We're Bad ... We're Nationwide
Posted On: Saturday - July 1st 2023 7:26PM MST
In Topics: Music Southern rock
That's pretty easy to achieve in the age of the www.
It's time for Saturday Southern Rock. Peak Stupidity has featured music from Skynyrd - the unarguable Kings of Southern Rock - and The Allman Brothers, the Marshall Tucker Band, a couple by The Outlaws, Molly Hatchett, and then one or two by ZZ Top.
These tres hombres* were from Houston, Tejas* and played together for 51 years! That was until one of them, Dusty Hill, died in 2021.
I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide was from the band's 6th (studio) album, Deguello.
ZZ Top was:
Billy Gibbons – guitars, lead and backing vocals.
Frank Beard – drums, percussion.
Dusty Hill – bass, backing and lead vocals, keyboards.
We just ran out of time today for any substantive post. However, the horrible S. African story, as it may apply to America, must appear sometime, then there's another about university enrollment, one having not so much to do with AA, perhaps more on the Titan sub story, some more on Feminism, an "I told you so" report on Ron DeSantis, an attempt to wrap up our Kung Flu coverage, and more... The Stupidity stops for no man!
Thank you all for reading and writing in this week.
* "3 Men", in Spanish, the name of their 3rd album. "Tejas" was the name of their 5th album. They made 15 over the years, but arguably 9 of them in their prime - through 1985.
Comments (6)
SCROTUS and the alleged end of Affirmative Action
Posted On: Friday - June 30th 2023 3:16PM MST
In Topics: University US Feral Government Race/Genetics ctrl-left
I too don't know what the caption was about - it just sounded bad-ass.
I saved the two pictures that appear in this post a few weeks or a month ago. They were to be used in a post about the ctlr-left's newfound interest in corruption on the part of Supreme Court Justices. This corruption hasn't been a problem for the last 50 years, amazingly. These concerns have cropped up since the year-ago ruling against the unConsitutional usurpation of yet more States' authority that was called Roe v Wade.
The ctrl-left is SHOCKED, and I mean SHOCKED, really, that this one branch of the US Gov't does not have to always push the country to the left. I mean, they've had pretty good control of the Legislative Branch via the UniParty (80-90% member coverage, higher in the Senate) for a few decades, total control of the Media Branch for about 25 years, control of the Executive Branch for arguably the last 30-40, with the exception of those 4 years, '17-'21 - that's what has made them VERY ANGRY ... VERY ANGRY INDEED.
Yep, that's all 4 branches. Now, somehow, the SCROTUS, top of the Judicial Branch, has wandered off the plantation. This latest ruling yesterday against the nearly 60 y/o-long government mandates of discrimination in hiring, promotion, and admission of White men, called Affirmative Action, has made them even ANGRIER. They are again, VERY ANGRY INDEED!
I'll put the 2 posts together: the ctrl-left's vendetta against SCROTUS and the effect of this latest ruling that tries to uphold the Constitution. (The nerve!)
First of all, let me say that the impetus for the lawsuit that resulted in this ruling, on admission to Ivy League universities, is not anything I care much about, other than any unConstitutionality. of it. The Ivy Leagues and half of the rest of the universities can burn, for all I care. (I would divvy up that fraction by schools and departments.) When it comes to forced discrimination in the job market and inside Big Biz, I care a lot. (See our series Harvesting the fruits of a half-century of Affirmative Action - Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - Part 4 and Part 5.)
Will yesterday's decision 6-2* SCROTUS decision "end it, not mend it", to reverse-a-phrase the President Clinton of 28 years back? I'm not as optimistic as some. I believe the ctrl-left minions are hashing out work-arounds in faculty lounges, HR/corporate meetings, and coffee shops as we write this post.
It's be great to see a blizzard of lawsuits against this > half-century travesty. However, I expect the words "racist", "sexist", "homophobe", and "xenophobe" to be tossed into the fray, making most plaintiffs, lawyers, and judges scurry under their covers. We'll see on this. It's good to hold out hope.
Right here, I would like to thank President Donald Trump for appointing 3 pretty decent Justices, Neil Gorsuch, Brent Kavanaugh, and Amy Barrett. He was lucky to have gotten a chance to appoint 3 in one term, and he seems to have not let us down. That itself may be luck, or maybe Trump actually had good judgement or got good advice on these picks. I remember G.W. Bush having first tried to appoint some secretary or something, and then there was his big dud, John Roberts, still there screwing the pooch most of the time.
But, yeah, there's luck involved. Some go native, as Peak Stupidity explained in our Cocktail Party Theory of Political Stupidity. Others may very well be latent lefties by design, having plans to head left soon after the confirmation hearings are finished.
George H.W. Bush nominated the guy below for Justice 32 years ago tomorrow, and after a rash of sexual-harassment nonsense, he was confirmed in mid-October of that year, '91. I'd have to nominate him as the BEST OF SCROTUS over the course of my lifetime.**
For some reaction by prominent lefties against this latest court decision, you may want to read a couple of Steve Sailer posts (and the threads below) from today, You'll be Surprised to Learn That Michelle Obama Is Taking the Supreme Court's Affirmative Action Decision Personally (heh!) and Surprise! Former LARPer of Color Liz Warren Is Taking Personally That the Supreme Court Is Shutting Down Her Old Grift.
I would guess that the anti-corruption campaign against certain Justices will be put into high gear after this deal. This stuff about the scandalous behavior is even in Forbes magazine***. Guess who they are all picking on?
* Kenatta what-have-you Jackson Brown recused herself based on Hissy Fit.
** I don't follow all of the decisions closely, so perhaps Sam Alito and the late Antonin Scalia should share the honor.
*** That's from early May, as this anti-Conservative-Justice campaign got going.
Comments (15)
Two Thirds of a League Under the Sea: A Woke Disaster?
Posted On: Thursday - June 29th 2023 2:31PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness The Future Science Muh Generation
I was very surprised to learn recently that the title of the well-known Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was bogus. I only recently looked it up, to find out that the Olde English unit unit of length - the "league" - was 3 nautical miles for sea purposes (and 3 statute on land). That'd put the location of the story in the novel way out in space on the other side. I guess it just sounded cool. The now destroyed (and being recovered) Titan deep-water submersible was down at just about 2 nautical miles. (1 nm ≈ 6,000 ft., 6,076 to be more precise.) The pressure down there is 5,350 psi.
Because water is nearly incompressible, pressure varies almost linearly with depth, very unlike the pressure variation within the atmosphere, made of gases, for example. The factor is about one atmosphere (~14.7 psi)* for every 33 ft down. So that was easy. That's a LOT of pressure. Diving down to 400 ft is a big deal and must be done carefully, so 2 leagues under the sea is an not anything like a proper environment for a human being.
The Titan story is interesting infotainment, and there a few aspects being discussed. Regarding one of them, I have no problem with whatever toys any grown-up boys want to play with next. Dangerous or not, it's always great for the world to have guys out there exploring and learning new things. Too bad, per Dieter Kief, this project used some of that "CARES Act" money. I don't like that aspect, no siree.
When it comes to the political aspect of the story of the failure of the Titan deep sub, I don't know any more than anyone else. I refer the reader to Race Realist blogger Paul Kersey. The excerpts from the Lyin' Press (usually) are normally the bulk of his posts, and he adds commentary and sometimes a few extra details on stories that hit close to home. That's the case again in CEO of Doomed Submarine Going to Titanic Didn't Want to Hire '50-Year-Old White Guys' Because They're Not 'Inspirational', as it appears on The Unz Review.**
Peak Stupidity has noted a something in our many posts on the Big Biz world. The HR ladies** and the big cheeses are, if not the very founders of it, big proponents of the anti-White-man D.I.E. program***. The designers/builders of the Titan worked within a medium/small sized company called OceanGate. The outfit has (or had, to be both accurate and maybe a bit morbid) 47 employees, a very convenient number when it comes to keeping out from under the massive Feral Gov't regulatory beast****. Lots of regs start applying at the 50 employee level.
The founder of OceanGate (in '09), Stockton Rush, was one of the 5 explorers on board. (Yeah, it was an all male thing. Did anyone have any problem with that?) The D.I.E./Woke aspect here is the attitude of this 61 y/o White man, as he mouthed the usual diversity platitudes. I believe that was nothing more than a corporate jargon reflex. These people love the corporate "24/7", "Core Competencies", "bandwidth", and "low hanging fruit" jargon.***** The diversity platitudes are expected, though, when taken seriously, they can mean trouble. Was that the case with the Titan?
The Titan was basically a cylindrical pressure vessel. For the life of me, I find searching for simple stuff like the P.V. dimensions harder and harder, but I got the wall thickness of 5" and am guessing from "height" of 9' that the P.V. diameter was something like 6', scaling from the pictures. This makes it a "thick-walled" pressure vessel, defined by engineers as one with a thickness < 1/10 of the radius. (Well, which radius, inside or outside? If that difference is significant to you, then, guess what, it's not a thin-walled pressure vessel. Haha!)
Now, this is engineering. Engineers make approximations to make things easier. This was especially important before fast ubiquitous computers, and we'll get more into that, but even now, as the idea is to keep the theory under control, i.e. theory that has already been worked out accurately. The difference between what's defined as thin-walled vs. thick-walled is in the former, the stresses within the material don't vary much across the radial dimension, so can be considered constant. (For the other 2 dimensions, the axial, and the tangential - using polar coordinates, of course - there is nothing to make them vary in either type P.V. so long as it's a cylinder, or sphere for that matter.) Why the dividing line right at 1:10? That's close enough for engineers to a situation in which that stress is fairly constant and easy to calculate.
The barely calculus-based derivation of the longitudinal stress in a thin-walled P.V. come from a force balance between this constant stress acting on a cross-section of wall and the pressure as applied to the area on the end caps. (No, the shape of the ends doesn't matter at all for this.) Take a slice perpendicular to the z-axis (length) and you get σ A x-section= P Ainternal. That's σ 2π r t = P πr2, which simplifies nicely to σ = Pr/2t.
