been ongoing. Those who cannot handle their own minds, hence can't handle themselves in the real world, are remaining in that world, on the streets of the cities. Some are violent. Finally back to Steve Sailer's blog post, there's been a lot of violent street crime due to this move 40-50 years ago. Some reforms were probably needed, but opening up the State Hospitals and letting them all fly out of the cuckoo's nest was an unforced error by governments.
PS: In the comments under his post Steve Sailer wondered whether the fact that State Hospitals were usually very old and architecturally-unfashionable (I'd say more like difficult to maintain) was part of the impetus for deinstitutionalization. (He used that word, one I should have used myself here.) From my example, I now also wonder whether the freeing up of all that inner city land to get divvied up might be a small part of this too. I mean, it is something like 50-100 acres. There had been one huge brick building but dozens of smaller ones on sprawling grounds.
* The pretty large decline in REAL economic activity, of course, has caused part of the increase, but if you interact with the homeless on the streets, you will find that most are flat-out crazymen... and women.
** Our State's facility was so well-known by location that the HS teachers would remark "keep doing that, and you'll end up on REDACTED Street."
*** Read more on that subject here.
**** Lobotomies were a whole 'nother story.
***** The actress, Louise Fletcher, died recently.
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[UPDATED 05/07:] Added link to and excerpt from commenter Almost Missouri on the political history Added a postscript with a point from Steve Sailer in the comments too.
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Comments (6)
Cry the DeConstructed Country - Part 1
Posted On: Friday - May 5th 2023 3:55PM MST
In Topics:   History  The Future  Race/Genetics  World Political Stupidity

I could tell this subject matter was going to be more than could be chewed in one post, so this will serve as not much more than an introduction, with more next week.
Patrick Cleburne, "handled" off of the Confederate General, the "Stonewall of the West"* has posted a lot of articles on VDare lately. One that is of widespread importance, heralding easily possible doom for America is his South Africa Today—America Tomorrow? And Why?.
In his article, Mr. Cleburne refers the reader to a fairly lengthy article by a former South African on the fall of his formerly beloved country in a website called Lay of the Land - that link is not worth too much generally unless you want to read about the Middle East. Why one has to go there to read on this is another story.
I reckon that most Peak Stupidity readers will think this is not necessary, but I'll lay out just some short history here for those who (like me, say, 25 years ago) know nothing but a bit from History class and then what the Lyin' Press tells them. I'll condense this greatly from the wide-ranging (in time and space) complicated story of South Africa for these few points.
After shipwrecked sailors at Table Bay off the Cape of Good Hope - at the south end of Africa - had lots of good things to say about the natural resources in the area, the Dutch East India Company saw value in establishing a fort at Cape Town and an expedition led by Jan van Riebeek sailed down in 1652. Mr. van Riebeek governed the colony for 10 years Various groups of Dutchmen immigrated to what was then just a small colony at the Cape. Over the next few centuries, some of the "Boers" became TrekBoers and spread out to expand this land for farming and pasturing far in all directions.
The English came down starting as an invasion force in the late 1700s only due to their warfare with France, the French Revolutionary forces having control of the Netherlands at that point. Conflict between the Boers (Afrikaners, but the terms are not quite synonymous) and the English were many, and 3 bloody Boer Wars at least are named. I imagine your average American doesn't even know about the 2 different White groups who've inhabited the place for nearly 400 and over 200 years. Let's see, who were the most indigenous people, anyway?
One important fact that the average history-un-inclined person does not know (and there IS an agenda involved) is that it wasn't like this part of Africa was filled with your standard Africans. It was a wide-open land, with some tribes that were encountered as the colony vastly expanded. These were not the Bantus (standard sub-Saharan Africans, as we think of them), as they didn't live this far south. There were the Khoikhoi, the Bushman, and the Xhosas, the latter in the east with whom the Boers ended up in serious battles.
As the land got settled, built up, and civilized by the White Man, many non-indigenous (keep that in mind!) Bantus did move down. The grass was indeed greener. Why this was let to happen was probably a matter of an inability to control a long border, but also likely an indifferent attitude in a land so vast, and then, as has caused unintended and somehow-never-foreseen problems throughout history for the White Man, the quest for cheap labor. Demography took its toll. Still, the British-run but also widely Afrikaner-populated South Africa kept the much larger Bantu black population under control under different laws in a program called Apartheid. For the whole 20th Century, South Africa was a real part of the 1st World. That system and status lasted until the rest of the West put the screws to the White Men in charge, due to ... justice, no, not "no justice, no peace" as it turned out (not like it wasn't foreseen!), but "justice" causing no more peace.
