The Four Corners - New Mexico
Posted On: Wednesday - September 1st 2021 8:45PM MST
In Topics: Geography Peak Stupidity Roadshow
Earlier: Arizona
"Honey, we need to buy more data - we're lost!"
Within 100 yards of the Four Corners quadripoint are rows of sales booths, one row in each State, set at 45 degree angles to the lat/long lines. Due to the Flu Manchu (but, of course), these outdoor booths (just concrete walls and a roof but open in the front and back with lots of air flow) were 2/3 empty by my estimate. They are manned, OK, "squawed", for the most part, by Navajo Indians. As I wrote in the previous post, all this is within the Navajo lands, and good on 'em - hey, at least there was no Pride flag, just the 4 State flags and 4 others (wish I could tell you).
Here we were though, with me a Geography lover, and I knew neither the latitude of the Utah/Arizona (western portion) and Colorado/New Mexico (eastern portion) nor the longitude of the Utah/Colorado (northern portion) and Arizona/New Mexico (southern portion). These lines were right there on the ground, in nice polished granite.* Since my boy asked about this, I needed to tell him. Well, one usually goes to the phones now for anything like this. Nope, no service. Haha. Whatdya' want, out in the corner of four Western States in the desert, endless wifi? I am just fine with having no cell service around - it lets people spend more time interacting with one another, which they were. However, a small sample of them didn't know our latitude or longitude.
Here's where I feel good about my Geography foo. I guessed 38° North for latitude, and just knowing the "dry line" is 100° West going through the middle of Texas (with each degree being ~ 50 statute miles at that latitude), I guessed 110° West. How were we going to find out?
Why not ask an Indian who works at one of the booths selling hand-made jewelry and stuff? They are there all day long most days, you gotta figure. This is a tourist attraction, so yeah....
(To be nice to the Indians, I asked my wife if she wanted me to buy her any of this stuff, but she declined on a $25 necklace.)
I went to New Mexico to do this, as that got me to the closest squawed booth. This Indian had no damn idea where we were! OK, I don't expect the average White
It turned out that there is a plaque that we hadn't seen with this information. It was way over in Arizona or Utah, can't remember. (Now, I don't know why the lady couldn't have at least pointed me toward that plaque - what is that, all White man stuff?)
I would have thought for sure that both the latitude of the East-to-West double-border and the longitude of the North-to-South double-border were round numbers, to the degree, that is. The latitude of the E-W border is 37° North. I was pretty close! The longitude of the N-S border is 109° 2' 59.25" West. I was close on this too, but why the non-round number? This NOAA** page explains and exonerates the NOAA from some claim of reports of errors. Here's the key to the odd number:
It is interesting to note that, upon completion of his Arizona-New Mexico boundary survey, Chandler Robbins went to the effort to write a letter to the editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican (still today’s daily newspaper) explaining the very issue of the difference between longitude values referenced to the Greenwich Meridian and those referenced to the Washington Meridian. In this letter of November 1, 1875, Robbins included the following explanation:I noted to my son when we were there that each minute of longitude at this rough latitude is a little under a mile - the math says, 1 nm x cos(latitude) = 6076 ft x cos(37°) = 4,852 ft, So 0.75" under 3' = 3(6,076ft)cos(37°) - (0.75)(6076ft/60) = 14,558 ft - (0.75)(81ft) = 14,497 ft. = 2.746 statute miles. So the spot where everyone took their selfies and families is 2 3/4 miles west of the 109° W longitude line. It IS the Four Corners.It seems to have been the general impression that the line was the 109 degrees of longitude west of Greenwich. Such is not the case, as the law makes it 32 degrees of longitude west from Washington, which corresponds to 109 degrees 02 minutes 59.25 seconds west from Greenwich, and which places the line a small fraction less than three miles farther west than would have been the case if it had been run as the 109 degrees of longitude.
I am kinda glad I didn't try to get that explanation off an Indian squaw. I trust the White Men at NOAA and the other White Men who wrote the text for that plaque, more than the Red Lady, no offense intended. The bead necklaces are pretty, if that helps..
* I wrote that they were marble yesterday and 6" wide, but they were probably just polished granite and the width was a foot at some distance and 6" closer to the quadrapoint.
** It's one of the VERY few US Government agencies I've got respect for. I'd even work for them.
Comments (3)
Where are my beautiful yellow steel trash cans?!
Posted On: Wednesday - September 1st 2021 11:13AM MST
In Topics: Kung Flu Stupidity
We have all been seeing the face diapers being donned again for Season 3 of the Kung Flu PanicFest. All the fashion magazines recommend we accessorize in order to round out our appearances. Seeing as Cosmo magazine hasn't come to the house in about 25 years - accidentally, but we didn't want to stop the bikini pictures from coming to the mailbox - I don't know if these face diapers are part of "the look" now.
I do know that if some SCIENTIFIC EXPERT, perhaps our beloved Dr. Fauci, has again recommended we don the masks, well who am I to argue, especially through a stack of them, as it comes out broken and unreadable anyway? If Dr. Fauci told me ... (Ahh, crap, I got Aerosmith in my head again.)
The thing is, this new Delta brand virus, as opposed to COVID CLASSIC, is said to be a couple of thousand times more contagious in terms of spreading viral load through our orifices. (I'll just stick with one orifice for now - no, I mean for this post too, dammit.) I would figure it's not linear, but we should probably be stacking up a few masks, maybe 5 or 10 thick, at this point, to get that same protection we had before for the Classic. (I mean, nobody with a mask on got sick, right?) As Peak Stupidity has admonished you all before, C'mon non-experts! It's ALL layering these days!
These face masks get contaminated with the Kung Flu,
If we are to take this new Delta brand virus seriously, we'd better start properly disposing of these things. I just don't see these $133 + tax and shipping cans where I need them, that is, everywhere. Please don't get me wrong. I don't want to argue with the EXPERTS. I'm just curious. I may find myself sneezing behind the wheel of a large automobile. Where is my beautiful yellow steel trash can? You may ask yourself, "how did we get here?"
PS: The reader may want to read our "March Mask Madness" series of posts:
Part 1
Part 3
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
I just noticed that Peak Stupidity had a metric shit-ton of mask posts back last Spring and late Winter. They all have this same Kung Flu Stupidity topic key.
Comments (5)
The Four Corners - Arizona
Posted On: Tuesday - August 31st 2021 7:43PM MST
In Topics: Geography Peak Stupidity Roadshow Kung Flu Stupidity
(This will be a series of, you guessed it, 4 posts, from our recent Peak Stupidity roadshow.)
We parked past (of course) and to well the left of that booth - in Arizona.
