Something to brag about
Posted On: Friday - January 23rd 2026 4:28PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Trump Economics Environmental Stupidity Healthcare Stupidity
This first portion of the post may seem like a weasely disclaimer, something to get me out of hot water if a Kier Starmer or Gavin Newscum were ever to take over the country. Nah, it’s not that. If one of the were to, I’d most assuredly have to post from a prison library after all the raw non-woke truth that’s appeared on Peak Stupidity over the years. However, the following is true too.
I’ve been good friends with quite a few immigrants. This includes long-ago Vietnamese refugees, some Chinese folks of the Chinese persuasion, and, way back, 2 guys I studied with who were from 2 other different continents - no, NOT Africa, not Antarctica, and not even Greenland…
Our worries here about Immigration Stupidity and our general elation about the President’s recent work on Job #1 have to do with MASS immigration. It’s not the individuals I don’t like, it’s the mass groups of individuals that have been brought inadvertently and advertently to destroy the nature of American society. (I do detest a number of individuals too, but that’s another matter.)
I had these thoughts as I was remembering something Peter Brimelow had written on the now-defunct VDare website. The greatness of VDare was that it covered every aspect of the mass immigration disaster. There were plenty of writers who wrote about the politics, but there was Brenda Walker (I hope she is OK - she quit writing long before fat-ass Leticia lawfared the site to death) who wrote about the damage to California and nature in general. There was Alan Wall who’d lived in Mexico a decade and wrote with an understanding of the Mexican viewpoint - this included heavy Mexican involvement in American politics. There was Joe Guzzardi (gone even longer than Mrs. Walker) who wrote of social aspects, IIRC. There was a monthly report (forgot this guy’s name) on the job growth for immigrants vs. native Americans. It was very one-sided.
Rather than the VDare writers, let me mention the many ills other than “just” the replacement of the White population, of mass immigration that were covered on the site: Availability and affordability of housing and land, a better job market, destruction of the environment, extreme stress on the healthcare system, huge burdens on public schools, diseases brought into the country that had been eradicated half a century ago, and more. It’s hard to look things up there now.
I bring this up to ask, is it not the case that, if we reverse the immigration invasion, we will reverse all of these many ills brought on by it? I don’t see why not.
Is the correlation in the table just coincidental? No, the law of Supply & Demand works. There’ve been about 2.5 million formerly illegally-residing people deported (about 1/4 of them) or that have self-deported (3/4) over the last year. In the meantime, still people entered legally though. DuckDuckGo’s Artificial Stupidity say the NET OUT-migration has been from 10,000 to 295,000. Well, that’s a hell of a range - do you see why I dub this software so? Even 300,000 is maybe 0.6% of the population. Can this really matter? It does when compared to a normal IN-migration of 1%. The trend is your friend. There are investor types and businessmen who are not as stupid (JMO) as my local university bubble housing developers*. I’d like to see the housing prices go down and availability go up mostly for the young people - more on this**. (It’s pretty much a wash for me.)
Besides the (screen-shotted) tweet above, I also read a ZeroHedge article Are Deportations Making Affordability A Winning Issue For The GOP?
America no longer has the frontier, but that land has been plentiful still and a guy can buy his own “spread” is a valuable thing. Would it not be beneficial for family formation and growth that a man can still buy 5, 10, 50 acres somewhere and make something out of it. That’s not a thing for all of us, but that it’s a possibility is important.
The job market in building and “the trades”, often crowded out by illegal aliens should improve too. (When it comes to white-collar work, it’s the legal immigration that’s the problem.) Now wait a minute, wouldn’t fewer illegal roofers and builders mean higher roof and house prices? Labor is not as big a part of it - same with Agriculture and Hospitality, as people make it out to be.** I think we’ll come out much better off… there was a time in the last century…
How about the disastrous financial state of American Emergency Rooms and hospitals as illegal aliens use them for “free” healthcare? (Free for them, yes, with the costs spread to Americans) I’m pretty sure I’ve told the story before in which I told the bill collector directly that “I can pay our share, but I can’t pay for the 5 illegal aliens that were in there with us.” Imagine ERs without all the scamming illegals. Maybe fewer hospitals would close down.
How about the wilderness? We are so blessed to have the beautiful land we have, but had it not been for a number of caring White guys 150-100 years ago, we likely couldn’t experience most of it. The National Parks might still exist after America is filled with the Globalists’ wet dream of ONE BILLION people, maybe not, but I’m not sure I’d care to visit one anyway. The idea is to have a place where one can find solitude with nature. It’s hard enough now to do that, but imagine 3 times as many people, almost all who don’t respect nature the way you do. You wanted to hike, but you ended up being a trash collector.**
Could we eradicate bedbugs and Tuberculosis … AGAIN? I read the VDare articles explaining how these formerly eradicated ills have come back with the illegal entries across the southern border.. People under 20 may thing these ills have always been with us, but older Americans know that America eradicated them in the past.
I’ve not nearly covered all the ills of mass immigration, hence the BENEFITS of a reversal of it. I tell you who should. The ZeroHedge writer suggested the GOP ought to, but the UniParty has been dormant when it comes to Job #1. They get no credit for anything. President Trump and his people - I give Steven Miller a whole lot of credit - have made this reversal in policy, and Trump is the one who ought to be bragging about the good developments that result. We can be pretty sure that bragging isn’t something that Donald Trump shies away from.
"In one year, I have provided more young people a place to live than that Levittown guy!"
"The Emergency Rooms will be empty. If you want your White doctor, you can keep your White doctor."
"You will have so much wilderness, more wilderness than this country has ever seen!" Actually, as a NYC real estate and casino tycoon, I’m not sure Trump really appreciates the wilderness. Yet, he can brag anyway. I won’t mind.
"There will be fewer bedbugs than when they were called Buffalo Hide bugs!"
Come on, Miller, Homan, and the ICE men: Let’s give him something to brag about!
OK, but sure, the numbers are small as of yet. Let this be an incentive to the bragging Orange Man. Want to have something to brag about, I mean without even bullshitting? Get MOAR done - a much higher rate of deportations (forced- and self-), total elimination of the H1B/etc. visa program, improved exit tracking**, cut down student visas (screw the greedy U’s!), and MOAR. Then, we’ll ALL see some major changes for the good you, President Trump, would deservedly be able to honestly brag about!
PS: I’d meant to mention that Commenter SafeNow brought up this same thought with respect to healthcare, that some political strategist like Carl Rove, but NOT Carl Rove, ought to get Trump to emphasize benefits that could come in that realm (no maybe way too late for California, SafeNow’s home.) Under the recent post about Trump’s success on Job #1, he wrote:
Stress access to competent, timely health care. There exist 40 million people who don’t belong here, and they are absorbing not only ER visits. It is an ongoing, frustrating, stressful, humiliating, health-compromising, losing battle to get timely office visits. And, fully one quarter of visits are now handled by - - new-word warning - - “providers” - - that is, PAs and NPs. It didn’t used to be like this, back in the day.Could it get better? At least note how much worse it’s been getting with illegal aliens swamping the system. Do young people never get sick or in car/scooter wrecks to they don’t care? They may want to care, just sayin’.
* Someone’s gonna lose his ass on that. The last time I told a builder that, after the fact, he insisted 2 times during our argument that “That’s just your opinion, man”, but then admitted, “Yeah, I lost my ass on this.”. ;-}
** That’s another post. Tell you what, I’ve go so many in mind that I’ll just list them respectively: “I paid for all my college by washing dishes in the summer..” “Yeah, OK, Boomer” - a post in sympathy with the economic/family difficulties of America young people - - Trump’s fee increases on foreign visitors to National Parks/Monuments/etc. is a good thing, if just for symbolic reasons alone. - - Back to that post on the cost of roofing with that particularly egregious example with the mansion - - We’ve written a bit on it, but we’ll have more on doing deportations with great publicity vs. quite under-the-radar work - - I hate the Orwellian photo-AI entry deal, but I think they are using this for exit of the country too, so the fix might be in.
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[UPDATED 01/24:] Fixed “advertently” and added PS.
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Comments (4)
P.J. O'Rourke on the Somalians - worst people in the world?
Posted On: Thursday - January 22nd 2026 9:57AM MST
In Topics: Pundits Race/Genetics Books World Political Stupidity
How do you get like these people, genetics, culture, inbreeding, environment, or a big mix of these?
Hey, I've only dealt with Somalians in Minnesota a few times, so don't ask me. Ask P.J. O'Rourke. Well, he's passed on, unfortunately, but I did read this great author's book All the Trouble in the World a few years after he wrote it, and I have been reminded that he wrote a long description of Somalia and the Somalians from being there as an actual reporter.
Mr. Steve Sailer included a big long excerpt from Mr. O'Rourke's chapter in a blog post (maybe the whole chapter), and if he's not worried about getting sued, neither are we. I will say, after being reminded how much I loved P.J. O'Rourke's writing, that Steve Sailer has a bit of P.J. O'Rourke in him.
Maybe the following will explain a little of what we see in Minnesota, Maine, Ohio, and (hopefully not) a State near you. I doubt a hundred Somalians, definitely not a thousand, lived in America when Mr. O'Rourke wrote this.
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FAMINE
All Guns, No Butter
I went there in December 1992, shortly after U.S. troops had landed in Mogadishu.
,,, And in Somalia the good intentions that professional worriers forever profess were being combined with—how rare this mixture is—good deeds. Food was being shipped to the country and international peacekeepers were being sent to deliver the food.
“Feed the hungry” is one of the first principles of morality. Here it was in operation. So where were the starving children of Mogadishu? …
What I met with instead were guns. Arrayed around the landing strip were U.S. guns, UN guns, guns from around the world. Trucks full of Somalis with guns came to get the luggage. These were my guns, hired to protect me from the other Somalis with guns, and they all had them. And I thought I might get a gun of my own besides, since none of these gunmen—local, foreign, or supranational—looked like they’d mind shooting me.
Everything that guns can accomplish had been achieved in Mogadishu. For two years the residents had been joining, dividing, subdividing, and rejoining in a pixilation of clan feuds and alliances. Previously Somalia had been held together by the loathsome but stable twenty-two-year reign of dictator Siad Barre. But Barre gained loathsomeness and lost stability, and when he took a walkout powder in January 1991, all and sundry began fighting each other with rifles, machine guns, mortars, cannons, and—to judge by the look of the town—wads of filth.
No building was untouched, and plenty were demolished. It was a rare wall that wasn’t stippled with bullet holes and a peculiar acre that lacked shell damage. Hardly a pane of glass was left in the city. There was no potable water and no electricity. At night the only illumination was from tracer bullets. Mogadishu’s modern downtown was gone, the steel and concrete architecture bombarded into collapse. …
It’s easier to advertise our compassion for innocents in misery than it is to face up to what happened in a place like Somalia. What happened was not just famine but the complete breakdown of everything decent and worthwhile. I spent two weeks in Somalia and never saw a starving child, not because they didn’t exist but because they were off somewhere dying, pushed into marginal spaces and territories by people with guns. Going to Somalia was like visiting the scene of a crime and finding that the murderer was still there but the body had fled.
… Nonetheless, for someone who has been to Somalia, Mr. Cohen’s views sail precariously close to Romantic primitivism. Mogadishu is no place to argue in favor of Rousseau’s ideas about “natural man.” Attribute superior virtues to simple natives, if you will, but the Somalis are about as untainted by civilization as they could be, and no one who’s met the Somalis is calling them noble savages.
III
In order to go to Somalia, I took a job as a radio reporter for ABC news. It wasn’t someplace I could go by myself. News organizations had to create fortresses for themselves in Mogadishu and man those forts with armies.
ABC sent in its most experienced fixers, men known in the news business (and not without respect) as “combat accountants.” The accountants hired forty gunmen and found a large walled house that used to belong to an Arab ambassador. The house was almost intact and close to the ruins of the American embassy, which—the accountants hoped—would soon be occupied by U.S. Marines.
Satellite dishes, telephone uplinks, editing equipment, half a dozen generators, fuel, food, water, beer, toilet paper, soap, sheets, towels, and mattresses all had to be flown in on charter planes from Nairobi. For some reason we wound up with five hundred boxes of a Kenyan chocolate chip cookie that tasted like bunion pads. Cooks, cleaning people, and laundry men were employed, as well as translators—dazed-looking academic types from the long-destroyed Somali National University.
Some thirty of us—journalists, camera crews, editors, producers, money men, and technicians—were housed in this compound, bedded down in shifts on the floor of the old audience hall while our mercenaries camped in the courtyard.
It was impossible to go outside our walls without “security” (“security” being what the Somali gunmen—gunboys, really—liked to be called). Even with the gunmen along, there were always people mobbing up to importune or gape. Hands tugging at wallet pockets. Fingers nipping at wristwatch bands. No foreigner could make a move without setting off a bee’s nest of attention—demanding, grasping, pushing crowds of cursing, whining, sneering people with more and worse Somalis skulking on the fringes of the pack.