My attention had already been on world political events as this anti-Apartheid agenda, sanctions, and pressure came at that Beloved Country from all over the world. (The Cold War was still on during half of this time - the Communists of the USSR were "loving it" too - they were up for any chance to socially destroy the 1st World. I think I've read at least an inkling of the Communists being involved within the country.)
So, there we were, in 1994. The anti-Apartheid forces had gotten their way. The new Black!-run Government would get their chance to rule this prosperous land, which was only fair, you know. The recent example of White, prosperous, bread-basket-of-Africa Rhodesia turning into hyperinflation-ridden shithole Zimbabwe, oh, and a dozen or 2 former colonies, now Black!-run, throughout the continent didn't serve as good examples, apparently. I write that sarcastically, as the agitating black population and the White sympathizers likely did know but didn't care**, and the White population knew but were defeated politically by their enemies in the rest of the 1st World.
Well, you probably knew all that and possibly know more than I do on the subject. You also may know how bad things have gotten in South Africa over the last almost 30 years, happening at a faster rate over the last 5-10. The example is something Americans should follow closely for a number of reasons. For one thing, the White people there are getting killed by blacks regularly, and the economic plight under this still-AA-for-Black system is getting terrible for those White people who are sticking (by choice or not). Also, as Mr Cleburne's title worries, are we next? South Africa is falling into ruin, and we've seen some of that here already.
His article is an important one, but I'll get more into the longer and more personal account titled South Africa at War with Itself in the next part.
* The original came over from Ireland, originally Country Cork in around 1850, ended up in Arkansas. He fought and led many battles in the War Between the States in the Western theater. The "West" meant roughly across the Appalachians - Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi in the South, and he fought at Shiloh, Stones River, Chickamauga (Tennessee), Richmond (Kentucky), Ringgold Gap (Georgia) and Franklin (Tennesse) where he was shot and died.
** The Black! leaders just wanted to be Big Men, no matter what happened to the place, and the White sympathizers wanted to prove a point. Their point? The White Men just shouldn't be in charge. They just shouldn't, and yeah, it would all work out fine, because it was a 1st World country. What could possibly go wrong?
Comments (15)
The Artificial Stupidity OFF switch
Posted On: Thursday - May 4th 2023 6:35PM MST
In Topics:   Globalists  China  Curmudgeonry  Artificial Stupidity  The Future

This post was to be a quick one to add on what I meant to write about in yesterday's post Trying to get a handle on a piece of iCrap. However, I will add a video at the end that commenter Oaf had referred to in the comments under that post.
Along with wanting a solid handle for these touch screen devices, what I really need is a solid OFF switch. I brought up the "modern" dome light feature on cars - well, it's a bug as far as I'm concerned - in which those lights stay on for some time period after one has left the vehicle and closed the doors. For that "feature", at least I can just put the switch in the OFF position. That's not at all what the designers intended and even less functional than in the old vehicles with just the DOOR and OFF position. However, I'm OK with that.
As I put this iCrap in my pocket, the display lights up again, and I want to smash the thing into the OFF position, but not quite so permanently! I know what this is about. Going back to the beginning of the modern computer age, say 40 years back, computers needed some time of their own to turn off. It seemed to be the first time I'd push a button - could be moving a toggle switch just as well - that electrical devices didn't go off right when one wanted to, or MADE, them, anyway.
I get it. "Listen, I gotta save the changes to these files of yours , put the current state of the interface into some settings files, stop these scripts over here, and other stuff, and in proper order. You can't just willy-nilly turn me off. I got a lotta shit to do first. That is, if you want me to work next time you turn me on!" ... is what the computer WANTS TO say and WILL SAY soon, when it's become AI and gotten mouthy.
It's not just computers that are computers now though. The car's not A computer, but a new one has hundreds of them in it. The TV's a computer. Speaking of TVs, it's not that I use them for TV or much at all lately, but I can tell you that models at the hotels have been known to even turn on in the middle of night. (See Ghost in the Machine for that story.) That has forced me to always unplug cords at the back of TVs now (one, only if I find the power rather than signal cord first), just to be sure. Thankfully, there IS that power cord. It can't work without it.