For the tangential stress we do something similar. Take a cross section the long way. The forces acting from the stress on the 2 areas, one on top and one on the bottom, therefore, 2 L t, must equal the force from the pressure acting on that x-sections area, but only the projection of that area (note that if we're summing forces horizontally, pressure forces near the top, for example, would have very small components in the direction we are summing.) Don't worry, it all works out! A diagram would be extremely helpful, but I can't do that right now. So, σ 2 L t = P L D, or σ = Pr/t. That's often called the "hoop stress" and it's double the longitudinal stress.
Those stresses combine to get a value that can be compared to the inherent strength of the material. Again, the Titan was NOT a thin-walled PV, but to just get an idea of the magnitude, the shear stress that would result from those 2 normal stresses (in the thin-walled P.V. theory) would end up equal to the larger of those 2 - please don't ask - I LUV LUV LUV Mohr's Circle, but I'm tryin' to finish a blog post here, y'all, and I'm not getting paid. There's no way to pay me, if you tried. Anyway, that max. shear stress would be in the range of 40 ksi. (That's ksi, a bastard of a unit, meaning kilo pounds/square inch.) 40 ksi is up there with the yield strength of some regular materials, but not near that of specialized aerospace stuff. The Titan was made with carbon fibers within an epoxy matrix of material.
Why'd I do all the calculations? Admittedly, that was partly for fun, is the answer, but also to give the idea that this was serious business. Let's do more thinking. For a thin-walled P.V., the simple theory to get stresses was based on INTERNAL pressure, but with the signs reversed, we get the same numbers with compressive stresses resulting. As you've probably read regarding this Titan deal, and may know elsewhere regarding concrete, some materials have different strengths under compressive stresses vs under tensile ones. How well was this all known for this complicated non-isotropic material (different strengths in different directions of stress)?
Compressive loading has a failure mode that is not a factor with tension. That would be buckling or crippling. To start off simply, let's discuss briefly 2-D, with buckling in columns. It's basically 2 2-D problems, unless the thing is axisymmetric, aka, a round column. The difference in this mode of failure is that the inherent strength of the material is not a factor, but the geometry and the stiffness (the x-sectional shape and the material's "modulus of elasticity" - a material property, the latter being one number for an isotropic material but NOT for these composites) are.
This is easy to envision. You've got a 1" diameter piece of steel/iron plumbing pipe. You weld 2 1' square pieces to each end, one for the floor and one to stand on. Make it a one foot length of pipe. Unless is this some cheap 1 mm wall, China-made crap (see 2 paragraphs down), well, it'll hold you. Say, you're 200 lb, and let's say it's only 1/16" wall. We get a x-sectional area of 2πr t, so, for simple axial loading, σ = F/A = 200 lb/(0.062in)2π(0.5in) = 1000 psi = 1.0 ksi = peanuts.
Now, do the same with a 100 foot length. (Call the PS accounting office to ask about hazard pay, first. It's hard to collect later.) What's gonna happen? Buckling, that's what. The stress in the material is the same, as length doesn't appear in that calculation we just did. No, but this failure mode is one of instability. The slightest off-center application of the force - your ass 100' up there! - results in a bending loading that results in more deflection, resulting in more bending loading, in an unstable fashion. Now, you're back on the ground, perhaps injured, but consider yourself better off than Stockton Rush is.
With a hollow cylinder, we have a 3-D and much more complicated mode of failure due to instability called crippling. Envisioning this is easy too. Stand on an empty Coke can sometime. Then get a friend - or if you're pretty agile, you can do it yourself - to lightly kick the side of said can. There you go, down to Earth, and little Greta thanks you for recycling ahead of time. This already difficult theory, the crippling mode, is made all made more complicated when it's done on this composite material. BTW, that Coke can is a seriously-thin walled P.V. Thickness is about 4 thousandths of an inch. With a diameter of 2.6", that's a t/r of 0.003.
Now, finally, regarding the engineering work that must have been done, you've likely read about the fatigue effect too. Yet again, for simple homogenous, isotropic metals, work in this field has been done for most of a century******. It's not just pressure vessels such as airplane hulls that undergo fatigue. Think of any rotating part. The simplest would be motor shaft with a pulley with a belt around it. The tensions on both sides of the belt go in roughly one direction, causing stress in the round shaft. So? Yeah, but this loading direction is fixed in space while the shaft rotates. The stresses are applied back and forth (up and down in value) every rotation. At 1,800 rpm, you get a lot of cycles in a hurry! Then, for these metals, the empirical data used is made for numbers like millions to billions of cycles. Airplane hulls must be light, hence they get made to withstand cycles in the range of 10's or 100's of thousands.
What about that sub? I don't know. It wasn't going to undergo thousands of cycles, but again, things get more complicated with new materials. (Also, compressive loading on a thick-walled P.V. is different from that in the composite lay-up aircraft hulls which are thin-walled and undergo internal pressure.)
Now, your PS blogger here is not going on and on with this engineering talk just for his health. Then too, I don't claim to know enough to make any comment on the failure of the engineering work either. (I guess, with the sub having been pulled up, OceanGate and we will find out at some point.) I do have a point though. This goes back to the comment on the 50-y/o White men and the disparagement of the hiring of them. Did Affirmative-Action-Adjacent engineering have something to do with this? It's likely not, because, as I wrote above, all that talk was just a reflexive platitude out of Stockton Rush. I think the problem is not about the engineering not being done by 50 y/o White men in the future, but about it not being done the 50 y/o White of today, in the future.
Let me explain. It's not just about the age and race, but about the times. It's about there being more and more reliance on software tools than on very basic deep understanding, by engineers. Yes, one could call this part of the decline in competence that has been one of our themes lately.
OK, just to go back into it a tad, when the math in the theory gets unsolvable in closed form, then we resort to software, since we can now. That's not a bad thing. Finite Element (and Finite Difference) analysis for stress/strain and for heat transfer has been around for half a century. Yet, many problems were too big, and engineers had to make proper assumptions, find empirical methods, and/or get more into the theory. Engineers had to be creative. I mean, the only other way to run a big model was to get more of those Hidden Figures gals to do billions of calculations, yeah, just get 'em, by the 100's of thousands, working there in the nursing home. What's a couple of hundred tonnes of creamed corn in comparison to a new Cray mainframe?
OK, anyway, the computers are so fast now, that, other than in the fields of turbulent gas dynamics and such, there is confidence that anything that can be properly set up as a model can be analyzed, with accurate results. Is there too much confidence, and are the underlying assumptions that the software is written around different sometimes? Was that the case with the new material used in the Titan?
Under the Global Climate Stupidity topic key, Peak Stupidity discussed 6 years ago the problems with the reliance on mathematical models of the entire climate of the Earth. We don't have a problem with the effort to do this. We just have a problem with those who have this false confidence that this complicated of a task (with still unknown processes involved and complicated interactions) has resulted in anything like an accurate working model.
This overconfidence in "the software" is more of a problem with the younger generations. They don't want to look at the calculus and the experimental results graphs. Instead, they want to get as many pieces of software as possible and plug lots of shit in. I think this overconfidence and over-reliance is a likely cause of the Titan disaster.
What that means is we need not only 50 y/o and older White men doing this serious work, but we need the 50 y/o White men of today, who got their engineering/tech knowledge 30 years back. 50 y/o White men doing this 10 or 20 years from now may not cut it. Going woke in addition? Well that'll just bring things to a point where they'll have to send convicts down in the subs, as nobody will want a part of that. That's if anyone would know how to do a project like this in what's left of America in 2050.
* Sorry to the Euros and, well everyone non-middle-aged and older American, but we'll stick to English units in this post.
** I see that Mr. Kersey has been keeping his titles shorter lately. Yes, this one IS shorter. ;-}
*** OK, here we go ... HR is the scourge of the Big Biz world!: Part 1 - - Part 2 and Part 3.
**** The Big Gov readers here, and you know who you are (the one guy?) may see that as having been a factor in the disaster in the deep. Nah, we're talking government. Would anyone in Woke/AA Government know more than these guys?
***** Yeah, it's been so long, I had to look a couple up. Once and former cube dwellers may enjoy this page on a site called Wavelength.
****** In fact, one big impetus for fatigue analysis and crack growth study was the demise of a few of the de Havilland Comets, the first operational commercial jetliners (by 6 years), that were mentioned briefly in our recent post 1st World Memories of Suid Afrikaanse Lugdiens (CtDC - Part 7). Cracks started at square window corners (normal windows were square, so...) and the repeated pressurization cycles caused crack growth - it's called "metal fatigue". There was more to the demise of that airliner than that - there were also some hard landing due to the differences in operating a new type of airplane like this.
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[UPDATED 2 hrs. later:] Per Dieter Kief, this project did use some taxpayer money. Fixed.
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[UPDATED 06/30:] Geeze! Math error right in the title! I was thinking 1 league = 1 nm when I first did this. That was the easy part.
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[UPDATED 06/30:] Not "titanium matrix" around the carbon fibers but epoxy, as is the norm. I had a hard time imagining a metal matrix, but I figured I haven't kept up, and I shouldn't get ANYTHING off non-technical articles. (Fixed after watching the "Sub Brief" guy in the video provided by commenter Adam Smith.) What were made of titanium were the 2 end fittings. They were epoxied on to the standard carbon fiber wrap.
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Comments (26)
Keep Kustomers' Kash King
Posted On: Wednesday - June 28th 2023 9:10PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Immigration Stupidity Humor Curmudgeonry Economics
I like the idea. Peak Stupidity covers the niche market in stupidity and curmudgeonry that is the attempt to phase out the use of cash. China has pretty much been there/done that, but I'll probably have a chance to report on that accurately pretty soon. (Please check out the Economics topic key for other posts on the topic.)
I'm sorry if this offends a reader or two*, but I don't get the idea of going around with a only a couple of bucks cash. It's not like a potential mugger can see you've got a hundred or two on you. People do though, and they buy that Hershey bar or 20 oz Coke with a credit or debit card. Hell yeah, ding 'em for the 25¢.