One of the first things I saw, besides guns, when I arrived in Mogadishu was a pack of thieves creeping through the wreckage of the airport, sizing up our charter cargo. And the last thing I saw as I left was the self-appointed Somali “ground crew” running beside our taxiing plane, jamming their hands through the window hatch, trying to grab money from the pilot.
A trip from our compound to Mogadishu’s main market required two kids with AK-47s plus a driver and a translator who were usually armed as well. The market was walking distance but you wanted a car or truck to show your status. That there was a market at all in Mogadishu was testimony to something in the human spirit, though not necessarily something nice, since what was for sale was mostly food that had been donated to Somalia’s famine victims, CONTRIBUÉ PAR LES ENFANTS DE FRANCE said the stenciled letters on all the rice sacks. (Every French school child had been urged to bring to class a kilo of rice for Somalia.)
Meat was also available, though not immediately recognizable as such. A side of beef looked like fifty pounds of flies on a hook. And milk, being carried around in wooden jugs in the hundred-degree heat, had a smell that was worse than the look of the meat. But all of life’s staples, in some more or less awful form, were there in the market. If you had the money to get them. That is, if you had a gun to get the money. And a whole section of the market was devoted to retailing guns.
I wanted to buy a basket or something, just to see how the ordinary aspects of life worked in Somalia in the midst of total anarchy and also, frankly, to see if having my own gunmen was any help in price haggling. I was thinking I could get used to a pair of guys with AKs, one clearing a path for me and one covering my back. I’d be less worried about crime in the States, not to mention asking for a raise. And, if I happened to decide to go to a shrink, I’ll bet it would be remarkable how fast my emotions would mature, how quickly my insights would grow, how soon I’d be declared absolutely cured with two glowering Somali teens and their automatic weapons beside me on the couch.
They were, however, useless at bargaining for baskets. Nobody gets the best of a Somali market woman. Not only did the basket weaver soak me, but fifteen minutes after the deal had been concluded she chased me halfway across the marketplace screaming that she’d changed her mind. My bodyguards cringed and I gave up another three dollars—a sort of Third World adjustable basket mortgage.
She was a frightening lady. Ugly, too, though this was an exception. Somali women are mainly beautiful: tall, fine-featured, and thin even in fatter times than these. They are not overbothered with Muslim prudery. Their bright-colored scarves are used only for shade and not to cover elaborate cornrows and amazing smiles. Loud cotton print sarongs are worn with one shoulder bare and wrapped with purposeful imperfection of concealment. There is an Iman doppelgänger carrying every milk jug.
You could do terrific business with modeling agencies hiring these girls by the pound in Somalia and renting them by the yard in New York.
The men, perhaps because I am one, are another matter. They’re cleaver-faced and jumpy and given to mirthless grins decorated with the dribble from endless chewing of qat leaves. Some wear the traditional tobe kilt. Others dress in Mork and Mindy–era American leisure wear. The old clothes that you give to charity are sold in bulk to dealers and wind up mostly in Africa. If you want to do something for the dignity of the people in sub–Saharan countries, you can quit donating bell-bottom pants to Goodwill.
When we emerged from the market our driver was standing next to the car with a look on his face like you or I might have if we’d gotten a parking ticket just seconds before we made it to the meter with the dime. Shards of glass were all over the front seat. The driver had been sitting behind the wheel when a spent bullet had come out of somewhere and shattered the window beside his head.
Mogadishu is almost on the equator. The sun sets at six, prompt. After that, unless we wanted to mount a reconnaissance in force, we were stuck inside our walls. We ate well. We had our canned goods from Kenya, and the Somalis baked us fresh bread (made from famine-relief flour, no doubt) and served us a hot meal every night—fresh vegetables, stuffed peppers, pasta, lobsters caught in the Mogadishu harbor and local beef. I tried not to think about the beef. Only a few of us got sick. We had a little bit of whiskey, lots of cigarettes, and the pain pills from the medical kits. We sat out on the flat tile roof of the big stucco house and listened to the intermittent artillery and small-arms fire.
Down in the courtyard our gunmen and drivers were chewing qat. The plant looks like watercress and tastes like a handful of something pulled at random from the flower garden. You have to chew a lot of it, a bundle the size of a whisk broom, and you have to chew it for a long time. It made my mouth numb and gave me a little bit of a stomachache, that’s all. Maybe qat is very subtle. I remember thinking cocaine was subtle, too, until I noticed I’d been awake for three weeks and didn’t know any of the naked people passed out around me. The Somalis seemed to get off. They start chewing before lunch but the high didn’t kick in until about three in the afternoon. Suddenly our drivers would start to drive straight into potholes at full speed. Straight into pedestrians and livestock, too. We called it “the qat hour.” The gunmen would all begin talking at once, and the chatter would increase in speed, volume, and intensity until, by dusk, frantic arguments and violent gesticulations had broken out all over the compound. That was when one of the combat accountants would have to go outside and give everybody his daily pay in big stacks of dirty Somali shilling notes worth four thousand to the dollar. Then the yelling really started.
Qat is grown in Kenya. “The Somalis can chew twenty planes a day!” said a woman who worked in the Nairobi airport. According to the Kenyan charter pilots some twenty loads of qat are indeed flown into Mogadishu each morning. Payloads are normally about a ton per flight. Qat is sold by the bunch, called a maduf, which retails for $3.75 and weighs about half a pound. Thus $300,000 worth of qat arrives in Somalia every day. But it takes U.S. Marines to deliver a sack of wheat. …
… Where did this strange nation come from? The Somalis have a joke: God was bored. So He created the universe. But that was boring, too. So God created Adam and Eve. But He was still bored. So God created the rest of the human race. And even then He was bored. So God created the Somalis. He hasn’t stopped laughing since.
As with all nomads, Somalis come basically from nowhere. Roving, quarreling, pillaging bands of Somalis show up in the Horn of Africa—the biblical land of Punt—about the same time that roving, quarreling, pillaging bands of Normans show up for the Battle of Hastings. The Somalis are, and seemingly always have been, divided into clan families. There are six of these: Dir, Isaaq, Hawiye, Darod, Digil, and Rahanweyn. They hate each other. Not that those are their only hatreds. The two worst Somali warlords extant at the time of my visit, Mohammed Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi Muhammad, were both Hawiye. Each clan family is divided into numerous subclans. They hate each other, too. And each subclan is likewise split and irked. The first Europeans, visiting Mogadishu in the sixteenth century, found the then-tiny city already riven into warring clan sectors.
Back when one culture could say what it thought of another without risking a massive Donna Shalala explosion, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (the only reference work I really trust) opined, “The Somali are a fighting race and all go armed. … They are great talkers, keenly sensitive to ridicule, and quick tempered … love display … are inordinately vain and avaricious. …” And, said Britannica, “The Somali have very little political or social cohesion.” In fact, the basic unit of Somali society is something called the “diyapaying group,” diya being the Arabic word for blood money.
Besides the members of the six clan families, there are other nonclan Somalis known as sab, or “low.” These are hunters, barbers, leather-workers, metalsmiths, and other productive citizens much looked down upon by nomads. Noble camel thieves think sab vocations are degrading. The six clans themselves are divided in prestige according to degree of idleness. The Dir, Isaaq, Hawiye, and Darod call themselves “Samale,” from whence comes the name of the country. The Samale clans consider themselves to be strictly nomads—fighters and herdsmen. They call the Digil and the Rahanweyn “Sab clans,” and Rahanweyn, in Somali, means merely “large crowd.” The Sab are farmers, and nomads regard farms with the same violent distaste I have for law offices.
The gunmen who are currently destroying Somalia, who are wrecking the livelihoods of innocent Somalis and robbing them of their sustenance, are largely Samale. And many of the people who are starving are Sab. It is one of Somalia’s plentiful supply of grim ironies that the victims of its famine are the people who grow its food.
Of course the nomad clansmen doing the wrecking and robbing aren’t traditional nomads any more than a Toyota pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in its bed is a traditional element of a caravan. But the Samale don’t need to go on any Robert Bly wildman weekends to get in touch with their inner warrior. Somali became a written language only in 1972. Just a few miles from the main towns you see itinerant families of Darod and Dir who could pass for Mary and Joseph on their flight into Egypt. Here all the men are dressed in tobe kilts, with sword-length daggers in the waistbands, and the women are wrapped in homespun instead of Kenyan chintz. The camel bridles, donkey blankets, pannier baskets, and milk jugs have been made by hand. The nomad life is possessed of almost as much honest, natural, rough-hewn folksiness as a New England crafts fair. Only the occasional flash of a bright yellow plastic wash bucket tells you what millennium you’re in.
I have a friend, Carlos Mavroleon, who works as a freelance TV reporter for ABC and who has spent a lot of time among nomads in the Muslim world. Carlos found a very good translator and went off with a minimum of security and baggage to the far parts of the Somali desert to talk to the real Samale. They were shy of strangers—given current events in Somalia, they’d be crazy if they weren’t—and it took Carlos several days of lolling around making gifts of tea and tobacco before the nomads would chat. Finally they invited him into their camp, and, when a suitable length of pleasantries had been exchanged, Carlos asked the nomads, “How has this war affected you?”
“Oh, the war is terrible!” they replied. And they told Carlos that just last week some goats had been stolen and a month before a valuable camel was lost. It was a very horrible war indeed. More goats might be lost at any time and only a couple of years ago a wife had been carried away.
Carlos said he didn’t realize for a while that the war the nomads were talking about was the war they had been conducting, time out of mind, with the next subclan down the wadi. “No, no, no,” said Carlos, “I mean the big war in Mogadishu.”
“Oh, that war,” said the nomads, and there were shrugs all around.
Carlos liked the Somalis. “Men in skirts killing each other over matters of clan,” he said. “People call it barbaric savagery. Add bagpipes and a golf course, and they call it Scotland.”
And, like good Scots Presbyterians, the Somalis can be religious fanatics when they feel like it. Sayyid Muhammad ’Abdille Hassan, known as the “Mad Mullah,” fought the British Empire to a standstill in northern Somalia
in the Dervish Wars of 1900 to 1920. The British were forced to withdraw to coastal garrisons, causing famine among the Somali clans who were not allied with the Mullah. An estimated one-third of the population of British Somaliland died during the Dervish Wars, a period that Somalis call “The Time of Eating Filth.”
The British never intended to rule Somalia but found themselves continually forced to intervene in Somali affairs to ensure the supply line to their strategic outpost at Aden. In the words of I. M. Lewis in his A History of Modern Somalia, “The problem of the future status of these areas was complicated; no one friendly or fully acceptable … seemed to want them.” And they still don’t. Various internationalist schemes were attempted, which is where Italian Somaliland came from. The Mad Mullah was unimpressed. During World War I he wrote a letter to the British Commissioner at Berbera:
You … have joined with all the peoples of the world, with wastrels, and with slaves, because you are so weak. But if you were strong you would have stood by yourself as we do, independent and free. It is a sign of your weakness, this alliance of yours with Somali, menials, and Arabs, and Sudanese, and Kaffirs, and Perverts, and Yemenis, and Nubians, and Indians, and Russians, and Americans, and Italians, and Serbians, and Portuguese, and Japanese, and Greeks, and cannibals, and Sikhs, and Banyans, and Moors, and Afgans, and Egyptians … it is because of your weakness that you have to solicit as does a prostitute.
Seventy-five years before the fact, Sayyid Muhammad was able to accurately predict the composition, effectiveness, and moral stature of today’s UN.
The Mullah is still revered in Somalia. And the day I arrived in Mogadishu a flyer was being distributed in the local mosques showing a servile Somali rolling out a carpet for a pair of armed men mounted tandem on a horse. One man was marked with a cross and the other with a Star of David. Two fighting men on one horse was the seal of the Knights Templars, a Christian military order formed in the twelfth century to fight Muslims in the crusades. Sense may be short in these parts, but memories are long.