Sorry, I often pull the plug on computers when I don't have the patience for their crap. For laptops, I have to pull the power supply cord AND pull the battery out a tad for a second. That has been known to teach them who's boss.
You can't do that with modern devices like the phones though, without some trouble. I am not even sure that taking the back of the case off and pulling the big battery out is really cutting all power. iEspionage concerns aside, I don't think the designers want us to be able to just cut them off.
Yet, I do! It's a good thing for we humans to actually positively control our machinery rather than only half-assedly: "Off, machine." "OK, soon. I'm in the middle of something." Just an electro-mechanical switch that cuts the damn power, that's all I ask for.
On a broader level, being able to turn off our devices and not depend on them for our daily lives is something that a woman named Polly talks about in this highly-depressing look at our future. She says we should all get off the smart phones or it's gonna mean a sci-fi doomsday scenario for ALL of us, even those trying to stay "off-grid". Because much of this Orwellian stuff starts first in Chine now, you may want to read out book review of We Have Been Harmonized (Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - Part 4) for more background. Also note that some of the clips from China are material we showed in the post The future's so dark, I gotta wear night vision goggles recently.
"YOU ARE BEING GROOMED - MY WARNING FROM 2019":
There's quite a bit of intro (as we like here too) from "Amazing Polly", so you could skip to 02:15 or 02:30. The video is half an hour long. Thank you, commenter Oaf.
Comments (7)
MIT D.I.E. Apparatchiks not DIEing to Debate
Posted On: Thursday - May 4th 2023 10:24AM MST
In Topics:   Commies  University  Political Correctness  Race/Genetics  ctrl-left

It's turning into Racial Awareness Month here at Peak Stupidity. We have not made the effort to register for a whole month on this, but there will be at least one more post, that one a doozy that may become a series.
From The College Fix, one of Instapundit Glenn Reynolds few dozen go-to sites, we can read from Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Kabbany that, oddly enough, the D.I.E. personnel on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff are not particularly interested in taking part in a debate to defend their field of endeavor.
You'd think they'd welcome the chance to show off the fruits of their careers. Nah, but, Miss Kabbany says A debate on DEI will be held at MIT. The university’s DEI deans refuse to participate.
An esteemed panel of scholars will tackle the question: “Should academic DEI programs be abolished?”It's hard to break away from the witch hunts and struggle sessions. I get that.
One group of individuals who will not be defending D.E.I. at the upcoming event is the phalanx of highly paid diversity, equity and inclusion deans at MIT.
They were asked. They declined.
Among the nearly 100 MIT scholars asked to participate were: Alana Anderson, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; Nandi Bynoe, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Engineering; Kuheli Dutt, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Science; Tracie Jones, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences; Monica Orta, assistant dean for diversity, equity, belonging and student support in the School of Architecture and Planning; Bryan Thomas Jr., assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the MIT Sloan School of Management; Ray Reagans, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Beatriz Cantada, director of engagement for diversity and inclusion for MIT’s Institute Community & Equity Office.So, don't drop any beakers in the chem lab, kids. All that costs money, and you see how much we need for the DIE program, don't you? These people don't come cheap!
Notice that these people are embedded, just as the Soviets and the Red Chinese had their Communist Party loyalist Apparatchiks embedded in the halls of power. Just as during those other Communist times, the idea is to have people in place to make sure there is no criticism of The System, whatever sick one is in place at the time.
Note, that, contrary what would have been the case in the Soviet and Red China eras, 6 out of the 7 mentioned "scholars" (Scholars? Haha!) are women and the man is Black!. (I just looked him up, and just to give you an idea of the numbers, from this first page I came to, MIT hired 6 more of these people in the 2nd Summer of the PanicFest, late June of '21 - D.I.E. staff are ESSENTIAL, ESSENTIAL, I tells ya'!)
Oh, yeah, about that debate. (It's not Peak Stupidity Adam Smith, but I'm sure he'd approve):
The April 4 debate, co-hosted by the MIT Adam Smith Society and MIT Free Speech Alliance and to be held in the Wong Auditorium, will instead feature an esteemed panel that includes pro-DEI debaters to be brought in from outside the campus community.That might be part of the problem, their planning on holding the event in the Wong Auditorium. It'd be better to hold it in the White Auditorium. Moving White along... John Dozier, MIT’s chief diversity officer, worries:
"We also learned of a debate that will be happening on campus in a few weeks over what I think is an utterly false binary of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ versus ‘merit, fairness, and equality.’Binary means true vs false. You can't have that. In D.I.E. world it goes RACIST! vs go-along-to-keep-your-job.