The term that I just learned for a point at which 4 distinct political regions join is quadripoint. Per wiki, who you hopefully can trust for at least geographical knowledge, there are many such points in/at 29 countries or intersections of countries (there is overlap in that 29). Many are intersections of municipality boundaries, which is no damn big deal. I also had no idea before about this: There is one quadripoint of nations at the intersection of borders of Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. I would think tickets would be sold out years in advance*.
The United States has many non-natural borders in the western States, due to the way these territories (at the time) were created. It turned out that the borders of 4 States meet at the quadripoint known as the "Four Corners", and this one is possibly unique in that the borders go due (true) north/south and east/west. The states involved are, going CCW, Arizona to the SW, New Mexico to the SE, Colorado to the NE, and Utah to the NW. All that said, this point is within the Navajo Indian lands that are a large chunk of northeastern Arizona (but overlap a bit into N. Mexico, Utah, and Colorado).
On the recent road trip of ours, since none of us had ever been there, we made the Four Corners a short stopping point. I expected possibly a little less fanfare than what we came upon, but it was no big tourist attraction with stops by big-ass Chinese tourist-filled busses either.**
We came in from New Mexico, as the US-160 had the entrance to this spot on the west side of the road. However, we walked into the monument from our parking spot in Arizona, I'd say less than 100 ft west of New Mexico - this is clear from the 6" wide marble State border/ lat-long lines one sees once he get in past though a gap in the sales stalls. Therefore, this first post is labelled "Arizona".
10 bucks for an adult and free entry for kids under 6 is not too bad. I'm glad the Navajo can make some money from this, but that they don't scalp you with the fee either. (What? What'd I write?) However, the Kung Flu PanicFest Season 3, or maybe even one long season, is still in full swing there.*** The little booth for payment was so covered up with anti-COVID material that I don't think the Indian squaw inside could see anyone else in the car, much less one (yeah, that's the ticket) under-6 kid. Did I mention this is out in the desert in the bright sunshine? It was a nice cool 90 degrees F that day. There were signs all over about wearing face masks, outside, in the desert, in the sunshine (kinda redundant), there in Indian country.
I told my wife I "ain't agonna
Not only did nobody bother us about the lack of face masks (though my wife complied), but with ours off, I noticed a few people that were wearing them in the parking lot yank them off. On that latitude line due east of the point, people maintained normal sane social distances of whatever it took to maintain nice conversations, without face diapers**** making it harder. People handed each other their phones for pictures back and forth, and I saw nobody using wipes with paranoia. It would have been embarrassing to do so. What a great crowd in a cool spot for those who like Geography!
* [Peak Stupidity and our agents provide only geographical learning services here. We cannot guarantee your safety if you plan to take a selfie lying down on top of these four African countries at one time - Disclaimer from Peak Stupidity International Legal Department.)
** That was kind of a nice change. All the people we saw seemed to be Americans, even the Indians.
*** Peak Stupidity already covered the worst of our experience with this in Showdown in Tuba City.
**** Maybe one in 10 people still wore them. Some wore that bandana style covering I think just for that western look - the wind was calm though.
Comments (2)
The start of the generation-long American war in Afghanistan
Posted On: Tuesday - August 31st 2021 5:45PM MST
In Topics: US Feral Government The Neocons World Political Stupidity
I'm really not that excited about writing this post. It's over with over there, except for the remainder of the highly-botched exit of Americans from the country.* When writing a post about Ann Coulter and that old Neocon attitude of 20 years ago, I put off any opinion on the war in Afghanistan (as opposed to Iraq). Additionally, I'll put this down before I get to the post coming on 9/11.
I can remember the day. Probably our readers can too, just as they say about the day John Kennedy was assassinated (nah, for me, more like the day John Bonham died of vomit inhalation while trying to sleep off 40 shots of vodka, a generation later**). No American under ~ 60 y/o in 2001 could remember Pearl Harbor, an attack on a US territory, which means most of us hadn't.*** This was a blow like most had never seen. People were angry and depended still mostly on the TV news to tell them who to be angry at. People such as Ann Coulter vented their anger. Whoever was responsible had to be punished and we had to change our ways so nothing like this could happen again.
I heard that name Osama bin Laden for the first time then, as I hadn't been following any of the on-going Middle East and Moslem nation political stupidity. Then I heard more about this Taliban, my only previous knowledge being of their shooting up a bunch of big Buddha statues in the hills a few years earlier. Next, we heard about this Al Qaeda gang. This was a time in my life in which I didn't follow a lot of politics, except for a short bit during that 2000 election. I was no Neocon at this point, having already wondered what that Bosnia interventionist stupidity and that no-fly-zone crap STILL going on in Iraq was all about. Like most Americans, though, I believed the official story.
Yeah, most of those terrorists were Saudis. All of them were Moslems, and Moslems, including the one big culprit bin Laden, were behind it. So, it was time to punish the Moslem culprits over there in Moslem land.
The thing is, this was no declared war by a nation-state. What do you do when some rogue bastards just come over and attack? Let's do a thought experiment. It's hard to make this thought experiment wrt the US just because our military has been by far the strongest in the world for 30 years. So, lets just imagine some terrorist group in Germany, that old Baader-Meinhof Gang, say, had blown up a soccer stadium in Jolly Old England. Would the English have been justified in invading Germany? Well, see, this is not a great analogy, because the German government would work hard to root out and prosecute the terrorists. Therefore, the talk was about nations that harbored terrorists. The Moslem nations wouldn't control their own, so we'd have to take care of this ourselves.
At this point, one could look at the situation more calmly and ask why we should not just get ourselves out of the Middle East in general, take some serious control of our already broken immigration system so we could keep the wrong people from entering, and perhaps just send a small special forces retaliatory mission to find the few responsible over there? Those first two points are about stopping anything like 9/11 from happening again. Isn't that what we wanted?
No, we were told that we had to change a few regimes out. It was a mystery to some of us how Iraq was a part of this, but the Taliban, this bin Laden guy, the Al Qaeda group, well, we figured these people in Washington knew how to handle this. Why Saudi Arabia was left out is not a mystery if you noticed how friendly relations were at the top level. For some reason George Bush's "Axis of Evil" went from Iraq through Afghanistan over to North Korea, consisting of just those 3. It was a nice gentle arc, skipping over Iran (to save for later) and then China. Likely, there was just Deep State interest in each of the 3, and you could tell the people anything at that point. Who was going to stop us?
Therefore, the military and their equipment were shipped over to Afghanistan over many months, and this war was prosecuted. The idea was to get rid of these Taliban guys, the Al Qaeda, all of them, fighting them there "so we wouldn't have to fight them over here." That sounded good for a moment, but wait, if we don't let them in over here, how exactly can they fight us over here anyway? Never mind. After changing out the government in Afghanistan, we'd have to build them up and teach them how to run a nice non-violent democracy****, and then Whallah, we can go home and all be in peace. Well, we might have to do that for a few other countries too of course, but one, no, two at a time. It might take some time... It might take some more money than was first allocated ...
