More face diaper anecdotes... but wait, there's MORE!
Posted On: Wednesday - February 16th 2022 7:00PM MST
In Topics: Inflation Customer Care Kung Flu Stupidity
(Continued from here and going on forever(?).)
I found one of the new black non-woven-material face masks on the concrete patio outside the coffee shop. Maybe somebody though I was some poor shmoe who was still skeered about the OMG-icron but can't afford my own medical face mask, much less a designer model. Nope, I just wanted to scan it for use in any further posts about this new style, even less communication-friendly type of mask, as described and modeled by a beautiful blond mask model in Moar fashion accessory anecdotes.
Then, a couple of days later I was at the food court in a big airport terminal, of course maskless as far as I can push it. Three flight attendants were eating nearby. The prettiest of them, which I could tell because they were eating, let her face mask of this type fall from the table onto the floor. This was an area with lots of foot traffic and spilled food. I saw her pick it up, and I was sure she would not throw it away. "Hey, the 17 second rule applies.", I told her. "You're good." All of them smiled. I maintain that nobody takes this mask business seriously, except in a control freak sense, not a medical sense.
This next little tidbit involves are oft-utilized "Customer Care" topic key too, because this was a phone call I was on for help with heath plan stuff. The call actually went much much smoother than have the rest of the customer service calls that Peak Stupidity rails about. After all, I just mashed "0" twice and got a live person. It's 2005 again! However, I thought the call was taking an immediate bad turn when I could hardly make out what the lady (as best I could tell) was saying. Oh, man, where is this call going, another obscure island off the Philippines, maybe a former penal colony off of French Guiana, old Ceylon, I don't freaking know!
"Uh, where am I calling? Are you Russian?" I could not make out so much, but that was my best guess. It was just all fuzzy. "No, something, something ...Ohio." Wow, what a break. It took 30 seconds for us to get straight that, her voice was fuzzy as all get-out and she would call back. When she did, it was not any better. "Don't tell me", I said, "Are they making you wear those face diapers? Is that the problem?" "Nah, we .. something, fuzz, fuzz, fuzzz...." I think that was a "no".
This was not the usual crappy signal that you get with the modern pseudo "land-lines" which aren't cell phones but still use some cheap low-capacity part of the internet. We described that whole piece of stupidity in From "hearing a pin drop" to "how 'bout a door slam?" long ago.
Anyway, I was able to get my questions answered satisfactorily through the fuzz, but that was only because the lady was an American. I thanked her for being one on the phone with me.
Finally, because I forgot in that Valentine's inflation post, here's what I was going to put there:
Not only is there price inflation of the goods and services we want or need for daily life, but there is also fine inflation. No, I'm not "fine with it". I mean that even the TSA fines for defending one's 4th Amendment rights in airport terminals has gone up. It used to be an even number, a round $10,000. The cost of being instructed on Totalitarianism has gone up, like everything else. This stuff started in 2002 using the Feral Gov't standard $10,000 fine, so using my favorite on-line compounding calculator page on Money Chimp, I got 1.66%* annual inflation in TSA fining. Well, OK, that goes along with the BLS green-eyeshade boys' numbers, and that near Mark 'o the Beast number there is pretty fitting too.
But wait, there's even MORE! As a special bonus, to cheer up the Peak Stupidity readers today, there is this news from my local pharmacy:
* That calculator only lets me use 2 digits after the decimal, but the interpolation between 1.66% and 1.67% gets me 1.664%, too close to the Mark o' the Beast for comfort.
Comments (8)
The Women of Wausau
Posted On: Tuesday - February 15th 2022 7:16PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Race/Genetics Female Stupidity
The town of Wausau in central Wisconsin has long been some kind of ground zero of Refugee Resettlement to middle America. (Before getting deeply into the immigration stupidity, all I knew about the town was some big insurance company that was advertised on TV back in the day.) It was the Hmong people, Cambodian/Vietnam mountain border people who were allies of the US during that war, who were invited to settle in this most unlikely of places for many years after that conflict.
More recently, it seems to have been the Afghans, from another lost and even more pointless foreign war, that have been invited to Wausau, Wisconsin. VDare's James Fulford tells us about Another “Ordeal Of Immigration In Wausau”?—Dem Pols Desperately Downplay Their Imported Afghan Sex Criminal
I will interrupt this post with a couple of big exceptions to the point, not something done here too often at Peak Stupidity. There are some former refugees from Vietnam that I know who are great people. They're not Hmong though, and I have no idea what they think of the Hmong. They are definitely not Afghan. As with all immigration issues, numbers are of the essence.
Secondly, I also know women who are childless, some for medical reasons and others not, who do good in the world and for our country. Many spend that female energy on children of their extended family, nieces and nephews and what-have-you.
Well, doing a post this way is not a good idea, as it gives away the point at the beginning. There are many exceptions, but I see a big problem with childless women* being in charge of things like, say, immigration policies. This case is at a local level, but Mayor Katie Rosenberg of Wausau illustrates my point. After reading Mr. Fulford's article about Mayor Rosenberg's new pet Afghans and the trouble they've been - I guess she thought the Afghans would tie the whole room together - for the poor suffering AMERICAN people in Wausau, I had a thought:
Is part of the impetus for this "Refugee" Resettlement Racket misplaced compassion of these nice ladies that should have been aimed at their never-born children?** I looked up this new Mayor, and my hunch was right that she was childless. Katie Rosenberg's biography says she has. political career but no kids. Would she have a different attitude if she used that female super-compassion on her children? If she had had children, might she have been a lot more careful in who she invited to live in the formerly nice upper-midwestern town?
They've just got to have someone to nurture, you know, or they ain't themselves. Sure, one (for now) of these poor Afghans have gone astray and sexually assaulted a woman (this time), but we can teach them to fit into our cozy community just fine, you betcha'! I don't know whether all the people of central Wisconsin would agree, especially those trying to raise children safely, don'tcha know? Could the nurturing instinct in these women be re-routed to some other end, some plants in a greenhouse or something, perhaps?
This is not the first time Peak Stupidity has gone down the road of these thoughts. Almost 5 years ago we posted some info from a tweet about Childless European Leaders. This can't be allowed to go on.
* Peak Stupidity kind of has a problem with women in charge, on any issue, period, in fact.
** Another widely recognized BIG part of the impetus is the usual - $$$$.
Comments (18)
Tired of Tyranny - Tucker on the Truckers
Posted On: Monday - February 14th 2022 7:12PM MST
In Topics: Globalists Orwellian Stupidity Anarcho-tyranny World Political Stupidity People's Revolt
This is pretty encouraging stuff. We'll see if this Canadian Trucker Convoy and protest will start something big worldwide that gets self-sustaining. Peak Stupidity is perhaps too optimistic, but we just added the topic key People's Revolt of 22 for posts focused on this exciting development.
We've had plenty of posts with our favorite video pundit, Tucker Carlson, before. I haven't watched enough Tucker lately, and it'd behoove me to watch clips nightly as the best way to keep up with the heartening start of the People's Revolt against the world's tyrants. America is a world leader in much of the tyranny, so isn't it time that Americans took the lead against them.
Personally, I'd just call them Commies, but maybe that's just me. Speaking of which, there's some rumor about Justin Trudeau, the Little Potato, being the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro*, he of one of those long-ongoing revolutions himself.
I guess it would be more accurate to call what's going on a Counter-Revolution.
For some real Orwellian stuff, watch at 08:00 for a minute or so.
* Some one should trick him into speaking a little Spanish and see if the alleged Fidel in him comes out.
Comments (11)
Happy Valentine's Day
Posted On: Monday - February 14th 2022 6:42PM MST
In Topics: Poetic Stupidity Inflation Holiday from Stupidity
Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
19.22?
"Shit's gone up..."
Wait, isn't that a Haiku? Sorta? Yeah, we've got a Poetic Stupidity topic key, so why not?
I did suggest to my wife that I get roses tomorrow when the go on sale. Yeah, she was glad that was just a joke...
Anyway, really, that's the only answer you're gonna get if you question prices. I hadn't looked at the natural gas bill very closely for the coldest month here, January. It is the highest bill we've ever gotten by far. I knew we'd had the heat on higher than usual, but then again, there was a warm week and a half at least. Upon inspection, I could see our usage (in compressed ft3, hence "therms") was only up by 5%. It was the price per therm that was the big change. Natural Gas - up 28%! Electricity, up "only" 6.5%.
House insurance is up, but I don't have the record on me from previous years that is separate from some of the car insurance payments. However, I have one datapoint clear in my head. For the same house, 30 years back, it was $300 annually. We are in the mid-$800's now. I get 3.5% annual inflation compounded. OK, that's not terrible, but it's not the BLS 1 - 2% we've been FED (pun intended) for many years. It takes a whole 20 years to lose 1/2 your money. You'll hardly notice it.
Wait, but this house has gone up in price too, so it's all good, right? I guess. It's everything. "Shit's gone up." No it's really: "$18.99 a pound for steak? Honey, the dollar has gotten more worthless again."