VI
So here we were on another crusade, this time one of compassion (though Richard the Lionhearted thought his cause was compassionate too). Enormous stores of food aid were arriving in Mogadishu, food donated by international governments and by private charities. Armed convoys were being formed to deliver that food. It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). …
Much uglier jokes were available. About food, for instance. It was all over the place. In fourteen hours of travel the previous day, we’d never been out of sight of the stuff. The American sergeant yelling at the Somalis for trying to grocery-shop in a famine was wrong. Just as I’d been wrong about parched sands when I’d seen our bivouac area. The Shebeli river valley is wet and fecund and contains the richest farmland in Somalia. The road from Mogadishu traversed miles of corn and sorghum, the fields marked out with animal skulls set on stakes. (Scarecrows, maybe, or scarepeoples. I saw a human skeleton beside the pavement.) Even in the drier areas, away from the river, there were herds of cows and goats. We’d been carrying thousands of pounds of food relief through thousands of acres of food. …
VII
On New Year’s Eve I went with another convoy west a hundred miles to Baidoa, this time with U.S. Marines in the lead. …
We began to drink and think big thoughts. What the hell were we doing here? We thought that, for instance. And we thought, well, at least some little bit of good is being done in Somalia. The director of the Baidoa orphanage had told us only one child died in December. Before the marines came, the children were dying like … “Dying like flies” is not a simile you’d use in Somalia. The flies wax prosperous and lead full lives. Before the marines came, the children were dying like children. Would this last? No, we thought. Everything will slip back into chaos as soon as the marines are gone. But to do some good briefly is better than doing no good ever. Or is it always? Somalia was being flooded with food aid. The only way to overcome the problem of theft was to make food too cheap to be worth stealing. Rice was selling for ten cents a pound in Somalia, the cheapest rice in the world. But what, we thought, did that mean to the people with the fields of corn and sorghum and the herds of goats and cattle? Are those now worth nothing, too? Had we come to a Somalia where some people sometimes starved only to leave a Somalia where everybody always would?
We had some more to drink and smoked as many cigars and cigarettes as we could to keep the mosquitoes away—mosquitoes which carry yellow fever, dengue, lymphatic filariasis, and four kinds of malaria, one of which is almost instantly fatal. Was this the worst place we’d ever covered? We thought it was. We had, among the four of us, nearly forty years’ experience of journalism in wretched spots. But Somalia … tiresome discomfort, irritating danger, amazing dirt, prolific disease, humdrum scenery (not counting this night sky), ugly food (especially the MREs we were chewing), rum weather, bum natives, and, everywhere you looked, suffering innocents and thriving swine. True, the women were beautiful, but all their fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, and, for that matter, male children over twelve were armed.
Still, we thought, this wasn’t the worst New Year’s Eve we’d ever spent. We had a couple more drinks. We certainly weren’t worried about ecological ruin, shrinking white-collar job market, or fear of intimacy. All that “modern era anomie” disappears with a dose of Somalia. Fear cures anxiety. The genuinely alien banishes alienation. It’s hard for existential despair to flourish where actual existence is being snuffed out at every turn. Real Schmerz trumps Weltschmerz. If you have enough to drink.
But what do you do about Somalia? We had even more to drink and reasoned as hard as we could.
Professor Amartya Sen says, “There has never been a famine in any country that’s been a democracy with a relatively free press. I know of no exception. It applies to very poor countries with democratic systems as well as to rich ones.”
And in the New York Times article featuring that quote from Professor Sen, Sylvia Nasar says, “Modern transportation has made it easy to move relief supplies. But far more important are the incentives governments have to save their own people. It’s no accident that the familiar horror stories … occurred in one-party states, dictatorships or colonies: China, British India, Stalin’s Russia.” She notes that India has had no famine since independence even though the country suffered severe food shortages in 1967, 1973, 1979, and 1987.
Says Professor Sen, “My point really is that if famine is about to develop, democracy can guarantee that it won’t.” And he goes on to say that when there is no free press “it’s amazing how ignorant and immune from pressure the government can be.”
Well, for the moment at least, Somalia certainly had a free press. The four of us were so free nobody even knew where we were. But how do you get Somalia one of those democratic systems Amartya Sen is so fond of? How, indeed, do you get it any system at all? Provisional government by clan elders? Permanent international occupation? UN Trusteeship? Neo-colonialism? Sell the place to Microsoft? Or … Or … Or …
We were deep into the second bottle of scotch now, and boozy frustration was rising in our gorges along with the MRE entrées. It’s all well and good to talk about what can be done to end famine in general. But what can be done about famine specifically? About this famine in particular? About a place as screwed-up as Somalia? What the fucking goddamn hell do you do?
There’s one ugly thought that has occurred to almost everyone who’s been to Somalia. I heard a marine private in the Baidoa convoy put it succinctly. He said, “Somalis—give them better arms and training and seal the borders.”
*************************************************
I guess the nice Minnesotan ladies who've "only wanted to help!" over the last 35 years never picked up any P.J. O'Rourke books. is it too late now? All the trouble OF the world has headed to America.
PS: Yes, this and the previous post have been "phoning it in". I'll be busy all today but should be able to write a decent post tomorrow and probably Saturday.
Comments (5)
AnotherDad on First Woman President(?) Trump
Posted On: Wednesday - January 21st 2026 6:21PM MST
In Topics: Humor Trump Pundits
Note: Peak Stupidity is required by the FBI (Federal Blogging Institute) to follow the Fairness Doctrine, lest we lose our … whatever that piece of paper is that we’re required to post on the wall in
Trump acts like a woman sometimes, nay, really more like a 14 y/o vindictive schoolgirl. Peak Stupidity has stated before that, in some ways, Trump is our first Woman President. (Well, we came awfully close to the First Woman President having been the Hildabeast or that cackling Kameltoe, so it coulda’ been much, much worse!) I won’t repeat our views on Trump’s vindictive schoolgirl-style stupidity regarding Jeff Sessions, MTG, and many such cases.
Under a quick, mostly “What do YOU think?” style post on his substack site, titled The Upcoming Northern White House, pundit Steve Sailer kept the comments visible for non-paying readers.* The commenter AnotherDad had many thousands of good, coherent, cogent comments back on The Unz Review over many years, but he’s since switched over to Mr. Sailer’s substack site.
This one of his on substack is excellent:
A whole lot of politicians are narcissistic. But for a “big man” type Trump has to have one of the most feminine and petty–take everything personally– personalities ever. He can’t just drive his chariot over his enemies, laugh, have a beer and call it good, everyone must kiss his ass and tell him he’s the greatest. And if anyone out there does not, Trump is willing to spend all his cycles and energy in some petty pissing match.LOL!, indeed, and, yep, I’ve been saying something like this… but wait, “I voted for him 4 times”? As a cross-country snowbird, AnotherDad must have voted in two States one of the elections. Hey, if everybody else is doing it…
Trump is like a world straddling, 6’2″ 14 year old mean girl with a penis.
And I’ve voted for him four times!
OK, Equal Time has been given. Good night.
* Just to repeat, it’s NOT the $10/month, and I’d be glad to support him, but I don’t want to get involved in yet another online time-sinking venue.
Comments (3)
Trump-47 Report Card: One year into Job #1
Posted On: Tuesday - January 20th 2026 7:01PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Trump
We've got plenty of other posts in mind here at Peak Stupidity, but I realized what day it was a few hours ago. It's been 1 year into the 2nd Presidential term of Donald Trump as of today. I have neither the time nor inclination to lay out opinions on all of what's gone on in the past year out of that one guy. However, I can write about Job # 1, his work against the Population Replacement Programme, version America.
As opposed to my tepid views about his work on this existential issue at the end of the last term, I am pretty much ecstatic about Trump's work so far, one year in. I would not have imagined that half of the policies he's introduced would have, back on January 20th of '24.
First thing you do, you STOP DIGGING! We've all heard that one. What we don't hear so much about, mainly because it's long been a relatively easy fait accompli, the US southern border is more controlled than it has been since the time of President Eisenhower's Operation Wetback. That was 72 years ago, for anyone counting. The digging down there at least, has been stopped.
That's a feat in and of itself, something they told us - even Trump himself was fooled by them last term - would take a whole lot of money - I mean HALF A DAY of a year of Congressional spending, for crying out loud! They said it was very difficult. Nah. Done... until the next destructive ctrl-left President...
Starting a reversal of the PRP, at least the illegal alien side of it, is something else. People have been deported over the years before of course. We've got to be careful to differentiate, though, between those sent right back across the border when they arrive, and the deportation of illegal aliens residing here. This time, we have ICE nabbing people in the interior. We've all heard of ICE by now, and Minneapolis is surely in the interior. (Well, there's a northern border too, and that is no friendly 49th parallel of the last century.*) As we noted in our post How many times must a man be deported? last summer, all the deportations in the world mean squat if you have un-secure borders.
Last I read, a couple of months ago, 2 1/2 million illegal aliens had left. Granted, only half a million were deported, but that 2 million that "walked before they made me run" are just as appreciated. Will this continue? Will it get ramped up even? Peak Stupidity pulls a number of 10,000 per day via rectal extraction, 3 1/2 million annually, as a sufficient number of forced deportations. If it were done with a real strategy and publicity where warranted, it could result in a total of 15 million, maybe more, leaving yearly, due to self-deportation.
We've written (here and here) about the ongoing violence in Minneapolis. The Communists who want to destroy America require the PRP to move forward - it is Job #1 for them, along with Feminism and other destruction of the nuclear family, Regime Media propaganda, University and other indoctrination, trashing of the culture... well, they've got lots of jobs I guess. This is why they are taking a stand in the Sanctimony States and municipalities. Trump and his Staff (Miller) and Field (Homan) Generals have their work cut out for them. I have no problem with whatever tactics Trump ends up using.
OK, this is all very good news. However the LEGAL side of the PRP is just as big - it's been on the same order as illegal for many years. What has Trump done?
What he hasn't done is listen to Elon Musk on this issue, as we worried about a year ago. (See here - - here, and here.) Trump's administrative move to change the H1B Indentured Servant fee from $2,000 to $100,000, "just a slight administrative change, mind you, part of my job, you know", has been very welcomed. The money matters, if you want cheap labor. It's not all about replacing the White Middle Class. Greed is a part of it too.
Then, whether it just a great excuse, or it's nothing but Trump taking things personally again, either way, the halting of visa issuances to first 49, then 75 countries is also an exciting thing.
Effective January 21, 2026, the Department of State is pausing all visa issuances to immigrant visa applicants who are nationals of the following countries:No, I don’t know who stuck Russia in there. Why Uruguay, though? It’s not a bad place, but Montevideo is not as nice as I’d imagined. (They love their graffiti, more than the thugs of Harlem!)
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic**, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
There're a lot of African countries there, a good start. No India, no China? You’ve got to get serious at some point…
Then, you've got people who come in legally and stay illegally. Non-immigrant visas can be overstayed pretty easily because, unlike China, America doesn't have a good enough Exit Tracking program.
The Trump Administration has recently required $5,000 to $15,000 bonds be posted to secure the exit of entrants to the US on non-immigrant visas. Those are tourist visas, work visas, and many others. Without it, well, I've seen guys like that Indian down at the crossroads***, and I know that those visitors that never get to the Grand Canyon or Disney World, only the convenience store... on a 3 dozen year tour, a 3 dozen year tour... I know what goes on.
We have someone in mind from overseas that really may benefit from visiting with us for a while, but if we have to put down money, that's on us. We'll have to make sure she gets home safely. Personally, I think it should be $50,000. Not enough tourists at Disney? I don't care.
Finally, this last thing is part a serious effort and part symbolic. The serious effort is that Trump has decided that there shall be no, that is ZERO refugees, asylum seekers, or whatever, coming in, besides a few thousand WHITE South Africans. This is an amazing move. I doubt the S. African number will even get near the 5,000 number, but Trump's stating out loud that it's these White people being persecuted and that they are ACTUAL refugees is very welcome symbolic move.
No, wait, that's not the last thing - it's just the last thing I'll mention, as plenty more work is going on as far as Job #1. Things are better than even I've described due to one factor that I've been seeing, even just today when going over articles. I've heard the promises before. We've mentioned before that one thing Trump has not been good at is follow-through, and without that, the promises were broken most times. Upon looking just today, I see that the items described herein seem to be actually happening. That's gotta take some good advisors, knowing Trump.
I chalk up the ideas and successes to 2 factors: Trump has learned a lot since '20, and he has some good people that he's been listening to this time. Peter Brimelow, in a very recent interview by Tucker Carlson (I'll post it soon) said that Steven Miller might be the first Jewish President. NeoConnery and other problems aside, due to his great work on Job # 1, I'd not have a problem with that.
Yeah, Venezuela, I dunno. Greenland, WTH? and I dunno. Bombing Iran, I dunno. However, some other foreign policy out of Trump has been very good, such as the likelihood that he has nearly single-handedly and FINALLY put the kibosh on the whole 4 decade-long Climate Calamity™ stupidity. It's not just about stupid attempts to claim SCIENCE! It's about control of large portions of CoC's (Oh, Countries Other than China's) economies. The ending of this alone makes for a successful year or full term, if you ask me.
All that aside, Trump-47 gets a solid A on the subject of Immigration Stupidity from this Professor.
* My friend remembers crossing somewhere from Montana to Alberta back in the 1970s, when the border was a traffic cone on the centerline of the road. There was nobody around, so he moved the cone, went past, and then put the cone back in place. Good thing too, as he had something sort of duty-free packed in the spare tire...