RESOLVED: MIT might be just slightly overstaffed in the D.I.E. area of scholarship, the budget must be balanced, and what the heck are they actually doing anyway.Sorry, go on, Scholar Dozier:
PRO: "Thank you for allowing us to be h...."
CON: "RACIST!!!"
"And... our judges have determined, that the debate has been settled and the premise is false. Thank you, come again ..."
A number of people, including me, were invited to participate in this event last year. We declined based on the framing, but it fueled our thinking about how to set the right conditions for a discussion — avoiding simplified versions of issues and concentrating on a format that will broaden attendees’ perspectives rather than on having one side ‘win,'” Dozier said in a March 15 news release announcing his own set of conversations to be held on campus.Bwaaaack,bwaaaackkk, chicken! Well, at least he we will announce his own set of conversations. By "conversations" these people mean "lectures" with no time for Q&A. That's the Communist way. It's here. It's been here. More people need to realize exactly what kind of country they live in.
Comments (10)
Trying to get a handle on a piece of iCrap
Posted On: Tuesday - May 2nd 2023 6:51PM MST
In Topics:   Curmudgeonry  Artificial Stupidity  iEspionage

I've gotta let these curmudgeonry posts out sometimes. This new smart-phone is doing stuff I don't particularly want it to do. Now, that's quite common with these sensor-filled, high-computing-capacity things that people still call phones. (Hmmm, does anyone else call them telephones still, even?) From a long ago post about software updates*:
Yeah, there's plenty more of this type of stuff: indentations that you don't want that happen anyway, automatic capitalization of letters, windows fading out when you accidentally moved the cursor over the task bar. I'm still thankful to have Clippy gone anyway, to an early bent-up rusty grave, hopefully.I added that bolding just now for my point about these devices of Artificial Stupidity. Everything new and cool (for the hardware guys, but annoying for me) is defaulted ON, it seems. There are a heck of a lot of software switches in that Settings (gear-looking) app. I've been trying to find one of them today.
I get it, I get it, computer geeks, you are proud of your new "features" and you want to have them default-on for the running of new forced-upgrades of the software that people who are TRYING to work use. You know, right, that I don't want to keep learning new things about my TOOLS, and software programs are nothing but tools? I know that my hammer works the same way EVERY SINGLE TIME that I pound in a nail (or beat the hell out of my computer), and I LIKE it that way! That's how tools are supposed to be.
See, I turn off this phone, so I don't accidentally butt-dial someone or buy a car off of ebay. I know it needs a code after this, but this thing turns on as I shove it into my pocket, unless I move extremely slowly. I don't like that - it reminds me of the dome lights in late-model** cars. Like the dome lights, made to "keep you safe", as you make it to your house, that based on a timer that I just don't trust, this thing uses slight movement or touch to turn the display back on. That's for a while, I'm sure, but again, I don't trust the thing. There's got to be a setting, but I haven't found it yet. I really wish these geeks had kept that setting default off though... I don't have as much patience for this stuff as they do.
Touch screens are part of the problem. I've muted the phone and even hung up on people with my ear before. Old Bell Telephone equipment didn't do this sort of thing - it'd even let you hang up in style. Now, if you don't grip your device just right, you end up getting something started that you may not be able to back out without a lot of trouble.
I talked with a friend about this years ago when I first used a tablet. I told him that what I wanted badly was to just clamp the damn thing down to a piece of wood with a nice handle. That way I could hold it solidly without making ANYTHING unwanted happen, and use my other hand to get the thing to do what I actually want it to.
iCrap! What CAN'T it do that you don't want it to?!
PS: I have noticed people using a type of handle that looks like a knob and attaches to the back of a smartphone. That's a good start. I don't have a place for it in my pockets, alas.
* ... much expanded and expounded on in Software as a Tool.
** For Peak Stupidity, that means anything built after, oh, 1995 or so.
Comments (18)
More on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from Wilkey
Posted On: Monday - May 1st 2023 7:56PM MST
In Topics:   Political Correctness  Race/Genetics
... and Res.