The Peak Stupidity readers are a bright and experienced crowd, so the following is probably not necessary,
Remember how much any of your savings in US currency are being steadily stolen. Put the savings from your life of labor in something real - real estate, precious metals, foreign currency, whatever, I don't know. OK, this is really advice to myself. I DID see this coming but didn't really act early enough, as a prepper should.*
No reason we can't grow our own roses, right? Chocolates are a bit harder.
* No, I didn't do it ALL wrong, but I somehow thought things would move a little more slowly.
Comments (4)
Ignorance was bliss - the early 1990s
Posted On: Saturday - February 12th 2022 8:16PM MST
In Topics: Music US Police State History US Feral Government
Now, I can't remember what got me thinking about that time and the reason to write this post. It was, like, a week ago. (I remember people didn't like, use "like" like that, so much, except for the latter purpose, if nothing else...)
Unless one is of the ctrl-left and/or a dedicated Communist from the get go, or lived in a bad time and place in history, he usually doesn't think of periods of his life based on what was going on politically. I could say that about my time in the early 1990s, right at 30 years ago. It's not that I wasn't already well aware of the politics of this country, thanks to lots of input from my Dad, but, I didn't obsess about it, much less have a blog (not an easy accomplishment in 1992!)
I was having fun then, and one could argue that it was my personal life that makes me remember this as still a pretty decent time to live here. However, I don't think it was that. I was struggling with money for some of that time, and I was struggling with other stuff for much of it too. What it was too, though, is that the early 1990s were a time before I personally realized that America was consistently headed in the wrong direction. This was before 3 big problems came to the forefront of my mind at least. I was young then, but even for most Americans, these 3 were not big issues yet at that time for the same reasons they weren't for me. They hadn't really metastasized, or we were all just not as aware, as say, a younger Peter Brimelow.
That name of course leads me to the issue that is most existential to American, the immigration invasion. Though the illegal Hispanic immigration had been big already - see 1986 Illegal Amnesty - Ronald Reagan's regrets - and especially right then during Senor Bush's* BIGGER amnesty, and it'd been over 25 years already since the Hart/Cellar 1965 immigration act, the numbers hadn't accumulated so much where I lived, anyway. You did see too many Mexicans around, and, yes, I was tired of seeing that. There were some big contingents of Chinese grad students and a few •Indians, but these, and other friends of mine at the time, were just a select very decent and smart people, who had not come over in massive numbers. Only one decade before this period, anyone from Mainland China was a rarity to be noted and met by the local dignitaries. No, I was nowhere near NY City.
I just didn't see what was coming. It was not, in fact, till over a decade later, that my Dad got through to me on the issue of the massive immigration problem.
Then, there was the continual increase in Totalitarianism. As I wrote in Part 2 of When did this country get out of control?, for me, it wasn't until the middle of the 1990s that I started to see that every question of freedom vs. authoritarianism seemed to go in the latter direction. In the early 1990s, all it had been for me was experiencing the Feral Gov't's blackmail of the States regarding the 55 mph speed limit and, later, the same with the 21 age limit for alcohol sales. There were still people, even in the US Congress of all places, that argued about the Constitutionality of proposed laws.
The US Gov't Waco, Texas murders were perpetrated in 1993, which gave us a preview of things to come. In my State, it was only by the middle of that decade that everyone was pretty much in agreement - yes, you can just stop cars at checkpoints, because, drunk driving. No violation of any Constitutional Amendment IV was even imagined, because who read that stuff anymore? Then, 9/11 happened, and things got much worse. By 2005, the SCROTUS said Kelo v New London "yeah, Big Biz can just go appropriating property, but the government's gotta help arrange it."**
In the early 1990s, I might have had a few pet peeves about government overreach, but I didn't see the big rise in Totalitarianism coming yet. Who did? (Well, Lew Rockwell probably, and Vin Suprynowitz - see "Papiere bitte!" - "Your papers, please!" and memories of Mr. Vin Suprynowicz*** - at least).
Then there was our country's foreign policy. The Cold War had just ended. We'd won. The money to be saved by not having to guard most of the free world ought to have added up to a lot. We had built up goodwill all around the world. What could go wrong?
Most Americans living in 1992 would have experienced that usually out-of-mind, but still existent, threat that the Cold War could one day go hot at the nuclear level for their whole lives until a couple of years back. Let's see, you'd have to have been born before 1942 or so to have some memory of a time before the looming USSR Cold War nuclear threat was around. So, that'd be anyone 50 or under knowing of nothing else bigger, foreign policy-wise, until just about then, 30 years back.
I've left off the internal Commie infiltration we see blossoming now with the Cultural Revolution in progress, the hard-left D-squad, and so on, because that is something that I wouldn't have even thought of in the early 1990s.
Of these 3 now-huge problems with our country, likely in the order I wrote about them in urgency (most to least), there wasn't nearly so much to worry about in 1990, or so it looked. Why would I, or my fellow Americans, feel a need to pay close attention to it? We all have a life to live. We know we will be mostly wasting time trying to solve the country's problems ourselves, and well, those politicians will hopefully not get too far off the rails.
After all, I did spend some time helping in the '92 Presidential election, and, of all things, it was a Democrat (his name was Paul Tsongas). Then, when Slick Willy pulled ahead, I supported Ross Perot for a while. You vote, you watch some Rush Limbaugh on the TV with a friend, you help out occasionally, you subscribe to a political magazine or two****, and you feel good enough about that. After all, it's just politics, not life.
Ignorance is bliss, they say. It's nice to not have to pay attention to it all. That's where I was in the early 1990s, politically. I guess most Americans were the same then and well before then. Most Americans seem to have been in blissful ignorance long since then too.
It's a great country when the politics interfere so little in life and don't seem to be any long-term threat. That was 1992. That's not 2022. How many Americans have come out of this blissful ignorance? Even if you still don't care about politics, politics really cares about you now. Sure, ignorance is bliss ...till it ain't.
Of course, some early '90s music is in order here, and on another venue, Mr. Alarmist embedded a favorite group of mine, The B-52's with a song from the '80s, but I can still use Kate Pierson here. This one is REM's Shiny Happy People from their1991 album Out of Time with Kate complementing Michael Stipe on vocals. I know I've featured this one before. What a shiny, happy time.
Yes, that Kate Pierson was something else! Wiki says REM (with Kate Pierson) performed this song on Saturday Night Live on April 13th of that year. I can find clips of rehearsals on youtube, but not of the show itself.
* It was a snippet of that guy's 30 seconds or so speaking in Spanish at some event in 1988 that turned me off of ever thinking of voting for him.
** This case got Peak Stupidity comparing China favorably to America on the issue of Eminent Domain in the post Fireworks from China.
*** First time I got his name right without copy/paste, and the other 2 of our posts in this series are here and here.
**** Yes, I shamefully admit it was National Review for about 5 years. Before that, it had been The American Spectator.
Comments (15)
What CAN'T the Russians do?!
Posted On: Friday - February 11th 2022 10:10PM MST
In Topics: The Russians Globalists Media Stupidity ctrl-left
I don't think the Russians would care what we do over in North America, so long as the American Gov't would keep its military and its minions a couple of hundred miles away from their territory. They probably don't care very much about the elections here either, as the Deep State will operate the same either way*.
In the eyes of the ctrl-left, the Russians, that is, the USSR then, could do no wrong during the 70 years of Communism. It was those Western imperialists that kept starting trouble. Over the last 30 years, this has changed 180 degrees.
Now the ctrl-left, via the Lyin' Press, blames Russia for everything. Donald Trump winning the '16 election? Rigged by the Russians!. Peaceful protests causing mayhem in American cities in the summer of '20? Stirred up by the Russians! Hunter Biden's laptop being full of incriminating evidence? Planted by the Russians!
Incredibly, the latest event to be blamed on the Russians is the Canadian trucker convoy/protest. In a great letter** by Ottawan Gunnar Alredsson on VDare, "Canadian Truckers Send Memo To Elites—You’re Out Of Touch", there's a short video of some talking woman-head on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (Canadian State TV) blaming Russian "actors" for the actions of Canadian truckers who want their country back.
That Vlad Putin is something else! He's got his hands all over the place, playing 5-D chess with a direct line to Bobby Fischer. See? General Patton was right. He should have marched his 3rd Army another 1,000 miles east so we wouldn't have to be dealing with The Russians now.
* Maybe they had some hope in Trump in that regard, as we did, but he let us all down soon enough.
** Please read this one for other reasons than the media Russia-blaming stupidity. This is a very uplifting piece of writing about the goings-on up north.
Comments (9)
El Gato Malo on the 2-week vax statistics scam
Posted On: Thursday - February 10th 2022 9:57PM MST
In Topics: Websites Kung Flu Stupidity
(I remember un pequito Espanol from 1985 - he's The Bad Cat)
Peak Stupidity has never gotten deep into the numbers regarding the risk/benefit of the experimental Kung Flu vaccines. Our position is based on principle and based on our perspective, as obtained from years of being simply alive and aware. I'll quickly re- or re-re-state these two, in order.