I don't think this store owner's problem is the non-use of cash, though. What he's on about is the processing fees of some sort - I'm not sure if there are any on debit cards vs credit cards, but he doesn't specify. He's not really a very good communicator in general, judging by the sign alone.
The owner is a nice guy though, a fairly friendly •Indian. He has an extra large • on his forehead in fact, which I take as the markings of his status as the covinence store chain Assistant Regional Manager, or at least Assistant to the Regional Manager.
I don't get a chance to have any long conversations with the guy. There are often lottery ticket losers scratching off cards in front of me and then buying others right there to see if they can make it up in volume. Behind me are guys and girls waiting to buy snacks, cokes, or red bull, as I stand there in the middle to pay cash for gas.
Therefore, I did not have a chance to ask the gentlemen about his children, and more specifically, whether he will be bringing up the new State Spelling Bee champion.
"I came to this country with 10 rupiees in my pocket and a bootleg copy of Goodnight, Constuction Sight! I had nothing. We are razing you to due bedder."
PS: I would call it 4 misspellings in that sign. You can have more than one per word. Let's not even get into the grammar. That's just the cost of
* Keep in mind that, per Section 109 para. (c)(1)(vi) of the FBC (Federal Blog Code), Peak Stupidity is an Equal Opportunity Offender.
Comments (23)
The Falun Gong Gang does Toronto
Posted On: Tuesday - June 27th 2023 12:29PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity China Bible/Religion World Political Stupidity
Who did I happen to run into on a beautiful afternoon in downtown Toronto, Canada but many hundreds of yellow-clad Chinese people of the Falun Gong. No, they are not actually a gang, per se. Cans of spray paint were nowhere to be found, there was nary a facial tattoo on the lot of them, and I saw no one's hands placed in some sort of stupid contorted position. They did all wear that shiny yellow clothing. Is that a gangland thing? I think it's a Chinese thing.
The massive Falun Gong movement became such about 30 years ago in China. Their thing is doing slow calisthenics and meditation in large groups in the outdoors. Per the Wiki page:
The practice emphasizes morality and the cultivation of virtue, and identifies as a practice of the Buddhist school, though its teachings also incorporate elements drawn from Taoist traditions. Through moral rectitude and the practice of meditation, practitioners of Falun Gong aspire to eliminate attachments, and ultimately to achieve spiritual enlightenment.Yeah, that's pretty much what I said.
That particular Wiki page, BTW, is reasonably unbiased when it comes to the Chinese politics - to be discussed shortly - but, not in regard to American politics. Wiki bemoans:
Falun Gong administers a variety of outreach organizations in the United States and elsewhere, including the dance troupe Shen Yun*. They are known for their views against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their anti-evolutionary stance. They also operate Epoch Media Group, which is known for its subsidiaries, New Tang Dynasty Television and The Epoch Times newspaper. The latter has been broadly noted as a politically far-right media entity, and it has received significant attention in the United States for promoting conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation, and producing advertisements for former U.S. President Donald Trump.OMG! I kind of like The Epoch Times. Plus:
It has also drawn attention in Europe for promoting far-right politicians, primarily in France and Germany.There are far-right politicians in France and Germany? Who knew? We could use some in America too!
Well, that Wiki excerpt is stomping on my post, as I was about to relate that the Falun Gong folks were supported by the Chinese Communist Party up through the mid-1990s sometime. I was not paying attention to anything in China then, but by the late 1990s, I'd been reading continual news items and editorials about the Falun Gong in the Wall Street Journal. The writers were somewhat aloof but generally supportive of this group. I remember the news about these people being thrown in jail in large numbers and such things. (That could never happen here though, no way ... we're a free coun... oh, never mind.)
The loss of that LUV from the CCP was likely due to the CCP not wanting any large group of people in the country to be unified on any matter besides CCP ideas, even if they did just stand around breathing slowly and doing yoga. Additionally, it's very possible that one's mind might get clear enough during this meditation to realize that a CCP is not a good thing to have.
Well, moving ahead 2 1/2 decades, there were definitely hundreds, if not upwards from a thousand, Chinese Falun Gong members marching through downtown Toronto. These are Canadian residents - you don't leave China together as a Falun Gong group in matching T-Shirts (or whatever) to do a protest tour.
In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, "Good luck with all that ..."
I talked to a few of them, and gave a thumbs up to others. It was all pretty friendly. A lady I talked to gave me a flyer, but I told her that I already hated the CCP, so she should save the paper hence the planet. There was something specific they were protesting too, which was that there are apparently Chinese Communist Party-run police stations IN CANADA. I guess what's left of the English-speaking population there may still see the familiar RCMP signs, whereas the readers of Mandarin understand that's actually the Radical Communist Mandarin-speaking Pot-sticker mongers. (Work in progress.)
Then, a non-yellow-clad lady, with the group but not in the march, came up to us pedestrians with a clipboard. It was a petition: "Sign here to support the elimination of the CCP."
I felt the need to speak up here: "Uhhh, yeah, I think you're gonna need more than a clipboard to eliminate the CCP. You're gonna need a whole lot of guns." That didn't sit well with her, so this lady decided to seek signatures elsewhere.
I ended up hanging out in a park nearby. Toronto is no longer the Great White North, and I don't write that because the weather was nice that day. It was as diverse as they seem to want it. Then I did see a group of White people. There were 50 to 100 of them in a group. This was another protest/demonstration, albeit smaller, and also about China. The main chant was: "Get the CCP out of Canada!" Well, yeah... It turned out this was also about the police station thing.
They were moving right along, so I didn't get up from the park bench in time to be able to have a word. I have nothing against their "demand", but then, I was going to make my own chant. That'd be something along the lines of: "If you hadn't have let millions of Chinese people into Canada, the CCP WOULDN'T BE in Canada." along with "... You dumbasses!"
PS: I will note here that I learned something about doing effective chants in a protest from these guys, the White Canadians. One guy would say a line through the bullhorn, and another guy, I think at the far end, would chant it back. I don't know what it is about that method, but it's good. I wonder if that's the Communist's ancient Chinese secret.
* Peak Stupidity's * to note that we have mentioned that Shen Yun business before. See here and here. Shen Yun is kind of a ballet with politics. Hopefully they tiptoe around the really controversial stuff. (Yes, pun intended! I mean, why wouldn't I ...)
Comments (8)
Pride goeth before the eject button
Posted On: Monday - June 26th 2023 7:01PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders Movies
In yet another of Peak Stupidity's growing list of movie non-reviews* due to exasperation with the PC/Wokeness, I will admit in this post that they really got me.
I do realize there are other, more "high-tech", options these days for watching movies or old TV shows. I have my reasons for not signing up for Netflix, Hulu, What-have-you, though, the main one being that I don't WANT to end up spending so much time in front of the idiot plate, even without it being hooked up to the agitprop channels. (It hasn't been for 24 years now.)
So, while at the small branch of the library for books too, and occasionally, recommended videos that I've had held for me, I peruse whatever videos are there at the time and take quick looks at the blurbs on the back. I grab 2 to 4, because it's FREE!**, FREE!, I tells ya! Here's the blurb for a movie called Pride:
My boy even asked me later about that title, what with all the Pride Rainbow stuff that we are being subject to by the Potomac Regime. "Nah, see, it's some old movie set in England or Wales or something." I didn't know anything else about it. I just take a quick look at the things, as I've got nothing to lose, and I have back-ups.
"Are you sure about that? I think it's like all that 'Pride Month' stuff." "No, see, the word 'pride' meant other stuff back before all this crap. There's no reason that couldn't be the title of a good movie."
A week or two later, in goes the movie, into the player. Well, I sure didn't get very far. You know the system with the DVDs in which little bits of the movie are shown with a theme song in something like a 1 minute loop, as it waits for the viewer to press PLAY or some other options? Well, that's how far I got. I saw some scenes that told me, oh, yeah, this IS that new Pride shit.
Bastards! How'd I get fooled? Firstly, I saw "1984" in the blurb and thought that was the year the movie was made. Nope, it's SET in 1984. Then too, the pictures on the back of the DVD case did not scream "gay!, tranny!, genderbenders!, BLT-G++!
Not really, right? Or, am I out of it? Anyway, [EJECT!]
This was after already having ejected one for boredom, one recommended one that was not going to be good after all, and then an old movie - B&W, even - that looked like it was going to be a PC story. I popped in one more after all this that's kind of OK so far. I didn't have time to finish it after all that.
Serendipitously, as we visited the library again, I found Season 3 of the Rockford Files right where I left it and left off!***
* The representative post on this niche topic is Tried to watch a movie - here's 3 reviews in one!. There are a few others around.
** Sure it is, just like those FREE lunches - PS opinion on public library "improvements" can be seen here and here.
*** I only stopped watching a year or so back due to my thinking most of the discs were bad. It turned out to be our player.
Comments (12)
Half-Century-Gay Elton John slams Florida
Posted On: Saturday - June 24th 2023 9:41PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders Music President DeSantis
It's the hurricanes that regularly slam into the State that worry Floridians. A 3/4-century-old bitchy homosexual is not so much of a big worry. It's not like it's a half-century ago, just before Reg Dwight's, aka, Elton John's, official gayness, as he wrote and sang some of the best pop and rock* in history for half a decade. (It'd put the period from his Madman Across the Water album in 1971 to Rock of the Westies in '75.) He was a force of nature then.
Mr. John and his "husband" have a problem with Governor DeSantis' and the Legislature of Florida's having gotten laws passed to fight the BLT-G++ Genderbender anti-family stupidity. I can't find decent articles to link you to, but the story includes a bit about the John's (?) not wanting to "do" residency in the US again. Hopefully, they can find other places in which to avoid onerous taxes placed on them by Socialist countries.
Are the good people of Florida or the United States supposed to be all butthurt (oops!) about this news? Who cares? Elton should just take my advice, take the next flight, and grow some funk of his own. (That was so macho ...)
The same '75 album, Rock of the Westies also had a great song called Island Girl. To paraphrase a lyric line, "Elton John, Elton John, Elton Jo-oh-on, tell me whatchu wantin' with the straight man's world."
