Science v Stupidity
Posted On: Wednesday - January 4th 2023 8:07PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders Science
Is Science itself stupid nowadays? Sometimes it is the scientists that are stupid. Often, it's that they just desire the limelight more than they do the satisfaction of real science, such as the situation with the Climate Calamity nonsense or the Kung Flu PanicFest. With the stupidity going on in the modern world though, most especially in the Academic world, it can also be a battle of Stupidity v Science in which Stupidity wins.
A couple of headlines struck me as demonstrating that this might be a losing battle for some.
The Peak Stupidity appointed Acting Newspaper of Record recently discussed the British Lancet's use of some new medical terminology.
The NY Post tells us that:
Leading British medical journal The Lancet describes women as “bodies with vaginas” on its latest cover — sparking swift backlash and an apology from the weekly’s top editor.Sexism? Bad taste, sure ... no pun intended in any way, shape, or form there either!
The publication — among the world’s oldest and best-known general medical journals — was accused of sexism for the cover, which refers to an article titled “Periods on Display", the Telegraph reported.
In a review of an exhibit about the history of menstruation at the Vagina Museum in London, the author writes “women” four times, but also uses the phrase “bodies with vaginas” once, according to the news outlet.They got museums now?! We used to have to separate the pages of magazines while hanging out behind the Slurpy machine at the 7-11. Times do change!
The Lancet mentions the phrase on the cover.
“Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected,” the journal says on the front page, which sparked a backlash and condemnations by some academics.Neglected? Damn straight there should be a backlash. I can see the comments now: "Just because you're not getting any doesn't mean we're all a bunch of geeks. Speak for yourself." and "We just came back from the titty bar. We made sure not to neglect the anatomy and physiology of the vaginas... to the tune of $120 in tips and 4 pitchers of Old Milwaukee. Vaginas are REAL, and they're SPECTACULAR! Our peer-reviewed paper will be out next month."
Here's what it's actually about:
“Trans people regularly face stigma, discrimination, exclusion, and poor health, often experiencing difficulties accessing appropriate health care. The exhibition review from which The Lancet cover quote was taken is a compelling call to empower women, together with non-binary, trans, and intersex people who have experienced menstruation, and to address the myths and taboos that surround menstruation.”Did Peak Stupidity call it, or what?* The Tranny Genderbender stupidity faces off against the science, which is has already been corrupted by Feminism. How can you do science when they change the basic terminology on you? Stupidity wins this round.
Next, from a site I know I've looked at before, The Post Millennial, I noticed the title of one of their articles on yahoo or somewhere.
Holy crap, I just saw that this story comes from the Lancet also! The Lancet is the UK's premier Medical publication, mind you. (I wonder what the off-Med-School publications are like.)
Mo MonkeyPox money, mo problems...
A study on MonkeyPox in women was published in The Lancet recently in which almost half of the cohort being studied were males who identify as women.What's the Venn Diagram of the "trans women", "cis women" and "non-binary individuals" look like again? This is a real problem for the application of the scientific method. It's hard to test for the unfair speculation of the spread of MonkeyPox being via men porking other "individuals" in the ass when the half of your sample that consists of people who can't pork anybody in the ass is tainted with people who may just be able to pork people in the ass after all.
In the study published in the world-class medical journal on November 17, researchers analyzed data for a total of 136 individuals with the MonkeyPox virus infection across 15 countries. There were 62 “trans women,” 69 “cis” women, and 5 non-binary individuals who were grouped with the “cis” women to form a category of “people assigned female at birth.”
Around 90% of the cases reported sex with men, and 27% were living with HIV, with 50% of the males who identify as women also being HIV+ compared to just 8% of the actual women.I don't really need to search for pictures. I've seen this very same thing in Hustler magazine behind the Slurpy machine at the 7-11.
The study concluded that the “clinical features of monkeypox in women and non-binary individuals were similar to those described in men,” and that anatomically, “anogenital lesions were reflective of sexual practices: vulvovaginal lesions predominated in cis women and non-binary individuals and anorectal features predominated in trans women.”
Maya Forstater took to Twitter to point out that it was hardly surprising that the findings showed women having similar clinical features as males when almost half the “women” studied were male.Ya' think? Additionally:
Others suggested that publishing such a study would undermine the public’s trust in the medical world.Trust? What is this trust of which you speak?
In this case, the scientists have to deal with highly tainted samples due to woke stupidity. They will get worthless results. Again, Stupidity wins the round.
* 4 years ago, the day before yesterday.
Comments (13)
Darksky goes Dark
Posted On: Wednesday - January 4th 2023 2:32PM MST
In Topics: Websites Curmudgeonry
Darksky.net has been my go-to website for weather for 2 or 3 years now. I can't remember what was before that, but before that other one it was wonderground.com ("weather underground"), which I started using after the Weather Channel site and other well-known ones started getting political. It's weather - we ought to be able to, but with the Climate Calamity™ politics, it seem that you can't even discuss the weather anymore.. Besides that problem, the big sites have flashy moving crap that detracts from the ability to see, like, the weather forecast. Wunderground.com was not flashy too, but it started getting political after 5 years of my relying on it, then the one after that ..,
Besides the silliness of predicting exactly what exact hour it will begin raining 3 days from now and of even bothering to show a forecast for 10 days from now, Darksky was fairly plain and easy to view. It was, but it has gone dark. They warned viewers that the "app" would be deprecated or something, but I'd thought they'd keep the website up. I mean, why not? Well, that they've done so well that they've gotten absorbed by Apple is the reason. Screw that. I'd be seeing the weather in Cupertino, California all the time (home to Apple headquarters, or at least their origin), a place which doesn't need to know the weather because it's ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL, a thing with my other apple devices. Also, I think they need me on an app, not a website. No thanks.
I'll support the small guys any chance I get. My 15 minute search for a new site got me to pick Weather Bug. If readers have some suggestions I'll be glad to take them.
For a number of uses of the www, the sites you are familiar with will turn on you eventually. They don't like the idea of just "doing what they do", even if they do it well. CEOs and marketing people don't get anywhere in life that way. This is a minor annoyance, but it's part of a bigger trend I've noticed over the last 5 or 10 years: The non-mobile plain old world wide web is getting harder and harder to use. It had a peak of usability some time ago. That deserves a post.
Comments (16)
The Graphical Truth?
Posted On: Tuesday - January 3rd 2023 8:14PM MST
In Topics: Kung Flu Stupidity
I really wanted to finally write something about the Twitter Files today, only a month or two late here. However, after spending time reading and writing under Ron Unz's latest anti-"anti-vaxxer" article, I decided to use some of this.
In yesterday's Vaxxing Deaths or Covid Deaths?, Mr. Unz comes across very reasonable* and even civil in the comments too. (From that, I was a little worried he's under the weather - he says he didn't take a booster, so it's not that... whewww...)
I used "anti-"anti-vaxxer"" above, because I can't be sure if Ron Unz gets the idea that being against mandatory vaccination is not at all the same as being against anyone's taking the vaccine. Besides those who are sure this Kung Flu vaccination push is a purposeful depopulation via death or sterility program, most of us have a live and let live, errr, "live and let die" attitude about it. That is the reverse, but equally sensible, policy that Ron Unz has written. He would not wish to to force vaccinations on people - if they die they can learn the hard way. (I say the same thing, though we tried to avoid that with our family member, mentioned again below.) Mr. Unz should find a better term, "Vax-Choicers", perhaps? Then, he'd be one too, of course ...
I will present briefly 3 anecdotes two that I've already written more detailed posts on and one that I'd written about in an Unz Review comment before.
At the early stage of the Kung Flu PanicFest, April 15th and 16th, respectively, Peak Stupidity had the 2 posts, Kung Flu Mission Creep + Goosing the Numbers and Are Kung Flu death counts being goosed for insurance reasons?. To summarize my experience with this incentivizing the logging of deaths as being from the Kung Flu:
My healthcare plan told us early on (April ’20, AIR) that that there would be no deductible taken into account and no co-pay taken, for any medical treatment “due to” Covid-19. I think that’s a lot of incentive for the patient (obviously) and the doctors and medical businesses (they spend a LOT of money on their billing/collections departments) to call an office visit, a hospitalization, and a death, as being from the Covid-19.