1) I have been against the vaccine for myself simply based on the unConstitutional government edicts that have tried to make the shots mandatory. I've used the phrase "this is not the Black Death 2.0" before*, and even if it were the Black Death, we would not NEED the vaccine to be mandatory. Were I seeing 1 out of 25 people of my age expiring of this thing, even 1 in 50, I might be headed down to get the jab early in the morning to beat the line. It'd depend on MY calculations or feelings about risk vs. benefit. It'd be MY call.
2) Over the last 6 months, after seeing and hearing of multiple problems that people I know have had, I don't want the vaccine for that reason additionally.
I have not paid attention to all the stats and details simply due to my being very sure I will not be getting this experimental "treatment". However, if we're going to cover the last, but important piece of Totalitarianism that "our leaders" have extracted from this PanicFest, it's time to comment on this new revelation to me about more of the Establishment's lying with stats.
Peak Stupidity has been neglectful in not following up on too many of our (and iSteve's) commenters' suggestions for research on the numbers regarding the nasty and often deadly side effects and the efficacy, risk/benefit, respectively, of the vaccines. I thank Dieter Kief and others for all his suggestions. Mr. Kief has got me finally looking into to a great simple explanation about the quite important errors (likely purposefully) introduced in the data regarding whether the people behind the numbers are vaxxed or not for 2 weeks AFTER getting a shot. It's this comment by Hypnotoad666, right out in front of me as I read that iSteve comment thread, that got me finally over to Mr. Kief's recommended Bad Cat Substack blog.
This is a simple point that I'm sure many of us who suspect those healthcare "authorities" and the Lyin' Press of trying to scam gullible Americans via statistics have thought of. However El Gato Malo presents some simple numerical examples to show the
It's already obvious that counting those 2 weeks after vaccination as non-vaccinated, due to some lag time, is going to cause errors on the side of more non-vaccinated cases (and beyond cases, when it comes to that). Oh, I suppose this 2-week period is the norm used for this type of statistics, but as the Bad Cat notes, that's a problem when you don't have any true control group in an honest experiment.
The Bad Cat's examples are nothing but simple arithmetic based on an example of getting the Kung Flu at the same rate whether vaxxed or not. Why? That is, he wants to demonstrate the fake good efficacy rates that come purely out of the shift of the sample during that 2 week period.
For good numbers on vaccinated vs. un-vaccinated problems (cases, hospitalizations, and deaths), moving people from an actually vaccinated category to an official non-vaccinated one is a problem that is worse when you aren't talking about a 2 year study, but just a few months, as is the real case - El Gato uses only a 1 month period to show a near worst-case example of bogus numbers. The discrepancies would not be nearly so extreme were the data calculated over one year with that 2 week mis-attribution. (See the way the sample calculations are done in the examples to understand this.) However, Senor Gato's examples are pretty good based on the fact that the efficacy numbers for the vaccinations HAVE been determined only over a pretty short span. Well, they tell us you need a new one after a short while anyway, as you've got a new strain coming along, and the current vaccine can't handle the new one.
Now, one could name some variables, one each for the average rate of the vaxxed getting the virus and one for the unvaxxed. Another would be the time period of the determination of effectiveness, or lack thereof. Then, the percentage of people being vaccinated per time period would be another. You could plug and chug and see the effect of these. Great, but these are not really known and not constant over time either. That takes us to another even bigger factor.
How does one separate covid-style ill health effects from the vaccination itself vs. those that would happen to from an infection of the virus? What if those effects are the most intense during those first 2 weeks?
El Gato Malo shows us that even if these vaccines were completely ineffective, this 2-week-after-vaccination un-vaccinated status scam can make them look pretty effective. Worse yet, for 2 weeks, maybe the most important weeks, the ill health effects of the vaccines are being shifted to being the ill health effects of NOT taking them.
This is a statistical scam. But, they'll just say that Peak Stupidity also has a bad cattitude. Thank you, Senor Gato Malo, for elucidating this scam with your examples.
* Covidiots like the iSteve commenter "HA" have said this is a straw man. Nobody said it was the Black Death 2.0. Personally, I like to use the strong language, but let me put it this way: This Kung Flu "pandemic" is not the big scare to me that these commenters and writers have kept saying it should be either. How about that?
Comments (14)
Stuff a 10 year-old used to know - lost to history or lost to stupidity?
Posted On: Wednesday - February 9th 2022 6:16PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Peak Stupidity Roadshow
Peak Stupidity is not all politics all the time. Sometimes, we just deal in your standard everyday stupidity. These post usually end up with a Curmudgeonry topic key. (There are quite a few built up here!) It's the usual question: Are people just getting more stupid, or is it just my getting sick of people?
Yeah, you try to teach kids the safe way to do things. Walking along the side of the road is what you'd figure is one of the simplest things. You need to see who's coming at you. People, OK, sober and/or non-British/Aussie/Kiwi's, Hong Kongers, or Japanese, drive on the right side of the road. Therefore, if there's no sidewalk or path well off the road, you should walk on the left side, so you can see who's coming at you. There's a much better chance to get out of the way of a driver who's not paying attention.
In our neighborhood, the cars aren't going very fast. Sometimes, we'll stay on the right, if we just took a right, we're only going a block or two and then we're going to take a 2nd right turn. Most of the drivers are very courteous and will get as far out of your way as they can. The thing is, it's not most of them that may maim or kill you though, just the one.
Don't they pass down this information anymore down to the kids? How about to the adults? I see them too, walking on the right side, not looking back either. They are oblivious to the danger from someone not paying attention. If their parents never passed down this tidbit to them, could they not draw on their own common-sense? Do they need an app for this?
Comments (6)
My dream interview
Posted On: Wednesday - February 9th 2022 7:11AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity
There's plenty more that Peak Stupidity has in mind to write about than this post. However, this one has to come into pixel form right now, and you'll understand why in a minute.
This was a dream interview I had for a job at a "TECH" company, right there in the heart of it, the Bay Area. By "dream interview" I mean, literally. By "literally" I mean, literally literally, unlike that word's common usage by, well, the type of people in the interview room I was in ... in my dream. I would not be able to write this post if I had not woken up due to my rant at the end of said dream this morning.
Seriously, you know how it goes if you have a dream and don't wake up right afterwards. You don't remember it at all. Wait, so how do you "know how it goes"? I just figured that out long ago. If you get woken up during a dream, it will be vivid as all get-out, but if you don't, possibly one detail may just pop out at you the next day, but you sure won't have enough material for a blog post. There you go. That's why I'm writing this right now. Had I somehow been able to spill out the whole dream within 15 seconds, I'd have a very entertaining long post here. Hopefully, this is good enough.
I was in a fairly large board room in a tall office building in what I was under the impression of being San Francisco. (Well, I mean, if I thought that's where it was, than that's where it was. It's a dream anyway.) This company had some kind of big web site that was widely known. I sat there knowing that I am no software expert, with only a little informal training and a small amount of experience. Why they wanted me there never came up, but I knew that they had my meager (in that field) resume. They needed me for something though, and I was prepared to do my best there at this boardroom table.
There were about 6 people in the room, but the manager-to-be was doing most of the talking. She was at least 1/2 Oriental, and sort of cute, but not hot. These business suits ought to have shorter skirts, and BTW, maybe it shows you how behind my mind is on things, as, who would be wearing business suits in this business anymore, if they ever did, and what in the world would we be doing in a big office building anymore (more on this at the end)?
I already can't remember what this manager girl talked to me about other than her adding "I'm a divorcee", which had something to do with something. I thought it was unusual for that to come out in an interview, and no, unfortunately for all of us, this wasn't leading to one of THOSE kinds of dreams! After some more talk, I was about to ask about this divorce of hers but remembered you don't do that. Everything was all business-like and the others, all middle-aged guys in suits too, told me a few more things. Someone showed me a video of the big day when the company had an IPO and the CEO was going on CNBC. That day was past though, I and I had the feeling the place was beyond its heyday, whatever the hell it was that they did.
At some point, and I REALLY wish I could remember, as maybe this would tell me something about myself too, the young lady got in some disagreement with one of the guys and bitched him out. I was not in agreement with her, but, again, I was pretty clueless on the whole deal. At some point we moved to another floor in the tall building for some reason. It wasn't to look at anything tangible though, not even computer screens, so I don't know what the point in moving was.
I never knew what they did there. The girl, with some additional talk from the others described what I would be doing. I thought that maybe I got the idea. "OK, so you want me to find bugs in the code?" (See that's what I did for a while at another job, and it was a great way to learn all the software. However, that non-dream job was at a small company in which one could get a handle on all the software.) "No, that's not it at all." I explained the bit about "well, it would be a good way to learn your software..."
Nope, it was something vague, well this was a dream after all, and it's over an hour later, about liaisoning with people, about bringing people in through my contacts, and, oh, the pay never came up! Hey, wait a minute, was this a Pyramid sch ... ooops excuse me, Multi-level Marketing opportunity? It wasn't that though. I was just so behind what they were about, that I didn't know what this job would be.
OK, well, the interview was over, with no resolution on anything. We all headed out of the room toward the elevators (I remember we were on the 26th floor), and finally I decided it was time to speak up.
"I don't know what this job is! This whole operation makes no sense to me." "Listen, I don't do all that crap on-line. I'm not on Linked-In. I never joined Facebook. I don't join shit! I don't even know what the job is, and I don't want anything to do with this f___ing bitch!" Said "bitch" was inside the elevator before us, with the doors almost, but not all the way closed. See, as in real life, I didn't need the job that badly.