Mind you, all this is just the official story of what this was all about. I'd say it's the one most Americans believed, at least through the first few years. After a 20 years = 2 decades = 1 generation, we know it was a waste of 2 1/2 TRILLION dollars, a waste of many thousands of just the American lives, and a tremendous loss of respect and goodwill for this nation. We just don't all know what the real reasons were*****.
* I should add here, that is also excepting the next dose of blatant population replacement, as James Kirkpatrick just told us more about in The Afghan “Refugee” Racket—Latest Excuse To Dispossess The Historic American Nation on VDare. (It's not fun reading.)
** I guess muh muh muh generation cared more about real Rock & Roll than the dead Kennedies... wait ...
** Pearl Harbor was an attack on the US military, really, while the ~ 3,000 dead in NY City were civilians. Since not a big proportion of Americans have been involved with the military since the winding down of Vietnam, I would guess an attack on civilians was seen as much worse by most of us, and our military had seemed omnipotent since the end of the Cold War anyway.
**** Pretty much everyone has forgotten that a democracy is not what we were supposed to have here either, but I'll let that slide for this one.
***** I read speculation in some possible reasons in the comments section under the recent Ann Coulter post. They sound like very reasonable guesses.
Comments (8)
Ron Unz comments with some comment-sense
Posted On: Monday - August 30th 2021 8:31PM MST
In Topics: Websites Pundits Kung Flu Stupidity
First, just a note here to say that Peak Stupidity will be including quite a bit more of the Kung Flu stupidity now that Season 3 is in full swing. I have so much other stuff backed up, but maybe, on the COVID-one-niner, a Peak Stupidity post a day keeps Doctor Fauci away... far, far away, I hope! I believe our readers want to read this stuff because it's happening now. We like to write about it too, because, though many flavors of stupidity abound, the Kung Flu PanicFest is a novel form of stupidity. We are both the Woodward & the Bernstein of the Kung Flu PanicFest story. Where are our Pulitzers?
I noticed just today that Ron Unz has a 3rd in a series of posts of his under his "Announcements" section specifically set up for commenter to debate the Kung Flu vaccination controversy. I had not gotten into the 1st two, mostly due to my disagreement, or so I thought, with Mr. Unz's stance on the Kung Flu in general*. I have neither the heart nor time to go through the previous comment threads as Are the Opponents of the Covid Injections “Anti-Vaxx Crackpots”? (Mr. Unz is interviewed by Mike Whitney, who has been on the anti-panic side of this thing.) and The Covid Debate: To Vaxx or Not to Vaxx have 1,681 and 1,589 comments in them, respectively! (The commenters are nothing if not consistent in output.). Good on The Unz Review for this, but a 3rd drawback of getting into them is who in hell would read a comment that old and that is one in 1,500?!
The 3rd post is simply called A Continuation of the Covid Vaxxing Debate. I have read through just over 300 of the comments in about 2 hours. (I was traveling.)
I know this is a digression, but just to back up my claim of 2 hours, let me put it this way. I don't think I read nearly as fast as Ron Unz claims to (and very likely does!) I can move along like most of the best of them, though, as I know when to skip the last part of an occasional uninteresting one, and I usually recognize the ones I've already read via clicking around on replies to others. I'll say this specifically for this thread. Corvinus wasn't on there, or it'd have been even faster - I skip not only his comments but almost all replies to his. There was a guy named "Rasche" who wrote some amazingly long-winded comments, and was as full of himself as I could even imagine someone being**. Mr. Unz seems to really like the guy.
Commenter Adam Smith wrote in a quick good one. (Let me know if/when you've read that whole thing, Adam. Or, are you not as obsessive as me about it?) The thread is up to well over 400 posts now.
Again, this one is specifically about the jab. I read a good debate there. I don't mean any of the not just pro-vax but mandatory-vaxxers*** had any points that changed my mind. The guy "That Would be Telling" had his usual bit, but IMO got reamed pretty badly to the point that he was just putting Troll tags on comments as his argument. Maybe "debate" isn't the best term, but the anti-mandatory-vax commenters really did well. Any point I would have made was already made well, including my question about Mr. Unz himself.
Last winter, in Where have you gone, Ronald Unzio, ... we wondered how an extremely intelligent guy like that could write about all kinds of big lies in history (not that I agree with every single one of his revisions), yet fail to see the big lie going on all around us "right here, right now"? Here's an excerpt from that long post:
If ever there were a big story that could rival that of WWI and WWII being instigated by certain people or the people behind the implementation of Communism in Russia, who shot JFK (or JR, for that matter) or. any one of Ron’s areas of historical research that many appreciate, woudn’t this Kung Flu PanicFest be it? Yet, Mr. Unz is so into his “who started it?” conspiracy theory instead. I’m just wondering if that’s just an anti-Americans and pro-Chinese attitude coming though. Be that as it may, this is the biggest story of the century, with huge amounts of political implications. Wake up, Ron Unz! This is happening NOW, Ron, Right Here, Right Now (Unfortunately, it's not as bright a happening as the fall of the Commies in Europe, the subject of that Jesus Jones' song.)Now, of all things, among a few other comments of his on this Vax thread Part 3, Mr. Unz has a really common-sensical comment that could have written by one of us Peakers... only, yeah, we'd have written it about a year and a half earlier, but who's counting? Here you go - the whole thing:
@nicelandI would not have expected this common sense comment out of the man, but I feel bad writing that now. Bravo, Ron Unz!With vaccine protection falling with time, perhaps recently vaccinated should seek infection as “booster” against future variants? I have seen this speculation floating around and for lower risk groups this might make sense.As everyone here knows, I’m absolutely no Covid expert so take this with a huge grain of salt, but I’ve been wondering the same thing for the last few weeks. Consider:
(1) From what I’ve read, getting infected gives you very long-term, perhaps almost permanent near-immunity. There seem to be extremely few second infections that are at all serious.
(2) Covid vaccines don’t seem to provide long-term immunity, though they greatly reduce the seriousness of the infection, perhaps by 95% or more. For vaccinated people, Covid really is “just the flu.”
(3) Since vaxxed people can still get infected and infect others, and the Delta strain is so extremely contagious, I’d think that sooner or later, almost everyone will get infected. Based upon excess deaths, probably something like 1/3 to 1/2 of all American adults have already been infected.
(4) Wouldn’t it make sense for vaxxed people to deliberately get infected while their vaccine-protection is still relatively strong? That way we essentially get herd immunity, but with minimal severe illnesses, loss of life, or overwhelmed ICUs. The exceptions might be those people who are so vulnerable due to age or other factors that even the vaccine might not be enough to protect them.