Two years later I related in the post Kung Flu Kash the story I'll summarize thusly:
A close, 86 y/o family member of mine had heart/blood pressure problems only after taking the vaccine and all boosters (very insistent was she). She’d had LOW blood pressure her whole life before, to the point where some doctors would worry a bit. Did anyone think of entering this info in the VAERS database? Nah, you need help from the doctors with that, and I could tell the cardio guy didn’t want to talk about it. She died. (No doubt, she had other problems, but the heart problems were brand new.)
Finally, from nearly the same time this past summer:
My friend’d, also 86 y/o, Dad died (within a less than week-long period of illness) from what was very obviously a GI problem (lots of blood in the stool, etc.) for which they didn’t want to operate (old, with dementia). What was cause of death? Covid-19! (He'd been tested back at the nursing home, just as a routine when being transported anyway.) Well, GI problems are simply NOT one of the many symptoms of that virus. However, $9,000 for funeral expenses to his Mom speaks louder than my friends words in question to the doctor. (The Doc changed it at first, but then changed it back to COVID-19 a few days later.) I’m pretty sure the medical facilities STILL get “CARES ACT” or what-have-you funds from the US Government taxpayers.
Now, the first thing any naysayers will tell you is data is not the plural of anecdotes! or some such thing. No, see, my point is not to use single data points to try to make graphs and see trends. The point of the anecdotes is to demonstrate that the data that IS being collected is likely bogus. It's HIGHLY unlikely that any of these quick anecdotes are something special for my location, mine, or my friend's family. We've all read the reports of the Covid-19 Motorcycle deaths (and other outliers that still illustrate the example) and wondered how prevalent this all is. It IS prevalent. The incentives are there and nobody is picking on me alone.
Now, let us look at some graphs, shall we? The first is the one Ron Unz used in his article. He got it from page from the Health System Tracker website that says COVID-19 leading cause of death ranking.
Look at the big pink hill that spans July '21 to April '22. I suppose that purports to be the Delta variant of the Kung Flu. Now, I'd first thought, and written, that this was the time of the biggest push for vaccinations. This was when Big Biz quit cajoling and started threatening. Deadlines to avoid termination were first of Nov '21, end of Nov '21, and "better tell us WTF you're gonna do right now, in Oct '21, from yet again, 3 anecdotes of mine. Yet again, though, these are anecdotes that are examples of what were widespread practices throughout the country.
Now upon looking at data on American vaccination, I see I was partly wrong. This WAS the time of the big push, but that was to get the %-vaccinated numbers up toward 100. The EXPERTS wanted this, for reasons we suspect as nefarious, it was a big goal of the Globalists, with government agencies, Big Biz, and universities all requiring it, or trying to. However, most Americans had gotten at least the initial vaccination by the Summer of '21. (Who knew? I wanted no part of it.) Here is a graph of initially vaccinated, "fully vaccinated" (for whatever number of jabs that included at the time), and boostered up, from USA Today.
Yes, it IS strange for Peak Stupidity to use the USA Today standard Lyin' Press outlet for a source. It's usually best used as a doormat outside hotel rooms. However, this is just good graphical output without opinion**. If you recall, our site used to append "Infotainment" as a prefix to "PanicFest", as this whole thing was a godsend to the Lyin' Press. Another way to put it is that they had a big incentive to push the panic. This USA Today page is one that has been updated very regularly, it's got thematic/schematic maps of State and county level vaccination rates. One could have kept up with the infotainment on this page for the last 2 years, going "Hey, your State sucks! We're way ahead of you! Rah, rah!" or "Yeah, well your State sucks! You're way ahead of US!"
Note the scale of these numbers. They are daily counts. On one day in early April of '21, 2 million Americans took the jab!
However, I'm now interested in that booster shot surge from Oct '21 through March '22. That happened at roughly the same time as the big supposed rise in the Covid-19 death count as seen in the first graph here. It's does not exactly overlap though. The rise in supposed Covid-19 deaths is just ahead of the big surge in booster shots. The fall in supposed Covid-19 deaths is a month or month and a half later than the end of the big boostering effort.
That doesn't support cause and effect exactly. I would not dare venture to state that booster vaccine deaths have been mostly marked as Covid-19 deaths. There are a quarter million deaths or so under that portion of the pink line, whatever it really represents. However, some, or even many, of those deaths could have been booster or other vaccine induced. The incentives have been there the whole time, going both ways. It's easy to test positive, and being vaccinated may even help.*** Chalking up a death to the Kung Flu pays, while trying to document a vaccine-caused death not only doesn't pay but is made difficult.
Back to a simple anecdotes that may indeed mean nothing, I've never known anyone personally who died of the Kung Flu. I do know someone whose death was hastened by the vaccines and more so, the booster shot.
Then you've got the football player who just keeled over on the field last night. Very bad luck on the hit, they say. Yeah, has that happened much before these vaccines? There's been a lot of this, and it's not business as usual.
Anyway, beware reading graphs of data recorded by the Establishment, medical or otherwise. Your conclusion may be what they want you to conclude but not the truth. The truth is out there... somewhere... but I'm no Fox Mulder either.
* Although, he did feel the need to paste in his Kung Flu-as-American-bioweapon-against-China theory at the bottom. In this case, that has not much to do with the rest of this writing.
** It does link the reader to "Where can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?" and "Vaccines.gov" without anything like "What are my side effects?", which is something of a bias, I suppose.
*** That was the situation with my friend's Dad who died of a GI problem. He'd been vaxxed AND he tested positive. I'm not saying they go together necessarily, of course.
Comments (22)
Happy New Years '23
Posted On: Saturday - December 31st 2022 10:16PM MST
In Topics: Music Holiday from Stupidity
Last year's Peak Stupidity New Years' Eve post, Happy New Year- 2022 - can it GET any worse? was referring to the new Omicron strain of the Kung Flu. (The video embedded therein is something else!)
We could talk about other ways things will get worse in '23, or we could look on the bright side, as John Derbyshire does, noting that things are always worse somewhere else. He writes Happy New Year, America!—At Least We’re Not Canada, Or Britain.
It's not Thanksgiving though. Things are not going to change for the better anytime real soon, so we need to all prepare. Peak Stupidity should have more prepper posts. That's New Year's Resolution # 1 then.
Thanks to all of our readers for spending the time here in '22, and even more so our commenters.
U2 is not my favorite band based on their political views. This is one of my favorite songs by them though.
Comments (28)
Ann Barnhardt: A kinder, gentler Fanatic
Posted On: Saturday - December 31st 2022 5:22PM MST
In Topics: Humor Pundits Bible/Religion So-called Pope Francis
Peak Stupidity featured a serious but occasionally humorous video of former cattle-futures trader Ann Barnhardt* almost 6 years ago**, in which she railed on Islam and Lindsey Graham and others who acquiesce to its rise in formerly Christian America. That post is here. Then, by 5 years later, Peak Stupidity had clean forgotten and featured the video again in this post (which is about another story too).
Commenter Robert reminded me about Miss Barnhardt's site recently, and then I saw she had the same cartoon I put below that I'd seen linked to by Instapundit. Though I would call her a Fanatic too, as opposed to pundit Andrew Anglin, I like Miss Barnhardt's style and principles.
She's extremely religious, and her view is that Catholicism is THE ONLY Christianity. That doesn't mean that she thinks any more of the Commie So-called Pope Francis than Peak Stupidity does. She believed that the recently deceased Pope Benedict was still the real Pope (till now, I guess). She writes about biblical matters and religious history that I can barely follow. She rants about some of the Genderbender and Feminist stupidity that we do here too.
What I like about Ann Barnhardt is that she stands on principle. As much as she doesn't want Islam in this country, she'd stand up for the right of those here to practice their religion, with the knowing they will end up in hell. The subject of the video by her that I liked so much was the Moslems telling us that we can not make jokes about their religion, IN AMERICA. I still get a chuckle out of her using those strips of bacon as bookmarks to mark the pages she wanted to read from and burn... to show them and us that she had every right to.
Making that video was a brave thing, and Ann dared any outraged Jihadists to come get here, showing them her AR-15 on video!
That all said, Miss Barnhardt has a sense of humor too, as she embedded the "Daily Stupid"-style front page shown below. What a different character than Andrew Anglin she is. It's good that Mr. Anglin is able to write what he does, and some of it must enlighten people. It's not bad to have fanatics like him, but I'm still not impressed by his ways. Ann Barnhardt is one of the good fanatics. She's kinder, if not gentler too - not so sure on the latter were one a Jihadist on her front lawn.