As I left the office building and the dream, I thought about some more things I wanted to say to the potential manager girl, some conservative thoughts about "maybe your job is to stay home and have some babies" and the like. Man, this was worse than thinking of the right thing to say on the way home. I was awake now, and there was no way to get back into that dream to tell these "TECH" idiots what I really thought about their whole lifestyle.
PS: I didn't write this post in order to get a dream analyzed, though maybe that would be interesting. I believe the thoughts came to me from my reading of Michelle Malkin's writing in her latest column* about her and her husband getting banned from AirBNB. Then, there is another article, from VDare's Eugene Gant that Ron Unz kindly posted about the large •Indian infiltration of the Big-Tech business - "The Indian CEO Virus"—Is It Good for the Historic American Nation?. I'm getting really sick of those people.
Secondly, this is the 2nd post about a dream I've had. The first was about a pleasant dream in the midst of the Kung Flu PanicFest - I had a dream .... After I woke up, I did remember that the dream for this post had nothing related to the 2-year-long PanicFest in it. Nobody was wearing face masks, and we were sitting close together at the big boardroom table. Boardroom?!! Geeze, even before the PanicFest, lots of these people would have worked remotely, and they definitely would be now.
* There are LOTS of comments there this time, heartening for a number of reasons. (One is just that I'd like Mr. Unz to keep her on. He likes page views.)
Comments (2)
Anarchy in the UKraine
Posted On: Tuesday - February 8th 2022 6:38PM MST
In Topics: The Russians The Neocons Deep State
I, hence Peak Stupidity tends to miss a few big stories due to not being subscribers to the Establishment Infotainment. Just as I was very surprised over a year into his Presidency, due to my not hearing anything about it, that the '16 election Russia Collusion story was somehow still a thing* - see Nothing but Distractions - I've been surprised again with "what it this Ukraine stuff?!"
I know there was a big deal involving the Russians and the Russian contingent in that land a few years ago that the US had no business being involved in. It's back, and apparently, it could get as stupid as the beginning of WWI was, with nukes. I don't know any details, I never wanted to know, but I get the info. second-hand. I don't write this to sound proud of that, but just to note that it says something that Americans, with all the serious destruction going on in the "homeland" must now be worried about a totally unnecessary problem that the US Deep State and the Neocons have created.
In another good thread** under a Steve Sailer post, in this case simply titled Ukraine, commenter Physicist Dave says, "they are drunk with war". In my terminology, "they" would be the Neocons and the Deep State.
The Deep State people have been addicted to power since the end of WWII, with the OSS crowd turning into the CIA with at least a legitimate enemy for 40 years, as inept as they were at fighting it.
The Neocons have been drunk with power and war only since the end of the Cold War over 30 years back. As the commenter Almost Missouri noted in that thread, these are a lot of the same crowd (mind-set-wise) who were overly sympathetic with our biggest Cold War enemy due to, well, their being lefties/Communists themselves. However, after Ronnie, Maggie, the West German leadership, Pope John Paul II, and millions of American and other Western engineers, technicians, soldiers, sailors, and airmen won the Cold War, the Neocons were very jealous about the new American military sole super-powers. They wanted them some of that.
Whether it’s been to keep the American military close by in the Middle East for a half century to support Israel (whatever the specific wars – it doesn’t matter), or beating up on some Christians in the Balkans on behalf of some Moslems, just for the hell of it(?), or spreading the new (evil, IMO) American values around the world, or else, there was no stopping it. That’s changing.
Sure, they are fooling gullible Americans on this. Some old-fashioned conservatives who don't pay attention to the long term big picture may still have this idea of Russia as the 1980s USSR in their heads, as seen in the photo above (likely in their heads). For others, the Neocon and the Lyin' Press are just pushing this stupidity that lots of us see as bizarre because, for the former, the Establishment goes along with it, and, as for the latter, these hysterical ninnies on the TV news spout it all because they don’t know any better.
NATO was formed to fight the USSR. The USSR has been gone for 33 years. Disband NATO! (If you recall, President Trump said he would, but then he was quite the bullshitter. I mean, could the Commander-in-Chief at least order American units not to participate in any NATO programs? Sure he could, if he had some confidence and didn't get snowed by his hand-picked anti-Trump Neocon advisors.)
I don't know very many details of the Ukrainian situation. I don't care to know any more than what I already know - that American military action there has nothing to do with the defense of the United States. I couldn't have imagined even 20 years ago that I'd be rooting for Russia over America in a possible military engagement! Does that make me a traitor? I believe that makes me a patriot. As for the two former Cold War polities, 2022 Russia is not the Cold War era Communist USSR. 2022 America is not the post-WWII leader of the Free World, but is now broke, woke, and and a sick joke.
************************************
40 years ago, if you told me you were pro-Russia, I would have called you a Communist.
30 years ago, if you told me you were pro-Russia, I would have called you a gracious winner.
20 years ago, if you told me you were pro-Russia, I would have called you a Conservative.
If you tell me you’re pro-Russia now, I would call you an American Patriot.
************************************
* Oh, yeah, and then it went on another 2 years or more, I dunno...
** It's a long one, I warn you, with 526 comments as of my writing here.
Comments (8)
Joe Biden is a criminal Human Trafficker!
Posted On: Saturday - February 5th 2022 10:31PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Websites Media Stupidity US Feral Government Anarcho-tyranny Zhou Bai Dien
The image above comes from our post Truth in Trafficking Triumph of a year back. In that post, Peak Stupidity discussed the hype involved in governments and Big Biz using that that term to worry Americans about Americans, while it's almost all non-Americans, and their Latin American cargo of •Indian* or African** slaves that are "trafficked". (Quotes just due to the term sounding stupid.)
In this case the term Human Trafficking well fits what's been going on. Tucker Carlson has been on this story of criminal activity in the name of American destruction by Joe Biden. (What an amazing and courageous man of integrity Tucker has been in general!) In this case, the New York Post has broken this story too***. Last week, Amanda Devine of this outlet wrote 'Betraying the American people’: Leaked video reveals Joe Biden’s ‘hush hush’ migrant invasion. If you can get past the usual big-news-outlet-site mess of pop-ups and crap jumping around (just give it 2 minutes to do its thing), you will see that this is some real reporting. There's no inserted opinionating as in the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. - going by Steve Sailer who I can trust on this. (I won't click on that crap.)
Is there a way to change the Paper of Record from the New York Times to the New York Post? Easy swap there, same city, one word, should be a piece of cake. In my mind, if we're talking newspapers, it already is the new paper of record, and if I could subscribe to a paper copy, I believe I would.
About the story finally: The Biden Administration has been shipping illegal aliens from the Texas border to multiple places around the country via charter airline service. It's been in the middle of the night and been obviously done very surreptitiously. They just figured no one important would know and/or they wouldn't say anything.
In the New York Post story, the video shows one of the 737s involved parked on whatever ramp space they could find at the compact Westchester County (KHPN) airport, White Plains, NY, just up the Hudson River from NYC. They come in after tower hours, perfectly legally, but I don't know how many scanners (say those used and conglomerated on the Live ATC website) would be catching the quick traffic calls on the tower frequency made in the blind or to other aircraft. Those radio calls are not even required, other than for one's own safety. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the pilots had been told to not use the frequency other than to light up the approach, runway, and taxiway lights. OTOH, for Westchester Country A/P in particular, one could listen to the right New York approach frequency, as it's be really hard to get there from the south without talking to them.
I noted the logo on the tail of that plane, and it seemed familiar. That's the logo of iAero, formerly Swift Airlines. Here's one of their 30-odd 737s:
Their logo has changed with the name, but if you recognize Swift Airlines, you may have read the Peak Stupidity post CPAC, gutsy Michelle Malkin, and Swift Airlines of 2 years back. In that post, we praised the job Swift Airlines has been, and STILL IS, doing in flying the most criminal of the illegal aliens from detention centers in Miami, Florida and Alexandria, Louisiana (via Miami) to their home countries down south. They hold at least 150 criminal illegals and 15 armed guards in coach class. This is very much a Con Air style operation, and I'm pretty sure there's no beverage service.
Well, that's great, but the now-named iAero charter airline is the one involved in this large scale human trafficking operation. They have been contracted to do this by a company called MVM, which in turn, works for Joe Biden.
The MVM, Inc. web site says:
As a trusted professional services firm, MVM provides extensive domain expertise in the areas of counter-narcotics, criminal and civil investigations, public safety, and national security.On their "Services" pages, they say:
MVM’s diversified capabilities allow us to meet the rapidly evolving requirements of our customers and forecast future needs. We work collaboratively with our partners to employ innovative program management techniques and utilize data analytics to support decision making and performance management.That sounds like their communication officer's way of telling you jack squat. The site says the place has 800 employees. I doubt it'd be easy to find out who they are, much less talk with them. (The cop at White Plains tried, and the arrogant bastard at least let escape that, yeah, he works for Creepy Joe.)