I try not to feature the same song twice on Peak Stupidity, something I did accidentally did until this edit, so per SafeNow memories, here is a duet from near the end of EJ's best period, 1976. As "Elton John" was an alias or stage name, so was "Kiki Dee", aka, Pauline Matthews. Kiki Dee was also there doing backing vocals on Island Girl.
I really like another duet Elton John did. It was ostensibly a Neil Sedaka song, but Elton's singing was a big part of the song Bad Blood, from '75.
Thanks for reading the blog, Peakers, and even more for writing in! We'll be back next week with more of the stupidity you crave. Also, thanks for the music suggestion, SafeNow. I would have bet real money I'd put that one up already, but I checked the dBase. Nope.
* His band could really rock - see Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding, well hear it some time ... LOUD!
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[UPDATED 06/25] Changed out music, Don't Go Breaking my Heart for Island Girl, since the latter was already featured on the blog.
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Comments (8)
Harold Robinson on the Competency Crisis
Posted On: Thursday - June 22nd 2023 7:40PM MST
In Topics: University Americans US Feral Government The Future Race/Genetics Educational Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity
Under this recent post, Peak Stupidity commenter E.H. Hail pointed us to this very interesting article on the decline of competency in America. The writer is one Harold Robinson, and exactly who he is, his occupation, and his whereabouts were discussed in that same thread.
Mr. Robinson wrote this article for Palladium on-line (I guess?) magazine. (Who prints stuff out anymore?) After reading this excellent article, to be discussed herein, I did check out a few of the other articles on that site. From the looks of the home page and half of another article I perused there (on Xinjiang, China, from '18) this magazine features long well-written essays. It's not the site you can depend on to, cough, cough, you know like ... cough have something new to read daily. It looks like you'll see something new once or twice a week.
Palladium magazine's ABOUT page has the names of 5 Editor/Manager types and 8 regular "correspondents". They invite freelance writing, and that must be the deal with Mr. Robinson and his article to be discussed. It is directly within Peak Stupidity's wheelhouse. The regular reader would have seen our recent articles on the subject of declining competency in America. For starters, check out the Harvesting the fruits of a half-century of Affirmative Action series - Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - Part 4 and Part 5, or Demographics to DIE
OK, link bomb away, we can climb up to cruise altitude and praise and critique the article in question. As I wrote, this is in our wheelhouse. Peak Stupidity sees the slow (for now!) decrease in the ability to live 1st World lives. It is mostly due, IMO, to the large change in demographics that has occurred in America over the last half century. Affirmative Action, in effect for over half a century now, was a screw-job on White Men, no doubt. However, there were lower, sometimes token, numbers, and we had the attitude that we'd still do our thing with the additional burden of parasitic AA hires. The new Wokeness, with its insistence on quotas in all fields is making, and will make, a competent workforce a thing of the past wherever it's in effect.
Mr. Robinson seems to agree with this assessment. He starts off, in his introductory section, discussing recent military and industrial disasters, and he relates the problem with the workforce and modern Woke working environment. He discusses the century old to half-century-ending American practices of meritocracy and the use of the many standardized tests. He notes the "collision course" of the meritocratic system with the decade long (early 1960s to early '70s) series of Civil Rites laws, Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws that were made to push non-White-Men into all the American Institutions.
Mr. Robinson's 2nd section, titled From Meritocracy to Diversity, goes back to the origin of the entrance qualifications to universities, with the explanation going back to Griggs v Duke Power (the impetus from Big Biz for the hiring of degreed employees). He discusses the ways Big Biz has been roped into the D.I.E. program, including the scourge of the HR "professionals.
Next, in Diversity in Theory and Practice, Mr. Robinson explains more about the escalation of D.I.E. in big corporations via "ask, tell, make". Going back to colleges and professional programs, he tells us how all the admission qualifications have been going away, because, DIEVERSITY. Then he discusses the very recent changes from the BLM/Woke pressure - with a helping hand from the Kung Flu PanicFest - that has resulted in the elimination of entrance and even EXIT! (i.e. Medical Boards) qualifications.
Mr. Hail noted that this great article may be something to bring to the attention of illustrious blogger Steve Sailer This university admissions discussion is especially in Steve Sailer's wheelhouse. He just loves that stuff. However, I will say here that Mr. Sailer likes to see and play with the numbers. Harold Robinson, writing here for Palladium tells the story without numbers and specific schools and racial headcounts. I'm fine with that, as I can see this guy's reasoning is sound, and he has the story right. Mr. Sailer might not be fine with that. Also, Mr. Sailer is too nice, and often a bit naive, to straight-out tell readers that the continuation of all this is leading to serious trouble, as in a 3rd-World nation.
There are 2 more long sections in this article, Competency Is Declining From the Core Outwards and The American System Is Cracking, that are not fun, but are very important reading material. This all goes along with what the articles on this site are trying to explain about our future. All the "complex systems" that let us live good lives in this nation are breaking down due to the lack of any serious fight against the D.I.E. non-White-male madness. I wish that a large majority of America could read this article.
Now, I'll give a few criticisms. Harold Robinson concentrates almost solely on the white-collar workforce in this article. He talks about the increasing numbers of AA/D.I.E. executives and managers who are incompetent including discussion of people running the Government.* Really, I don't see that as the real problem. After all, the NAZI and Soviet Russian Governments were run by almost all White men, but, arguably, Totalitarianism is worse on us the more competently it's practiced. I am not at all concerned with the US military having gotten into this Wokeness. Let the navy ships crash out in the South China Sea. I would like a weaker and weaker American military that (when it eventually comes to it) States or the American people can beat more easily. I'd like to see the US Feral Gov't, most especially, the IRS, be so incompetent that they do nothing resembling their functions as prescribed by Congress.
As can be seen in our Hotel Haiti series for example, Peak Stupidity is more concerned with the incompetence in blue collar and/or service work. There are professionals that Mr. Robinson discussed too, doctors for worrisome(!) example. Incompetent engineers are a REAL problem. Put the latter together with an incompetent blue collar workforce and bridges fall down, roads crack, machines break even faster than the current China-made Crap, and life becomes ever more of a struggle just to stand still economically. Bad service everywhere adds to the misery.
Mr. Hail brought up the lack of attention paid in this article to the Kung Flu as a point of discussion. Besides mentioning that the Covid gave impetus to the removal of testing requirements (done previously in person), the writer had only this to say:
The more recent coronavirus pandemic was another teachable moment. What started just three years ago with a novel respiratory virus has caused a financial crisis, a bubble, soaring inflation, and now a banking crisis in rapid succession.I don't think that was all about incompetence. Much of that was purposeful, by power-hungry and greedy people who took advantage of the latest virus. It doesn't sound like Mr. Robinson gets this, but I'm not sure from the 2 sentences.
I will now excerpt the last part of Harold Robinson's conclusion:
Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.It could be worse than that even. All of this reminds me of the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy. I don't think Mike Judge's time span of 500 years is correct. We could be there in 100, maybe 50.
The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.
* The writer rightly puts the focus on the FAA's Air Traffic Control system, which is a part of government. There have been an undue share of near-disasters lately. I wonder if the Globalist elites who push all this D.I.E. stuff onto the Western world can see the problems they have caused. These people do like to travel. Maybe they plan on bailing out of the West.
Comments (20)
I am Non-Man - Hear me Roar!
Posted On: Thursday - June 22nd 2023 7:40PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders Music Feminism
American's Cultural Revolution, call it Cult Rev 2.0 for the World, is going swimmingly, as the Instapundit likes to say. He uses that word sarcastically though. I think those willingly in charge of Cult Rev 2.0, and the usual useful idiots, are likely pleased with its speed and progress. The Genderbending nonsense that has been pushed for the last 5 years or so is so damned stupid that Chairman Mao (of that 1st go-around) couldn't have imagined it in his wildest wet Red Dreams. Yet, it's moving right along.
The deal now, per a tweet I came upon, is that the word "woman", and I'm sure its plural, "women" is no longer acceptable, per the Revolution. This must have something to do with the transgender business, though it would hurt my head too much for me attempt to figure how. We'll just have to deal with it.
There are many other terms that have been in use by men, some with very nice connotations and others not. Going in some sort of chronological order here and without including the more specific terms, we note that there were/are dames, broads, chicks, and so on... The cops use just plain "female", but as a noun, one of the most annoying terms, IMO. "Lady" is always in. Also, they've always been girls when fairly young, up through 30-40 even, depending on the utterer and gals when older than that. The use of the latter term goes right on up through the oldest gal in the world, still living on rice and sweet potatoes at 115, somewhere in the deepest parts of China - she remembers Cult Rev 1.0 so is glad to be called "gal" or about anything - just don't call her a Capitalist Roader!
The word "women", in English, is obviously an extension to men. The Bible tells us that women are not true originals, having been taken from Adam's rib cage. Well, the Feminists don't like any of that and so tried on a different spelling, "womyn" or "wymen" or double-"y" "wymyn". The latter reads a bit olde-Englishey but is only annoying to me based on the shrieking harpies (see, there's another one) that use it.
As of late, there's been a disturbance in The Force, if you will, well, known more widely as a crack in the Coalition of the Fringes*. The recent Genderbender / BLT-G++ crowd tell us that being a woman is just not that freaking simple. To clear, yes, clear, things up, we are supposed to use "Non-Man" instead, per the prestigious Johns Hopkins University.
The thing is, if your Communist campaign is to work, you have to enforce these things. In the time of the original Cult Rev, there was no internet around. Was it easier to enforce these programs then? You'd have to print new books, such as those Little Red ones and take the old ones. As the N. Vietnamese Commies came down into the south and Saigon in 1975, one could be shot for having English or French books at home. Pol Pot's Commies just figured anyone who was an intellectual, i.e., might read a lot should just be shot. The wearing of eyeglasses makes one LOOK LIKE an intellectual, so hell, why not kill everyone who wears eyeglasses in the whole of Kampuchea. What? Wasn't it Cambodia? Yes, it's gone back and forth, but nobody noticed as they couldn't make it out without eyeglasses.