I'll have to keep up with her site more.
* I think that's why she's got the .biz as her top-level domain, from her previous use of her URL for her business.
** The video was from 5 years before our post.
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[Updated 01/02:] Added one sentence about the late Pope Benedict.
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Comments (5)
Andrew Anglin and Anti-Social Media
Posted On: Saturday - December 31st 2022 7:00AM MST
In Topics: Pundits Muh Generation Anti-Social Media
I wasn't ready to add a new topic key after 2,483 posts, but I just needed and thought of "Anti-Social Media" for this one. (The back-filling on this and about 5 others will be a bear... if that happens at all.)
38 y/o uber-pundit Andrew Anglin is a wild man. His Daily Stormer website has been well known for years, especially by the HATE industry. I can't say I agree with it all, but Mr. Anglin has lots of truth in there that is NOT OKI with the Establishment. His site on US servers had been cancelled, as I recall - if you note, the top-level domain for his site is .in for India.
India may just be Andrew Anglin's server location. I'm not sure where the guy lives right now, but he seems to have gotten sick of the political and/or social situation in the US at an early age. After having grown up in Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Anglin left the US at 23 years old to go to Asia. From what I've read, he's been in the Orient and particularly the Philippines. I would bet good money that he has enjoyed the benefit of short and longer-term girlfriends in these lands, somewhat at odds with his all-things-White political views.
Though mostly agreeing with his views, I have found the writing of Andrew Anglin juvenile and hyperbolic most of the time. Due to my seeing his most excellent meme at the top of the Unz Review site a couple of days back - I mean, it covers the cuckiness of the traitorous Mitch McConnell, the stupidity of the Ukraine and the immigration invasion all in one image - I decided to give this guy another read. His post there, The Truth Is Not Important to Conservative Leaders – They Are Anti-Christ, is pretty good too. I like his political fervor and search for the truth.* However, I question his religious fervor and his insistence that Jews are the cause of all the world's problems. That's a subject for another post, but it does relate to this one as far as this pundit's general mental state.
Maybe this guy is worth reading, I figured. Then, I clicked on his most recent post (at least on the UR) Germans Losing All Hope as Economy Totally Collapses, just based on its possible news value to me. "Woah, is this true?" This pundit does tend to exaggerate, as I wrote, but Germany has gotten much of the WWW (Western Wokeness Wasting disease?), immigration invasions of its own - long term and recent - and now the economic fall out from "No-Nukes!, excepting those aimed at Russia" with high energy costs. How bad is it?
Well, it's pretty hard to find out from a post that is nothing but a string of freaking tweets! That is just no way to write. I see wording repeated, I am never sure who's replying to whom, and, oh yeah, the page loads slow as molasses due to the incessant tweet-loading (probably my fault, the latter). I will not put up with that garbage. I know Mr. Anglin can write fairly well, so why does he not do that... coherently?
I know why. His whole world is in his head, the internet, and specifically Twitter. I’ve seen a series of headlines of his that all have to do with who is ON twitter, who is OFF twitter, who tweeted what about whom, what twitter itself is doing, and on and on. When Mr. Anglin was banned from twitter for a while, it was probably a near-death experience for him.
For Andrew Anglin: There is life out there, outside your computer and outside your head. Your being a Millennial is still no excuse for this stuff.
Every post I’ve read of yours has a lot of truth but also a lot of hyperbole. You’d get a better sense of things by getting off the Anti-Social Media, getting outside, working, talking to people - that sort of thing. I don’t know where you live, but people in every land are not all the same per some meme. There are decent Germans and decent Americans, and decent people where you live, Andrew Anglin.
* I don't agree with his take on Tucker Carlson in this post of his. Like a lot of fanatics, he disparages anyone who doesn't agree with him 100%. There's nothing wrong with pointing out Tucker's failings, but he is most assuredly on our side (even with the precise staging of his interviews, as related to us by commenter E.H. Hail).
Comments (14)
The Extreme Weather Events will continue until morale improves
Posted On: Friday - December 30th 2022 2:17PM MST
In Topics: Websites Humor Global Climate Stupidity Science
Anthony Watts has been publishing his Watts Up with That? blog for over 16 years now. Back when I cared to argue about this stuff, I'd occasionally read some of his many posts, which argue with calm science and reason against the hyperbolic and wrong predictions of the Climate Alarmists.
At this point, I'm pretty sure that Greta and the Alarmists (great name for a band, BTW) only care about the Climate Calamity™ for its political control aspects. They don't want to discuss Science.
Therefore, the only way to deal with them is to ridicule them and just say no. "No, I'm not going the sell my El Camino!" "No, I won't quit burning the old pecan tree in my fireplace!" "No, we will not sit here and freeze in the dark!"
In the meantime, as we enter this warming period, it is finally OK for me to stop running the taps at night to keep the pipes from freezing*. It could have been a real calamity.
* Granted, it's pretty precautionary, as I insulated most of them long ago. OTOH, they won't let us have the light bulbs we need. Adam Smith, if you can't get the ones you want, let me know.
Comments (6)
Brazen Bai Dien Border Bullshit - Invasion Acceleration
Posted On: Thursday - December 29th 2022 8:00AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Zhou Bai Dien
I didn't even realize this was to be part of a series until I typed the title - see also: An Odious Proposal, Replacement AND Bankruptcy, and They want us dead from over a year back.
VDare has writers who are in the know, insiders or former insiders in the US Feral Gov't bureaucracy or front lines in the Border Patrol, ICE, etc. I've mentioned them before, specifically Washington Watcher II, Federale, A. W. Morgan, Former Agent, and more. These guys have published a lot of big numbers since Bai Dien (really, the people running things behind him) took charge of the Invasion. They discuss monthly numbers of thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands of apprehensions, many of who don't go back, "Got-aways", detentions, inadmissibles, "asylum-seekers", whatever. These numbers are getting bigger and bigger. Long-term regular writer James Fulford gave more numbers here just yesterday.
The numbers would have and may still, get to 10-20,000 DAILY, were it not for our depending on the recent luck of a decent decision by the SCROTUS member John Roberts*, usually not on our side. Depending on how many end up staying, and it's most of them from what I've read, that's 5 to 10 medium-sized American cities of ADDITIONAL ILLEGAL ALIENS per YEAR!
It was almost too depressing to continue reading the VDare posts on the scale of this newest Bai Dien-led surge of the Immigration Invasion. It was a post from A.W. Morgan, Reports: Illegals Are Taking Over Streets In El Paso, And Soon Will In Yuma, that really got me posting about this existential issue again. The picture shows it. These masses of people just come and are new inhabitants of cities and towns. El Paso:
“Migrants have taken over the streets of El Paso—where food banks are just days from running dry—after making last-ditch border dashes in anticipation of Title 42 limits being lifted,” Emma James and Katelyn Caralle have reported for the Daily Mail:On Yuma (off a tweet):
Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls says Border Patrol Agents will be releasing people to the streets of Yuma starting today—Saying at least 50 will be released & it may be a “daily occurrence.”50 sounds like peanuts, but that's daily. Brownsville:
This happened once before during an unmanageable immigration influx in March of 2021.
Last week, CBP was releasing as many as 10 busloads of illegals per day into Brownsville, Texas.I'm used to sections of town that are basically pieces of Mexico or Guatemala. I don't like it, but I'm used to seeing it. Sure, El Paso and Yuma could have been considered almost parts of Mexico before, but there was a semblance of their still participating in this nation. These floods of newcomer inhabitants drive home to me that we will lose whole cities and regions completely. I imagine that, unless they are kin, even last year's illegal aliens don't like what they see in the streets of El Paso, Yuma, and Brownsville.
And as many as 50,000 illegals are prepared to trudge north through Mexico toward the border. Traitor Joe Biden plans to “prelegalize” them.
Don't believe any headlines that use words like fiasco to describe what's going on down there. This is no fiasco - this further destruction of America is purposeful, done by those Globalist elites, Big-Biz slavemasters, and the ctrl-left, who tell Zhou Bai Dien what to do and say, if he can remember the latter.
Even on VDare, I've seen this misunderstanding. The term "panicking" is sometimes used about the Bai Dien administration and the southern border. OK, maybe leading up to the '22 election, they were worried about the word getting out as to the scale of the numbers. Now, I don't think so. It's more important to ruin the country quickly than to be liked right now. To help that out even more, the overwhelming number of new D-votes to come will obviate the need to expend energy cheating on elections going forward.