One can track iAero's flights on the information-packed Flight Aware site**** using their code SWQ, taken from their old name and still-current call sign. (The code is already part of the link.) However, this company does lots of other flying, including some freight work for DHL out of/into Cincinnati. This human trafficking is only a small part of their flying.
One more problem with the tracking of these flights is the use of the "Dot Com" call sign. I applaud the FltPlan company for helping flights remain anonymous***** in this age of almost no privacy left. That company arranges for "Dot Com #" call signs for such flights. I have looked on the Flight Aware site for that code DCM and seen nothing, so perhaps they go along with the idea and don't display them. It's possible that we can't see these human trafficking flights using this resource.
Back to the NY Post story, we see that these illegal aliens (not minors, as liars have told us!) are being moved off the airplanes and onto buses, likely 3 or 4 of those big buses per 737 planeload. Those buses are spreading them out to wherever, I guess where the votes, cheap labor, and cultural destruction are most needed. This trafficking is not about sex slavery or illegal entry. It's about purposeful continued destruction of the country.
MVM, Incorporated and iAero, formerly Swift, Airlines are now regularly aiding and abetting the trafficking of hundreds of illegal aliens They are being whores for the Feral Gov't. It's real Anarcho-Tyranny when the Feral Gov't and Big Biz regularly annoy us with posters and announcements about human trafficking, insinuating that it's a problem that occurs between regular Americans, when it's the Feral Gov't itself conducting human trafficking!
Lastly, with the name Creepy Joe based on some of this election fraud's previous behavior around the children, I wouldn't be surprised if Joe Biden doesn't have a past of some other human trafficking, done as a freelancer.
* See New Jersey Jones and the Temple of Doom
** Yes, their horrible legacy of slavery continues.
*** That actual news organization did great work on the story of the Joe Biden laptop/corruption scandal back just before the '20 election, but, due to ... reasons ... it was never picked up by the main Lyin' Press. Hence, there WAS no scandal, officially.
**** Any IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) flight, which must include all flights at 18,000 ft and above (by law), meaning the altitude of most decent-distance jet aircraft flights, will show on this site, with the exception I explain above. Do they stay low and go VFR (Visual Flight Rules)? That may be against their FAA operations specs, but maybe not.
***** I.e., we can't track Bill Gates' or George Soros' planes so easily. It's mostly used by the business/corporate jet world.
Comments (10)
Groundhog Month
Posted On: Friday - February 4th 2022 4:41PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Race/Genetics
It's not just February 2nd. It's not just Punxsutawney either. Groundhogs all over, and people too, are experiencing Groundhog Day, the movie. Day in and day out, you come out of that hole hoping to not see any dark shadows.
Wait, what's that? It's a new Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. statue, or Rosa Parks, or Emmitt Till. They've already taken down all the Confederate statues they know about, so Punxsutawney Phil statues may be next. #GroundhogDayTooWhite!
Nope, back in the hole. It's STILL Black History Month. Come out in 25 days.
Comments (14)
Inspiration from the Canucks, eh?
Posted On: Thursday - February 3rd 2022 12:52PM MST
In Topics: Humor Globalists Kung Flu Stupidity People's Revolt
Yes, we are about a week behind, due to the usual too much time spent on Unz Review reading and commenting, as you all know can be a problem. I appreciate the many informative and entertaining comments being written and posted in our own Peak Stupidity "threads" by our regulars and even by some irregulars.
We're gonna do what they said can't be done.
(Put the Totalitarians in their place, that is.)
Anyway, that Canadian Trucker protest is still going on up there in Ottawa, and per one particular Canuck I heard from on a clip, they may stay a lot longer. His statement was that he would drive his rig home only after the PM Justin Trudeau, the "little potato"**, resigned from office. Well, he'd have to be found first.
What I like about this, is that the truckers have a whole lot of power in big numbers like this. Not only can't you arrest them all, you can't even tow a one of them, much less tow them all. Besides impeding the important traffic flow into a city (like all of them) much dependent on the hard-working Deplorables, should the decide to do so, they can deprive a city of sustenance just by not going anywhere. Additionally, if they wanted to get violent, who's stopping all those big rigs?
I don't think many on our side WANT it to get violent yet. This trucker protest is a great middle road. It's more than writing letters to congresscreatures/ministers or standing out in the cold with signs. If the Globalist Totalitarians push things though, the power is with the truckers. I am glad to see so much support from around the world, coming to Washington, F.S., all the way from California, from what I read. (I hope to be there, somewhere, in support.)
The turn of events is very heartening and inspiring. I hope there will be a lot of protest creep, that is, the expansion of the pressure against other Totalitarian measures that have been laid on population.
I'm sure there's some other newer music to go along with the protest, but I don't know - at least instead of going back to the 1960s for inspirational protest music, we just have to go back to the mid/late 1970s trucker/CB radio craze for the Jerry Reed song above. Yes, C.W. McCall's Convoy is perfect, but we've featured it before, and I like the Eastbound and Down*** tune and banjo pickin'.
About Little Potato stashed there in a dark cupboard somewhere in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, the Babylon Bee did a number on him. The article is different, but just as funny.
(You gotta love the swigs from the maple syrup bottle, eh?)
* I'm not sure if they can even be called "threads", since it's nothing but a submit-time-based linear listing.
** In Chinese, the word for potato sounds like "Too-doh"
*** It's from the 1977 Burt Reynolds/Sally Field movie, Smokey and the Bandit. Westbound and Down is the same song with slightly different lyrics about the trip out west to GET the rare Coors Beer. Do try to keep up! ;-}
Comments (15)
Eric Clapton on Enoch Powell and the Wogs
Posted On: Tuesday - February 1st 2022 10:37AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Music Race/Genetics
(No, "Enoch Powell and the Wogs" WOULD be a good name for the band, but it's not.)
This post is not really a continuation of the previous one about musician Eric Clapton, but it is a discussion of the second topic involving Mr. Clapton and politics from that VDare Carl Horowitz article "Is This A Sovereign Nation / Or Just A Police State?" Eric Clapton, COVID, And Immigration. The two discussions, about Mr Clapton's opinionated commentary from 4 decades apart are intermixed by Mr. Horowitz, but this second topic is in VDare's wheelhouse, out-of-control, unwanted mass immigration. (Out of the people's control that is!)
I'll put this caveat near the top here this time: Eric Clapton is just a musician. I wish it didn't come down to people getting their politics from entertainers rather than, I dunno, Ron Paul's Liberty Report. (Hey, it's entertaining too but it's no Layla or Blues Power.) That's the way it is, and this second discussion by Carl Horowitz is really something, anyway.
We're going back to 1976 here, 45 1/2 years back, when Eric Clapton had already been a big star already for10 years or so. This was a month after the American Bicentennial, if that rings a (liberty) bell for you. The show in question was at The Odeon in Birmingham, England. Horowitz's article notes that, like your average white band* during that era, Eric Clapton drank a lot of booze then and did cocaine. I'll discuss that "excuse" in a bit, but during a break in playing, he started a monologue to the audience which included this:
Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man. I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. F*cking wogs, man. F*cking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back.Firstly, now I can guess more accurately what a "wog" is. Secondly, Enoch Powell was a scholarly, true-Conservative British Minister of Parliament for 37 years (1950 - 1987), famous at VDare and elsewhere for his "Rivers of Blood" speech in April of 1968. He was the British version of, well, maybe NOBODY America had, warning of this existential threat to his country.
Eric Clapton agreed. Were I transported back into the audience that night at the Odeon (the WHAT?), my current political bent would have me hooting and hollering "you said it, man!" However, I have sympathy for the bloke who paid his 5 quid for the show** who just wanted to hear the music, at that point hopefully some of the older best blues stuff alone with his "newer" music from There's One in Every Crowd and No Reason to Cry*** "Shut up and Sing!" Sure, OK, fair enough.
Because it was a conservative rant, not a leftist rant, the repercussions for Mr. Clapton were a lot bigger. I won't go over all the details from the article except to say that the "Rock Against Racism" group that resulted and persisted for 6 years after must have been mostly a British thing.
It reads as though Mr. Clapton didn't give any overt apology, at least for many years.
In a 2004 interview with the British music magazine Uncut, he termed Powell “outrageously brave,” adding that the UK was “inviting people in as cheap labor and then putting them in ghettos”Any excuse could easily include "I was drunk off my ass, so you know..." I would say things are in reality quite the opposite. Often the truth only comes out, or CAN only come out, when the potential truth-teller is drunk, not necessarily off his ass completely either.****
By the year 1976, it was brave of Eric Clapton to try to tell some racial truths to the people of formerly-Great formerly-Britain. How did he get his views, as an Englishman in a still almost-all-white country in 1976? I'm guessing it's from some time spent and experiences gained in America and from his American musical friends.
One was of his musical friends was Jimi Hendrix - I doubt he was the example Mr. Clapton had in mind. Another was Duane Allman who was, in fact, in an integrated band, during the time in the South when private schools were forming to get away from that. Still, you can get the truth out of all races of people though. That's especially the case when there ARE drugs and alcohol involved.