NOTE: Commenter E.H. Hail has put up a brand-new post on his Hail to You site. I haven't read it yet, but I'm absolutely certain he's got more details than we do. In this case, he comes at the story from the interest in the OSF board Asian members, which leads to a wider question. (Do they care really care about Shakespeare and Western culture, and then, how different are they from Westerners?): On the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) board and the role of Asians in the USA. BTW, I'm not being inconsistent with this - I wrote "Asian", as one of the 4 women's name sounds • Indian, while the other 3 are Oriental.

It's not Peak Stupidity's thing to spend hours diving down into these kinds of stories. Sometimes an independent blogger can really do some good journalism, uncovering stories that would have never been, such as Steve Sailer and the UVA rape hoax, etc. Maybe we'll chance upon something like that some time, but our job in general is to point out the stupidity and leave it at that.
The story about the ruination of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, OR) by Wokeness is just something that Peak Stupidity came upon recently in comment threads and one that others have covered well anyway. This includes comment by the Steve Sailer commenter Wilkey, as discussed in the previous post.
Wilkey kindly provided some more information in response to my questions of pushback at the audience level. Here is the comment in its entirety:
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Most normal fans just won’t bother buying tickets. Ticket sales are down about 50%. Most former OSF attendees will read the play descriptions and realize what a crock of shit the OSF has become. That’s probably where all the alleged “death threats” and “hate mail” have come from.
People do walk out of plays. My wife and I have while the actors were on stage – once. More commonly, people just leave at intermission. That has to be pretty jarring for the actors to come back after intermission, night after night, and see 25% or more of the audience has left. It’s happened.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has already paid dearly for hiring Nataki Garrett. They handed over $7 million from their endowment to keep it running. The remaining $28 million is bound by donor restrictions on how it can be spent. They’re still short on funds. They’ve asked their supporters for $2.5 million. The state of Oregon, which has a $300 million budget surplus, may yet give them $5 million. But that won’t solve the ongoing reduction in ticket sales caused by Garrett’s shitty productions. Garrett is a blatant racist who hires almost entirely black directors and lead actors. She might as well rename it the Ashland African American Fringe Festival, because that’s basically what it is now. They’ve just hijacked the name and assets of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
And the OSF board is as Woke as you’d probably expect. Of its 24 members, only 9 actually live in Oregon. The chairman, a Chinese woman, lives in New York. Of the 24, 11 are white, 5 are black, 4 are Hispanic, and 4 are Asian. And many of the whites, of course, are hardcore lefties. So whites who have any interest in preserving English/European culture as embodied by Shakespeare are a distinct minority on the board, if there are even any of those left at all. One board member even supports a project to “modernize” Shakespeare’s language – which eliminates about 70% of the reason for even watching or reading his plays. So they will have to be pushed to the extreme before they will fire Garrett.
The death of the OSF under this regime might just be the best of all possible outcomes, from a conservative viewpoint. It might put the rest of the theatre world on notice about just how unpopular this shit really is. Let it die, so that every other Shakespeare festival in America can realize what it needs to do to live.
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I'd assumed that most people attending had already put a bunch of money down way ahead and were committed. That may be right, but yes, many normally repeat customers will want nothing more to do with this travesty.
Then, commenter Res also gave more information, this time on some corruption involved in this new OSF Administrative Piece of Work. It involves Director Nataki Garrett's husband getting paid some $43,000 for "CONTRACTED SERVICES". (Glad they itemized that out for the accountants!)
Between, and I'd assume this order in descending magnitude, the withdrawing of sponsorship, the loss of ticket sales, and the all-too-usual Black! corruption, the choosing of this diverse Director by the Woke group that Wilkey mentioned is really doing a number on the OSF budget and general future. We can hope this will drive home the "Get Woke, Go Broke" lesson for the rest of the industry. It looks like they'll have to kill the theater in order to save it.
PS: Correction here for the last post. Obviously, arithmetic suggests there was a $35 million endowment, not $30 million, key word being "WAS".
PPS: Thank you, Wilkey and Res, for all the good information on this story.
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[UPDATED 05/03:] Added top note with reference to the new Hail to You post.
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Comments (15)
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a gay play, and walking out
Posted On: Saturday - April 29th 2023 5:46PM MST
In Topics:   Genderbenders  General Stupidity  Political Correctness  Race/Genetics
NOTE: Commenter E.H. Hail has put up a brand-new post on his Hail to You site. I haven't read it yet, but I'm absolutely certain he's got more details than we do. In this case, he comes at the story from the interest in the OSF board Asian members, which leads to a wider question. (Do they care really care about Shakespeare and Western culture, and then, how different are they from Westerners?): On the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) board and the role of Asians in the USA. BTW, I'm not being inconsistent with this - I wrote "Asian", as one of the 4 women's name sounds • Indian, while the other 3 are Oriental.