Americans have kept their guns, so a Mao, Ho Chi Minh, or Pol Pot type effort won't work. Nowadays, it's all on-line anyway. It must be weird to be in the middle of a page on a Kindle book when all instances of "women" change to "non-man" before one's eyes.
First, per an Unz Review commenter, they're going to have to change to old song lyrics, hoping people won't notice, as it's not the lyrics that make a good song anyway.
Song titles to be revised:
From the soul music genre:
(You make me feel like a) Natural Non-man from Percy Sledge
When a Man Loves a Non-man from Aretha Franklin
The old Rock & Roll standards:
Oh, Pretty Non-man from Roy Orbison
Country, old and new:
She's a Good-Hearted Non-man from Waylon Jennings (and sometimes Willie too)
Man, I Feel Like a Non-man from Shania Twain
The Disco era:
More than a Non-man from the Bee Gees
The Rock Era:
LA Non-man by The Doors
Sweet-Talking Non-man by ELO
Reggae:
No Non-man, No Cry from Bob Marley and the Wailers
Finally, from the Feminist genre itself:
I am Non-Man, Enn Oh Enn dash Emm Ay Enn! by Peggy Lee
I am Non-Man (Hear me Roar) by Helen Reddy
The song we'll feature here is from guess who? Nope, not The Who but The Guess Who, and it's from 53 years back. The song from this Canadian band had a lot of vitriol against American Non-men.
Our vitriol in this post is just aimed at men and non-men who push this Cult Rev 2.0 garbage. Whatever the lyrics be, this is a good old rock song. (The flip side of that single record was No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature which I think has a better tune, 2 of them actually.)
The Guess Who was:
Burton Cummings – vocals
Randy Bachman – lead and rhythm guitar
Jim Kale – bass
Garry Peterson – drums
* H/T, Steve Sailer, of course.
Comments (5)
Stupid Man Locked out of Smart Home
Posted On: Wednesday - June 21st 2023 9:38PM MST
In Topics: Humor Political Correctness Artificial Stupidity Orwellian Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity iEspionage
Alternate title: Live by the iEspionage, die by the iEspionage
I try to stay aware of all the ways my smart phone can keep track of me, and it's not that I believe the things I set in "Settings" for privacy will stop the evil Orwellian scum that can use the info. I cannot fathom the mind of someone either naive enough or uncaring enough to get one of those amazon Alexis home spy devices. Bezos and company are clear enough about what they are doing with those.*
Well, apparently, along with smart phones, smart cars, smart toasters, and smart toilets(?), there are smart whole houses. The convenience of one of those must be PHENOMENAL!, like you don't have to flip light switches, and the water may turn on when it looks like you're due for a shave, I don't know, in order for someone to happily invite computer spyware to run and spy on his home.
There can be problems, though... such as when Amazon Locks Man Out of His Smart Home After Baseless Racism Accusation. This is going to be a complete copy/paste job, as that site is IGN SEA, the "SEA" meaning Southeast Asia, so I'm not afraid of being sued from Phnom Penh or Jakarta by this Izzatul Rasali. (Thank you, Sir, for the story.)
In a world where technology has seamlessly intertwined with our daily lives, a man recently encountered an occurrence that showcased why relying on tech can be inadvertently complicated.Complicated? It thought computers were gonna simplify our lives. Also, I'm not so sure about the "inadvertently" part.
The alarming incident caused a smart-home owner to get locked out of his home for a week due to a misunderstanding with an Amazon delivery driver.After a couple of hours of that, I'd have smashed a window and when I got inside asked Alexis how to fix it.
The unwanted disruption happened when a package was delivered to Brandon Jackson’s home by an Amazon driver. Everything seemed like it was going smoothly until Jackson was unable to access his Amazon Echo devices the next day, indicating that his account had been locked.All his tools and helpful appliances work only under the control of Jeff Bezos and his programmers. Let's go, Brandon!
In a post shared by Jackson on Medium, he initially thought that someone might have attempted to log into his account repeatedly, which triggered the safety lockout mechanism when he was unable to interact with his devices.Brandon's doorbell called someone a nigger? I don't get this stuff...
In an attempt to address the problem, Jackson contacted Amazon’s customer service and was asked by an executive if he knew why his account was locked.
“When I answered I was unsure, their tone turned somewhat accusatory. I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my ‘Ring doorbell’.”
Jackson, who claimed that his house has multiple cameras recording everything that happened within his property, reviewed the footage and found no proof of such remarks being uttered. According to him, the driver, who was wearing headphones, must have misheard the doorbell as the only sound it could make was the automated response, “Excuse me, can I help you?”I'd have already sent that thing back just based on the bad grammar programmed in at the Chinese factory, but maybe the doorbell was right about this. Did this delivery driver damage Brandon's stuff due to carelessness and stupidity? Per another doorbell I've heard from, "It's all so tiresome..."
You can't blame this one on Brandon because...
Adding to his bafflement, upon reviewing the footage, it became evident that no one was home during the incident, meaning the delivery driver had truly misinterpreted the situation. However, despite clearing the air with Amazon, Jackson’s account was still locked for an entire week.One is considered guilty of racism until definitively proving one's innocence - that takes donations, apologies, and yard signs. Yes, it can take weeks.
Amazon allegedly did not opt for a more reasonable approach, such as sending a warning email or contacting the homeowner before locking him out of his own house. Following the messy ordeal, Jackson said he is “seriously considering discontinuing” his Amazon Echo devices.Seriously? Just because an Orwellian network of iEspionage spyware appliances locked you out of your own house for a week due to a wholly manufactured slight reported by a diverse Amazon delivery man, you would change your whole life around?! You might have to switch on lights and set your alarm clock yourself. Oh, the humanity! That's right, how about some more humanity, rather than a life full of Artificial Stupidity?
* An acquaintance told me about a 1 1/2 hour video interview with Jeff Bezos on this stuff, but I forget the "venue", which would help in looking it up. I'll be seeing him again and will get the info.
Comments (16)
1st World Memories of Suid Afrikaanse Lugdiens (CtDC - Part 7)
Posted On: Tuesday - June 20th 2023 6:04AM MST
In Topics: History Geography Race/Genetics World Political Stupidity
(The title would have ended up too long, but I'll consider this Part 7 of the Peak Stupidity series "Cry the DeConstructed Country". It's a series on the ruination of South Africa due to the ending of White rule. Earlier: Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.)
That'd be South African Airways in English, and these aren't my personal memories. As a family, we'd thought about going to "Jo-burg" and then out to "the bush" to see the big cats and other animals in the wild, maybe 5 years back. I think now, 5 years later, that it's not worth braving the medium-sized animals for a chance to see the big ones.
Though I'm not at all enamored with State-run enterprises, such as nationalized airlines, it has been the mark of a 1st-World country to have a big international airline. South Africa was no exception back when it was a 1st World country, run by White men - Englishmen and Afrikaners*.
They wouldn't have had 14 girls. The required crew is 3 or 4, but the better service in the day may have called for a couple more. I note there IS one coloured Stewardess in the picture, actually - at the center.
There's lots of good information on the company in this Wikiwand** article. At the start, in the middle 1930s, SAL flew a handful of British-built de Havillands and Airspeed Envoys and a decent number of German-built Junkers (13's, then 50's, 52's, and 86's). The airline all but shut down during WWII, then acquired some Douglas DC-3's and DC-4's.
SAA (to use the English name from here on) entered the jet age in late 1953 with the first jetliner, the de Havilland Comet. By this time the piston-engined airliners had gotten pretty fast and capable too, so the Lockheed Constellation and the DC-7B were also used. The DC-7 could do the Jo-burg to London flight with only one fuel stop, at Khartoum, Sudan, on the eastern route - 21 hours total, or Kano, Nigeria, on the western route - 18 hours total. (Africa is a BIG continent! Note that, of the 5,600 statute mile shortest distance, Jo-burg to Palermo - the latter which could be considered entry to Europe on a direct route - is 1,130 miles, 4/5 of the whole route.)
Anyone with some knowledge of the history of aviation knows about the problems that befell(?) the Comet, so SAA's jet age continued with their delivery's of Boeing 707's***.
Even in the late piston-engine age for them, there were many countries on the African continent, neighboring countries being and exception, that would not allow overflights by SAA. These countries were butt-hurt, I suppose, about a bunch of upstart White people, having been on their land only 4 centuries, running an Apartheid plan against their Black! newcomers. These same people couldn't run a 1st-World airline themselves, much less a 1st-World country. How they planned to shoot down an encroaching SAA airliner I have no idea. (Soviet help, perhaps?)
By the mid-70s, the rest of the 1st-World too had gotten into this shunning mode against SAA. (See Parts 4 and 5 of this series.) Therefore, the airline had to plan large deviations or totally different routes to operate international flights, putting them at a competitive disadvantage often. This had an effect on their aircraft acquisition decisions. Either way, everyone who's anyone wanted that long-range 747-400.
Per the Wikiwand article:
The US Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 banned all flights by South African–owned carriers, including SAA. In 1987, SAA's services to Perth and Sydney in Australia were ended, in light of the Australian Government's opposition to apartheid.30 years back, it was decided by the world and S. Africans under immense pressure that this nation would convert to Black! rule. The ruination started then, but as Peak Stupidity often says - and Adam Smith (the OTHER Adam Smith) too, "There's a lot of ruin in a nation"****. South African Airways got their international routes back, but had lost control of their country.
Competence goes down, and things fall to ruin, first gradually, and then suddenly. As per Part 2 and the original article that inspired this series, South Africa at War with Itself, South Africa has no airline service now - they don't even have reliable rail service due to Black! theft of the rails themselves for scrap metal.
After 2 decades of Black! rule, SAA went from serious reductions in the fleet in '17 to bankruptcy ("Business Rescue") in '19 to shutdown with the help of the Kung Flu in '20. The once proud and glamourous Suid Afrikaanse Lugdiens, South African Airways, is supposedly restructured, having "restarted" in September of '21, but they haven't taken to the skies since.