PS: One more point is in order. Commenter "UsNThem" on an iSteve comment thread brought up the question of Mr. Clapton's having made his whole, early, at least, career from the blues music originating from blacks in America. That's true, as with most of the British bands, and plenty of American, in those years. Carl Horowitz addresses this. I will too, real quickly here.
You know, in the whole continent of Africa, all of which makes a bit of civilization was appropriated from the White man, 2-story housing, electrical tools, hand tools, plumbing, law & order, medicine, [database error, text field exceeded!], OK, OK, I've already embedded that "What have the Romans done for us?" video before.... Yet, they may go on all the anti-White-people rants they want anyway, over in Africa, and I have no problem with that!
OK were these 2 posts just an excuse to feature some great music by Eric Clapton, as Peak Stupidity has been remiss about? Partially.
I suppose Lay Down, Sally from the Slowhand album has some indirect blues influence. It sounds a lot like the style of J.J. Cale in his They Call me the Breeze, made famous (OK, to ME, at least) by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Tulsa Time is Eric Clapton's rock version of a true country song, written by and sung first by Don Williams - my second favorite country singer*****.
Finally, I will put this ballad down, though knowing the pain that Eric Clapton must have suffered from the tragic death of his 4 y/o makes me cry, honestly. Oh well...
* No, I'm not sure about the drug habits of the Average White Band itself. This is the generic average white band and average black or integrated band too, hell, everyone!
** a) I'm trying to stick to British terminology here. b) I think a quid is a pound - yes, thank you, wiki. c) I will write a post coming about the inflation in concert ticket prices soon. Even for the apples to oranges (then to now, and assuming you like apples better) comparison of smaller venues and better artists back then, without using hedonics, these prices have risen exorbitantly!
*** There's really not many hits that I remember from those 2 albums, but that's what the musicians did then, go on tour to popularize their new stuff .(That'll be part of the discussion the post coming per note **(c).)
**** There was a running Seinfeld gag is which the other characters would give Elaine some alcohol to get the story out. Peppermint Schnapps, I think it was, that did the trick.
***** No, that was just a funny line by Jerry Reed from Smokey and the Bandit Part 2(?)
Comments (29)
Eric Clapton - Stand and Deliver
Posted On: Monday - January 31st 2022 10:39AM MST
In Topics: Music US Police State Kung Flu Stupidity
(I'll tell you first thing, the video is not very good. Perhaps it was hard to find like-minded people to make one. Additionally we are no longer in the music video heyday of the 1980's, as VJ'd by Martha Quinn.)
Peak Stupidity is not in the habit of keeping up with the modern music scene, such as it is or may be, even from musicians who have been in the music scene for 6 decades. Yeah, there are a lot of them that have been around that long now! However, we have nothing at all against the music of Eric Clapton, so I was surprised to do a search of this site and find only one, Crossroads from Eric and his band Cream. (I was almost positive that I'd embedded Blues Power before, one of my favorites.* We'll have to remedy this lack of music from Mr. Clapton.
To give a background on this great guitarist and White-man's blues** singer is just too much for me, and there is Wikipedia and the whole internet. Suffice it to say, after noting Eric Clapton was in the bands The Yardbirds, Blind Faith, The Bluesbreakers, Cream, something, something ... Derick and the Dominoes... Why do these bands sound familiar if you've been interested in all the big 1960s-70s rock stars? It's because it seems like that whole British artist crowd had been in some of these bands in some combination. "He was with Jeff Beck in ___, and Jimmy Page, and Steve Winwood, who broke up and formed ____ with Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, and ...." It must have been a close-knit group of these blues-influenced British guys.
Because I don't keep up, it took my reading of a recent VDare article by Carl Horowitz*** to learn about about Eric Clapton's views on the Kung Flu PanidFest - "Is This A Sovereign Nation / Or Just A Police State?" Eric Clapton, COVID, And Immigration. That line is straight from Van Morrison's late-'20, anti-Totalitarianism song, as sung and played by Eric Clapton above.
It's really great to read of at least SOMEBODY over there having taken a stand, especially back in the first year of the PanicFest. It was perhaps 6 months behind my views on the matter, but good going, Eric Clapton (and Van Morrison, obviously too). Early on in Mr. Horowitz's article, I found myself not so enamored by the musician after reading that Mr. Clapton was only anti-vax for personal reasons, due to his having taken the vax..
The recent trouble began for the 76-year-old rocker after he received two AstraZeneca vaccinations. Unexpected—and frightening—symptoms ensued.That is not impressive to me. It's not being a man of principle - against Totalitarianism - to finally come out against mandated vaccines only when it becomes personally injurious. I don't have any problem with his having taken the vaccine. He may have felt pretty vulnerable at his age and whatever condition. He may have felt very comfortable taking experimental or non-experimental drugs, heha.... (After all, if you were in the Yardbirds, or Cream, or the Bluesbreakers ... and friends with Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page ....)
“I took the first jab of AZ and straight away had severe reactions which lasted ten days. I recovered eventually and was told it would be twelve weeks before the second one,” Clapton wrote:About six weeks later I was offered and took the second AZ shot, but with a little more knowledge of the dangers. Needless to say the reactions were disastrous, my hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning, and pretty much useless for two weeks, I feared I would never play again, (I suffer with peripheral neuropathy and should never have gone near the needle.) But the propaganda said the vaccine was safe for everyone.The experience caused him to rethink whether immunization is necessary and whether mandated vaccines and “social distancing” are worth the loss of liberty. In solidarity with musicians who couldn’t find live gigs, he now won’t perform at venues that require proof of vaccination.
[Eric Clapton’s Anti-Vaccine Diatribe Blames ‘Propaganda’ for ‘Disastrous’ Experience, by Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone, May 16, 2021]
Eric Clapton took a stance against the vaccine only after the vaccine almost took HIM out. However, I did read more about Mr. Clapton's efforts against the rest of the PanicFest, and there's the song above. That part is admirable. He knows he has the rest of the entertainment and Infotainment "industry" against him, so I applaud his courage, or at least his not being another useful idiot. It's good to have someone "influential" in some way on our side on this.
I put "influential" in quotes to make a point. I don't think a rock artist, musician of any sort, artist of any sort, actors and actresses, or any of these entertainers have any special insight into political matters that would make it worth listening to him when he spouts out his political views. It’s understandable if you’ve already paid good money for the show. That’s when the whole “shut up and sing!” advice is warranted.
I really couldn’t care less what any musician, artist, or actor/actress does in his personal life either****. That is, not any more than I would about any other random interesting character. This explains why I’ve never bought a People Magazine copy or written about these people on Peak Stupidity. That's why I didn't even know about this anti-PanicFest song from over a year ago.
Still, as for the music, back when Eric Clapton got big, Bob Dylan was playing in, and playing, an influential part of a big movement. Movements against Totalitarianism could use some good music too... or we could recycle the old stuff ... leading to a Canadian Trucker post?
Finally, if you read Carl Horowitz's article, you'll see that there's a whole 'nother story mixed in, about Eric Clapton's anti-immigration (anti-destruction-of-Great-Britain, I should say) views that he voiced during a concert in 1976. That is more in VDare's wheelhouse, hence the appearance of the article there. I will write about that political stance from Eric Clapton in another post shortly.
When it comes to my views on Eric Clapton, well, it's about the music. Here is my favorite, a live version of a song from his 1970 self-titled album. Ain't no need to be a wallflower, cause now I'm livin' on blues power! Really, this is more straight-up Rock & Roll with his great leads. If not "Blues power", the movements which we must form to fight "the man" this time really ought to have some music power behind them. I don't know how you can beat THIS though.
* Then, it's impossible to search much here, at least with any ease, and even with my check in the dBase, it's still possible I just embedded it with no reference and not much writing, as I used to do.
** I have hereby reminded myself to write a post I thought about a year ago about blues music. It'll be coming.
*** He's a very infrequent contributor to VDare, having only 13 articles on the site in 20 years, but I do remember this one from last year, with its great title too: Marx Got It Right: Mass Immigration Wrecks Wages. Why Won’t America’s Resurgent Communists Admit It?.
**** I do have a big amount of sympathy for Eric Clapton regarding the tragic accidental death of his young son. That must have been devastating, and it did make his song Tears n Heaven very moving for me, once I learned what it was about.
Comments (21)
I can link to spotted toad, I can podcast on the road, goin' mobile ..
Posted On: Saturday - January 29th 2022 8:16PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Music Humor Media Stupidity Artificial Stupidity Peak Stupidity Roadshow
(OK, maybe not in the title, so I'll link to Spotted Toad here. No guarantees, as I've never read him, but the articles look promising.)
Let me first just embed this same video that I found near one year ago, with a guy named James Austin Johnson doing an excellent imitation of Donald Trump. His Trump on Scooby Doo is truly LOL funny. Watch, if you haven't already:
As I wrote one paragraph about under that year-ago post, there's one thing that perplexes me about not just this video, but loads of others the young people are making. Some of these people have, if not funny like this one, very interesting and important things to say. As the independent media we need, people will report on the nasty effects of the Kung Flu vaccines, better remedies for the dreaded disease itself, the stolen election of '20, race realism, whatever, but things that need to be said that the Lyin' Press will not touch or will simply lie about.