You've already got a back-log of a dozen posts that must, just MUST, be written, and then you come across some interesting comment that generates yet ANOTHER one! It's like being in The Mob, this blogging thing - they just won't let you quit, that is. Just when I thought I was out, the Stupidity pulls me back in!*
Now that was a dramatic intro., one very suitable for a post about Drama. It's not everyday Tic-Tok/Instagram/Twitter drama here, as I am pretty good about avoiding that - this is good drama, "the Theatre". (Sounds much more sophisticated using the British

In an iSteve thread under a post about more BSing worthless Black! women professors, there was a not-too-off-topic digression about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It's not off-topic because, as we find out from this detailed comment by the commenter Wilkey, there's a Black! director now of this festival that almost solely caters to White and Asian** tastes. Ashland, Oregon, in southwestern Oregon - not on the coast but across the coast range in the Rogue River valley, just south of Medford - is a Whitetopia. It's a great place to feature Shakespeare's and other's plays to the public, some of whom come from all over to enjoy the small White town and the theater.
After getting that speeding ticket coming up hill from California to Grant's Pass some decades ago***, I've been hesitant to spend any money in this area, but then too, my family consists of far from artsy-fartsy types. (I think we could use a little more of that, honestly.) There's one exception, whom I'll get to down further in this post.
Commenter Wilkey's comment was a long, detailed, and thorough story of the Wokeness that involved hiring a Black! lady director for this $30 million endowed non-profit organization that has run the theater program for over 85 years. White people eat up this stuff, if anybody does. Yet, they had to go Woke, and what went along with it was the usual mis-handling of money, causing worries about the program's continuation. Not only that, but the casts of the plays, Shakespeare and otherwise, are going almost fully non-White.
I can't post up Wilkey's entire comment due to length ... along with my not having asked him. However, let me post in some of the casting/staff and play and movie (they got movies too) information. Movies:
Short films playing at Cyberland, the cinema house:The Plays, as in the whole reason this Festival EXISTS:
1) “You Go Girl” – it’s about a black woman
2) “Ash Land” – it’s also about a black woman
3) “Whole” – it’s about a 12-year-old black boy, growing up in the (white) suburbs, “missing parts of his blackness.”
4) “North Loop” – it’s about two black friends in Minneapolis
5) “Let Me Kill My Mother First” – a film about a token alternate minority, in this case East Asians.
And that’s it. No short films by white people – at this Shakepeare Festival in Southern Oregon.
As for the plays…Now imagine the nice White people who go to these plays. They have always liked the Theater, and now, in their senior years, they've got the money, they've got their dream RV to travel the country, seeing the National Parks and the grandchildren, so why not head out to Ashland, Oregon? They've always wanted to. So, they made an effort to obtain the tickets and to get to Ashland early to stay at a B&B and eat the gourmet food. Now comes the play date. The play starts, and ... Wait a minute! This is not MY Shakespeare? What's with all the Blackety! - Black!?!
Romeo & Juliet:
1) Black director (Garrett herself)
2) Hispanic Romeo, black Juliet
From Garrett’s foreword to the play:It teaches us that a society divided against itself cannot prosper. Yet we allow ourselves to live in a more polarized country in a more polarized world. As a society, we are more cynical and self-righteous, while our children continue to be slaughtered by violence and poverty. The vitriolic campaign against people—mainly children—seeking refuge and asylum reflects our base humanity.The Three Musketeers:
1) Black playwrite
2) Black director
3) Entirely black or Hispanic cast
From the director’s foreword:The adaptation freely deploys verse, contemporary vernacular language, hip-hop, Rap, dance, music, and swordplay! Is this the origin of Urban contemporary swagger and style?Twelfth Night:
1) Black director
2) Almost entirely black and Hispanic castDirector mostly avoids reference to race in the extremely short foreword, but does mention the production was inspired by “Blues and jazz greats.”Rent:
1) Black director
2) Only 5 of the 20 cast members are white.
Where We Belong:
1) Asian director
2) A pretty damn white looking “Native American” playwrite/actor performing a one woman show.