(5) The big unknown in this analysis is whether vaxxed people who get infected develop “infection immunity” or not, or at least what the percentages would be.
(6) Similarly, since children seem almost invulnerable to Covid, wouldn’t it make sense for them to get infected and develop permanent immunity against later reinfection? Obviously, a year or two doesn’t make any difference, so there’s no rush and probably Covid should be better understood before this decision is made. But offhand, I think it probably makes more sense to deliberately infect children than to vaxx them.
PS: I took slight issue with Mr. Unz's point (6). I'm fine with the health aspect of it, but asking even the least hysterical of parents to purposefully infect their child is a non-starter. OTOH, if you tell them it's a vaccine, ... and it IS nearly the same as using an old-fashioned vaccine!
* He seems much too involved in his pet theory about the origins of the Kung Flu (not much of a spoiler, but "it's the Americans!"), a year ago was predicting millions of deaths FROM this virus, and lastly, used to denigrate as a "hoaxer" anyone who didn't sound hysterical enough about it. Maybe the last two opinions may have changed ...?
** It's almost to where it reads like satire, as far as his "full-of-himselfness".
*** They are the real problem. If you want to promote the vaccine and get more people to take it, fine. Our problem is those who want to force it. They are trying hard, a subject for numerous posts to come.
Comments (15)
Doolin Dalton reprise post
Posted On: Saturday - August 28th 2021 6:33PM MST
In Topics: Music
In yesterday's post Showdown in Tuba City, we included an Eagles song from their country-western-rock days. As I mentioned, that album, the 2nd of theirs, Desparado was a concept album. Though not all the songs fit some Western story, one can imagine they do, as I had, when listening to the album through.
Peak Stupidity readers may have more suggestions, but the other two in that concept album post, the Moody Blues' Days of Future Past and ELO's Time stuck even more to their themes. Days of Future Past tells the story of a lifetime as if it were a day, with each song being a part of it. Time is the story of man who traveled forward in time ("wish I was back in the 1980s..." - which was almost all in the future still!) with each song on the theme but (arguably) two - The Lights go Down and Hold on Tight, the latter being a hit song. Both of these are superb albums.
Back to Desperado, the Eagles liked the Western theme started with Doolin Dalton so much, that they had both an under 1 minute bluegrassy instrumental and a reprise. This reprise is followed, with no pause, by a reprise of the much more well-known song Desperado - the title song.
I've got to include these two now:
Doolin Dalton instrumental:
(That's the appropriate album cover.)
It then leads into Bitter Creek.
Doolin Dalton reprise:
(Note: I made the Doolin Dalton reprise end before the Desperado reprise starts, but you can keep that playing. It's just as good.)
"Then Jill Biden,
met Joe Biden.
He was workin' cheap,
just biden time....
If they're fast,
and if they're lucky,
they may never
see that hangin' tree ...
It was band member Bernie Leadon who was the big country/western influence on the Eagles. He played banjo, mandolin, and dobro and wrote and sang lead vocals on two tracks, Twenty-one and Bitter Creek. His influence extended through the band's next album On the Border on which he wrote and sang My Man and parts of On the Border, but surprisingly not Midnight Flyer, one of my favorites. He has partial writing credit for Hollywood Waltz on the band's 4th album, One Of These Nights and wrote and sang the final track, the slow ballad I Wish You Peace.
The Eagles had already become more hard-rocking with the guitar of Dan Felder who joined the band for a little bit of On the Border and played on One Of These Nights. By the time of Hotel California Bernie Leadon had left the group, and the country/western sound was long gone.
PS: I had two suggestions for other Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) songs that could have better gone with the previous post. Alarmist suggested Laredo Tornado and Al Corrupt suggested Wild West Hero. Check those out. I did, but I still like the Eagles for the post. I thank you both for the musical suggestions.
Comments (4)
Showdown in Tuba City
Posted On: Friday - August 27th 2021 7:44PM MST
In Topics: Music Geography Peak Stupidity Roadshow Kung Flu Stupidity
No, it's not Yuma, Arizona, a town you might know from a modern Western Movie*, way at the opposite corner of the State of Arizona. It's not even Yuba City, up in the Sacramento Valley, half way up the California-99 from Sacramento to Chico, on the way north to Weed. (I mean, where else would you be going?) We're talking Tuba City, with a "T", in the northeast of Arizona within Injun country, the Navajo lands, to be specific.
We needed gas, a few snacks, and a pit stop to pee on our recent road trip, and Tuba City, Arizona was the pit stop I selected. I'd been through there long before, on a long road trip, and I like to see if anything has changed. Many moons ago, back before the Tatanka, that is the COVID-19 virus, roamed the land of the Red Man, I had slept in the truck in this town, right outside the Indian police station, as all the hotels were booked up. Well, the hotels are another story, to be discussed in another post, but we just wanted to go into the gas station. We found that the doors were locked up. I first thought that the town of Tuba City had been abandoned due to the recurrent deadly shoot outs that had occurred after the Coconino County Sheriff high-tailed it down to Winslow to take it easier.
Nope, Tuba City wasn't abandoned. Instead, a masked Indian squaw stood behind the glass door of the entranceway. I am no codetalker myself, but I distinctly heard the muffled sound of "you n__d to we__ mask, Wh__ Man."
It turned out we had to wear face masks or we could not come in. A tumbleweed rolled across the dusty plain, well, the parking lot, as we headed back to our steed. Actually, it may have been a Circle-K bag. We
With the door now unlocked for us by the one I now call "shoots-with-thermometer", we were told we must have our temperatures taken. My temperature shot up a few degrees F right then and there. Words flew, such as "you've gotta be kidding me - this crap again?", "you're not gonna die today, lady", along with "hysterical" and "retarded". It got pretty heated, long after I should have just walked away. Apparently, the words "hysteria" and "retarded" mean something worse in Navajo, I dunno. Luckily all guns stayed holstered,.
We headed about 200 yards up the dusty trail to an Exxon station, in which the young brave behind the plexiglas didn't care much about our attire. Gas pumped, gummies purchased for the boy, bladders relieved, and no longer desperate, we high-tailed it out of Tuba City. Hoping the law would not be on our tail, I kept it under 75 mph.
Next time if ever we are in Tuba City, I intend to come in peace. As an offering of good will, I think we will enter the gas station bringing our slightly soiled, but still very nice, blankets with the Washington Redskins logo. Hopefully that will go over well...
OK, I know we are going to get emails galore** after this 2nd instance of putting what may not be the readers' choice in music here. Let the vitriol fly folks, because, I'm sorry, I'm just not agonna embed an ELO song for this post. I won't do it, I tell you! Don't get me wrong - they were a great band among many*** great mid-1970s bands. Jeff Lynne was creative as all get-out. However that style of music doesn't fit with the Western theme of this post. Look at the scene up above again - you're thinking Eagles now, right?