Do you think that couldn't ever happen here? I don't know. There will be a Part 8.
* Descendants of the Dutch who settled the land starting almost 4 3/4 centuries ago. (See Part 1.)
** A version of wikipedia.
*** The 707 and the Douglas DC-8, both coming into service in 1958-59, marked a "restart", if I may, of the jet age, at least in the 1st-World. Those Tupolevs built in the USSR flew in that interim, '56-58, but that was the 2nd World. I should add the runner-ups, the French-built Caravelle and the General Dynamics Convair 880, also being delivered in the late 1950s.
**** See also Part 2 and Part 3.
Comments (11)
24/7 Stupidity
Posted On: Monday - June 19th 2023 6:10PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Humor Salesmen Big-Biz Stupidity Customer Care
When did people start saying "24/7"? A couple of internet sites told me it was the early 1980s, so 4 decades back. That could be, but I know this phrase as one said by businessmen, especially those dot-com 1.0 types. Amazon's Jeff Bezos used to use this one. (I don't know if it was his alone, but he also had the "It's still Day 1" bit. At this point, Mr. Bezos, I'd call your company's point on the timeline as "The End of Days"!)
It's been more than 20 years since "24/7" came into widespread use. The meaning is, of course, that something will work, be available, be open, what-have-you, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I guess that implies that this goes on over the years too, until early bankruptcy*, so the "365" is not necessary, and using it would also imply that the site goes down on leap days - Feb 29's. You can't have that!
Originally, "24/7" was meaningful. It's been used so much that it's become trite and/or erroneous. What happened is that proud businessmen all over have forgotten the meaning of the phrase. That's the case with the website of a company called Laptopscreen.com.
The reader may infer some computer problems here at Peak Stupidity from the sudden revelation that that particular website's banner info has an important contradiction. Yeah, I needed a laptop screen. As the reader may know from all of Peak Stupidity's Customer Care complaint posts, I like to talk to live humans often. My only question for a live human in this case was on the delivery time, whether a few days to a week or something like 1-2 months via slow boat from China.
I want to make it clear here that I was actually very pleased with the job done by Laptopscreen.com. An American guy answered the phone in less than 1 minute, after ZERO button pushes. He assured me that "no, we don't drop ship stuff from China." and gave me a rough arrival date. The thing came and worked!
Therefore, while I was on that call ... on Monday morning... when they were open... I both held my tongue, and forgot in the meantime anyway, to give whomever answered a little shit about the contradictory banner.
See, it was a Sunday when I had found the site. Maybe I HAVE had this thing wrong for 20-odd years, but this whole time I've been under the impression that 24/7 meant that I could call these people on Sunday, even late at night. Nope, I got a voice message. Also, I'm not a chatty guy by this internet definition - that's a very LAST resort for me - but the "chatterers" are apparently offline too during, errrr, non-business hours... wait, whaaaa?
I supposed the way I should see this is very much along the lines of the standard joke I would pull out were I a clerk at the Circle-K. "How late are you open?" "24 hours." "Oh, good, 24 hours." "Yeah... I mean, but... not in a row."
PS: Ohhhh! Maybe they meant 24 days a month, and 7 hours a day. That's not quite right either but a lot closer to reality than what they say now.
* Yeah, I've got that dot-com 1.0 era in mind here.
Comments (27)
Payback time for Starbucks and Shultzie
Posted On: Thursday - June 15th 2023 9:32PM MST
In Topics: Race/Genetics Big-Biz Stupidity Legal Stupidity
For the usual reasons (either logging out of email or doing a "Peak Stupidity" search) I glanced at a yahoo news headline. This one was surprisingly not biased and stupid, but some good heartening news.
From the NY Times , I just now noticed (trying to NEVER click on a thing from that rag) and writer Ed Shananan, we learn White Starbucks Manager Fired Amid Furor Over Racism Wins $25 Million. This story goes back over 5 years. Peak Stupidity commented a few times back then, with Starbucks - fake coupons and raising hell and Nationwide 10,000-Store Barista-Based Synchronized Struggle Session a Success!, on the caving in to yet another race hustling set up* by the huge Starbucks exotic coffee chain.
Caving in and giving out a couple of hundred thousand bucks to the 2 huckster guilt-trippers is one thing. Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz went way beyond what the risk-averse corporate lawyers would have told him. He turned his back on loyal, but not Woke enough, employees, and initiated a guilt trip, including what I called a big "struggle session" along with new rules to "be kind" to (especially Black!) deadbeats. As Peak Stupidity saw over the last couple of years personally, this move has come back to haunt Starbucks. (See Starbucks Wokeness Backfire, and the 3rd item of this post.)
Well, White people, you can't lose them all. A fairly high level manager of Starbucks, one Shannon Phillips, has won a lawsuit and hopefully taught someone at Starbucks a lesson. Keep in mind when you read the article, that 5 years is how long the manager in question has been fighting Starbucks, not knowing all that time whether she'd lose to the Woke Big Biz Establishment.
On Monday, in a surprising twist, a federal jury in New Jersey ordered Starbucks to pay $25.6 million to a former regional manager after determining that the company had fired her amid the fallout from the Rittenhouse Square episode because she was white.The verdict was unanimous (wow!), and yes, I guess it IS surprising to see justice be served to White people, come to think of it.
The jury found that Starbucks had violated the federal civil rights of the former manager, Shannon Phillips, as well as a New Jersey law that prohibits discrimination based on race, awarding her $600,000 in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.
[My bolding.]
At the time of the episode, Phillips oversaw about 100 stores in Philadelphia, southern New Jersey, Delaware and parts of Maryland. She had been promoted to the job in 2011 after what she called her “exemplary performance” in six years as a district manager in Ohio."Damage control" in the Big Biz world meant screwing over whomever in order to placate the Establishment, even an exemplary employee. She was so exemplary, that she wouldn't play along in what I'd call "Big Business,
Phillips said in the suit that Starbucks, as part of its damage-control effort after the arrests, had sought to punish her and other white employees in and around Philadelphia even if they had not been involved in the events that led to the police being called.
Amid the image-burnishing campaign, Phillips said one of her superiors, a Black woman, told her to suspend a white manager who oversaw stores in Philadelphia, though not the one in Rittenhouse Square, because of allegations that he had engaged in discriminatory conduct — allegations that Phillips said she knew to be untrue.Remember that John F. Kennedy book Profiles in Courage? Is there a way to add an addendum, because this Shannon Phillips ought to be in there?
In contrast, Phillips said, no action was taken against the manager who oversaw the Rittenhouse Square store, a Black man who Phillips said had promoted the employee who called the police.
Phillips said she was fired not long after balking at the order to suspend the white manager.
The plaintiff rests. You know, there's always another side of the story, though. Let's hear from Starbucks:
Starbucks denied in court filings that Phillips had been fired because she was white and said she was let go because she performed poorly in response to the episode that led to the arrests.Oh man, they're right. She did perform poorly. The plaintiff should have instituted her own struggle sessions, fired Capitalist Roaders, hung vente-character posters around White employees' necks, and sent a few baristas to the pig farms. Regarding her lack of performance, I gotta admit, Starbucks' lawyer is right about that too. Miss Phillips failed in that role. Not everyone is cut out to be a Red Guard style Communist.
“During this time of crisis,” a lawyer for Starbucks wrote in a court filing, the company’s “Philadelphia market needed a leader who could perform,” adding that “Ms. Phillips failed in every aspect of that role.”
PS: For some comments, including informative ones from lawyer/commenter Jack D., look in the thread under this Steve Sailer post.
* This is not anything new. It goes back to Rosa Parks, at least.
** Just to be complete here, we'll link to 3 other posts on Starbucks, these relating to the Kung Flu PanicFest: Grasping at Straws - Part 1 - - Grasping at Straws - Part 2 and Grasping at Straws - Update from Starbucks. Looking back at those posts, I see that some of the PanicFest stuff was just freaking weird.
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T'chaniekwa has left the building
Posted On: Wednesday - June 14th 2023 6:35PM MST
In Topics: Humor Political Correctness Race/Genetics
Peak Stupidity has tried our best to introduce and explain Modern Peak Stupidity telephone etiquette over 5 years ago. Just today, I didn't follow my protocol of just listening for a non-salesman human voice before replying to an unknown number.
It wasn't one marked by the system (on-phone software, the carrier, I don't know) as "probably SPAM"., but who did I know in Indianapolis* that might be calling? You never know - people move and keep the old area code or whatever...
... at the other end there was background noise, but then a young lady spoke up to say hello. It was a little confusing, as there was too long a pause after I told her my first name just to check who I was dealing with and shake her brain loose, and I also realized the other end was on speaker phone. I imagine the conference room seen above with some business to be done with someone named ... "Hello, is this, err, T'chaineikwa?"
It's not like I've likely spelled it right here, but that name is one that I'm familiar with from occasional text messages and calls from (obviously) Black! guys asking for her. T'ch... or whoever had this # before me.
"No, I'm not, uhh, her. These Black! names get really tough, don't they, but anyway, she must have switched phone numbers. Sorry."
Well, this woman on the other end was really chuckling at that, I mean, for the rest of the call. I thought about her having the phone on speaker, meaning usually others are on the line, some bill collectors or what-have-you. The rest were probably cracking up, but inside. The really funny part is imagining some diversity at the other end of the line, and whether this (obviously) White young lady couldn't help herself.
I'd cut through the Woke Curtain for just a few moments. Felt good, man.
* Both the area code and 3-digit prefix are used to come up with a nearest town or city.
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What we have heah is failure to communicate
Posted On: Wednesday - June 14th 2023 4:30PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Curmudgeonry Peak Stupidity Roadshow
The curmudgeonly complaint in this post could be called a "1st World problem". That said, it's a problem that wouldn't exist even in 3rd World countries, as most are at least not multi-cultural Towers of Babel. The multi-cultural madness we've got going on manifests itself in very poor communication, but then there's native stupidity too.