The bigger the accumulated numbers get, the more guts and effort it's going to take to reverse it. I'm not counting on it.
* The decision was on the removal or not of Title 42, a Trump provision for sending illegals back specifically due to the Kung Flu worries.
Comments (6)
I am Monk! No, I am Monk!
Posted On: Tuesday - December 27th 2022 8:27PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Humor Kung Flu Stupidity
This is another post based on a bit of TV show watching. Between some time at a friend's house alone with his 1000's of streaming thingies (such as The Marksman) and some time behind the airliner seat-back screen, I pulled up that old show Monk produced from '02 to '09.
This show, one of my Dad's favorites, starred Lebanese descendant American Tony Shalhoub, the guy who played taxi driver Antonio Scarpacci in the decade earlier Wings TV show (from back when I did watch the tube regularly).
The image above is perfect, after our recent post on bowling, and I do like the short-haired blond assistant he had better than the voluptuous one that was on either before or after. The detective Monk character had some major idiosyncrasies, the biggest being his obsession with cleanliness.
Watching two or three of the episodes recently reminded me that... basically, I'm an idiot and missed an excellent opportunity for ridicule of the Kung Flu PanicFest Covidiocy. I could kick myself, but it's better late than never, and I do have more to report from today.
There is still mask wearing going on here and there, and the healthcare field has the most, as one might expect. I had to go in to follow up on something (turned out OK, as far as I know), and this time the receptionist insisted I wear a mask. Being a cheap piece of China-made Crap, the first one broke at one of the loop-"welds" within a minute. She provided another. Once I got into an exam room, however, I saw that the Doctor and his assistant had not donned these things. "Nah, you can throw that out. I don't care either", the Doc replied. I jammed it into my pocket (for throwing into the fireplace later - Covid~Zero, bitchez!) and did not don it on the way out. It's good to be
I think back to all the packages of wipes the cute assistants would carry around for Detective Monk on this TV show. He was freaked out by anything dirty and germs in general. This was a big part of the show. Did anybody at all bring this show up during the height of the PanicFest, as the wipe industry went into high gear, with dispensers of disinfectant installed everywhere to the Four Corners of the Earth? The fanatical obsession of this TV character was a perfect caricature of the behavior of millions of panicky Americans for most of a year!
PS: I've gotta add something else I thought about while watching these episodes recently: The show Monk was set in San Fransisco. One would see him step around a slight mess in the street and that sort of thing. From what I've read about that city recently, as nasty as it is, Adrian Monk would have panicked and died before even stepping out of the station house!
Comments (16)
Tony Soprano on stereotyping
Posted On: Monday - December 26th 2022 7:25PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Humor Political Correctness
Peak Stupidity has railed on TV so much that we hesitate to bring up anything good about it. The Sopranos was a series on HBO that I really enjoyed. This was after my TV-ownership years. About 20 years back, there was a time at one job where I did not get put to work very often for a while. It was long enough for me to watch most of the seasons of The Sopranos on the VCR. (Yes, the VCR, but not Betamax anyway...)
If you've not watched the show, you may not appreciate this scene as much as someone who has. To fill you in just a bit though, there's this Mafia group run by Tony Soprano, who was played by James Goldolfini. I wouldn't call the Mafia guys a "family", but they are all Italian, of course (like the starring actor and much of the cast).
Tony Soprano has his own family, and this makes the show more realistic to me than some of the mob movies. In this episode, he's taking his daughter on a road trip to New England for a tour of a few colleges she may attend.
Tony Soprano's faking being offended by a stereotype of Italians is just hilarious, if you know the character in the show well.
"Did the Cruzamano kids ever find fifty thousand dollars in Krugerrands and a .45 automatic [sic] while they were hunting for Easter eggs?" Heh! The funny part is right after that. The funniest part is that Tony Soprano IS a stereotype and loves it.
PS: It seems very coincidental that the idea of Tony Soprano visiting the lady psychiatrist, featured more in the of earlier episodes, is the same as that of the movie Analyze This, starring Robert DeNiro. The show and movie were both started/made around the same time, 1998-'99.
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Linus tells us the true meaning of Christmas.
Posted On: Saturday - December 24th 2022 8:47PM MST
In Topics: Music Movies Bible/Religion Holiday from Stupidity
Whether you are a believer or not, this old Charlie Brown clip is traditional America. I wonder if you'll end up better off having yelled "Down with the CCP!" in front of the cameras on the streets of China last month or putting this video on American TV. There are places in Washington, FS, they can put you too. I checked, and A Charlie Brown Christmas got taken off of network TV, or what's left of that, a few years back.
Then, this song is always associated with Christmas, as it's from the The Peanuts. One may still hear it in public on occasion during this season, at airports and such. Though it's called The Peanuts Theme the writer of this song, Vince Guaraldi, wrote more than this one for the cartoon show, and he called this one Linus and Lucy.
I wish all the Peak Stupidity readers a very merry Christmas, from our blog-family. Thanks for reading and commenting this year.
PS: I really do have keyboard problems, so if I post lightly next week, it's due to that (until I replace it) and/or we're doing some traveling.
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CCP steps off, Pekingese hardest hit
Posted On: Saturday - December 24th 2022 6:25AM MST
In Topics: Commies China Media Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
The CCP stepped off, if I may, from their asinine Covid~Zero program. This was due to worry about 10's or 100's of million Chinamen all raising hell in solidarity, not due to any new scientific findings out about the effects of the remains of the Kung Flu.
That the protests have quelled due to the people getting the CCP to actually back down doesn't mean that the brave Chinese people who were out front and captured in the Chinese panopticon* won't be severely punished. I wish the best for these Political Prisoners, as I do for our 900 in the dungeons of Washington, FS.
The "news" out of China is that, instead of brave Chinamen, it's the Kung Flu that is running rampant right now. Peking is said to have lots of Kung Flu hospitalizations and deaths. I do not believe much so very much of this. Just as we learned from the 1st go-around, at the very beginning of '20, when Chinamen were supposedly dropping dead in the streets of Wuhan, Chinese MSM news is even less trustworthy than that in America. Yes, that is saying a lot!
As bad as our Lyin' Press is, we still (for now) have other sources we can go to. In China, there is no pulling up the Chinese version of the Corbett Report. One cannot pull up youtube in China, Mr. Ker Biet would be languishing in prison, and the videos would be blocked on every social media program around.
Back to this story, yes, I have heard from my source that there is lots of illness in Peking. I don’t know how bad it is, but I do wonder if the story's in Peking because that’s where the CCP can best control the narrative.
Is Fox News any better than the official Chinese news sources? In my opinion, still yes. One Peter Aitken reported just this morning (Christmas Eve in China) that China estimates 250 million people caught COVID-19 since end of 'zero-COVID' policy. He reports:
Sun Yang, a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, presented the figures during a closed-door meeting of high-level officials, according to the Financial Times. The figure, which accounts for 18% of the population, includes 37 million people who were infected on Tuesday alone.One could speculate that because the Chinese people have been forced under duress to avoid these virus variants for most of a year, they have lost immunity to the latest ones. Does that mean millions and millions will die .. YES, of course, but FROM the latest Kung Flu? Pshawww.. Well, but:
Sun reported that the rate of infection continues to rise and that more than half the population of Beijing and Sichuan have already been infected, two people familiar with the matter said.
"There’s been so many people dying," said Zhao Yongsheng, a funeral worker, who estimated that his shop burned between 20 and 30 bodies a day. "They work day and night, but they can’t burn them all."Yeah, but:
A Reuters witness saw a line of about 40 hearses waiting to enter a parking lot outside a crematorium to carry away 20 coffins. Staff wore hazmat suits and smoke rose from multiple furnaces, but it remains unconfirmed – though likely – that the deaths resulted from COVID-19.
China also moved to narrow the definition of what qualifies as a COVID-related death, which will reduce the public death tally. Officials reported only eight such deaths since Dec. 1.8, OK, that's not that many in a country of 1,400,000,000. Also who is this "China" of which he speaks? I assume that's the Central Government, aka CCP. This is surprising, because I figured this whole new crisis is an "I told you so!" effort to steer the narrative back on course. Could they have more integrity than our "expert" officials?