Desperado, the Eagles 2nd album from 1973, is my favorite. I got this one as a cut-out**** in the 1980s. It is what people and Peak Stupidity called a concept album. This one is a great example, with its Western theme that all of the songs could fit. In our link about concept albums, the 3 examples I give include this one, along with albums by the Moody Blues, and, yes, ELO.
It's called Doolin Dalton. Enjoy! Thank you for reading, listening, and/or writing. I may put some more songs up tomorrow, but we won't provide any more stupidity "solutions" until next week. Have a great weekend.
* I thought 3:10 to Yuma was pretty good.
** Though I don't see exactly how.
*** There were so many great British acts. Think about it. Elton John, Queen, Jethro Tull, Al Stewart, Rod Stewart, along with bands that had already been big in the 1960's, like the Stones, the Moody Blues, and Led Zeppelin.
**** For those who don't know about the old vinyl records, the stores would put a 1/4" wide by 3/4" or so cut in the cover to indicate they were used or just on sale, I guess. That meant $3 for an album vs. $8.
Comments (8)
Ann Coulter with a Neocon flashback
Posted On: Friday - August 27th 2021 10:40AM MST
In Topics: Pundits The Neocons World Political Stupidity
It happens. You can agree with 98% of the writing or speech of some pundit, politician, even friend, but occasionally stuff that you just plain can't agree with comes out. How can they be like that, you wonder. Ann Coulter has been Peak Stupidity's #1 literary pundit for a long time. It's not just her opinions but her writing style and humor that put her at numero uno.
I would say I agree with 98% of what she writes. I have disagreed on her about the pot (a minor issue, IMO) and about her support for Affirmative Action. The latter stance is not libertarian. It's not conservative. In this day and age, after 1/2 a century of proscribed discrimination against the White Man, not to mention that the shit hasn't helped matters, that stance is plain stupid. Like I wrote though, there's that 98%.
Therefore, while reading what started off and ended as another good common-sense column that any real Conservative, Libertarian, Constitutionalist, and alt-righters, even, would agree with, I came across a Neocon flashback from Miss Coulter. In her latest column, Teaching Psycho Flintstones About Women’s Equality Didn't Work. (Duh!), there's this one small paragraph in the middle:
I was, and remain, more pro-Afghanistan war and Iraq war than Donald Rumsfeld, but not so we could hang out for 20 years and teach them to respect transgenders.Please note that I kept the link there that either Miss Coulter or VDare had included, pointing to her column on the TownHall site from September 14th, 2001. Yes, it's important to first read her writing from 3 days after the NYC attack. I have a memory of Miss Coulter being a Neocon but forgave her for that emotional writing during that time.
I ask the reader to click that link, because it's not all Neocon vitriol. There's a lot of great libertarian writing about the airport security stupidity. I didn't mean to write a long post here, but.. anyway, here:
"All of our lives" don't need to change, as they keep prattling on TV. Every single time there is a terrorist attack -- or a plane crashes because of pilot error -- Americans allow their rights to be contracted for no purpose whatsoever.Great stuff! Now, I read further, and I got to part I specifically remember, 20 years later! You may too:
The airport kabuki theater of magnetometers, asinine questions about whether passengers "packed their own bags," and the hostile, lumpen mesomorphs ripping open our luggage somehow allowed over a dozen armed hijackers to board four American planes almost simultaneously on Bloody Tuesday. (Did those fabulous security procedures stop a single hijacker anyplace in America that day?)
Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.That was pure emotion, that's all. People read it though. Perhaps the Neocons took great advantage of that.
The 2nd clause in that one sentence paragraph in her recent column has Miss Coulter's point that the wars were OK, but only to punish people and get out. Well, I'll write more with my view of the purpose of the Afghanistan war in another post. Regarding Iraq though, does Miss Coulter just not want to admit she was wrong? Lots of people have. I'd forgive her. Does she still see some purpose for America having waged war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack, even as alleged?*
Steve Sailer had a recent post in which he excerpted his writing from a blog post written at the time of the build-up to Iraq War II and the Afghan war.. I give him a lot of credit for his anti-war position back then. As I wrote on that thread, I also saw no rhyme or reason for the Iraq war. However, I remember now that 20 years ago I still had a small amount of respect for these high-up policy makers. My thoughts leaned toward "maybe they know something we don't and can't divulge it... for reasons." I now know that they have plenty of reasons not to tell us their intentions, but it's not because they know better than us.
* Peak Stupidity will publish a post on why we don't argue about 9/11 on 9/11, this year.
Comments (17)
As the Raven flies ...
Posted On: Thursday - August 26th 2021 10:00AM MST
In Topics: Music Humor Environmental Stupidity Peak Stupidity Roadshow
...wooo hoo hoo hooo... ♫ ♪ ♬🎵 ... well, or tries to.
"Don't feed the animals" is a sign we saw at a lot of the viewpoint type places* at the National Parks. I get the idea. The bigger the animals, the worse an idea it is too. You know when you see friendly little odd-colored squirrels that, no, they aren't just a friendlier species of bushy-tailed rat, excuse me, squirrel, but that people have been feeding them.
There were ravens flying around Bryce Canyon that would land on a rock pillar "coincidentally" right at the view point, where people could take close-up pictures. It's one thing to feed one of them a peanut, but I saw someone feed the guy above a whole sandwich! I don't think he could even get airborne with that thing, so he had to jump into the brush and deal with it.
Crows are pretty smart birds, and these ravens are nothing but big crows. I don't believe they are as smart as the one in the Edgar Allan Poe - m, but they seemed to stay away from the tourists until another one, such as my son, comes up with a flavor blaster Gold Fish™ or something (yeah, all that salt made me worried too - and the trans fats, what's the recommended daily requirement for a Corvus?)
With all that added weight, I wonder if they flew down below the rim of the canyon just for the thicker air, to stay aloft at that extra gross weight. OK, seriously, though, they do all that flying to look for prey down there, your ground
OK, listen, I know a bunch of our readers will be expecting The Alan Parsons Project at this point. I'm sorry. I like that band. I just think that stuff is a little bit out there for this blog. I know, this is cough, bullshit, cough, cough. I! GET! THAT! We're (OK, I'm) the blogger here, and we're going with Dan Fogelberg. Dan Fogelberg it is, from the excellent album Souvenirs, with As the Raven Flies.
This one is not NEARLY the best song from that classic 1974 album.
* Shamefully, we didn't do any real hiking on our trip this time, just the driving-around touristy thing for the most part. Well, my boy and I did climb around a lot of the red rock formations at The Arches.
Comments (5)
Where in the world is Carmen SanDiego?
Posted On: Wednesday - August 25th 2021 9:49AM MST
In Topics: Humor Globalists Geography Big-Biz Stupidity Customer Care
... well, as I imagined her anyway.