The Peak Stupidity reader could get a flavor of the present-day hotel complaints in our series Hotel Haiti: Introduction - - on Competence - - on Caring, and Conclusion. Yes, I know this post sounds elitist. It's more about the continuously decreasing competence we Americans are experiencing than anything.
We often have a reason to stay in hotel rooms later than check-out time, as arranged upon our arrival. The ability to keep up with that arrangement by the staff is just getting stupider as the years go by. Let me put this in terms of communication methods:
3-Way Communication: The on-duty manager should be able to let the housekeeping staff know what the deal is on check-out times. They have clipboards with this info - I know that. In the modern day and age, I could see an easily-writable software program - OK, app, fine, dammit - that could be used to communicate 2-way from the desk to the staff or vice-versa. I'm old fashioned, and I'd be fine with a clipboard were I doing this housekeeping work. (I sure hope I don't, as it's hard work and not my kind of thing at all!)
However, even when that doesn't work, one gets a knock on the door, "Housekeeping?" and just tells her "we're not leaving till one.", she gets that, says "OK", and then at least someone knows the deal.
2-Way Communication: As I was getting to, often this quick conversation above doesn't result in anything getting written or updated anywhere else. So, another housekeeper comes by an hour later. "We're not leaving till one." "OK, thank you." It's not optimum, but, no problem. (They just don't really have their shit together, but who does, right?)
This has gotten worse due to the language barrier that exists within the English-speaking world... wait, whaaaa? "What??" "I said 'we'll be here till one.'" Then it's "OK" - maybe she got that, maybe not. 10 minutes later, at 10:45, "Housekeeping?" "We're staying till one, remember?" Well, this might be someone else, who also knows minimal English.
It just gets worse when people don't reply at all, as that seems to be just as much a modern thing as the language barrier.
1-Way Communication: This is mostly the case now. I hear no reply when I give someone information. I'll sometimes poke out the door, "one O'Clock, that's when we're leaving." Maybe I get a reply then, maybe not, depending on language and/or attitude.
However, the way it is today, they've also gotten to just trying to break into the room, either while simultaneously saying "Housekeeping?" or not. Because they need the feature, the staff has master card keys, which can also open the deadbolts. However, with the security latch on, the door just bangs against it. It might be a little jarring, is all.
0-Way Communication: That's me nowadays. Because communication with the housekeepers is usually futile, I don't answer anyone. Go ahead and bash away on the door - I just sit there and wait for them to go away. Occasionally, I'll comment that "you're gonna break something, if you keep doing that!" They'll figure it out. It's still a shame it has to be this way.
PS: Yeah, Led Zeppelin's Communication Breakdown would be very appropriate for this post, but we featured it already in this post from the waning days of the Kung Flu PanicFest.
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The Potomac Regime goes full Tranny
Posted On: Tuesday - June 13th 2023 9:19PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders US Feral Government
... while in the meantime, nobody can analyze the root cause of that Nashville school shooting 2 months back done by a tranny, because it might lead to bad thoughts and more understanding.
Last summer, Peak Stupidity first noted how the Potomac Regime has taken up new colors, and let its freak flag fly. They are at it again. It is pissing off a lot of Americans, but to me it's a good thing that The Regime has made it clear to everyone that it is not America's government anymore. (I could say it's not American's government any more.)
Angry Americans have been rebelling in schools, tearing down store displays and even, GASP!, cutting up their Target credit cards. The latter, though it may not feel as good, is probably the best idea though. We need to quit thinking we can teach this government in the Federal Shithole what is right and what is wrong. We need to realize that it's not our government up in there. Let Target decide which side it's going to be on.
Slow but sure and steady separation from this other nation parasitically infecting our land is the way to go. That means cultural separation, financial separation, and hopefully eventual geographic separation.
Meanwhile, since it's Pride month and all, it would seem like we would want to get it all out in the open - what makes these trannies tick? What would make one of these Proud people go shoot 3 9 y/o's and 3 60 y/o's in her old Christian school. It's been 2 months, and the Nashville police have not released the information they have straight from the late psycho-killer's hand.
Peak Stupidity says:
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GOPer Mike Pence - Another dumb Trump hire
Posted On: Monday - June 12th 2023 4:39PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '26 Immigration Stupidity Trump
Candidate Donald Trump picked Mike Pence to be his VP-candidate back in '16. I don't know what his decision was based on. Mike Pence was not some high-seniority Senator with a lot of pull, and his State of Indiana, where'd he'd been Governor, is not a big enough one to warrant picking a candidate for those votes. Besides, Trump was really his own man. I don't think somebody nobody had ever heard of before would have changed Trump's chances.
Mike Pence has been a GOPe (GOP establishment) man, with no value I see in being the guy who could make the ctrl-left think twice about impeachment, or something like that.
I don't know the deal there. I do know from some reading that a number of Presidents had VP's that they didn't particularly like or actively hated. I don't think there was much love for the Socialist Scumbag LBJ out of JFK. Ike made an effort to kick Nixon off of the GOP ticket for 1956. (It didn't take.)
Looking back to '15-'16, the only reason Donald Trump came even CLOSE to the office of President, EVER, is because he cared about, and worked on, the immigration invasion problem. Mike Pence supported most of Trump's policies on immigration during those 4 years, but as VDare's anonymous FS insider Washington Watcher II tells us, Mike Pence, Whatever Else He Is, Is No Immigration Patriot. In other words, he was being loyal, but faking it.*
Pence’s immigration record before 2016 was one of the worst among prominent Republicans. In 2006, then U.S. Rep. Pence, who represented Indiana-2, proposed his own Amnesty. He fronted the Pence Plan at the behest of Treason Lobby Mistress Helen Krieble of the horsey set. Amusingly—or not!—the Amnesty was considered the “conservative” alternative to the John McCain-Ted Kennedy plan backed by the Treason Lobby. Nothing was “conservative” about it, but that didn’t stop Conservatism, Inc., from supporting it. It would have legalized millions of illegals. The only difference between it and McKennedy was that corporations and megawealthy GOP donors like Krieble would decide how many “guest workers” should flood the American job market. Pence claimed it was the Christian thing to do, and that Ronald Reagan, the man who supposedly made Pence a conservative, would have supported it.Now, this guy is one of the 2nd tier GOP candidates for the '24 Presidency. Mr. E.H. Hail has a great run-down on the GOP candidates, in his post on his Hail to You site, and the term "2nd tier" comes from that post. The 2nd-tier as of May 27th, per Mr. Hail, are Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, and 4 others**.
Bunk.
Pence backed it on Krieble’s orders. And he absurdly claimed it was not an Amnesty. He cited his own immigrant ancestry—his Irish grandfather was an Ellis Islander—to justify rewarding illegal aliens. Insultingly, Pence said Amnesty was a critical test for the American Right. “It’s a test of the character of the conservative movement in the 21st century,” he said. “We are either going to prove that we believe in the ideas enshrined on the Statue of Liberty or the American people will go looking elsewhere” [Star of the Right Loses His Base at the Border, by Jason DeParle, New York Times, August 29, 2006].
Fortunately, conservatives “failed” Pence’s fraudulent test. They rejected Amnesty, and him.
I want nothing to do with either of those 3 I spelled out. As for Mike Pence in particular, his attempts at treasonous acts on immigration are THE reason, but there are more. He could have made an effort in various ways to support Trump's (and my) claim of a major Cheatfest in '20. Going full Constitutional - see Article II, Section I v Blue Squad CheatFest: Part 1 and Part 2 is beyond a guy like him - but how about some words of support and loyalty for his former boss? Nah, this guy's fealty to the GOPe and the UniParty are much stronger than any love for this country.
I write many of these posts going by written descriptions of the words out of, and the actions of, these people. If you would kindly check out the video in the tweet embedded in Mr. Watcher II's article, regarding his stance on pardoning the J6 Political Prisoners, you'll be disgusted by this man. Screw you, Mike Pence, you traitor!
Ha! I nearly forgot my main point for this post: What does it say about Donald Trump that he picks people who are against his agenda, and in this case, not loyal in the long run, to work for him? Ron DeSantis isn't stupid in this way.
* Or has he had a Road to Damascus moment? WWII gives examples that show "no way".
** ... one of them being Tucker Carlson. IMO, if he were to actually say he's running, he'd get to1st tier right quick!
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A-Woke-end from a dream
Posted On: Monday - June 12th 2023 1:36PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Political Correctness
This is either the 3rd or 4th Peak Stupidity post written based on a dream of your Peak blogger. I understand that our commenter Dieter Kief out of the birthplace of Sigmund Freud may be curious and helpful, but that's not why I write these. As in the other posts, that I'm dreaming something like this says something about the times.
I was in an engineering or physics lab classroom, not the lab itself, but in the class in which the experiments were being discussed. Here I was, with a big pad of paper and a pencil, trying to get a point across to the teaching assistant or whoever he was. (He seemed to be in charge.) The young people now don't do much with paper and pencil. All data must be entered on some screen somewhere. So this was a bit difficult for him, as I made a table and told him how we should collect data "like this".
The other guys in the room were not getting this at all, so I got a tad frustrated and showed it - not loud or angry, mind you but just a tad vehement, let's call it. That wasn't a problem for the students and this instructor, but for some reason, my getting forceful about my idea was responsible for bringing about 5 HR reps, into the room, and STAT! Speaking of "STAT!", they were all wearing nurse scrubs. So, were they actual HR people? I don't know. Their purpose was to squash any disagreement going on in a classroom. They weren't particularly after me, but just any disagreement going on was verboten.
I told these apparently on short-call classroom "controllers" that "Hey, I was just passing by and came in to help. I don't have to be here."
Then I walked out, and right then I Woke up.
Johnny, what can you make out of this?
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Night Train to Lisbon
Posted On: Saturday - June 10th 2023 7:44PM MST
In Topics: History Movies Geography
In answer to my question, an older lady getting off the airliner with her husband the other day told me that, before their connection at the hub, they had come from a visit to Lisbon Portugal. "Really? You've got to watch the movie Night Train to Lisbon!", I exclaimed. She said they would - due to that brief, but positive recommendation. That's what I've got here, well, a positive recommendation, but not necessarily a brief one.