BTW, Fox pushes the vax, Chinese version (maybe it IS more effective? Is it safe? That's not a Chinaman's question to decide.):
The deaths prompted nationwide protests and a demand for the government to end the policy, which Beijing agreed to do – but the sudden change and lack of preparation, including inadequate vaccination levels, led to a surge in the infection rate.250 million, per the article, is up toward 20% of the population. Are they all going to die soon? Nah, but let's keep that PanicFest going - there's viewers to hook, money to be made, and a population to control.
Oh, finally, here you go:
Washington and the World Health Organization have pushed Beijing for greater transparency regarding case numbers, disease severity and other health numbers."When you point your finger cause your plans fell through, you've got three more fingers pointing back at you, yeah!"**
* If you don't believe it IS something like that, I urge you to find Kai Strittmatter's book We Have Been Harmonized - our 4 part review: Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - and Part 4.
** I won't keep posting the song, but this line is from one of my favorite, but obscure, Dire Straits songs, called Solid Rock. No, Mark Knofler didn't make up the expression, but it's backed by SOLID ROCK!
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Alex Washburne and the Covid Community of Scientists
Posted On: Friday - December 23rd 2022 9:58PM MST
In Topics: University Pundits Science Kung Flu Stupidity
In the commenters under this Peak Stupidity post , commenter Dieter Kief suggested this Substack post by Alex Washburne as an interesting look at the conflict within the scientific world as the Kung Flu "raged" across the world.
Two notes: Firstly, that is a long post. Either Substack or Mr. Washburne himself says it takes "84 minutes" to read. That really depends! A word count, easy enough to get, would make more sense. About an hour and a half is not a bad estimate, but that depends on how much the reader wants to understand the technical details. or how much he is equipped to understand them. An 8 page engineering paper full of heavy math could take days! You can do a Ron Unz skim-job on this one and get er done in 10 minutes*.
Secondly, I noted that Mr. Washburne's URL (web address) for his Substack blog - called A Biologist's Guide to Life - uses a different spelling. He's missing the "h". That seems like a way to disconnect his blog just a bit from his other world, probably a wise thing for him to have done. I do similar things when ordering on-line, both to "throw them off" and to help me track what they up to a bit. (As in, who's using that same wrong spelling in the junk mail, for instance.)
Now, to the substance of the long article:
Mr. Washburne is a biologist, as per his blog's name. He was doing post-Doctoral work at Duke University in N. Carolina and was doing the same at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana until his long-term dealings with the scientific community on the spread of the Covid-19. He does modeling of ecological systems and things like microbes in our guts, and he sees this type of work as carrying over pretty well into epidemiology. Additionally, he notes that his quantitative methods work pretty well for the financial analysis he has done too. Fair enough. He has really enjoyed his research, he states, but that is up until he tried to help out with analysis on the spread of the Kung Flu virus in 2020 and beyond. The problem for him was that other scientists involved did not WANT his help, most especially the big shots that had been dubbed "THE EXPERTS".
I would like to discuss this type of modeling and then discuss Mr. Washburne's attitude as a scientist. Though I respect his scientific achievements (though not really the financial ones he's so proud of), I'll state right here that I am not really impressed by him on either of the two topics.
The gist of the article, The Predictive theory of COVID-19, just to keep this in context, is that Alex Washburne's own modeling of the spread of the Covid-19 virus was a much better prediction of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from it there would be over a timeline. In his words:
From my perspective as an epidemiologist, COVID was tragically fascinating. I studied morbid time-series of outpatient visits, hospitalizations, and deaths. I published cutting-edge research and entered the mosh pit of epidemiologists on Twitter, revealing tragic challenges with the scientist-scientist, scientist-public, and scientist-policymaker interfaces. I got to know a world of brilliant epidemiologists, yet I also felt I burned my bridge to an academic career by speaking my truths to world-leading epidemiologists on Twitter whose theories or policies I disagreed with. While I’ve been fascinated in epidemiology since my undergrad in 2007, there was much love lost during COVID.I don't write here to argue with Mr. Washburne's claims. Though I read through the article, I also don't pretend to have followed all the details of the modeling and results. That is both due to time constraints (I'd indeed have to spend a day or two) and my not caring that awful much about who was right. That's not the point of this post. I will give Mr. Washburne the benefit of all doubt on his stated much better predicted results.
Now, to the modeling. Here is that description of Mr. Washburne's work:
I was a NSF-GRFP recipient, and I did my PhD in 4.5 years at Princeton’s program for Quantitative & Computational Biology, studying mathematical models of competition and discovering cool connections between models of ecological competition (trees fighting over canopy space, predators fighting over prey, microbes competing over food in our gut, etc.) and competition in economic systems (companies competing over customers, stocks in a portfolio competing over market share, etc.)It does sound like cool stuff to work on. As opposed to in engineering, I wonder if all these cool mathematical models he's made were tested thoroughly by comparing to observation. With the computing power that's available now, one can model some very complex systems, but the models are only accurate if every single process involved is modeled. It's very hard to include everything that's happening in nature. I read of people modeling this and modeling that, but don't get to read the papers that show how well they comport to observation of reality. I get the feeling most of them don't, as otherwise the world wouldn't surprise us so much.
Peak Stupidity has noted that manufacturers add unnecessarily complicated features to products that are "cool" because they can be done with modern sensors and electronics. Along the same lines, Scientists wand to model all parts of nature with "cool" output showing all manner of predictions, because they can. The theory behind every equation in these models must be known very well, or their "products" are overly complicated junk.
None of that was written to denigrate the Covid modeling by Alex Washburne, however. As opposed to the 3-D models of more complicated systems such as the Earth's climate**, this modeling of the spread and effect of the Covid-19 is not that kind of math problem. It's 2-D of course, as far as physical contagion, but the modeling as described is 1 dimensional, the number infected, the number hospitalized, dead, etc., as a function of time. That's not to say there isn't any higher math involved, but I don't consider this to be anything like modeling the currents in the ocean (just an example).
That's not to say it's easy to get things right. First of all, you must start with good inputs. The one factor that Mr. Washburne sees as having made his model a much better predictor (as observed too) is the doubling time of the infections from this virus.
I’ve already shared some of my story on COVID-19 on how I estimated a much faster growth of cases in February 2020 that conflicted with estimates publicized by the most famous epidemiologists in the world. To be more specific, major institutional teams saw 6.2 day doubling times with June/July 2020 peaks whereas I saw 2-3 day doubling times with a high probability of a fast and massive March 2020 surge in places like NYC, and I saw this by mid-February 2020.There's lots more he wrote on this doubling time difference. In general it was a matter of 2 days versus roughly 6 in NY City and the US, a difference that changes A LOT. He explains the errors in coming up with the higher period (lower rate) based on very early findings that caused the errors in the big shot Kung Flu experts' value.
This is not all it took to make Mr. Washburne's predictions much better, per his touting of his modeling. He does tend to toot his own horn...
My history of COVID tortures me as the predictive accuracy and out-of-sample insights of my theory, which I would imagine are cause for celebration, accolades and awards...I don't know. I'll take his word for this. In this article, he wrote lots about his being shunned from the world of Covid-analysis, due to his not being an official Epidemiologist and his calling for solutions that didn't fit the narrative. Most of us could have foreseen the same. The PanicFest was NOT about doing the right thing (more on what the "right thing" is in the next section). This scientist knows he would have saved more lives by doing things much differently.
Next, as for the attitude of this scientist:
I'm sure Mr. Keif liked, as I do, that Mr. Washburne's prescriptions for the best outcome of the Kung Flu were in general less Totalitarian. Readers here may have read E.H. Hail's many posts on the "Corona Panic" (his term), with a number of them extolling the open policies in Sweden. This scientist agrees on Sweden and praises and demonstrates the better policies in Florida, S. Dakota, and other States here.
Sweden, however, wasn’t sure about the severity of the pandemic but was sure that such aggressive containment policies had a high likelihood of being worse than the disease, so Sweden chose to educate people on transmission and, albeit haphazardly, focus their effort on protecting the most vulnerable populations with the highest risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes.It sounds good, so far.
Here are my big problems with the attitude of scientist Alex Washburne. After reading this long article, one gets a feel for how arrogant and smug even an outcast like this guy can be. If his models had predicted that Michigan would come out better doing what they did, he would be all for what they did there.