I think it was 30 years ago when "Carmen SanDiego" was the imaginary character who taught classes that were on the new CDs!, and maybe still on 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. Well it's not her of whom I'm worried about the whereabouts today. As an afterthought to yesterday's post Has "Customer Care" just been fully outsourced?, I really do wonder where these outsource workers are "working" from. ("Working" is in quotes simply because it has been a real shitshow dealing with these people lately - that ain't workin' ....)
As I wrote yesterday, the accents of a couple of them were very similar and Eastern European sounding. Perhaps that E. Euro. is something I got in my head that is just wrong. However, the accents definitely were neither the normal •Indian one nor the normal Filipina/o* one. Where in the world are "our" customer care associates? They are trained not to divulge that information now - it probably brings on even more vitriol from American customers who are rightfully sick of the misunderstanding, confusion, and waste of time. "Why you... you foreigner!" Who knows now? I have talked to foreign-sounding shady-sounding "representatives" who told me they are right in Georgia - the one on the North American continent too.**
Are the normal •Indians and Filipinae that speak English very clearly with occasionally a very good understanding too, getting just too costly for Big Biz now.? "Continual cost savings", CCS, has got to keep moving, to keep the company stock and the GDP rising. Maybe the equivalent of 3 bucks an hour, with 1/2 hour lunch breaks and free electricity for curry and rice cookers, is just a big piece of low-hanging cost-saving fruit that has had to be picked. Are these new customer care people inner •Indians, from the interior jungles, or outer island Filipinae, from the islands under Moslem and Communist threat? With the lower cost of living and lower building costs, a high-speed wifi-enabled row of huts could be feasibly built, as part of the Global support network. These people don't demand air conditioning either.
You could be talking to any one of 6 continents in the world, Antarctica being just too pricey, what with having to heat the cubicles and all. It's so global and small-world-after-all-ey that it gives you a nice warm feeling when you are on the call for an hour and a half to find out what you need to know from this nice probably hot, probably skimpy-business-attire-wearing young lady who could indeed be named Carmen SanDiego.
Is she Bangladeshi? How about Malian? Burkina Fasolian? Let's try some other continents here. Maybe the young hottie on the other end is a Yucatan Peninsularian. She's probably not a 38th Parallel Asian (see same link), as costs are high there, at least on the south side. She could be French Guianian, working out of the newly renovated old solitary confinement cells in Saint Laurent de Maroni (still no air conditioning though...). How about Micronesian? I kinda doubt it - from the size of those hooters in the picture, I'd guess more likely Macronesian or a Bolivian working from the shores of Lake Titicaca, her English having been taught to her by the ancestors of Los Bandidos Yanquis. Was I speaking to a Bikini Atollian? That'd be nice to think about. It's been quite a few 1/2 lives already of most of the material, and she didn't mention anything about having extra eyes or a 3rd mammary gland or anything. (Of course, they are trained rigorously not to divulge location, so she may have been just being coy.)
She could be Romanian, ... she could be Bulgarian, she could be Albanian, she could be Hungarian, she might be Ukranian, she could be Australian, she could be an alien, send her to me!
* Here's a situation in which maybe the woke Filipinax term may be actually easier. Or, should it be Filipinox, though?
** Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that one WAS a scam. I forgot to look into it further, and I forgot to report on it here.
Comments (11)
The JP233 Runway Buster
Posted On: Tuesday - August 24th 2021 6:35PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity US Feral Government World Political Stupidity
I knew a guy who used to fly the Panavia Tornado*, along with the General Dynamics F-16 and, earlier, the Lockheed F-104, with the Luftwaffe. He mentioned something about these runway buster bombs, something like this:
Could we use some more JP233 runway busters? That'd be for the airports in Afghanistan of course. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't wish for innocent Americans to get taken by the Taliban as hostages (went through this crap about 41 years back).
However, how many innocent people are there? The war was going on for nearly 20 years. Anyone who signed up on his (her, its) own for this stuff did not do it to defend America, or at least one would have to be pretty slow to believe that, for the last 10 to 15 years anyway, of what was an occupation. They'll probably be extracted. There are reporters stuck over there. I don't care too awful much - them's the breaks. Then there are the tens of thousands of Afghanis who supposedly deserve to come to America for, helping out or something. Nah.
Politicians of both squads, State Governors, all kinds of idiots have been inviting yet more "refugees" to continue the process of changing the population out. We urge everyone to go ahead and argue against this**, but sometimes we just yearn for a simpler, more decisive solution:
PS: Yeah, I know that this form of weaponry is probably obsolete. Cruise missiles can fly in and bust up whole airfields now, but these things were cool and useful in their time.
* European made (United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands) with headquarters in Germany.
** The stalwart Ann Corcoran has been fighting the Refugee Resettlement racket for many years.
Comments (4)
Has "Customer Care" just been fully outsourced?
Posted On: Tuesday - August 24th 2021 11:07AM MST
In Topics: Economics Big-Biz Stupidity Scams Customer Care Kung Flu Stupidity
Peak Stupidity will have some other posts about the seemingly accelerated rate this country is heading into 3rd-Worldliness. I have been noticing all kinds of changes for the worse. I don't think this is normal Curmudgeonry around here either. Today, I want to write specifically with worse and worse experiences with what the Big-Biz world so nicely calls "customer care".
I really think the economic effects (or plan, if you will) of the Kung Flu PanicFest are showing up, (or coming to fruition, if you will again) heavily in various ways. Now, we have railed against the barely-understandable heavily outsourced customer service people in other posts multiple time before - use the Customer Care topic key. I have had to deal with this a number of times recently, and I don't recall speaking to Americans, period. You'd think that the year or so full effort Kung Flu PanicFest would not have affected this "industry" very much. They should be able to work from home with the best of them.
For the same problem, a broken laptop computer, I ended up talking to the customer service people of 2 different entities (well, my wife also, for the 1st one), Dell Computers and Fed Ex, the latter being involved in (not yet) getting the computer back from Houston, Texas. The Dell thing was downright weird. My wife started the calling, as she knows that I hate this stuff. OK, well, I told her again that she'd have to do it, as "I hate this stuff!" (It was her computer, so, ya' know ...) She only got so far before she finally reached the right individual who was too hard to understand to continue.
Well, being better with accents and understanding them, I took over the call. It got weird in a hurry. I'm no linguistics expert, but, I'm pretty good, usually. The lady was neither •Indian-sounding nor Filipina-sounding. I got the feeling she was Eastern European after some time. They may be good Christian unapologetic Western holdouts over there, but they are known to be some big-time scammers too - well, almost on par with the •Indians. Between that and each step in fact finding and decision making taking very long, I became very suspicious this was not Dell Computer customer care we were talking to at all. My wife and I spent time searching the web with this phone number of theirs looking for information* all the while we were on the speaker call, for what amounted to over an hour!