** Whaaaa? Then again, if the whole damn country even has not been vetted, we don't need any of that.
*** BTW, I had to go buy a car part in that same direction and I'm sure I turned at that same crossroads just over 8 years later. The gas station is now a much newer looking Shell station, but I didn't go inside this time.
Comments (4)
Scott Bessent on the Somalian Scorpions
Posted On: Monday - January 19th 2026 7:54AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Economics US Feral Government Scams
Scott Bessent is President Trump-47's Treasury Secretary. I just wanted to look up his age, 63 it is, on his wiki page, and man, did I learn more than I wanted to know. This guy is openly gay, they say, with 2 surrogate kids "with" some guy, he used to work for George Soros, right during the time of Soros' crashing the British Pound in 1992. He has supported politicians all over the map, from the Hildabeast and Øb☭ma to Juan McAmnesty to Trump (with some BIG BUCKS). His South Carolina Low Country family background is something else too.
I just wanted to comment first on Mr. Bessent's LOOKING like a Treasury Secretary, what with that slicked-back partially-gray hair, nice suit, and the glasses. Most people don't need to wear glasses now, so that's probably for the look. I suppose he should, but I appreciated in his interview by Chris Rufo below that he doesn't TALK like an old time money man. Going back a few years, I don't think someone of the stature of a Cabinet Secretary would have brought up the famed scorpion parable ("it's in my nature") as applied to any certain group of people. It'd have been too Politically Incorrect. This guy Bessent sounds like he's been reading Steve Sailer and/or some of his commenters.
I think this whole 18 minute interview is worth watching, but I've set it to run for less than half a minute.
What you might enjoy here is the short story of the double-grifting by one Somalian that Chris Rufo or someone else in some "round table" meeting had brought up earlier.
Holy cow, these people are corrupt! It may have behooved those nice Minnesotan "frogs" to have learned about these Somalian scorpions long before they'd multiplied to 100,000 in their State. The old Minnesotans were too nice to have been the frogs even. We're gonna need a bigger parable...
PS: Many readers will likely know, but this Chris Rufo has his Rufo and Lomez podcast, the same Lomez that is Mr. Steve Sailer's publisher. He (Rufo) is pretty big. I'm glad to see these new journalists getting access to the big wigs.
Comments (11)
The UKarens
Posted On: Saturday - January 17th 2026 4:51PM MST
In Topics: Movies Curmudgeonry Female Stupidity
(File photo - not necessarily JFK, but it might well be.)
Regular Peak Stupidity readers may have gleaned that we were on a long airline trip over the New Year’s period. After a not so pleasant experience with "our" Transportation
There I was, rushing down the moving walkway, bringing some food to the family. It’s not a moving standway, no matter what the letters read. I believe it’s the same people that block the passing lanes (which are ALL but the rightmost) dragging ass at 75 mph on the Interstates that stand there on the left on these walkways. I have a pretty good joke I made up, best for people I know, that a lady also trying to get somewhere didn’t fully appreciate. Woman and humor… I know…
Oh, but she was British. (Actually I just thought: Do they pass on the right when walking too?) Though she kind of agreed, this woman then went into a lecture about being 3 hours early to the airport, so you don’t have to hurry. Well, OK, if you’re headed to that overseas city that I’d never heard of before, sure. Some travelers are going more local for a flight to, say, Rochester upstate* - no, by the time I’d park and then be 3 hours early, I could be half way there on the road.
People don’t want to waste their time, so they may very well be in a hurry, and I didn’t appreciate the lecture, which is what it had become. This is where I got off. It is something about being lectured in that British accent that really grates. I think its because the accent makes them sound so smart, brilliant** even, and we don’t talk so good here. Yet, I may still know better.
This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this. Somewhere in the PS annals of the Kung Flu PanicFest, there’s a story of the British Mom at the school scolding me for throwing my Covid mask into the sticker bushes. (I had to apologize, not to her, but to the Assistant Principal for cussing in front of the kids.). Before that, she’d lectured me about running stop signs on my bike. She neither understood nor appreciated my explanation that when I feel the need for speed, no, I’m not stopping at these 4-way stops in the neighborhood when I can see. What’s with these UK Karens, or UKarens for short?
This must be some thing about scolding British nannies from deep in the recesses of my childhood memories. I didn’t have a British nanny though. I didn’t have any nanny, thankfully, though now I think a fat Guatemalan nanny who knew no Inglesia would still have been better than a scolding UKaren. She wouldn’t have told the IRS on my Mom for improper tax accounting.
Is this about Mary Poppins? I remember that I saw the movie, but I don’t remember the movie. The IMDB makes it sound like she was pretty cool, nothing like the bitchy neighborhood Brit-Broad or the JFK UKaren… or maybe this character, one Wendy Leach, from A Fish Called Wanda. This movie was brilliant!
Well, that was neither here nor there. We didn’t stay long in New York. Thanks for reading, nonetheless. MOAR posting will come, with the use of a real keyboard. This on-screen one sucks.
PS: The joke goes: "Hey, have you seen Mickey Mouse around here?"
[Perplexed stander on walkway] "Errr, no… "
"Right. ‘Cause we’re not in Disney World, and this ain’t a ride." Yeah, it’s only for people I know.
* Most of the passengers on that route would have connected, but that’s not always the case, more so from LaGuardia.
** Ha, the first time I heard "Brilliant!" from an English lady, 25 years ago, I thought "Aww, shucks, no big deal". It’s just like "awesome" used to be here.
Comments (4)
Venezuela, China, and the DonRoe Doctrine
Posted On: Thursday - January 15th 2026 11:27AM MST
In Topics: Trump China Americans Liberty/Libertarianism World Political Stupidity
I knew someone from Venezuela way back in the mid-1980s. Within a post on a slightly different subject, I included my opinion of the former Crown Jewel of South America that was Venezuela before Communism and AFTER the discovery* and then proper exploitation of the oil riches that lie underneath. Most would say that Peak Venezuela was the 35-40 year period from the early 1950s through the late 1980s.
From that old post:
Let me tell you about South America, though very generally, and about Venezuela. Back in the 1980's that country was the "crown jewel" of the continent. For various reasons, probably good stuff for another post, all the countries in Latin America have have been run badly for most of their histories. Simon Bolivar was the guy who liberated more than 1/2 the countries in South America from the Spaniards, who were no Magna Carta-drafters or Constitutional scholars themselves. Subsequent to these liberations, the mixed native-Spanish people have been running these semi-shitholes into the ground, pulling them out of the ground and back, in 10 - 50 year cycles. Some have been in the shithole phase for their entire histories so far - bad timing, that, huh? In general, down there, military juntas come and go, Commies take over for long periods, death squads try to get rid of the Commies, along with other people they never did like and so forth.Hugo Chavez took over the Presidency in early 1999 and ran the place into the ground through his death in '13. A pundit named Adrian Wilson has a nice quick take on Venezuela Before Chávez — A Democracy Built on Oil and Fragile Trust on his Quiet Revolutions substack site.
However, the Venezuelans had done well with their oil resources, and Caracas, the capital, was an up-and-coming modern city. The one immigrant I knew was a smart one, and did very well in the US, but saw no reason to bring anyone else from the big family up here. They were doing quite well down there. Now, that's nothing but an anecdote (if that) but I am going by the stories I was told of the place, though obviously a bit biased. As is the case throughout Latin America, there are always loads of the very poor. Who knows what would have happened if a stable government down had stayed in place in Venezuela? However, the Commies, starting with a long reign by Hugo Chavez, took over 20-odd years back, and the place eased itself ungracefully into shithole status. Could one expect anything else?
As I read about the President Trump- arranged kidnapping of Communist Nicola Maduro over the last couple of weeks, it seems that his predecessor Hugo Chavez has gotten short shrift. The downfall of Venezuela didn't start with Maduro. He just oversaw the last dozen years of it. (Does Trump even know this history? It doesn't matter, I guess.) Chavez is dead though, so ...
What does Peak Stupidity have to say about the raid on the leadership of Venezuela, a very blatant Regime Change either side would admit?
First of all, let's dispense with the pure stupidity, such as that Mr. Maduro was arrested on gun and drug charges. The leader of a country's armed forces will by definition be in control of lots of guns and other armament. Can the Prime Minister of the UK come to my State and arrest the Governor, or any of us living here for violating the strict gun laws of the Realm? Didn't we fight a war about that a quarter Millenium ago? ... and officially, we were Colonies. Venezuela is not exactly a colony, though we'll get to this.
Narcotics have come in from the cartels in Latin American countries for... since I ever thought about it.... Mexico, Colombia (Medellin was THE place in the '90s - it's supposed to be very nice now.), Peru, Bolivia Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela too, sure. How about Americans don't take the drugs that will kill them, and there is no problem? Along with this, that's one more advantage of securing the border, the control of uncontrolled substances.
No, it's not about the guns and only a bit about the drugs. It's somewhat about the oil - Trump does not like Americans getting screwed, and he may have just learned what Communist "Nationalization" of industries has been about over the last century - better late than never. (At least he's honest about the oil - I'll give him that.) What this Western Hemispheric Regime Changes is really about, though, is China and the Monroe Doctrine.
That Monroe Doctrine, the policy that America will basically prevent external large powers from having any control of the countries of the Western Hemisphere, goes back a LONG WAYS, just over 2 centuries. Per wiki,
President James Monroe first articulated the doctrine on December 2, 1823, during his seventh annual State of the Union Address to Congress (though it was not named after him until 1850). At the time, nearly all Spanish colonies in the Americas had either achieved or were close to independence. Monroe asserted that the New World and the Old World were to remain distinctly separate spheres of influence, and thus further efforts by European powers to control or influence sovereign states in the region would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security.China was not in the picture back in 1823, and it was not even in 1923. This is 2026.
One can claim rightly that in Chinese history, other than the 7 voyages of Zheng He in the early 1,400s AD that were unfortunately shut down by the Yuan Dynasty emperor Hong Zi, the Middle Kingdom has never had military aims outside the Middle Kingdom. You can't say they're not a war-making people, as just this one case alone would attest. Other than as a matter of pride, cough, Taiwan, cough, cough, China doesn't want to take over the world, right?
China doesn't have to "take over" the world militarily though. Chinese people are already everywhere. The sun never sets on the diaspora of Chinese people. The Chinese have business deals going in nearby countries to China, all over Africa, and in South America too with people there to make it happen.** Is that OK by the Monroe doctrine, if it's "strickly bidness"? Should we care about the 203 y/o Monroe Doctrine?
This is where Peak Stupidity may stray off the Libertarian/Constitutionalist ranch. I would like to proclaim that, NO, the US has no business in deciding who runs what country anywhere beside ours and we CAN make it on our own. I'd like to see more of that making it on our own.
However, those 2 big oceans may still bless us militarily, but the economy is Global, and if China ends up owning the resources of all the rest of the world, controls the sea lanes and the airways, are we going to be OK with that? It's been 2 centuries already during which the Monroe Doctrine has been in place, with the small Cold War era exceptions of Cuba and Nicaragua... and there was quite a big fuss made about that, especially over the former.
We might not be happy about a world run by the Chinese, with only us trying to operate separately. Having the world up in our business next door is not something Americans are used to. (There may be a lesson there for NATO and Russia.)
A friend who is very excited about the action Trump took down there in Venezuela says the Chinese have been taken aback by this and taught a lesson. This is where I'm conflicted.
Let me add one more sentence from that wiki blurb above that follows:
In turn, the United States would recognize and not interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal affairs of European countries.Wait, what ...? I guess we haven't been following the whole of the Monroe Doctrine after all... at least half of the time it's been in place. Is it Trump's idea that maybe we should? This could include controlling Greenland but then angering the Euros so much about that, such that NATO is destroyed? Would that be that 4-D chess that they say Trump is playing, though we'd guess these ideas would have been passed on to him by some advisors?
So, I don't know the answer to the question, was this the right thing to do, even if most certainly not proper per the US Constitution and declarations of war. I can see that the ctrl-left has been left in a quandary. They have criticized Trump before for NOT taking out this Latin American dictator, but now they can't thank him for doing it because... he's Trump.
Good luck to Venezuelans... those in Venezuela that is. The end of Communism, for now, can't be a bad thing.
PS: What I didn't state in that old post is that it has often been US help that switched some of these places from Communism back to Military Juntas, which was going beyond the Monroe Doctrine, as other foreign powers were not always involved.
* It was first found in Maracaibo back in 1922.
** I am in the process of re-watching Empire of Dust for that movie review.
Comments (7)
Just the flu, bro.
Posted On: Wednesday - January 14th 2026 7:01PM MST
In Topics: Healthcare Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
I don't like the sound of THAT!