In general, he's against LOCKDOWNs. However, this not on principle, except when he virtue signals - which does quite a LOT of in the article, BTW. No, if the model shows you do it, then you do it. On the UK:
Their models recommended lockdowns without adjusting for different demographics or accounting for very different economic and public-health risks facing these countries.From some of his graphical data regarding his models for New York City:
B) The purple outbreak shows a successful lockdown applying the brakes and ending the outbreak at fewer deaths per-capita.Let's throw in more virtue-signalling:
I didn’t like lockdowns because I felt they were an unattainable ill-conceived idea. Even if we had lockdowns AND a massive social safety net to subsidize labor and pay everyone to sit at non-abusive homes watching TV and doing their math & reading homework, this wouldn’t solve the problem of people outside our borders.***I personally don't care what the models say, accurately or not. LOCKDOWNs are Totalitarian. Period!
If better scientists like Alex Washburne had been let to be involved in the Kung Flu analysis, we may have very well seen fewer deaths. That'd have been fine with me if this was due to their RECOMMENDATIONS, not their POLICIES. Scientists should not HAVE policies. OK, well, on the masking then, this guy does sound like he'd have been making recommendations... but the smugness of it all:
I said one could encourage people in the center & right to wear masks by saying things like “when I wear my masks, it says I love my neighbor; when I wear my masks, it keeps the doors open for NY businesses; when I wear my masks, it keeps hospital beds available for others who need them.”Do the people need to be humored like this? Screw you, Washburne.
On the vaccines, I never got a feel for whether Mr. Washburne was for mandatory vaccination or not. I suppose if the science says so, per his better models, than you do it. You find a way to break it to the peons in a nice, maybe virtue-signaling manner. Or, would it be a recommendation only? I feel not.
Here's how this scientist pictures us:
Let’s quickly back up in time to when Omicron was announced. When Omicron was announced, the world went into panic. Borders were closed to South Africa, vaccine apartheid and global inequalities were laid bare as people starved in Africa while people in the US and Europe locked their doors to get their guns & vaccines and hide from Omicron.Nah, actually not. Many governments and the Lyin' Press kept up the PanicFest, but this guy was not running and hiding.****
Ahh, hell, let's wrap this up with another example of this lefty virtue-signaling/ It also show this smugness and arrogance yet again.
The concepts of the Great Barrington Declaration resonated deeply with me. Not only was the world being goaded into policy action by massive overestimates of how many would die, but they were also not being told the costs of COVID policies nor did they have the resources or support to feasibly contain COVID without causing massive, inequitable, and I believe unethical harm to the people starving outside our borders. However, the people I know love the people they’re with on a day-to-day basis, and it seemed feasible we could reduce all-cause harm by arming them with concepts about how transmission works, how masks work, which masks work, and some models for how one can protect the vulnerable.No, we do know the costs - we saw them as it was all happening. We don't mind recommendations, but we can figure out how masks work... or don't. As for outside our borders, I was worried about Americans and America, because I'm American. We set new precedents in Totalitarianism. That's the problem!
Whew! That was a doozy. No more commentary coming on 84-minute articles for a while.
* To be fair, what I guess is that Mr. Unz only skims the articles I've read that supposedly support the Covid-origin theory he's wedded to. He seems to have a great handle on some of the material from the books on LBJ/JFK, etc.
** The long-term reader may well have his mouth wide open here, thinking "haven't you been writing that all those Climatologists are full of it?!" No, I just think that those who claim to have TESTED and WORKING mathematical models of the entire Earth's climate are full of it. Long ago, we posted a 5-part series named "There is no working mathematical model of the world's climate, dammit!" to explain this. (Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - Part 4 - -and Part 5) If they aren't the Carl Sagan types out for glory and enjoying scaring all hell out of the public, I respect the Climatologists that use the appropriate theory in Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Meteorology to try to understand changes in the climate around the world.
*** Here's more from that paragraph, showing his political attitude. (That's not the point of his article, but I sure don't have to like it!)
Most of the world is outside our welfare net, and I feel it’s cruel to recruit the world into our network of global travel and trade only to contract the network during an emergency, leaving the global poor to starve with no US citizenship welfare.WTF?? Now, here's a real enemy of VDare, making him my enemy too.
**** I am just now working with a guy who just got over the Covid (knocked him back pretty good for 4 days, he says). am not worried. Will report back. If I don't within a few days it's because my portable keyboard is almost broken, that's all.
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Never go full Curmudgeon!
Posted On: Thursday - December 22nd 2022 6:30AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity Inflation
That's what they tell you, but this post will come awfully close. Our very first post on Peak Stupidity's Day One was about curmudgeonry. In that post, we asked ourselves (those in the Curmudgeon Community) whether the bad attitude about the world is because we have gotten kind of sick of the way it works, or because the world itself has changed for the worse.
From reading and talking to people of all ages about the political and cultural world, I'd say the answer is the latter. One might get called generational insults for providing the right solutions, but most agree there at least the world does suck more. On the other changes to the World, such as the rise of "TECH" in all aspects of life, yeah, I'm a Curmudgeon with lots to say today. Plus, this stuff is easer to write!
Bowling used to be considered pretty square, at least starting in the 1980s. (There's one movie about bowling, King Pin - from 1995 with Woody Harrelson - that I know about. It's pretty good.) Things change. I've seen quite a few new ones crop up. Nowadays, the bowling alleys have been modernized, with quicker pin-placement equipment, automatic scoring, balls color-coded by weight, all kinds of colored lighting, more TVs, fancier food, and louder and crappier music. The music SEEMED louder, but I can't verify this. I can verify that it sucked, especially compared to what came out of the jukebox back in the day.
Rather than go full Curmudgeon, I did try to go with the flow. There were 3 kids, not all mine, at the alley, only there in the first place due to a gift card. Of course, the auto-scoring meant that they weren't necessarily going to learn the bowling scoring system. It just did what it did. There were TV screens on the far ends of the lanes. Hopefully it was on purpose that the screens at the end of the lanes in use had non-moving ads, while the others had football on.
We paid for a lane based on time. It used to be by the game where/when I bowled long ago. Because we paid that way, we used to take our time and savor it, so we'd be there a while on the 2 games each we could afford. I can remember numbers like $1.50/game. We may as well pull up MoneyChimp and do another REAL inflation calculation. Because we were paying by time now, and they were kids, they played fast. The rate would have been* about 15 games/hour (3 kids x 5 games each). The $77 for the 1.5 hours would be just over $5/game. The shoes were free, but I remember one had to pay a quarter or so for them back in the day. That would probably wash out with the faster rate we played. Inflation in bowling comes out to only 2.5% over the many years. That's not too bad, but, man, 77 dollars!
OK, we went off to get food with that $43 left on the card. I won't complain about prices - nobody cares ... especially not a computer that we were told we needed to use in a manner suggesting "what century are you living in?" This is the kind of thing I do go Full Curmudgeon on, because I'm right! I can learn, and punch it all up on, the touch screen (almost) as well as the kids. However, when trying to run the gift card to pay, we got a "cannot connect to server" error. I mean, the kids tried 5 times, each time going back through the choices on the touch screen from the beginning.**
So all that fancy technology did for us was to get all of us hungry people to head out the door and drive to our favorite (NY style) pizza place, 25 minutes away. Nobody cares though, back at the bowling alley. We had been the only ones in that restaurant. We couldn't connect with the computer server or the human server in the back there, sitting on his ass making his hourly pay focused on some app on his phone.
Well, I won't stop there. On the way home, one of the other kids requested I turn on the car radio. I suggested that the radio music sucked (honestly, I wouldn't know which station to tune in is all) and turned on the CD player which had a Fleetwood Mac album in it (oddly, that my kid and I had found by the sidewalk 5 years ago). Kids these days are insistent, and upon a further request, he deserved an explanation. "Why can't we use the radio? Because it's not 1975 anymore!" That shut him up and will end this post.
* The equipment failed at about 1:05 in. That took about 6 minutes, and by that time, the kids were hungry and complaining. (Not my kid, and that's another thing!) We bailed and went to the restaurant there. It was as if spending OPM with the gift card too.
** Part of that was changing the gratuity from the default 20% to 15% - after all, the server - wait, which kind of server? Were we tipping the computer? - wasn't doing jack squat to help with the ordering!
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Drop Dead funny!
Posted On: Tuesday - December 20th 2022 7:06PM MST
In Topics: Humor Kung Flu Stupidity
Well, damn close, anyway, luckily!