Here's what perplexes me. These people won't freaking stay in one place doing this! The guy above is walking around some city that looks like it's in south Florida. He never said where he's going. Some people from the area might recognize some features of that urban landscape and enjoy the puzzle, but he lost me, anyway. With that camera angle, I couldn't tell if he was heading somewhere in particular or just walking around the blocks. Since he's in that nice locale, why couldn't he have sat on the beach and done this? Just sit down, for cryin' out loud, or at least stand in one place.
Then, there are even more of the guys that make these videos as they drive in their cars. WTF is that about? Is your day THAT busy? Long commute, I guess. See, I could see using this time for voice recordings, but with the background of movement through traffic, this really worries me. "OK, wow, this is Ron Unz-level 'I just read 14 books about this, and all the history is wrong!' stuff, but damn, watch your blind spot, man, I want to hear the end of this! "Hey, there's a merge ahead, dude. Quit taking part in the formation of a traffic jam and just drive. It's not THAT urgent. You can tell us when you get home."
I don't know how one can really pay attention to the road while spending the mental effort to talk coherently about politics at the same time. (You gotta hope they have a mount for their phones, at least.) I would not be safe doing this. Maybe I'd be still safer than the guy surfing Peak Stupidity right now and especially the guys commenting on Peak Stupidity right now, or the women putting on make-up or arranging real estate showings.
Yes, these are MOBILE phones**. I! GET! THAT! [/Tucker]. Notwithstanding the iEspionage aspect of these things, I'm still pretty happy I don't have to stop at a diner (yes, diner!) to use a pay phone. I do talk on it when driving by myself on long trips of if something comes up. I don't mind stopping to do something demanding serious attention on it, though. Need to look up a motel? I can stop at the gas station when the time comes, take a leak, get some nabs, look up info about the motels, and even, yes, if I feel a deep need to make a video podcast RIGHT NOW, even pull into a rest area and do it from a picnic table.
OK, stars of the new media: Keep up the good work. Let's make an end-run around the Lyin' Press directly to the people and make the Lyin' Press obsolete. When you do it, though, just, please, stay put!!
Better yet, sit down in a comfortable chair at home and look dignified.* If you're going to do this a lot, like some of these podcasters, set up a bookshelf with a collection of classics showing for the background. You don't have to READ them. Hell, you don't even have to have the real books. Be creative.
Look, I know they don't have any good music now and must listen to the good old rock, so let me just tell these Millennial iPhone jockeys: Yes, they are mobile phones, but that's not what people mean by "going mobile".
This one was my favorite Who song at one point, in the 1990s when I was pretty mobile myself.
I might drive up on the curb
or wreak havoc on the road.
Goin' mobile.
I can stop in any street
and get follows for my tweet.
Goin' mobile.
Keep me movin'.
Swipe, swipe!
beep beep!
Tap the tiny screen,
order fair-trade bean
when I'm mobile.
Well I can stream the Grateful Dead
while I text to Fred
when I'm mobile
Keep me movin'.
Acoustic Who?
* OK, for that Trump imitation, the latter is uncalled for...
** Though they haven't been called that for a minute.
Comments (9)
Face Masking anecdotes for the week
Posted On: Friday - January 28th 2022 11:58AM MST
In Topics: Kung Flu Stupidity
(File photo from the old days, before masking and plexiglass.)
It's got to be that nearly half of the Kung Flu Stupidity posts* are about the idiotic face-masking rules and practices. I've written before that this is not the worst of the Totalitarianism being made the new normal, or at least having precedents set for. The public LOCKDOWNs are the worst, though this forced vaccination comes close and is scarier in the short term.
Here's what it is about the face masking: This is the side of Totalitarianism explained well by Theodore Dalrymple (from here.**)
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.Even EXPERT Fauci has so much as admitted that these face masks don't do squat against the Flu Manchu, but, still, they worked. Wait, what? Yes, they worked to show that Americans can be forced to do all kinds of humiliating and even self-harmful things if they are panicked or just the very compliant sort. And, this can be kinda fun for the elites!
What's with the restaurant images up top? Well, I try to start posts with an image, and this is the first anecdote. This was one of those take-out Chinese food places at the airport terminal. There's Panda Express, and now Lee Anne Chin. There's a lot of them now that have cropped up everywhere. Lee Anne Chin herself does not partake of her own offerings full of fat, sugar, and salt, so she is not one of the many Chins and many-chinned that one can find in a Chinese phone book. (Hey, I work with what I got.)
The black lady behind the counter had one of those new-fangled face masks I described in Moar fashion accessory anecdotes***. The foreign customer, •Indian from what I could gather, was having a hard time figuring out what the stuff there was, or what she was supposed to be getting. You've got the black accent, foreign, English-as-a-2nd-language old lady on the other end of some plexiglass, and then the mask on the employee. How is communication supposed to happen at all? Per the usual way, the server lady pulled down her face mask to be clear.
Now, I wasn't paying too much attention, but I did hear the customer say something about the Covid or what-have-you. This employee then, very clearly and nicely, said "no, ma'am, it's OK. You're not gonna catch anything." That's a lady after my own heart! "Hey, I just work here. They make us." would have probably been my addition, after a quick glance to see where the manager was.
It was back to the county building to pay taxes on a vehicle, in which one of the 2 anecdotes of that previous "fashion accessory" post came from. Yep, those are nice cloth masks they got there. I saw prices like $15 apiece when I checked on-line after last visit. Sure, I put it on, but I had to take it down to my chin to talk to the lady who accepted my property tax check. Nobody cared about that, least not the cashier behind 1 1/4" of plexiglass. (For Flu Manchu germs? No, for Glock .40 rounds. The bullets don't curve, but the germs CAN make their way underneath where you slip your check through.)
Going back 3 minutes - yeah, it went very quickly, as it wasn't that time of the month (for taxes! for taxes, I mean!) - I'd told the guard there**** about the price of those masks:
"Hey, do you know these cost 12 or 15 bucks?"
"No. These are free!"
"Uhh, no, you and I are paying for them with our taxes. Matter of fact. I'm paying for them right now."
On the way out:
"Hey, can I take a couple more of these?"
He didn't care. So I have 3 sitting in the car. Maybe craigslist will be easier than ebay for listing these things. It's better than that old hippie idea of stealing library books to get "the system" back, isn't it?
I wanted to describe the nicer part of that visit to the hospital that I complained about yesterday. My not carrying even a balled-up cheap medical style blue mask in my pocket anymore means I have to rely on the charity of strangers. I headed right into the lobby expecting the people at the information desk to hand me one of these - it's not government-run, so I expected a 5¢ rather than $15 dollar rig this time.
Nope, either nobody noticed my lack of accessorization or nobody noticed me, as I sailed right on through to the records area. I kept waiting for somebody in there to give me grief about this, like some kind of mask-ochist. Nope, I was there for 10 minutes, right in front of dozens of masked-up people well-inside the hospital. How pleasant! It was not only nice to be able to breath normally, but just to know that, yeah, normal people are not actually scared shitless of the Flu Manchu.
* As much as making a separate topic key just for "Face Mask Stupidity" would help a bit, I try to go for more general topic keys. I am missing a number of them due to my not wanting to add new ones so much. "Totalitarianism", "Taxes", and "American Political Stupidity" seem needed, as I tend to put other slightly ill-fitting keys on some posts where these would fit.
** That Heidelblog web page links to the archive of FrontPageMagazine (I used to read that regularly years ago) where I guess Mr. Dalrymple wrote this, but the link doesn't work.
*** We're finally catching up with that "moar" meme, pretty much for nostalgic reasons at this point.
**** That's also a new thing. Why do they reckon people are so pissed off? Maybe there's been a robbery there, I don't know.
Comments (17)
The Matriarchy - what can't go on, won't go on.
Posted On: Thursday - January 27th 2022 5:20PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Female Stupidity Peak Stupidity Roadshow
Yeah, but for how long do we have to put up with it?
(I couldn't find a really representative file photo. It was much nicer outside but much busier too.)
I'd have saved 55 minutes of the hour I spent doing to the hospital for something if it weren't for those damn HIPAA laws. Again, mission creep is the problem, as I thought it was to apply only to the health care of female hippopotami. Nope, it slows us all down, not just the hippa. These people can't email stuff to me. Therefore, as far as medical records go, we are back living in the world of 70 years ago, at the earliest time of the widespread use of the automobile.
I've been through that, so I knew the drill. It's just that I'd promised my boy we'd do something together in an hour. OK, it was all good until my arrival at the hospital complex. It's a big place. There's some parking, but you've got multiple speed bumps* and stop signs, and... ridiculously ultra-cautious people who made a traffic jam out of thin air.
I! GET! IT! There are sick and injured people walking slowly, some not able to get out of the way. There are some steps leading up to walkways with bushes blocking part of the view. (Whose idea was that one?) You DO have to slow to 20, even, 15, mph here and there and keep your eyes on a swivel. What you don't have to do is stop for 10 seconds at the signs and go 2 mph over the speed bumps. Imagine if I were in a real hurry... inside an ambulance. I didn't see any way ambulances could get around this, as this 2 lane street had nothing but curbs lining it, and cars everywhere.