There have been a few headlines here and there about some new spreading flu. We got it. At least one guy at work got it and probably gave it to me, my wife got it, probably from one or both of two guys coughing continually during our trip, and then I got it again. It didn't help, for my wife and this 2nd instance, that we ended up stuck in a far away airport for 20 hours and then I ended up being up for 46 hours, not counting nodding off just a few times. Get yourself in that weak of a state, and you're asking for it... something.
Perhaps some of my disdain for the Kung Flu PanicFest was due to my being blessed in never experiencing ANY lung problems, no matter how sick I might be otherwise. It's nice to be able to always take a deep breath and feel that O2 do what it's supposed to.
Therefore, not very much distinguishes any kind of flu from just a cold for me. This time I've been weak, sneezing in spurts, blowing out phlegm on occasion, and had the chills. It's a cold, pretty much ... but... it was a little different, I gotta say, with the chills. Normally, one will feel cold and only get over it by putting a sleeping bag over the normal covers. Within 2 or 5 minutes, you'll be warm. This time it took half an hour! of being wrapped up to finally feel warm. I also got this slightly queasy feeling and a very short mild headache a couple of mornings after getting up.
So, that must have been the flu, bro. Big damn deal. After what we went through 6 years ago, there aren't many people who are going to glue their eyes to the TV and internet awaiting the latest symptoms to worry about, the latest case counts, and further instructions. The boy didn't just cry wolf a couple of times to set himself up for failure - in the case of the Kung Flu PanicFest, it was two year long piercing scream that pretty much did in any further opportunities to scare the populace with tales of scary germs.
As for doctors, with the exception of seeing one just to obtain a prescription - we didn't require any medicine, and I forwent my wife's home concoction - that doctor-patient relationship has been ruined for many of us. Were a few more people traveling wearing face masks? Maybe, but nothing significant.
If we're going to try to come up with anything to worry about epidemic*-wise, let's get all paranoid and conspiracy-minded here: What if these people, the Faucis and Scarf-ladies and those behind them, are smarter than we think? If they want to wipe out much of the population, to fulfill Georgia GuideStone Point #1 (in 8 languages, it was!**), they could put us off guard first. Imagine that the whole Kung Flu PanicFest was a set-up. They not only wanted people to panic for a coupla years, but they wanted people to realize afterward that they'd been duped and get mad about it. Never again will we listen to these CDC and WHO idiots!
Ahhhh, see, that's how they WANT us to think now... as they work in the lab, with their Pangolins and Bats up there on the slab... in deepest yellowest China ... on a virus SO DEADLY that 8 Billion of us will die because we will refuse do the only things that would have saved us, continuously wiping down doorknobs, wearing face masks, and standing 6 feet apart on stickers.
PS: Before I looked deeply into this possibility, I was just like you readers. I thought the people in Government and the Legacy Media were just stupid. Then, I read 17 books this weekend while laying in bed covered with 5 sleeping bags and a case of Kleenex ... [/Ron Unz mode]
* When did these things change from being epidemics to pandemics? Will there ever be any more epidemics, or is it all pandemics, going forward?
** ... till some stupid with a flare gun... no, it was more than a flare gun... but, thank you, Blue Oyster Cult.
Comments (2)
Get US out of the _______!
Posted On: Tuesday - January 13th 2026 2:01PM MST
In Topics: Trump Liberty/Libertarianism World Political Stupidity
UN!? Peak Stupidity readers are welcome to fill in the blank with whatever international organization they want out of ... or we can see if President Trump follows through on his latest advice.
The advice from Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the result of an Executive Order Trump signed a couple of weeks after taking office ordering the State Department was to "review the international intergovernmental organizations that 'no longer serve American interests'". He only gave them a year? That's a tall order.
ZeroHedge reported last week, via the Epoch Times, US To Withdraw From 66 International Bodies, Treaties. That's a start. Let's get an inkling of who and what they're talking about there:
The U.N.-related entities that the Trump administration withdrew from include the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Law Commission, International Trade Centre, Peacebuilding Commission, Peacebuilding Fund, U.N. Democracy Fund, U.N. Energy, U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, and U.N. University.Anything spelled "centre" or "programme", yeah, it's gotta go. "Empowerment"? You're on the list!
The non-U.N. organizations included the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact and the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.
The memorandum cited over two dozen “hybrid threats,” such as the Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories and the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund.
The very first ZH comment asks what I would, "How about NATO and the UN?" That is THE original request, nay, DEMAND, from those Libertarians, Constitutionalists, real Americans of all sorts, as stated by the John Birch Society long long ago. GET! US! OUT! OF! THE! UN! The "us" conveniently means both the pronoun and "United States". Going along with this, since there's no point in hosting a gathering of Globalists if you're no longer going to the meetings, there's GET! THE! UN! OUT! OF! THE! US!
We'll forgo the Dr. Zhivago scene seen that appeared in our post Bolshevik Zohran Kwame Mamdani on seizing the means of habitation this time, but I can imagine Mayor Zohran's Housing Czar Kaprugina's scolding right now: "There was living quarters for 18 thousand illegal alien Communist New Yorkers in this building, Comrade Trump." "Errr, yes, Comrade, this is a much better arrangement."
“These organizations actively seek to constrain American sovereignty. Their work is advanced by the same elite networks—the multilateral ‘NGO-plex’—that we have begun dismantling through the closure of [the United States Agency for International Development].”This is what I voted for.
Get us out of everything!
If Trump keeps this sort of thing up he might be eligible for an Honorary John Birch Society membership. I'll pay his dues.
PS: I don't think since the JBS started up there's been any President who deserved to be a member. However, Barry Goldwater, GOP Presidential candidate in 1964 was said to be "the John Birch candidate". Had that election 62 years ago gone the other way... America would have added another few decades to its life.
Comments (5)
Bob Weir has died
Posted On: Monday - January 12th 2026 8:27PM MST
In Topics: Music The Dead
There were the 2 drummers, Mickey Hart and Bobby Kreutzmann, and a few solid keyboard players came and went. Their keyboards are ingrained in the sound of all my favorites. However, the core of The Dead were Jerry, Bob and Phil.* I remember reading that these 3 played something like 1,500 shows in a row without any of them missing one.
We lost Jerry 30 years ago this past summer. Phil died a year and a quarter ago, and now Bob Weir has died. I ran into a lady today who saw my Deadhead Steal Your Face sticker and remarked "It's been a really bad time lately." Well, these guys were playing their music in 1965 as The Grateful Dead, they'd already been playing together and were young adults then, so what would you expect the year 2026 to bring? We all get old. Hopefully, we will be grateful when dead. I just answered "Yeah."
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I don't think many Deadheads would deny that Bobby had a better singing voice than Jerry, at least after the early years of the band before Jerry's kind of deteriorated. (It was his guitar playing that was his gift anyway.)
Our reader G. Anderson picked the following And the Music Never Stopped from 2/3/78, University of Northern Iowa UniDome, Cedar Falls, Iowa**, and he knows his stuff. (I think Phil's bass line in this song is one of his best too.)
I really like Bobby's voice on Estimated Prophet. There are probably great live versions that would beat this, but this studio version, from the album Terrapin Station. Gerry's guitar with the wah-wah (envelope filter) is sublime!
My time coming, any day, don't worry about me, no.I hope he ... we all... go find a paradise beyond that Golden Door... maybe even better than the Grateful Dead era Paradise that was California.
Been so long I felt this way, I'm in no hurry, no.
Rainbows and down that highway where ocean breezes blow.
My time coming, voices saying they tell me where to go.
Don't worry about me, nah nah nah, don't worry about me, no
And I'm in no hurry, nah nah nah, I know where to go.
I could paste in a hundred other songs, but I wouldn't know where to start. We'll have to feature The Grateful Dead more regularly, as we used to.
PS: Thanks go to Adam Smith for the artwork!
* That'd be Jerry Garcia, vocals and lead guitar, Bob Weir, vocals and rhythm/lead guitar, and Phil Lesh, bass guitar and occasional vocals.
** You don't just specify Dead SONGS - you specify Dead songs as played in a certain SHOW, as they played them differently.
Comments (4)
Ex-FED Janet Yellen finally catches up with Peak Stupidity
Posted On: Saturday - January 10th 2026 10:36AM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Economics US Feral Government
… but she’s got a professional Economist’s technical term* for it, so there’s that. Fiscal Dominance is going on, my friends. Gasp! Is it worse than the COVID one-niner?! By far, yes, it is.
The Unz Review commenter ePebble excerpted a lot of a recent Fortune magazine article by one Eve Roytburg, Janet Yellen warns the $38 trillion national debt is testing a red line economists have feared for decades. Here’s what this Fiscal Dominance is (thankfully, nothing involving Mr Yellen and whips & chains):
Fiscal dominance is the point at which financing needs begin to constrain the central bank’s inflation fight, and the adjustment happens through the purchasing power of money rather than through taxes or spending cuts.Let’s stop here before the brake analogy** brakes down even further…
Imagine the U.S. economy is a car, with the Treasury as the driver, ready to spend money at the government’s behest, and the Federal Reserve is the brake, ready to raise interest rates to slow inflation if the Treasury spends too much. The car is now towing a $38 trillion trailer. The weight is so heavy that if the Fed hits the brakes too hard, the brake pads will explode from the pressure (the government’s interest payments will become too expensive, causing a default). So, to prevent the car from crashing, the Fed is forced to let off the brake, even if the car is speeding toward the cliff of over-spending. The result: hyperinflation.
At a panel hosted by the American Economic Association on Sunday, Yellen said she worries the U.S. might be getting to the point where the car is too heavy for the brakes to work.
Is it OK to have a post consisting entirely of only the two words No shit!? I’m not Yellen here, but, man we’re been writing about this obvious arithmetic certainty for years here. Yet, I’ve been neither the FED Chairman nor the Treasury Secretary, as has Janet Yellen.
Without all that financial expertise around us, Peak Stupidity has written a number of posts based on the simple little pie charts near the back of the IRS 1040 Instruction booklet .pdfs that show very basic revenue and expenditures – the first was one 8 1/2 years ago: Quick glance at the budget from US-Gov crack Green-eyeshade boys. Check our Economics topic key for more.
Indeed, that little piece of pie called “net interest on debt” used to be a little morsel at 5-6% or so, BUT at FED-set interest rates (based on the mixture of bonds redeemed) of 1.1% (one of the other sets of pie grapsh.). Were that to be a number that Janet Yellen is FINALLY worried about, yeah, a more natural rate of 7% would bring the pie slice up to 30-40% or probably higher now that the debt is up to 38 1/2 $Trillion.
It might have been helpful if Janet had wised up*** back in ‘14, her first year as FED Chairman, when the national debt was “only” $18 Trillion. She could have foreseen the problem and maybe told somebody who probably wouldn’t have done … I guess she doesn’t do her own taxes, so she didn’t do this arithmetic.
We are very much looking forward to the newest IRS provided pie charts, which will show the ‘24 fiscal year’s Fiscal Dominance. They are probably already out. A post is forthcoming…
* It’s not like anything in Economics is technical in the scientific/engineering, I.e. REAL, sense, but it gets worse than this with the use of the term in the “trading” world.
** Exploding brake pads, you say? You would expect them to lock up back in the day before anti-skid, but friction permitting, they’d get hot and “fade”. Brakes don’t normally explode. Economies can. I would say, stay in your lane, Economists, but they’re off into the rumble strips…
*** Yeah, another obscure old movie reference there.
Comments (5)
Why call them Commies?
Posted On: Friday - January 9th 2026 5:12PM MST
In Topics: Commies Pundits
In our last post, the word "Commies", short for "Communists" obviously, appears a whole lot. I understand how readers may be wondering why we call the Antifa types, such as the latest "anti-NAZI", supposed anti Police State crowd in Minneapolis Communists.
We've said before, such as in the old post None dare call them Commies, that no, it's not the original Communist ideology itself that fits these pieces of work (to put it nicely). They could not get through Das Kapital, The Communist Manifest, Mao's Little Red Book©, or probably any book at all. Are they on-board with the class struggle and the proletariat vs the bourgeoisie? There's actually a little bit of class struggle involved, even though the American ctrl-left has long struggled on behalf of race and sex. That has meant being against White Men as Job #1 for them.
These people were well described by Cajun ex-Cuban Humberto Fontova as Los Resentidos, "the Resentful Ones". Young people today have a lot to be resentful about. Not all of them want to destroy society though. It's the Communists in the lot that figure it'll take tearing down traditional America, the very society that created the best living conditions in the world, to "show these people".
Oh, yeah, they are supported by the Globalists like George Soros and such, as we've already learned about this latest batch, so doesn't that make them Globalists officially? I don't think these are the "eat zee bug" people, as much as I'd like to see that. No, they ARE in a class struggle, as they work to destroy what's left of the White Middle Class. The White Middle Class is being destroyed in large part by the immigration invasion. Therefore, they are for it.