Peak Stupidity has railed against the massive attempt to make the Covid-19
However, this site is not into statistics and data reporting. Suffice it to say that I don't mind if people find out the hard way, so long as it's been their own decision. The video clip below if of a Comedienne who seems to have not only made her own choice in this matter but decided to brag about it.
With no further adieu, here's some crank named Heather McDonald at The Improv. This one starts out funny but kind of goes downhill. Physical comedy can be difficult, and it's more difficult when you're jabbed.
"Thank you, thank you! I'll be here - in the ICU - all weak. Don't forget to show your insurance card. Try the saline!"
I know this is almost a year old. My wife just showed it to me last night though.
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Gun control DownUnder - 6 shot dead
Posted On: Tuesday - December 20th 2022 6:48PM MST
In Topics: Guns
Glenn Reynolds, founder and lead blogger of Instapundit links often to a guy who runs the site The Truth about Guns. One of those truths that used to be on NRA bumper stickers and used to be laughed at by the ctrl-left was "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."
This one makes perfect sense and was just borne out by yet another example, this time from Australia. There was a mass shooting in Port Arthur,Tasmania in April 1996 that "inspired", on could say, the Central Government there to impose massive gun control. Wiki tells us a bunch of details, but the gist of it is:
A person must have a firearm licence to possess or use a firearm. Licence holders must demonstrate a "genuine reason" (which does not include self-defence) for holding a firearm licence[2] and must not be a "prohibited person". All firearms must be registered by serial number to the owner, who must also hold a firearms licence.If self-defense is no good reason, I guess "revolting against a tyrannical central government" is completely out of the question then, right, blokes?
[My bolding]
It'd seem unpossible for 6 Australians to get shot by a gunman, wouldn't it? The Truth about Guns's John Boch used that adjective for this case, in which:
Despite that massive gun confiscation of almost all firearms, not just “weapons of mass murder,” six people were shot to death, including two young police officers in a stand-off Monday evening.The New York Post gave these details:
One of the suspects was a former school principal named Nathaniel Train. Police ended up shooting and killing him, his brother and his sister-in-law. The police are tight-lipped about how the trio secured their weapons and ammunition, most long banned in Oz.
Six people, including two cops, were killed in an hourslong standoff in a remote area of Australia on Monday night.I feel sorry for them and the neighbor, but guess the 2 young Constables, pictured above, did not understand the idea on those bumper stickers.
Four officers from the Tara Police Station had arrived to a property in rural Wieambilla in Queensland around 4:45 p.m. to investigate a report of a missing person, Queensland Police confirmed early Tuesday.
Constables Matthew Arnold, 26, and Rachel McCrow, 29, were shot and killed as they approached the address, authorities said. A third officer was injured.
The shooting gave way to six-hour siege, during which the suspects killed neighbor Alan Sure, 58, who came over to investigate the commotion, officials said.
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Tucker shouts out "Who killed the Kennedies?"
Posted On: Monday - December 19th 2022 7:13PM MST
In Topics: History US Feral Government Deep State Dead/Ex- Presidents
... when after all, it was
Later on, one of the guys skied into a tree somewhere, and then there was the famous "John John", the late President's son (the toddler in the famous pictures from that day in 1963) who lost control of his Piper Saratoga in night VFR over water on the way into Martha's Vineyard. That one has been speculated to have been no accident. Though I don't discount the political scene (he was planning on running for that NY Senate seat that the Hildabeast got herself into, and you know how the Clintons can be), I also don't discount this type of accident as having happened as reported. It's one of the most common type General Aviation accidents.
I'd rather not discuss Teddy the U-Boat commander at all, but there is a pretty good movie about the Chappaquiddick incident that Peak Stupidity reviewed in our post Chappaquiddick, the movie, the man, and the manslaughter(?). Yes, there's been lots of drama and lots of trauma out of, and for, the Kennedy family over the years.
Now, the news from last week is that Tucker Carlson delivered the news - his opinion that's widely held - that John F. Kennedy's murder in Dallas, Texas November 22nd of 1963 did not happen per the official narrative anyone might have read over the last 59 years. Yeah, well, no kidding! The official narrative that it was the 2nd lone gunman who killed the 1st lone gunman who killed JFK with a couple of rifle shots and then died before he could say much about it is kind of far-fetched, far-far-fetched. We knew that, but Tucker at least reaches 3 million people (per Ron Unz here), as he says this out loud, and likely lots more via youtube. Speaking of youtube, here's the clip:
(I'm sure he's had lots more to say before this 7 minute clip, but I'm not sure what the deal is with the timing here.)
I can't even remember if I've seen the 3 decade old Oliver Stone movie, I did read one book about the assassination over 1 decade ago, so I am not the guy to have the details to say what really what and who was behind the murder of President Kennedy. However, what I can say is that it would be pretty coincidental if there HADN'T been Deep State, Communist, Israeli, or other big power behind it. There are so many people and entities that would have wanted Kennedy dead.
Back in the day when I figured his being a Democrat automatically made him a bad guy (pretty much the case now, but not then), I had nothing good to say about JFK. I've learned a lot since then. He was a staunch anti-Communist. He proposed tax cuts of 40%! (Not that this alone should piss anybody off, except for the Communists themselves ... wait...) President Kennedy wanted to keep the United States on sound money, per the US Constitution. (He may as well have been a John Bircher.) The Federal Reserve Board and all those "customers" of that "bank" probably weren't all too keen on the FED being terminated with prejudice though. Kennedy also didn't want to play ball with the Israelis regarding their nuclear arms program. There was also no love lost between Kennedy and the bastard Lyndon Johnson either.
One particular group of Communists who would have hated Kennedy were the Communist Cubans. They probably figured the Bay of Pigs fiasco (lack of promised air support was the problem) was not the last such attempt at getting rid of Castro.
Though it seems like they are an American Institution (that's where most of them truly belong anyway), the CIA spooks and screw-ups had only been around under that name for 14 years when John Kennedy became President. (That agency had been formed out of the remains of the wartime OSS then SSU/OSO, Wild Bill Donovan presiding.) Perhaps after the Bay of Pigs and other screw ups, Kennedy thought enough was enough with this agency and had plans to shut it down. It'd have been a different country now, had President Kennedy killed the CIA. However, the CIA was having none of that.
The CIA is where most of the fingers point to when analyzing the JFK assassination, one of them being Tucker Carlson's. I don't know.
About the Kennedy family in general and all their travails, I was not around during that Camelot era. I was really glad to see that these Kennedy worshipper holdovers into even the late 1990s at the time of JFK Jr's accident had given up on crowning these people a Dynasty. However, some say the murdered President was the last one to not be controlled by the Deep State. (Perhaps Reagan was taught a lesson, Ross Perot was scared by them and came back at 'em, and Trump was too stubborn - in a good way - to get the full lesson.) Tucker Carlson's "news" is not news to most Americans, but maybe his shouting it out is.
So now we know for certain who's NOT been running the country for the last 6 decades. Is that news you can use?
* The Mark 8 torpedos they had (in four tubes) were pretty worthless, per the wiki article, in regards to firing up and leaving their tubes, heading to the right spot, and exploding when there were supposed to.
** I'd never read about Operation Aphrodite before. It was a combination of manned flight first and remote-controlled flight next, using converted bombers - B-17s and B-24s - see here.
Comments (23)
Long distance dedication to Jovan Scott Lewis
Posted On: Saturday - December 17th 2022 7:12PM MST
In Topics: Music Race/Genetics
... in Berzerkley, California from your secret abominator at the Peak Stupidity headquarters. This is Kasem Kasem, talking a quick break from our Billboard magazine American Top 40 show, stopping at number 15 with a bullet, to do a long-distance dedication.
Our special listener this week says he has not missed our show since the 1970s. He doesn't want our listeners to know his name out of embarrassment ... and fear for his twitter account. His letter says "Please pass on my deepest, most sincere feelings of abomination and detestation to Professor Jovan Scott Lewis out in California, for his most galling piece of anti-White racism I have ever experienced, as excerpted in Steve Sailer's recent blog post that I received today via Western Union telegram, titled $223,000 Here, $223,000 There ...".