The customer service was so completely shoddy compared to a normal call, whether to Americans or not. I do not joke about the call being over an hour. Some of that time was taken by my worries about not being scammed*, but there were 2 to 5 minute holds for the simplest things (part of the reason I was worried). The accent was not actually that terrible pronunciation-wise, but it was very unfamiliar compared to the normal.
I asked multiple times where the lady was situated but got no answer. They are now told not to tell the customer, even if asked directly, I gather.
Finally, after a lot of stress, we took our chances that we'd never see the computer again. Wheww, well, it did go to the Dell dock in Houston**. A few weeks later, the FedEx*** guy must have knocked and ran like hell, per usual, leaving a note saying signature required. OK, fair enough, but then, we hadn't see a FedEx guy for a couple of days, with our sticker signed to say "just leave it".
The wife was anxious, because you really can't do every damn thing on a smart phone, so "just go down there and get it". It's nearly an hour round-trip, kind of taking the "Ex", OK, both "Ex"'s, out of "FedEx" for me. Before going, I did what was prudent and called customer service, as how did I know the computer wasn't on the delivery van at this point? (The "Door Tag" number pointed to a web page that said I could come get it, but I just won't trust a computer - more on this, as, yeah, you can't.)
After mashing 8 "0"s in a row, I was able to shut the nice computer lady voice up and get someone on the phone. She sounded just like the lady from Dell. It was the same accent. We went round-and-round, but I think my rant about "how can we do business if we can't understand each other" pissed her off enough to put me on a long-enough hold to get me off the line. Yes, I had asked her where she was, but she refused to tell me.
I called again, mashed the 8 "0"s again, and got a guy named "Nick". He's not really Nick, but rather than open up a can of worms ... I really wanted to get this computer. For a change - maybe I don't deal well with women - this guy was decent. He wouldn't tell me directly where he was, but I started off a game of 20 questions: "Dubai?" (Not a great guess - I should have asked "French Guiana?" or somewhere just to miff him a bit and test his Geography.) Nope. At the 3rd guess, "The Philippines?", Nick said "yep". Not bad, got it in 3!
After a mite bit of confusion, Nick told me I could indeed pick up the package across town. Now, we transition, if I can still write that with a straight face, from customer care stupidity to other 3rd-Worldliness, just for a bit. There across town, the black lady with a mask on - kind enough to take it off each time I said "I just can't understand you with that on" - told me this package was now containerized, and she couldn't get it. It was set up to be taken by the delivery truck, again. Damn! It wasn't her fault. It wasn't Nick's fault. I sure as hell wasn't MY fault. I'd done what I could before I wasted an hour.
See, those IT or logistics people at Fed Ex Express never got around to putting a flag in the database to get a guy like Nick in the Philippines to tell me that I couldn't get it right now. He had specifically told me I could, as did the website (remember the website?), that I could get it after 11:30 AM, and it was 4 in the afternoon.
Hopefully the computer will come today. There's a larger point here, though, regarding my experience. Has Big Biz just outsourced all the rest of the whole Customer Care "Industry" during the full year of the PanicFest-induced economic crash? I mentioned earlier that this is a field for which working from home is suited very well. However, did many of these people still in America take that $3,000/month unemployment money and run as fast as they could from the cubicles? Are they never coming back? Did Big Biz have to do this, or was it just more "continual cost saving"? I wonder, because, when you stay on the phone for over an hour, or call back multiple times to get an understandable care representative, how much money does this save exactly? Is the loss of customer goodwill any part of the calculations of the beancounters? Oh, wait, that's right, as with Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman, "we got no place else to go!"
* These scammers can be very clever. I suspected a false number, then checked the URL we got it from really carefully, My opinion varied from 50% chance of a scam to near 90% at one point. (The scam being we send them the computer, they fix it and they keep it, and bye bye.)
What I then did was think very carefully about what information they already had on us from this very call (via asking my wife what she had given them). I compared that with what they seemed to already know. For example, they asked for my home address. "Well, you should have that." The fact that it took them over 5 more minutes - on hold - to find it made me seriously wonder if they had just looked one of us up on line and made a best guess. Damn, it was getting like Spy v Spy for a bit! They did have an email address that we hadn't give them, and not an obviously named address, so I relaxed just a bit.
** I'd even looked up the address on bing maps, with the photo aerial shot, to make sure what kind of place this was. I was that paranoid, and rightfully so, I hastily add.
*** Oops, it's "FedEx Express" now. How damn redundant and stupid is that? I hope the corporate naming consulting company didn't make more than a couple of million out of that one ... "The rate is too damn high!"
Comments (5)
Yep, it's the mirrors
Posted On: Monday - August 23rd 2021 9:44AM MST
In Topics: Cars Curmudgeonry Peak Stupidity Roadshow
This is a follow up from a post of over 2 years back, one of our curmudgeonly about cars. In this case, it was about modern vehicles, of which we're all going to have to deal with at some point. In Modern Auto Stupidity, Peak Stupidity discussed the problem now for those of us who like to ride with the windows down.
Hey, some of us are still not scared of the outdoors, even under America's current state of Faucism. As we noted, the problem doesn't occur at low speed, so riding around town with windows down is still doable. At high speed, even just 60 mph, there is air turbulence that causes all occupants to feel that Steve Austin feeling - "she's breaking up, coming forward with the side stick ...". I mean, it's BAD, especially the effect from the back seat windows (we have the standard 2 rows).
I speculated on the big side rear-view mirrors being the cause of this, and now Peak Stupidity has verified that during a test run on the Peak Stupidity proving grounds called the interstate out West. Why so long a wait? The problem was that the BIG-ASSED (to be more correct) mirrors on our only vehicle with the things are in fixed housings. The rental SUV we drove, however, had the feature of inward-foldable mirror housings. Yes, it's another thing to fail, but at least this feature is a manual one - no motors and "mirror control computer" are involved. That's a good thing, and I do like this feature. We used it in a very tight parking spot at one of our stopping points.
It was very hot on the trip, so nobody ELSE in the family was up for windows-down driving. Finally though, after maybe 3 days of driving this thing, it came to me - hey, let's test this mirror theory.
Yep, with the mirrors folded inward, the turbulence inside the cabin with the windows down was greatly minimized. It may have been as low as in an old sports car, sold with no A/C. Ooops, only thing is, once you do this, you don't have your view, and as Peak Stupidity has railed against to a slight degree (so far), visibility in these new small and mid-sized SUVs sucks ass!*
So, the point here is not that the inward-folding mirrors solve the turbulence problem. It's just that I know the cause for sure now.