The people you see out in the streets pretending to care about, or being duped into caring about, the ICE Police State rounding up people, care not a whit about the old rule-of-law-not-men, limited government America. They want to destroy it all, hoping for, not a Utopia this time, so I don't know what. They haven't thought that far ahead, as these new, more sexually, ethnically, racially, body-mass-indexually ink-cover diverse are not your Great-Granddaddy's Commies, those that could be found in 110 year-ago Russia or 100 year-ago Germany. They're missing a couple of dozen IQ points too. It's just that America has always been the prize catch, and in today's times, gotten to due to the VERY same people having infiltrated the Institutions, our country has become ripe for their struggle.
A REAL Nazi would use his service revolver. Even the smallest round would penetrate that umbrella nicely.
These Commies call the ICE guys doing the job we want done Fascists, hoping Americans will get duped. This is nothing new. The Antifa has been around longer than I'd first realized. They are of the same ilk that marched and caused havoc in century-ago Berlin against the Nazis, who WERE Fascists of a sort, but came to power due to their being the ones who got rid of these Communists. That didn't work out well... for ANYONE.
I think Americans can do better this time. We're thankfully not in the sorry state economically that Germany was in a century ago. Most Americans want nothing to do with them. We're better off just moving these people out of the way, so ICE can get Job #1 done. Would the old-timey Fascists have just thrown these annoyances into the snow at the side of the street? Hopefully that's all we'll have to keep doing. That's up to the Commies though.
ZeroHedge posted a very good article along these lines by pundit Brandon Smith - mentioned here before, entitled How Dare You Fight Back Against Communists!. Here's a big excerpt:
1) They work with the very same oligarchs, corporatists and globalists they claim to despise. They happily take the money of wealthy institutions and NGOs and do the bidding of their elitist masters as long as they get to tear down their enemies.Well said, Mr. Smith. Thank you.
2) They employ illicit funding to pay for the mobilization of an astroturf army of provocateurs and agitators (useful idiots will naturally gravitate to this army over time because they wrongly assume it’s grassroots).
3) They use propaganda to justify the activist sabotage and disruption of the target society by falsely claiming that they represent the will of the populace and the rights of the “disenfranchised.”
4) They wrap themselves in the identity of the “victim”; they are the poor, downtrodden masses. They are the poverty stricken underclass. They are the abused and mistreated majority suffering under a minority of overlords (anyone more successful than they are or anyone who opposes their beliefs). Therefore, everything they do no matter how vicious, deceitful and destructive is morally exonerated.
5) The insurgents then agitate and provoke and poke and prod the society until it reacts to defend itself. When they finally get hit back, leftists then cry the tears of the wounded underdog.
6) They then attempt to abuse the laws and principles of the existing system in order to punish anyone who defends themselves against communist provocations. If they can get the law on their side, through corrupt judges and politicians, then they can cripple their opposition by making people afraid to fight back for fear of imprisonment.
7) When leftists can’t control the law they wail and rage over it’s rightful application. They act as if the enforcement of basic law and order is the same as government tyranny. How dare you fight back! How dare you subject them to the punishments they deserve!
8) A great and fabricated drama unfolds. Leftists play the role of martyrs who “only want to be free”, who only want “equity” and the same prosperity enjoyed by their betters. They only want to protect the rights of the vulnerable. In reality, they are militants trying to burn down your freedom and prosperity and pillage what they can in the process.
They don’t want to be equal to you, they want to plunder what you have so they can feel superior to you. They want to steal your wealth, your accomplishments and the life which you worked so hard to build. They are parasites, not people.
If any of this is sounding familiar it’s because we are experiencing this very process of communist revolution right now in America. And, I think it’s time to admit that our republic and our constitution (as we currently interpret it) are ill equipped to defeat an insurgency made up of millions of the same citizens that the republic was originally built to protect.
If the Founding Fathers were alive today, they would have already crushed this insurgency to dust and they would not be concerned about any constitutional conundrums. They understood that the liberties of the republic only apply to people who want to keep the republic alive. They do not apply to people who desire its death.
PS: I'm gonna add a good comment from another ZH post, this one about the shooting - Watch: New Footage Shows Federal Agent's Perspective In Minneapolis ICE-Involved Shooting. The new footage didn't help that much but a commenter with the handle Revolver2030 wrote:
Hey 'Trump4Israel..." [another commenter] From the get-go you seem to be very confused about who is really who and what is really what here. Sincerely. I'm more of an sovereign citizen type, have qualm's with both but certainly more the Left bro! And the ones doing all this anti-ICE stuff bro? Try to focus, but those are the "communists" bro. The officers are not communists, sorry just not. Now, could they fall under the (or a) definition of a federal fascist? Perhaps. I am certain those guys are doing a real and legit job though bro. They feel they are tryng to clean up and save (try) this country from the doldrums of unaccounted for waves of immigration.. You want a "country" or not? Can't have one when 10% of the population is unaccounted for and doesn't want to assim. I just don't get why "Americans" are out there putting themselves in danger to protect people who are truly.. And I don't just say this off the cuff... not friendly to this country and don't belong. Certainly not all or most even but there are nasty ones.. got to go.. If we are going to have a country, that is. Or, is the plan to not have one? Some say... by design..?Agreed!
* I put it this way because I really don't know if that is a paintball, pepper spray, bear spray, or what? Thankfully, I'm not too familiar.
Comments (2)
Blood in the streets of Minnegadishu...
Posted On: Thursday - January 8th 2026 11:32AM MST
In Topics: Commies Immigration Stupidity US Police State US Feral Government ctrl-left Anarcho-tyranny
...Blood stains the snow near by East 34th Street.
Blood in my love in the terrible winter.
Bloody red sun of retarded St. Paul*.
She came in town and then she drove away
Sunlight in her hair...
Those doctored lyrics are from The Doors' song Peace Frog. That one is in the very best true Jim Morrison/Doors style, with a good tune, good sound, an ominous voice, and the usual weird lyrics. The following is not sung but spoken by Mr. Morrison:
Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleedin'.Don't ask me what ... maybe I could at least tell you what drugs they were taking...
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind
I'll hold off on the Venezuela post, as I'm still very conflicted about that. These recent protests in Minneapolis to prevent ICE from doing their job are something I am NOT conflicted about. The shooting of one Renee Good in her SUV is another is something that I'd rather let the law deal with before proclaiming the ICE agent's guilt or innocence. The video below has a pretty good view of the event and has generally good discussion underneath too.
No, even PURPOSELY running over a cop is not "Domestic Terrorism". We've got to stop with that nonsense. It looks like Mrs. Good turned the wheel to the right to get away. One wonders indeed, if the cop had time to draw and take 3 shots, why he couldn't have jumped to his right, out of the way?
On the other side of the ledger, I imagine this ICE guy had a lot of adrenaline flowing (not an excuse, mind you), and it was said that someone had tried to come out him with a vehicle earlier during the action. I will not agree with "She disobeyed direct orders." as a reason to shoot her.
The shooting was unfortunate. The ctrl-left will use this to their advantage. What is much different between this shooting and the George Floyd O/D 5 years back is that the Feral Gov't at least will prevent this ICE agent from getting completely railroaded, as did Derek Chauvin 5 years ago. Maybe there could be a fair trial... some may say, I'm a dreamer ...
The action itself that I've seen perhaps 20 minutes of is great.
These Minneapolis Commies and very likely Commies arranged to be there from all over the country were there trying to impede ICE from doing its job, a job that any Conservative should be FOR. The woman shot dead was in that spot to block the road. During much of one of the videos, the reason the ICE agents were pushing people around was to get them out of the road so they could drive through with a white pick-up. I gotta say that I really enjoyed seeing these people get thrown down into the snow (not gonna hurt much) and have all manner of things sprayed into their faces when they wouldn't just get out of the way.
Now, I could see some Peak Stupidity readers being miffed by this attitude of mine. After all, we've had a couple of handfuls of posts a year and a half ago in which we enjoyed just the opposite, some fiesty Brits or Irishmen raising hell as the police tried to hold them off. (Check here for those posts.)
There's no contradiction though. Our biggest focus on this site is the Immigration Stupidity. Over in the UK, the people's protests were against the housing of aliens in the hotels, but really, "GET! THEM! OUT!" meant more than just out of the hotel. In the fun up in Minneadishu, "the people" do not represent the American people. They fight ICE because they want to shut down the Deportation Nation program. The useful idiots, or even those who are in on the plan, are claiming "NAZIs!" and "Police State!" because they don't think much or it often works, respectively.
After this shooting especially, I can see that the ctrl-left is using the Police State claims against ICE, which means against Deportations and against Trump of course. We need to stand fast and not get fooled by the BS of these Communists. It's not the first time this tactic has been used. Just go back 60 years. That is the time, from 1964 to 1967, I'd say, in which SO MANY destructive policies were developed.
The Hart-Cellar mass-immigration Act was passed without any ctrl-left marches and violence, as far as I know. However, there were protests about nearly everything else. As they protested and took over university buildings on behalf of Feminism, Socialism, anti-White-Men AA, etc. they shouted "Our Constitutional Rights!", really just so they could keep out of, or get out of, jail when necessary. I wasn't quite there at the time, but I can imagine that Americans bought a lot of that deception, at the time. We must not do the same this time around!
Those Commies are out on the streets of Minnegadishu, with only a little blood so far, because it's very important to them to block attempts by Americans to remove people who shouldn't be here. The Somalians up there are a great example - even were they not ripping off the taxpayers, we don't want them. I don't think a couple of million Somalians, as it'll get to soon (if we don't continue) will ever be all broken up about anybody's Constitutional Rights. Sharia Law or Shithole Law is their thing.
The shooting of Renee Good has been a godsend for the ctrl-left. Many of them are pretty happy it happened... breaking some eggs and all that ... not just in Minneapolis but all over as planned by the Protest Industrial Complex.
I'm with ICE! I should get a T-shirt.
OK, the song has been in my head the whole time here, so here's Peace Frog:
PS: I just read that Mrs. Good is a lesbian mom of 3 (they repeat "Mom of 3" but not so much the lesbian part) who left her kids in Colorado to participate, such as it was, in this planned agitation against ICE. What kind of Mom...? It just doesn't seem normal.
* Nothing against St. Paul here, which is across the Mississippi River and north and east of the Minnesota River, but we needed something with 2 syllables for the song.
Comments (7)
January 6th, '21, 5 years back: American v European Resistance to Globalism
Posted On: Tuesday - January 6th 2026 7:56PM MST
In Topics: Trump Globalists Orwellian Stupidity World Political Stupidity People's Revolt
Site Note: The last week and a half were an unintentional hiatus. As I explained quickly in the last 2 posts, I was missing my stuff. I imagine the average reader had already figured out I was on a trip based on that phoned-in post on a TSA "experience". We're still limited on tools here, but hopefully Peak Stupidity will be blogging at 75% power or so this week and next.
Yep, it's 5 years to the day today. 3 days prior, when I heard about it, I'd pictured another YUGE rally that would probably not have been worth going to, mainly due to Trump's manner of speaking. I was still tired of that - he has changed a bit lately for the better (and has definitely gotten more literate people to write the tweets) - but then I was hesitant about wasting my time. I remember very well trying to cajole 2 friends into traveling to the Federal Shithole, and then I had the date off by one, giving us more time to plan. They and I, none of us, knew what was going to go down and what was possibly planned.
I should give President Trump credit right here for releasing the J6ers, first thing after his taking office. If he hadn't kept THAT promise, I'd have figured this term would be just like Trump-45. We can talk about Venezuela later (next post or so), but the holding of average Americans charged with trespassing, some light rioting, and the kind of hell raising that pales in comparison to that out of the Antifa and BLM goons, as political prisoners was THE most egregious affront to the US Constitution out of Dark Brandon and his minions. Had it happened in the early '70s - that's the 1770's, the Declaration of Independence would have surely included this right up at the top of the grievances against the Regime.
Readers may think I'm so supportive of the J6ers because "that coulda' been me!', were the airline flight schedules somewhat more recovered from the Kung Flu PanicFest. I may well have been in the midst and taken in later - I do try to think of how much longer the American patriots would have been languishing in African-run prisons had Trump not kept this promise.
I wanted this post to go in a different direction though, very much along the lines of what I already wrote this past March in Defeating Globalism: Europeans v Americans. The comparison was between America and the 3 biggest countries (economy wise, I think) of Western Europe, the UK, France, and Germany. The governments of those 3 countries have their own ways of squashing any resistance to the Regimes in power and above that the EU Regime in Brussels.