Why the title here? My slight hassle is just one small result of the Matriarchy we are living under. Women make these ultra-cautious rules and are the enforcers of it. They are the ones complaining at the neighborhood meetings that we need MOAR 4-way stop signs! (You can't even get through my neighborhood in one direction any faster than a bike now, well, when I run the stop signs on my bike, which, hell, they don't like either!)
Woman are running the neighborhood groups (or men who wan't resist them on anything), running the government offices, running the universities, running the lots of Big Business, overwhelming lower education, with almost all female teachers but the gym teachers where I am.** As I walked into the hospital (a brighter story, for the next Kung Flu stupidity post), I noted how woman-dominated these places are. I'd guess 9 out of 10 people working there were women. OTOH, I didn't see any doctors. Perhaps they were all out at the golf course, and honestly, who can blame them, with all this?
Unnecessary traffic jams, extra stress, but I guess there was a 0.1% lower chance of someone getting hurt on that road. The road can be pretty safe when nobody's moving. That's it in a nutshell. We are all a tad safer, but stuff can't get done, and there's no advancement of society under a Matriarchy.
* Peak Stupidity has already discussed this in Sport Utility Drivers - GET OFF
** I don't say they are all headed by women, but I pity the man who resists the overabundance of caution and takes some risks, even if he is nominally in charge. The way it works is, you can't go wrong making a mountain out of a mole hill. It's called "zero tolerance".
Comments (9)
It's almost as if yahoo wants me to click this...
Posted On: Thursday - January 27th 2022 7:48AM MST
In Topics: Websites Global Climate Stupidity Media Stupidity
... based on the promising headline, read some more, and get pissed and write a blog post.
Firstly, Peak Stupidity apologizes for being a slacker this week so far. I did have quite a few errands built up and more that came up - the good thing is that blog post ideas have already come of that. We (the cat and I) got distracted by a particular iSteve post and thread too, on "systemic racism", but that's not a real good excuse.
Speaking of Steve Sailer, thought, if the title here sounds familiar in your head, that's because it's almost as if I took that Sailer line and appropriated it. It's pretty sarcastic and snarky, but it's almost as if he's used it too many times for me to appreciate it anymore.
Again speaking of Steve Sailer, with this post, it's almost as if [Last Freaking Time! - Ed.] Peak Stupidity is getting to be the low-brow version of the iSteve, with our PS content generator being yahoo.com rather than the NY Times or Washington Post. It's only "almost" however, because it's not like I read this Lyin' Press crap on purpose like he does! Hey, it's usually when I log out of email or while in the process of doing a search* for this site on there to ya know, support the team, that I run across the garbage.
Anyway, "We're in trouble. I hope everyone understands that." from that guy I recognize from such elections as US President, 2004 sounded promising. Hey, does John Kerry even, know what kind of shape this country is in? I doubted it was about the immigration invasion, as, we don't talk about that, but maybe the guy knows a little bit about the financial stupidity and the doom coming from that sector of the stupidity market.
Well, then I saw the text there and was sucked in by the stupidity of it all. Kerry is pushing the Global Climate Stupidity - that's his angle, but let's just click and see how stupid this can get. (Channeling iSteve here.)
We're in trouble. I hope everyone understands that," Kerry told an event called Building Momentum to UN COP27 hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and officials from Egypt, the host of the next UN climate summit.Yes, sure, that's why we are in trouble, too much energy generation and industry. As long as we don't bother China about it, we can coerce the rest of the world into heading back toward the Stone Age or at least go warp speed, to the 3rd World. China, where they have huge coal power infrastructure and are building nukes like it's 1970s America, will just proceed to eat all the world's lunch.
Kerry told the event he is concerned about the recent uptick in the use of coal globally and about plans to build new coal plants without carbon capture technology..
I'm not gonna sit here, and ... or podcast about this while walking to the drug store or driving to work... OK, that's another post .. and argue against the Global Climate Stupidity all over again. Peak Stupidity did quite a bit of that early on in the life of this blog (click the link in the last sentence and look back a bit). I will point out one piece of duplicity that the Climate Crisis Crowd has been pushing for a while.
Note that John Kerry wants to see "carbon" capture technology. It's not carbon that these people have been worrying themselves sick (see G. Thunberg, et al) and bitching (see G. Thunberg, et al.) about. It's Carbon Dioxide. Carbon is an element. Carbon Dioxide is a compound, a molecule made up of more than one element. For the elucidation of John Kerry and the like, the atoms of these two elements are 1 carbon and 2 oxygen.
See, I think it's purposeful, this use of "carbon" now, rather than CO2, just as the term "emissions" has been used. They want chemically-challenged Joe and Jane Blow to think that CO2 is pollution, as in, if you breath it, it WILL kill you, soon enough. (OK, technically, like pretty much anything except for O2, if you breath NOTHING BUT CO2, yes, you will die.) When they say or write "carbon" they are hoping people will think of soot and ash, in which there is a lot of elemental carbon.
However, controlling that particulate pollution has been the purpose of many pollution controls already. The soot in the air is mostly gone, much the effect of REAL pollution controls and some the effect of exporting real industry to, there you go, China. As far as smoke stack scrubbers go, they were made for getting rid of true pollutants, the nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, aerosolized metal oxides, and some nasty hydrocarbons. Almost all of those are the result of unclean burning, meaning combustion of compounds other than just the hydrocarbons with the appropriate amount of oxygen. What we get from ideal clean burning is 2 things: Water and Carbon Dioxide. So, WTF do these people want?
"We need to reduce the emissions of carbon" is duplicitous. You know, over in the sauna room the other day, I noticed that there are huge emissions of hydrogen. Do you they know how dangerous hydrogen is? Anyone remember the LZ 129 Hindenburg**? Lakehurst, New Jersey? No? Well the stuff is extremely flammable. Yet there are emissions of it from saunas, swimming pools, combustion engines of any sort.
"What the hell are you talking about?", you say. Well, yeah, I mean hydrogen, in a compound, part of those H2O molecules that are emitted all over the place. We need to reduce the emissions of hydrogen, people!. To add insult to John Kerry's intelligence to the injury that he must have already received, water vapor IS, in fact, a greenhouse gas, and we are making water every time we make CO2. Only thing is, at least plants can convert that CO2, and we can eat them, while the water stays around. O2MG!
Yeah, we're in trouble alright, but the stupidity emissions out of John Kerry and yahoo are part of that trouble.
That was just a small, mole-sized, if you will, taste of the stupidity for the chemically-inclined. For the other types of geeks, l meant to say something more about yahoo here.
From my memory yahoo's heyday was in the very late 1990s, maybe into the '00s just a year or two. Back when there were those search engines that bring back memories, your Alta-vistas, Lycos's, Excites, Ask Jeeve's, dogpiles (well, if you ran your phone cord from the modem to the back yard, yes, dog piles), yahoo was on top for a while. They had also had free email account service at least as early as late-1997, from my memory.
Now, yahoo is just another form of the Lyin' Press, with still a search engine, long having lost out to google, and then, I've got emails on there from 1997! It's not like I WANT to click there, and, dammit, I should have sold my shares 20 years ago. I might have been better off putting them into a dog pile.
* I mostly use google for (only) that, as it's being the biggest search engine I figure we need to stay on top over there. I've been regularly searching for this site on bing and duckduckgo too, but I just started doing this on yahoo lately.
** No, the "LZ" does NOT stand for "Led Zeppelin".
Comments (10)
Let them eat Dirt
Posted On: Monday - January 24th 2022 7:11PM MST
In Topics: Books Healthcare Stupidity
I picked up Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Our Children from an Oversanitized World, The co-authors, Brett Finlay and Marie-Claire Arrieta, are medical-science types in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
I only skimmed this book for 15 - 20 minutes, so this post is NOT a book review. I'd gotten this book out of the library for my wife to peruse, or at least see the cover of, for fun and shock value. Yeah, the title is pretty clever, at least if you're familiar with the famous "Let them eat cake" quote, attributed to the big-breasted last Queen of France prior to their revolution. (Wiki says the quote goes back a few decades before then, written in a story by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Confessions.)
One can see the idea that the 2 authors wanted to get across from the title. Large increases in asthma, allergies, and other ailments have been attributed to the modern house being TOO clean. This is not at al a problem for our household, and we have not seen such health problems. There's you one data point.
From skimming, I see that the authors also took aim at the modern-day indoor/snowflake type of living that kids now are experiencing. Due to their not spending nearly the amount of time outdoors than the kids of a generation or two ago, they are not exposed enough to the many germs that could give them better immunity against quite a few diseases. Has that concept been forgotten? (I can't be sure that the authors didn't also mention the value of Vitamin D from the sunshine, but they mostly concentrated on the microbes.)
For a new parent, I suppose the title of this book could be shocking,* The book was written in '16, well before the Kung Flu PanicFest. Maybe if they had bought Let Them Eat Dirt beforehand, some more people might have been on our side. The ideas within apply.
* It could be a good ploy to sell a few books to some outraged Moms, in the way that I've sometimes just got to read a yahoo article to see how stupid and disingenuous it is. Those Moms might be pleasantly surprised. I have not been so far with the yahoo articles.
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