First, I have noticed that Lisbon is a tourist destination. Maybe it has been for a while, but it seems like a new thing. (We may go there sometime, but then, we have other destinations in mind too.) Perhaps what's new and cool about it is that it's an out-of-the-way European city. I still have traveling on trains in mind, for which Lisbon would be not on any other route if one is touring the European continent. I guess that's an old practice now, with Ryan Air, Value Jet, and the like, so I guess it's not nearly as out-of-the-way as before. People like to say they've been somewhere that others haven't, though, and that also makes it better when one is there too - not so many damned tourists around!*
There's the scenery, I suppose. Lisbon is a coastal city, and I'm sure Portugal has its beautiful spots. However, California, Oregon, and Washington have more than enough of that to beat Portugal. The movie I'm trying to review here shows some scenery near the end, but most of it occurs in urban Lisbon (per IMDB, the Caxias area, which is the actual location of the historic drama in the movie). I have a feeling that the movie-makers and government incentivizers want movies filmed in their locales to attract tourists. I think that works.
There's the history. Like most Europeans cities, all kinds of madness and travails have occurred throughout the 2 to 3 millennium that we know about. I looked up some quick Wikipedia history on Lisbon and Portugal in general. They had it all, Roman rule, Christianity, various barbarians, Moslems**, then the Age of Exploration, colonization, (and, as of late, reverse colonization, which I'll get to shortly). Unfortunately, a huge earthquake in 1755 destroyed most of the city, and more was torn down for a different more modern cityscape during the rebuild.
Then there was the whole 20th century thing. Going along with this out-of-the-way country idea, Portugal is about as far away from the USSR and East Bloc one could get. There was no chance of it going Communist due to invasion from the east, but the southern European countries did and still do tend to get a little wonky - as in a "wonky knee" - and kind of unstable politically. Greece seems to be the worst of them. It went nearly Communist on its own for a bit. Italy too has had new governments yearly or monthly. Portugal though, somewhat like its (only) neighbor, ended up with a dictator from 1932 until 1974. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar had been a valuable finance minister earlier, seemingly the only guy who could keep to a budget. During the 1920s political turmoil, he, often unwillingly, stayed in the government, and the President appointed him Prime Minister in July 1934 of what was called the Estado Novo - "New State" - and was an authoritarian dictatorship.
Salazar was neither Fascist, Communist, nor Theocrat, though he favored Catholicism more than the other isms, which he actively hated. He was a Nationalist, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, it's just very difficult for a dictator to remain completely benevolent for very long. You make enemies, some with cause and many of them just against traditional society, like the Commies. Well, if you want to stay "benevolent dictator", you've got to crush those enemies, with secret police and the like. It doesn't end well. The end of Mr. Slazar's dictatorship in Portugal is a big part of the story of Night Train to Lisbon. It's been almost 50 years now, but that's not so long in the past - again, kind of out-of-the-way, out-of-mind for me, but not for the characters in this movie.
Jeremey Irons, the star of this one, plays Raimund Gregorious, an upper-middle-age conservative teacher of literature and such at a school in Bern, Switzerland. (For some reason, wiki and half the IMDB reviewers say he's a Professor, but, as I recall, he taught younger kids.) He's single, having been divorced a few years back - we find out later - and he understands that it's a safe but boring life he leads.
Luckily for us moviegoers, something odd happens to Raimund on the very day we are watching. Some young pretty girl was about to jump to her death off a bridge into the Aar River. Raimund saves her, and brings her to the school so he could teach his classes, but she leaves with no goodbye or contact information. What she'd left, though, was her jacket with an interesting book in the pocket.
The viewer couldn't be faulted for thinking at this point that our protagonist will chase the young lady down and things would eventually get all kissy-kissy and such, but, alas, the movie takes a different direction. He being a bookish guy, Mr. Gregorious takes to the book of wisdom he's found, A Goldsmith of Words, written by one Amadeu de Almeida Prado in Portuguese, and also finds inside it a train ticket to Lisbon, bought by that skinny young girl. Since he couldn't find her at the train station, he makes an impulsive decision, probably the first in a while, to board the night train to Lisbon. (Oh, yeah, he left the kids in the classroom that afternoon. Whaddya' gonna' do?)
Raimund's search for the author of this book (1 of only 100 copies made, per a guy at the bookstore back in Bern), Mr. Prado, soon turns his trip to Lisbon, hence the movie, into a detective story. He has no P.I. license, and doesn't work for $200 per day + expenses like Jim Rockford*****, unfortunately, and this investigation is into goings-on in Lisbon from 50 years back (well, 40 when this movie was made, in 2013). Luckily, most of the people that his investigation involves are still living, in the movie. So, rather than a street-smart taco-eating ex-con with a business card printing press in his Firebird pretending to be an insurance salesman, we have a multilingual straight-talking intellectual with a penchant for history having tea at old townhouses, coffee shops, and nursing homes. Instead of a jive-turkey sidekick who's of no help whatsoever, he's got a nice middle-aged lady optician he met, who spends the time to help him dig into this most interesting past.
The past in question was the time at the end of the Salazar dictatorship. It was a time when revolution was in the air - pardon me a minute while I cue up an old ABBA song. There are no Fernandos that I recall, but the long flashbacks that come from Raimund's interviews of the characters in the present bring to life a bunch of idealist young people with Spanish-sounding names - Portuguese, of course - with plans and plots. The young Amadeus Prado, he the author of that great book of philosophy that started our protagnists' quest, was a very bright medical doctor involved in these plans along with his ex boarding school roommate/close friend.
Then there's the girl. She was young in the past, so not the girl from the bridge back in present-day Switzerland. This very pretty young lady was heavenly, make that heavily, involved in the plots, her having an amazing enough memory to keep all contact info on the many plotters in her head. See, now that's why we use thumb drives now, because you just KNEW she was going to ruin things due to LUV. You keep the women out of these things, I could have told them, and I did actually, but it's just a big screen, this was 50 years ago, and they weren't real people then even.
There's not very much action as we are used to in modern movies, but the story is complex enough to be very interesting. Besides the love story from the Salazar era, there's a mild one in the present too. I'll leave the story line at that, except to note that the ending in the present time was pretty good. There's not a lot of humor in Night Train to Lisbon, as it is a serious story. However, there's the running theme of Mr. Gregorio's headmaster or fellow teacher back in Bern calling his mobile phone occasionally asking when he's planning on coming back. He doesn't know.
Production values? Yet again, I don't know. It wasn't blurry. Also, it was nice that the dialogue was in English.
Well that was probably one of Peak Stupidity's longest movie reviews. No problem though - you should have had enough time to read it on the night train to somewhere. Any readers who've been to Lisbon, please comment here with your experience there please.
That's a wrap! I'm done for the week. Have a good Sunday, folks.
* I wonder how many Chinese tours go there. The Chinese tourism in general has tailed off since the Kung Flu Panic started.
** The fighting men of Portugal were able to expel these Moors from their lands about 3 1/2 centuries before the Spanish did.
*** They had Henry the Navigator, but they really could have used a Henry the Geographer with that S. American deal with Spain. As I recall, the dividing longitude line they agreed on - and even I, a Euro-colonization non-apologist, see that as pretty arrogant - was a bad deal for the Portuguese. Next time, don't sign anything without a good map in hand!
**** It's not just the reverse in geographical direction, but the reverse of the colonization process, aka, things go backwards in a de-civilizing process.
***** Yeah, you can find something like 10 Rockford Files posts all in here.
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The Born Inferiority
Posted On: Friday - June 9th 2023 7:36PM MST
In Topics: Humor Movies Race/Genetics
You've seen The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Bourne Supremacy. Now, coming to a theater, drive-through, nail salon, or funeral near you, it's The Born Inferiority!
"Make-up!"
(I started this video at 24 seconds in simply due to the cuter news reporter that appears at that point. Nice blue dress!)
It has been the case in most communities that dead people end up at funerals. One difference in the Black! community is that a lot of people at funerals end up dead.
There's a hilarity factor in both the story ("... they have arrested and charged the owner of the funeral home that was actually providing yesterday's funeral service for the 10 year old" and "... identified in court documents as the owner of Compassion and Serenity Funeral Home" and "... he is now facing charges of 1st and 2nd degree murder.") and the reporting ("Witnesses say shots rang out at around the time family and friends were told to gather around the casket"). No, you can't just make this stuff up so easily ... in anything but the Black! community.
I was impressed by this part, (@01:15 in):
“… court documents say Chavis backed up, tripped over the concrete vault lid on the ground next to the grave, and fell, and as he landed he immediately pulled a pistol from his waistband and allegedly fired …“Wow! This guy is good. I mean, he's much more than Mr. Anderson (of The Matrix) material. As he fell, I'm sure he had his head tucked in and, from Judo practice, been slamming his left arm down to break the fall, but in the meantime, his right hand went straight to his gun, and he clicked off the safety... he did have the safety on, right? ... and fired... allegedly, or course ... with the gun held sideways for better accuracy in azimuth, and killed a pallbearer all while in the process of busting his ass! Dude!
Now, folks of other backgrounds could never have done this. Folks of other backgrounds WOULD never have done this. Even though involved in a business dispute, they'd have probably acted serene and compassionate at a funeral. ("You diss me now, on diss, da day of my daughter's funeral?" [/Godfather I] ) No, but not Wilson Wesley Chavis. He's a man of action.
Wilson Wesley Chavis - he's even already got a great Hollywood name - should be in the next Jason Bourne movie! Oh, I've seen 3 of the movies already. They've got Matt Damon shooting while riding motorcycles and small European cars down stairways and all, but can he shoot while tripping backwards over a casket lid? No way, plus he's a White guy, and you can't make another Bourne Something-or-Other movie in 2023 without wokening it up.
Peak Stupidity has come up with a working title already: The Born Inferiority. Is there some way it can take place all in a prison, if at all possible? It's called, by us in The Business, "making movies on location".
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