Going from east to west, the German government protects itself and the Globalists' agenda with threats - all very constitutional and all, you know - to shut down any political party that is different enough to be "a threat to German democracy". The French government has conducted lawfare against the political Le Pan family members. This is akin to the lawfare against Trump, the NRA, and VDare here in America. (The former two beat it, but the very small VDare Foundation was forced to shut down.) In the UK, things have taken a more Orwellian turn, and communications alone that are in opposition to the Starmtrooper Regime are banned. This makes it hard to even start creating a serious opposition party. (Nigel Farage is a decent guy, but he and his party are milquetoast.)
The lack of that well-thought-out US Constitution has a whole lot to do with it, but I also think that the multiparty systems* with their compromises and alliances working against any serious opposition party make it more difficult for the Euro countries to fight the Globalists, at least at the executive level. You can say what you want about him (in the comments), but Trump is against the Globalists. He is a Nationalist as opposed to an anti-Nationalist (a friend's term). MAGA and Trump have gotten into a powerful position finally. As the UniParty Congress twiddles its thumbs, and the Judicial Branch at lower levels, at least, acts as an impediment, this Executive branch has been making moves that the Europeans can only dream of. I'm generally pretty happy with what's been done so far.
Where do the J6ers come in, back into this post? Nearly 8 years ago, I wrote a 6 part series entitled ""There's battle lines being drawn" ..." with the title coming from an old 1960s (Buffalo Springfield) protest song. In the 5th part**, I noted (this was a bit over half a year since Charlottesville, keep in mind):
This is where there is lots to be learned from the 1960's (and I'm finally getting to what I was going to write last Monday!). Individuals speaking out and raising hell may always get doxxed, shamed by their peers, and maybe even arrested with the book(s) thrown at them. Groups of a few dozen - same thing but with better legal protection due to economy of scale. 5,000 of you - hey are they going to arrest you all? Where will they keep you?That didn't age well, I gotta say. Then, I wrote:
They've got hundreds of Motherland Security goons ready for any excuse to beat your ass during your march on Washington, FS? That'll work if there are 200 of you - 200,000 - not so much!Well, not all 200,000 participated ... or, were invited in - 5 years ago today.
This was in those old posts somewhere too: Conservatives are much more likely to have jobs than the activists of the ctrl-left. This means, that, no, there WAS no BIG ongoing protest in front of the jails holding the J6ers.*** I never showed up myself even, shamefully. The Regime Media, something not all of us have weaned themselves off of, were not going to promote your Bono's Mothers of the Disappeared or anything like that.
It took a political fight, resulting in the election of President Trump above and beyond all cheating, to get us our J6 Political Prisoners released. Should we be discouraged the next time? What I think the aftermath of that day 5 years back has taught is that we're much better off enacting change if we have someone on our side at the top, as flawed as he may be, if not to "watch our six", at least to not be actively working to fry us. Failing that, the next ctrl-left Administration, if there is one, will be out for blood, with less respect for rule-of-law than the last as they work on behalf of the Globalists. If you're taking a chance of being shot dead from 10 ft by a cop 3 times your size while unarmed, or of not being seen in daylight again for 5 years, you'd tend to figure that you may as well go all out yourself.
I don't know who can replace him, but for now, it's President Trump that has put America miles in front of the European anti-Globalists.
* President George Washington and others of the Founders were hopeful that there wouldn't be ANY political parties. A man would drop his work to help run the nation for a while as an ACTUAL public service - what a concept! It didn't outlast George Washington though. After his 8 years, there were the Federalists against the Democratic-Republicans, with the latter winning all but one election (against John Adams in 1796) out of 7 with these 2 major "team match-ups".
** The rest of them are: the intro. ... the ctrl-left army ... The People of the Gun ... The official military ... The Conclusion.
*** There was some small group I'd read about.
Comments (6)
Belated Happy New Year wishes from Peak Stupidity
Posted On: Friday - January 2nd 2026 8:51AM MST
In Topics: Holiday from Stupidity
Some dot-art work from Mr. Adam Smith.
I’ll have the tools to write proper posts next week. Sorry for any inconvenience. We know your on-line time is valuable…
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Thanks, Adam!
Comments (9)
Subscribe to Peak Stupidity's financial newsletter (NOT!)
Posted On: Sunday - December 28th 2025 10:41AM MST
In Topics: Economics Scams
You know how Peak Stupidity has our ears to the ground about the big picture of Global Financial Stupidity*, right? It's the peak of this particular stupidity that we reckon will cause all stupidity to decline, barring a turn toward Communism.
Shouldn't you be a subscriber to our financial newsletter then?
We kid. There is, and will be, no financial newsletter. Anyone who know so much about the near future of stocks, bonds, commodities, etc., one of those After-the-fact Explainers, really would be better off keeping it to himself to make more money on those trades.
In our review of the Strauss & Howe books we mentioned a clever financial newsletter scam in the context of making predictions. I wish I'd thought of it, not because I want to scam people out of their money, but just because it's a clever simple mathematical idea I SHOULD HAVE thought of. It's also an idea just made for the internet age, having been almost infinitely more costly in the age of paper letters and postage.
Here's what you** do: You send out a series of 10 emails to a million recipients that deign to demonstrate for the them how well your financial eNewsLetter predicts moves in the market. OK, well, maybe you send them to 100 million people, as (hopefully) not one in 100 people are clicking on this crap in this day and age. (You can see why email beats the living out of letters with postage.) The predictions you make are binary, as in, this stock WILL rise this week, or this commodity will fall next Tuesday. If you do give numbers, you make them over a fairly wide range.
You write a simple little program that tailors these emails. Let's take 10 separate financial predictions that your advertisement for your pricy eNewsLetter predicts over a series of 10 emails to each recipient. Every combination of rise/fall for the first prediction is covered, so that's 10 different initial emails, with hopefully a million or so (just a very rough ballpark #) of each being read. Now, you've got 1/2 of these recipients a bit impressed that you "got it right" with your prediction by next week. The set of ad emails sent next week only go out to the 1/2 of the recipients to whom you had sent the correct prediction last week. Again, computers would be very helpful in this endeavor.
1/4 of your original set have now read ad emails that got 2 market calls right, one week after the next. That's better than the average Jim on CNBC. By now, some may already decide to subscribe. Wait until it's 1/32 of the recipients who have seen that you got "all" 5 predictions correct! They'll be signing up. Even if it takes 10 predictions in a row to get these recalcitrant losers off their asses, that's 1/1024 of your original list, still maybe a (very rough, cause SPAM folders) thousand people who totally believe in your system. Hell, why not buy a lifetime subscription of $1,800?! I mean, you're gonna save over the annual rate, and you'll be SO RICH that the $1,800 will be peanuts to you.
Another way to go might be to put all 10 predictions in one advertising email, with your software inserting all the combinations to make 1,024 different emails. Stretch the predictions to a month time-frame, and by the end of that, they'll be begging for your eNewsLetter. Dang, I wish I could do this with blog posts...
PS: Our posts may be coming few and far between this week, as, per my comment under the previous post, I am without the normal electronics temporarily. Some hotels have decent desktop computers on which one can save images and everything. This one has inop CTRL keys, which explains why you may see only the one topic key for a while.
* There are also many more related posts with the subject with the Economics and Inflation topic keys too.
** By "you", we mean here, "you people in Bangalore or Bombay".
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The TSA - A word to the wise
Posted On: Saturday - December 27th 2025 11:10AM MST
In Topics: US Police State
Apparently, it's NOT OK to say "this is kinda faggy" when being felt up by an OFFICER of the TSA.
Though Stupidity is our Core Competency here, we feel it incumbent upon us to occasionally provide some of that "News You Can Use". That was such.
Our file photo below - supplied purely as clickbait - from this old post, shows a somewhat parallel situation but even worse. I.e., I don't think the TSA guy in my case was gay, but I probably wouldn't have been kicked out to another checkpoint if he had been... Just sayin'... queue up Third Rate Romance, Low-Rent Rendevoux.
Nope, no Humor tag today.
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Merry Christmas from Peak Stupidity
Posted On: Thursday - December 25th 2025 9:39PM MST
In Topics: Music Bible/Religion Holiday from Stupidity
A friend of mine recommends Johnny Mathis' Oh Holy Night as his favorite Christmas song ever.
Now, here's Enya with Adeste Fedeles. I hadn't known that she even sang Christmas songs. The New Age music she is famous for was/is part of a movement that goes in a different direction, religiously. In this case, one can pick up some Latin, a whole lot easier to understand than whatever she sang in - Klingon, was it? - in some of the best of her Shepherd Moon and Memory of Trees days.
Then, I'm still partial to John Lennon's Happy Christmas. No matter what you think of the guy's politics (he hasn't been with us since 45 years ago), this is a great one.
Peak Stupidity will be really slow in posting for about a week, starting... right now... actually earlier today.
PS: Finally, because, Spirit of Christmas Present(s), I like this headline: Lawyer Wins Legal Battle With Homeowners Association Over Christmas Display – Uses Settlement Money to Buy More Lights. Ha, I have not heard of too many good experiences with Home Owners Associations, and maybe William Shakespeare was wrong. First, let's not kill ALL the lawyers. I like this guy's spirit!
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Strauss & Howe - Generations and The Fourth Turning
Posted On: Wednesday - December 24th 2025 7:00PM MST
In Topics: Music History The Future Books Muh Generation
(Continued from Strauss & Howe - Generational Theory.)
Here's a little bit of psychology of memory to chew on: Do all people use location to pin down their memories and even thoughts? I have found that I usually remember when I read a book, or even when I had a certain important thought, by where I was at the time. For this post, I was trying to pin down when I read these books to be reviewed first. I got a pretty good idea this way.
Where I lived at the time is important, but it was a wider range than I wanted. I know that I first took out William Strauss & Neil Howe's book Generations; The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 in the mid/late 1990s. The book was published in '91, but I took it out of the library later, going by where I was and what I was generally doing then. I can pin it down to '97 because that's when I realized the www was becoming a big thing, and this is related to my thoughts after reading the book. Hey, if it works - easier than Michael Scott's technique (go to 02:55).
The book was interesting enough that I recall I took out their 2nd book (from '96), The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy—What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny soon afterwards. OK, that was fun, but, wait a minute, what is this crisis of which you speak? Crisis, what crisis? (Yes, a Supertramp song is long overdue on Peak Stupidity.)
Hell, in '97 I didn't see how we could even be in an Unraveling "turning". I mean, the internet was the next big American-made thing, and everything important with it was going on in America. The President at the time, Bill Clinton, being nothing but a pussy-hound and lover of power, didn't really have the kind of destructive ideals that one can see in the ctrl-left of today. Congress had him somewhat restrained, the Hildabeast was back in the Whitehouse kitchen baking cookies, and politically, things were still under control. Economically, the Globalists were in the process of outsourcing manufacturing to China, but this was early on. Things did not look bad at all 28 years ago, but I was 28 years younger too, it so happens.
By chance, I found one of these 2 books, I'm pretty sure The Fourth Turning, at the library in the early '00s, with that time not being so easy to pin down - say somewhere from '05 to '08. The funny part here is that I took the book out from the library with no recollection of my having read it or its companion book before until I was a chapter or so into it! Anyway, upon this reading, well, yeah, I could see how we were in a late-3rd or early 4th turning alright. That made the books seem pretty dang prescient. Remember, Strauss & Howe got the first one, Generations, published in '91, now over a third of a century back. "Hey, this saecula, turnings, and archetype crap just might work!" I figured. OTOH, was it just luck though?
I've been involved before with people who were into horoscopes. All manner of things can be explained by various and sundry movements in the night sky, and what, with the stars, planets, sun, moon, hell, maybe asteroids now, how you are doing can be "determined" on a daily, if not hourly, basis due to what's up there, depending on what or who is in conjunction with Uranus at the moment. The Chinese, with their 12-year cyclical calendar, are on a much longer time-scale with their Year of the Whatever silliness. What year you are born (within a lunar, not Gregorian calendar) supposedly has something to do with something. Really, the Chinese way is: so long as you get into a good school and buy a house with a view of some water, NOBODY CARES!
As I wrote in the previous post, there's a whole lot to this Generational Theory. There are many concepts explained that don't involve anything like astrological or Chinese silliness.
Firstly, let me bring back that note about the whole theory being made to fit Anglo-American history. Oooops, well, though immigration was brought up, IIRC, it was not in a critical fashion, just that some of the disunity during the current (at the time of writing) UNRAVELING involved that issue as one of many. No kidding, it's an issue! The thing is, if America has changed its demographics this much, does Strauss & Howe's Generational Theory mean anything? Should they write revisions for some one-third Hispanic/other foreigner saecula? Let's get past that for now, as otherwise this review would be over!
It could become somewhat tedious for the reader of these books, but I think many readers would really like that the examples of this cyclic history are thorough - each saeculum is covered, and each turning within is discussed, from the 1400s to the present, with some near future predictions based on the theory. The archetypes are explained thoroughly, and each named generation - all 25 of them - are covered, with discussion of how they fit their archetypes. The birth years of these cohorts are laid out, which is kind of nice if wants to know exactly what "muh generation" is. As I wrote, and as one can see in the big table shown in the last post, it's all very neat and tidy.