Description:In 2015, a Mohegan theatre-maker moves to England to pursue a PhD in Shakespeare, grappling with the question of what it means to remain or leave, as the Brexit vote threatens to further disengage the UK from the wider world. Moving between nations that have failed to reckon with their ongoing roles in colonialism, Achokayis finds comfort in the journeys of their Native ancestors who had to cross the ocean in the 1700s to help their people. In this intimate and exhilarating solo piece directed by Mei Ann Teo, Sayet asks us what it means to belong in an increasingly globalized world.
Do they dare say anything? Do theater-goers coming to see Shakespeare, et al, in Ashland ever leave the venue, better yet, after giving their opinion to the crowd and producers, and even demand their money back? Let me back up a bit before addressing that. Per more on this story from the (always accurate and also thorough) commenter Res, I saw the following excerpt from this Black! Festival Director Nataki Garrett in his comment:
I got a really nasty note in the mail a week ago that said, “Go woke, go broke.” And he put his member number down next to his name and said, “Former member, 33 years.” I was like, let me analyze this language here for a moment: He doesn’t want to be awakened. He wants to be in the dark. He wants to be asleep. And if choose to wake people up at OSF then then we’re going to lose our resources—that’s the threat, you know, “Go broke.” And I think: Thank you for letting me know in advance. What I need to know now is, who’s coming behind you? And how do I make a connection to them? And then maybe you’ll come back?No, he's not coming back until you and the Wokeness are gone. The Festival will likely go defunct, to the sadness of American Theater-goers though, before that'd happen. (She's getting over $300,000 yearly - remember that when you buy a ticket, but that's not your main problem right now.)
So, the financial support from the people who love live theater may go away, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival would go away with that. As they say, "that's why we can't have nice things". Wouldn't it wake - actually wake - people up to this Black! takeover of a White thing more quickly if people just ... raised a little hell, for crying out loud!
Yeah, I know. They are mostly well-off old people driving expensive RVs. They are not natural hell-raisers. Is ANYONE up for raising a little hell these days, because, I mean, the time for lots of that is NOW?
Sure, sometimes it's not warranted based on politeness or knowing the wife won't speak to you for a long while afterwards. (Wives aren't natural hell-raisers, at least outside the home.) That was the case in our anecdote titled "Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo.... Were she not with us that day, I'd surely have politely asked the scolding zookeeper "can we just watch the seals and sea lions in peace and quiet now, please?"
This brings me to the gay play. One family member is involved in the Theater. Rather than a Shakespeare play at a large venue, this was a set of 10 very short plays at a nice little 100-seat place. The first 5 plays were fine. At the intermission, my family member even asked if my son might be too tired to sit through 5 more. The boy was fine though.
Next up came the gay play! Who knew? (Actually, in hindsight, the title may have given that away, but I didn't see it coming.) No way were we staying, so I got up with him, and we left, very quietly, but very obviously, as it was that small 100-seat room. See, now this one sat in between in terms of willingness to make a scene - pun unintended. I wanted no part of this play, but this deal had not been advertised as some children's thing, and then there was the factor of my family member suffering embarrassment. I wasn't a donor either, and we'd gotten the tickets for free at that.
What's really damn out of line though is a big Festival with summer-long plays attended by White people from all over getting turned into Blackety! - Black! Festival! Yes, I'd have stood up, family and all (the wife's getting better) and spoke to whomever could hear me: "What the hell is this?! I didn't pay for Black! Shakespeare! I want my money back, NOW!"
No, it's not the $100 (who knows, probably a lot more) that will hurt the Festival's Woke Directors. See, but that kind of thing, raising some hell, gets OTHERS ready to do the same. It's the visibility and "We're not gonna take it!" factor. It gets the ball rolling and people understanding: We want to keep this thing White.
Is that too much to ask? Apparently, it is, and they'll lose their nearly century-long artsy entertainment if SOMEBODY doesn't raise some hell about it - then walk out.
* Yeah, we've done that Al Pacino line before, 3 times, in fact! That'd be here - here, and here.
** I don't know - maybe that's mostly Oriental people, but I wrote "Asian" this time, because I can see •Indians enjoying the theater too.
*** Just trying to pass an RV, which was climbing the 2-lane road at a snail's pace. I got to the passing lane stretch, and the dude hit the gas...
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[UPDATED 05/03:] Added top note with reference to the new Hail to You post.
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