The quote our long-term listener wanted me to read on the air is this:
“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” said Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a member of the task force.Mr. REDACTED wants to dedicate our next song, by Chrissie Hynde and her band The Pretenders, to Mr. Lewis, California's entire 9 member Reparations Task Force, Governor Gavin Newsom, and all the millions of other lazy, ungrateful bastards pissing and moaning out there who want to steal more of this White Man's money.
This is from the band's self-titled album. The most famous song from that album is called Brass in Pocket.
Stop your Sobbing was originally a Kinks song. Rick Davies wrote it in 1979. The Pretenders version was released the same year, and I'd only heard their version. However, The Kinks' version sounds like it's from at least a couple of decades early, late 1950s maybe, the way it's played. I like the Pretenders' version much better ... maybe because I had a thing for Chrissie's Hynde.
Interestingly, Wiki says that the covering of Rick Davies' song by Miss Hynde resulted in the two of them ending up with a baby. That's a pretty nice business to be in, so all you rockers turning the page and running on empty, you've got to stop all of your sobbing too.
The Pretenders, at the time of this song:
Chrissie Hynde – lead vocals, rhythm guitar
James Honeyman-Scott – lead guitar, keyboards, backing vocals
Pete Farndon – bass, backing vocals
Martin Chambers – drums, percussion, backing vocals
Thanks for reading this week, Peakers! The immigration stupidity is getting truly out of hand, so we'll post on that next week. Then, there will be a post about scientists and the Kung Flu based on the post Dieter Kief linked to in the comments, some blasts from the entertainment past, and more!
Comments (16)
Why am I getting this letter?
Posted On: Friday - December 16th 2022 5:41PM MST
In Topics: Salesmen Curmudgeonry US Feral Government Taxes
This tidbit based on a comment of mine is mostly just curmudgeonry. We at Peak Stupidity haven't pampered ourselves with a rant under this topic key in a couple of weeks, so we deserve it. The IRS, in the meantime, deserves to be terminated with extreme prejudice. What's discussed here is not even close to the main reason though.
That's the top of a letter from the IRS, sent to our household a week or so. back. The envelope did not tell me that inside was nothing but an advertisement by one branch of the Feral Gov't about another. I took that out of the mail thinking, "Oh shit. How much money is this going to be or time that I've got to spend on the phone on hold or punching in keys even if it's not $20,000?!" I had an idea this might be a reply to my letter to them this past February instructing the nice IRS cube dwellers to look again for my last 2 tax returns.. Nope, they must have found them, left in a bathroom stall or something.
It was a big relief seeing that this IRS letter was nothing but an ad for Øb☭macare. However, this still pissed me off, as it used to do when the bank did this. I use to figure that something from the bank is important. If not my monthly statement, it might have been I screwed up or someone's screwing me up. As with the junk mail, I resent being suckered into opening it. The junk mailers have gotten pretty smart over the years, and this is their latest trickery, making you think you've got something really important to open.
Yeah, straight to the fireplace it goes*, but, OK, you got me, IRS! Feel better?
What's #SAD is that the US Gov't has gotten to sending junk mail to push people into other US Gov't programs using this trickery. OTOH, I can only hope that this is what those 87,000 additional agents were hired for.
¿Why AM I getting this letter, Senor? I get free health care in los Roomo Emergencia y this eeess not my made-up SS numero.
* This one went to the scanner first.
Comments (24)
Illuminati ID delayed. Peak Stupidity delighted.
Posted On: Wednesday - December 14th 2022 8:21AM MST
In Topics: US Police State Liberty/Libertarianism Orwellian Stupidity
My good friend who died young right before the start of the PanicFest used to call these the Illuminati IDs. The State - not our State, but THE STATE, now the Potomac Regime, calls them "REAL IDs". Along with the other Police State programs put in place soon after 9/11/01, most visibly the new cabinet Department with the appropriate Totalitarianism-style name Department of Motherland Security (or something), the REAL ID Act was passed in '05.
See, the Social Security numbers that the scumbag Socialist Franklin Roosevelt told Americans would NEVER, no NEVER in a million years, be used as some kind of national ID were no longer good enough for the Feral Police State. American States have had their own different rules for the issuance of driver's licenses, which have become de facto ID cards over the years. Yet, not all the information was consolidated well with the Police State.*
The American Police State wants to be sure who we all are, exactly, I mean, unless we are illegal aliens... Hence, the REAL ID law mandated the various States to issue Feral Gov't compliant forms of driver's licenses containing the appropriate information on us. They want lots of documents from us to link together behind these cards. Maybe at this point, it's just an interim step until they can convince us, forcibly or otherwise, to all get chips implanted. Back in '05, it was less technologically and less politically feasible. (The B-1 Bomber back in the day - late 1970s - was to be an interim step until the stealth technology for the B-2, could be developed. In this case the idea is to get rid of any possible stealth in the population.)
Back to my late friend, I am having a hard time remembering for sure why he was forced to get his Illuminati ID. I don't think his getting it was just due to his driver's license being due for renewal, though that's what I'm worried about. The US Gov't is first - because I don't think that's going to be the whole of it - enforcing the Illuminati IDs for air travel using its Motherland Security's TSA as an enforcement arm.
The original deadline imposed on the States for compliance by their residents was sometime in '08. That didn't take. I don't know all the details of other delays., as it was always one of these things that disgusted me as a Libertarian, but I do know it was advertised as October 1, 2020 for quite a while. I ignored that bullshit. Then, well, Kung Flu, bitchez! The deadline was to be a year later. Then, that didn't take, and Motherland Security moved it to 'October of '23**, which is unfortunately no longer far in the future.
Well, thankfully, that's not agonna happen either. The ABC news site said this back in April '21:
With less than six months*** left until that deadline, the country is far from meeting the new standards, as only 43% of the U.S.-issued driver’s licenses are REAL ID-compliant, according to DHS data.Politico said a week back (yeah, I know, some really winners today, link-wise, but just for numbers):
According to the U.S. Travel Association, an estimated 83 million Americans, roughly 34 percent, are still without an enhanced form of ID that would be accepted to travel, which includes a U.S. passport or passport card, U.S. military ID, or DHS trusted traveler cards.Lots of Americans have passports and/or military ID's, and those frequent fliers have the last thing mentioned, getting them ahead in those TSA cattle pens. I don't feel like looking up all these numbers, and there is lots of overlap. Let's' just say then, that there the number of Americans marked with Illuminati IDs is well under that 56% (100% - 34%) even now. I like that.
The articles I read chalked up the low "compliance" or "REAL ID saturation" numbers to plain old procrastination or slackness by State governments. Yeah, I'm not so sure of that. My friend and I may be outliers, but I hope that the big reluctance to obtain Illuminati driver's licenses is due to more than simple procrastination. Maybe there ARE a good number of Americans who see the evil in this Government tracking of us. Along with that, I hope any slackness in implementing the plans of these Illuminati-wanna-be's is also due to some real resistance to Feral power and control. (I couldn't find anything on Florida's Governor DeSantis regarding this issue.) From the comments section under one of the articles comes this complaint from a true believer:
Good on the Conservative Minnesota lawmakers, and fuck you, Paaron!
Paaron senpai71
12/05/22 10:14pm
I’m in MN. The conservative lawmakers here are treating real ID as the mark of the beast and have been dragging their feet.
In a very recent other ABC news article, the general excuse for this latest 2-year extension is:
The DHS again blamed the delay on COVID-19, saying the process was "significantly hindered" by state driver's license agencies having to work through a backlog during the pandemic.Yea!! I'm starting to like this Kung Flu thing, just a little bit. Is it possible some private lab could do Gain-of-Function research on a designer virus that only infects governments? Peak Stupidity would crowdfund the living out of something like that.
PS: To make this clear, it's the mandating of these things for regular DL renewal or their use elsewhere that I'm worried about personally. I have a PP, so I don't need one for airline travel. This affects the domestic occasional travelers the most, and they are the ones the travel industry is worried about and extending the deadline for.
* They've done pretty damn well themselves connecting up when it comes to keeping track of traffic tickets over the last 3 decades, I can tell you ... personally! Back 30 years ago, I paid for one ticket - 66 mph in a 55 mph zone out of Globe, Arizona - with a money order with a smart-ass comment on it, "you should have searched the door panels" - but, this did not make it to my home State's attempt at a database. Nowadays, you're not likely to get away with that.
It's about money, so the States take it seriously. That money is the direct money from the ever-increasing fines, but just as importantly, more money collected by insurance companies for us "bad drivers".
Comments (13)