The examples, well, those are where I'll start getting critical. Peak Stupidity has mentioned this Strauss&Howe cherry-picking before, so we're FINALLY getting to it here in the very book review. The examples of why this turning occurred on schedule, how this generation became the type of people they are, all that is reliant on snippets of the culture at the time. Often, especially recently, since there's so much more documentation, it's pop culture references that are used. See, the G.I. Generation was permissive with their children, as noted by these couple of quotes by these politicians, these movie lines, these lyrics in the popular songs.
The problem with this is that millions of quotes, movie lines, song lyrics, etc. can be found every year to explain ANYTHING. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it was fun for the writers, and for the readers it rings very true if one lets it. I imagine the writers believed they were on the right track, but one could find quotes, movie lines, song lyrics, etc. to prove exactly the opposite for every turning and generation. In this way, it's not THAT unlike horoscope predictions and that time we (with a girlfriend) went to that fortune teller one day, and man, how'd she know all that?! This all reminds me of that financial newsletter email scam that I really wish I'd thought of. (I'll put that in another quick post.)
Another problem with the entire "Muh g-g-g-generation" thing is, again with another post coming, that the scores of millions of people in each of these generation do NOT all think alike. Even if you just discuss the generalities, when it comes to politics, no, not all Boomers voted for this and not all the Millennials voted for that. On important issues, 60-40% is considered overwhelming. Yet, that's 4 in 10 people born in those years that are NOT like this (whatever).
I wrote in the previous post that I don't have these books on me as I write. In this review then, I may have missed a few things I didn't like, but one big one just came to me (see, my memory can be pretty good at times). These two writers are big Statists. In all their discussion of the history with their examples to back up the theory, government seems to be a factor in way too much of it. I could see that being the case for the last couple of generations with this Feral Beast we are subject to, but that was certainly not always the case. Many American lived their lives without dealing with the US Gov't at all for much of the history of the country. The examples in these books lean way to heavily on what this government department did and how this election went and so on. Nah, there's been a whole lot more to life, affecting the raising of children and other aspects that have "made" the archetypes and turnings what they were that have NOTHING to do with government. As a part-time Libertarian, this was a big turn-off for me.
Back to the prescient predictions of this Fourth Turning, now, I doubt any Peak Stupidity readers would deny that America is in some kind of Crisis stage. These books are fair, or they are hedging, in that they note that not every Crisis stage will end up in a new First Turning HIGH. It may be that the country just goes a different direction, as in, it all ends. In that case, Strauss & Howe will have still not been wrong... so there's that...
I may get ahold of The Fourth Turning yet again, just to see what matches what between 1996 and 2026. I can't expect specifics about smart phones, AI, and the like from 30 years back, but I'm curious if much of the predictions about the now-already-passed UNRAVELLING turning and this current CRISIS turning at least conform to the theory with the set up we got: You've got your Baby Boomer Prophets in old age, as your 13th Generation Nomads are in mid-life "running"(?) things, your Millennial Heroes (I know, right?) are in Young Adulthood, and those Homeland Generation Artists, none of them born yet during the writing of The Fourth Turning, are mostly done being born and are from toddlers to college students.
It's thoughtful and fun. It's probably a bunch of hooey. No matter what, you'll get a little bit of history out of these books, and if you don't realize we're in a CRISIS by now, you
Now, since I read and wrote "Nomads", I've got a song in my head from earlier that decade I first read these books. This Nomad archetype was enjoying Indigo Girls music, before and after they had to be known as Lesbians. The following song from their excellent Nomads, Indians, Saints album has a really great melody and a good acoustical guitar riff with great harmony with lyrics from the title, AND it kind of fits all this heavy thinking.
Here you go...
I'm coming home with a stone strapped onto my back.
I'm coming home with a burning hope turning all my blues to black.
I'm looking for a sacred hand to carve into my stone,
a ghost of comfort, angel's breath,
to keep this life inside my chest.
This world falls on me.
Dreams of immortality.
Everywhere I turn
the beauty just keeps shaking me...
The Indigo Girls were (basically):
Emily Saliers
Amy Ray (lead singer on this song)
PS: Don't forget that William Strauss & Neil Howe, wrote these 3 other books based on their Generational Theory: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, written with also one R.J. Matson) back in 1993, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation*, written by William Strauss only in 2000 and The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End from just 2 years, back, '23) written by Neil Howe only. Mr. Strauss died 18 years ago. I'll have to check out these books.
I'm sorry, no offense to William Strauss or that whole generation of upcoming HEROES, but this is an excerpt from the goodreads site by reviewer Lesley Reed on Millennials Rising:
A sampling of their potential influence in this decade: pop music will become more melodic and singable and sitcoms more melodramatic and wholesome; there will be a new emphasis on manners, modesty, and old-fashioned gender courtesies; and they'll resolve the long-standing debates about substance abuse. "They will rebel against the culture by cleaning it up, rebel against political cynicism by touting trust, rebel against individualism by stressing teamwork, rebel against adult pessimism by being upbeat, and rebel against social ennui by actually going out and getting a few things done."Wait, WUT?
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Strauss & Howe - Generational Theory
Posted On: Tuesday - December 23rd 2025 7:11PM MST
In Topics: History The Future Books Muh Generation
It's about damn time ... for a book review of 2 books I read in the late 1990s and early '00s! This is also long in coming in that I've written probably a half dozen times here on Peak Stupidity that I'd have a review of the books, Generations and The Fourth Turning, errrr, any day now. (They go together, and there are now 3 other books I believe, that these authors, or one of them, have written on the same subject that I haven't read.) Today is that day ... well, bleeding into tomorrow too.
Is it feasible to do a book review of 2 books I've read a couple of times 20 and nearly 30 years ago? In this case, I think so. The main and very interesting theme of these books is very well known at this point, explained well on this wiki page on "Generational Theory" for your or my reference. Therefore, in this post, I'll do my best to explain that simply, and in at least one further post, I'll review the books. Keep in mind, that, as interesting as all this is, I am not really down with the whole idea, and the book review will not be all favorable.
Strauss & Howe's big idea is that the history and future history of the Anglo, British and then American*, people, can be described not as a linear progression, but as a cyclic process. I would describe it as a spiral, as there's no contention by these writers that things return, economically, politically, etc. to their same state after each cycle, but we'll use the terminology that's in the books. There's LOTS of terminology in these very organized view of the cycles, the 4 periods ("turnings") within each cycle, and the 4 different archetypical peoples of the different generations that are each in 1 of 4 stages of life progression during each. Whewww! Don't worry - there are lots of tables.
It's so neatly tied up that there are people that seem to take this series of books, or say Generational Theory, as their bible. One I recall is the pundit Jim Quinn, featured on ZeroHedge still (after my seeing him on there over a dozen years ago too) with writing from his Burning Platform blog. (I generally agree with his views.) Steve Bannon is also said to be an acolyte. Another reason one might think of these books as some sacred texts is that if he had read them soon after they were published, they would seem pretty darned prescient at this point or even 20 years ago. I'll get to this in the review.
Again, you could just read the wiki page, but I hope the reader will get this quick summary and use the wiki page for more reference.
Here's the gist of Strauss & Howe's Generational Theory: The cycles of Anglo-American history, or "saecula", are about 85 years long, a long human lifespan. Each of them contains 4 roughly generation-long (21 1/4 year average) periods within called "turnings", a term that is unfortunately confusing. One would think that turnings would be the short periods when society goes from one of these 4 periods to the next, but a 'turning" IS the period itself, hence the name of the 2nd book I read. There are 4 TYPES of turnings only, Highs, Awakenings, Unravellings, and Crises**, but each individual turning is named and associated with a generation, such as Baby Boom generation, that name referring to the people born during that 20-odd year period, during the Great Depression and WWII crisis. That "Boomer" generation was probably the first widely known by a name, well before these books, but Messrs Strauss & Howe got pretty creative in naming the 25 generations from WAY BACK WHEN to today's infants. That's half a Millenia worth of generations.
Back to the saecula, they are all named too, going back to before the Reformation, yes, THAT Reformation. The start of this known cyclic history (?) is the last 2 turnings of the Late Medieval Saeculum going back to the year 1435. The authors just describe the Unraveling Turning, named Retreat from France, and the Crisis Turning, named War of the Roses.
The Reformation Saeculum is the only one that completely took place in the Old World still, England, that is. Within that one, just as one example (the rest being in the tables) there were these generations in the corresponding turnings: The Reformation Generation (has a nice ring to it) was born roughly during the Tudor Renaissance HIGH turning. By "roughly", I don't mean the generation in question had a hard time coming through their respective birth canals here, but the periods when the different generations were born correspond roughly, but not exactly, to the turnings to which they are attached in the tables.
Next, there were the Reprisal Generation, born during the Protestant Reformation AWAKENING turning, the Elizabethan Generation, born during the Counter-Reformation Reaction and Marian Restoration UNRAVELING turning, and the Parliamentary Generation, born during the Armada Crisis, well CRISIS turning. Not all the names of the generations are so political in nature, BTW.
These turnings (periods, remember) and generations are so far back in history that it's difficult for anyone but a Historian of Britain to make sense of it, so I'll do the same for the most recent COMPLETED saeculum - that'd be the Great Power Saeculum, which went on from 1865 to 1946. I'll phrase it differently in case that helps, but I'll also add in the "archetype" for each generation, something we'll get to shortly.
The HIGH turning, the Reconstruction***, Gilded Age (1865 - 1886), was the period, approximately, when the Missionary Generation (of Prophet archetype) were born (1860 - 1885). The AWAKENING turning, the Missionary Awakening/Progressive Era (1886 - 1908), was when the Lost Generation (of Nomad archetype) were born (1883 - 1900). The UNRAVELING turning, World War I, Roaring Twenties, Prohibition (1908 - 1929), was when the G.I. Generation (of Hero archetype) were born (1901 - 1924). The final, CRISIS turning of the Great Power Saeculum was The Great Depression, World War II (1929 - 1946), when the Silent Generation (of Artist archetype) were born (1925 - 1942).
About the archetypes now, the theory is that the mentality, I guess one could put it, of the many generations in history changes in a cyclic fashion too, and among 4 archetypes. The archetypivity, if I may, is both the cause of the direction of society during the turnings in which they live and is determined by the stages of life (again of 4 stages - so very neat and organized!) that these "cohorts" in a generation undergo during each turning of their lives. (So, go the turnings of their lives, goes the old American
In this way, with both causation and effect being functions of these many generations' stages of life as the cyclic societal periods go by, Strauss & Howe distance their theory from a basic long-term horoscope.
Strauss & Howe made a great effort to explain why people born during certain types of periods (turnings), and not just that, but are young adults during other certain periods, in midlife during others, and old during others, act as they do, generally. (This theory is not a big complex high-brow horoscope - that should be duly noted on the back covers of the books.) Note that "generally" I wrote - Strauss & Howe are not absolutists, but still, in the review, I'll explain a couple of reasons the pigeonholing of people into named generations is generally bunk.
What these writers are very common-sensical about is that they don't draw out solid round-numbered years for the saecula, turnings, and generations. There's some shrinking and stretching of the periods to match history, and I don't see that as cheating. As one real off-theory exception, the Civil War Saeculum has its 4 turnings but with only 3 generations attached. This saeculum is only 72 years long. It's Nomad-archetype Gilded Generation is followed by the Artist-archetype Progressive Generation, with no Hero-archetype generation in between. I give them credit for making it all fit and for seeing and dealing with an appropriate exception to their neat 4-of-everything theory.
That small table, taken from the wiki page, shows one aspect of society that is said to be changing through each saecula, ending up at the same level at the same turning every time around. The book presents many more aspects. All are explained by the presence of the 4 different archetypes of people being in their certain stages of life at the time. Permissiveness of parents is one example. Because society is like "this" during an Awakening, the Artist parents are more permissive, and their Nomad kids grow up to be like "this", which means that in the next turning, "this" will happen, etc. It goes on like that, everything is neat cycles of history.
I'll leave the big table below for the reader to peruse. If this Generational Theory developed by Strauss & Howe seems too hokey already, you can stop here. Our review will appear tomorrow, hopefully, if you want to know more to decide whether these books might be good reading.
* The reader may already see a problem with this theory coming into play right here. If these book are to predict the future of THESE people, how does that work after the massive immigration changes to our demographics? We'll get to this in the review.
** The authors make a comparison of the 4 turnings of a saeculum to seasons of the year. A High is compared to Spring, an Awakening to Summer, an Unraveling to Fall, and a Crisis to Winter.
*** I don't at all see the so-called "Reconstruction" of the South being any part of a HIGH, not for anyone involved!
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