* In fact, this one had maybe the worst visibility for changing lanes to the left that I've ever seen. It took 2 days before I felt comfortable coming left without greatly hedging it.
Comments (7)
Does Donald Trump read Peak Stupidity?
Posted On: Monday - August 23rd 2021 6:10AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Trump Pundits
You wouldn't think so, right? Otherwise, he would have gotten his shit together at the end of '16, before he'd even taken office, and at the time this blog started up, hired the right people, gotten together a strategy, and gotten shit done for us!
Well, Donald Trump is still out there speaking at rallies. That's all well and good, and I'm glad to hear he's bringing out 30-40,000 people in a town like Cullman, Alabama, with a population of 20,000. (Cullman, BTW, is way up in very white northern Alabama - the other part of the State is derided as "LA" - Lower Alabama.) All the stuff he rails about? Well, he could have done tangible things via the law to undo and prevent all the woke "that turns to shit" - his own wording from the rally.
OK, well why would Trump read Peak Stupidity? I only put that title in due to a real coincidence that I noticed only last night. Here is a quick footnote from our post of this past Saturday afternoon Possible Afghanistan pull-out Chinese connection? (just a post with some speculation, mind you.):
Boy, that General MIlley sure gives me the willies, with his woke nonsense. Were he around in George Patton's time, I would think Patton would have not only slapped the shit out of him, but likely took him out on the battlefield with his pearl-handled pistol... accidentally, of course.Now, note the timestamp on the post. It's 2:28 PM Mountain Standard Time. OK, you know Peak Stupidity doesn't make it easy for the reader to glean our location, but let's put that in Alabama (Central) Daylight Time - 4:28 in the afternoon. You'll just have to take my word here, as no doubt, I could have changed the time stamp, but also, more legitimately, that footnote could have been an addition - I only write in update notes myself, with no timestamp from the server or anything. However, I didn't. I don't think I added anything but last minute typo fixes, as I checked the links.
[Typo with big "I" in MIlley still included for authenticity.]
Sometime Saturday night, my wife had that Trump speech at his Cullman, Alabama rally playing on her phone. I don't know if that was after the fact or live, but I only listened for a minute or two. As much as he is heartening to listen to, that round-in-circles pep talks style of Trump gives me no confidence any of this means anything, so I didn't pay that close attention. I do remember distinctly the part in which he said "everything woke turns to shit" and thought "hey, not so nice, as 2 younger kids are right here listening." (True, though, everything woke turns to shit.)
Here's the coincidental, if not eerie part: I did not hear ANYTHING about General Patton in those couple of minutes. I read something in the Sailer comments yesterday evening about General Patton and General Milley being compared. Then, I just found out that Trump had had the whole huge American flag / Patton speech opening scene from the move up on a screen. I have not seen any more of the speech, but this WBHM page** has a quick amazingly fair report. The whole rally is linked-to at the bottom of this post.
It's not always so easy to find the details one needs on-line, I noticed again as I tried to look up the time of this already-past rally. Everything I read does say "evening", a term that is used differently in different locales, but, to clinch it, I see that the speech was made during darkness. The :17 second clip of the very start of the speech on the WBHM page has a time of 8:59 PM. It's dark outside from the beginning, and even at the eastern side of Central Time there, sunset is still not till 7:25 P, with the end of civil twilight being near 7:50 PM or so. Trump's comparison of generals had to be 3 hours or more after I published that post with the footnote.
That's really something. I'm sure the Trump speech, at least the Generals Patton v Milley comparison, was worked out well ahead, but Peak Stupidity was first to "print". Now, I've to sift through this speech and find out exactly what was said regarding the two. I've been listening to 10 minutes or so while typing this, and, man, this guy has not changed! It's really hard to see where's he's going with it all, he's ridiculously egotistical and it's plain exasperating to listen to sometimes. Here's another thing: I scanned through the introductions by a few of the Alabama politicians in the beginning. How difference is the Southern White culture and accent from that of NY City boy Donald Trump!
How strange that Peak Stupidity used the same comparison of General George Patton v General Milley (Cyrus?) on the same day as Donald Trump did, independently? Perhaps we should think about applying for speechwriter jobs with their operation***. We can get long winded too. WE can disrespect government officials and politicians with the best of them. Only thing, we just can't write in complete circles though - never had the talent on board. I know they have the spiral-lined paper for that ... we got a great bunch of writers here at Peak Stupidity.. the best ... let me tell you ... I mean, look a dees guys... we have done some AMAZING things ... you wouldn't believe ...
That over 2 hour video is not meant to be embedded, I guess. OK, here.
PS: Note one of the Topic Keys, that I am not really specific enough with. It is General stupidity. Ha, that fits this post to a T!
* One of my favorites - I watch it every 5 years or so, like The Bridge on the River Kwai - and older one, from 1957.
** Site of a Birmingham TV station.
*** BTW, I noted in a picture that Mr. Trump was next to a business jet that I assume he came in on. What happened to the big, beautiful 757? Without the 757, I'm not doin' it. No, I was told there'd be a 757... and I want my red stapler back.
No comments - Click here to start thread
No More, No More
Posted On: Saturday - August 21st 2021 3:40PM MST
In Topics: Music
The post title this time could have to do with anything, especially the huge inundation of stupidity we are undergoing. However, I just like the band Aerosmith and especially their album Toys in the Attic. I just read over the lyrics of today's song (see the "Show More" section on the page). I had no idea what half of them were till just now. It doesn't matter too much in Rock & Roll.
No More, No More is the 3rd song Peak Stupidity has featured from this great rock album. A long time ago, we posted Adam's Apple, and pretty recently we posted Uncle Salty.
Arguably, that's arguably, keep in mind, this is the best song Aerosmith played, and I don't want to read any arguments about it. ;-}
Thank you all for reading, commenting, and listening! Next week will feature posts from the Peak Stupidity Roadshow.
Comments (6)
Possible Afghanistan pull-out Chinese connection?
Posted On: Saturday - August 21st 2021 2:28PM MST
In Topics: China US Feral Government The Neocons Geography World Political Stupidity Zhou Bai Dien
I've got no evidence, haven't read anything in particular about it, and would not even put much of my own money on it, so please treat this post as the speculation it is.
Zhou Bai Dien leaving Afghanistan is like Nixon going to China. Former President Richard Nixon made a name as a staunch anti-Communist, so the nobody could accuse him of being soft when he visited China in 1972*. The current selected President has been the hand-maiden for the ctrl-left for a long time, having worked for the race hustler Øb☭ma for 8 years and having been with the Feral Gov't 11 years longer than the median-aged American has been alive. After 4 years of President Trump, as far from a Neocon as we've had in office since Ronald Reagan, being unsuccessful at ending this ridiculously long occupation of a Moslem shithole, now this guy just up and did it. No one can accuse him of being one of those "right-wing warmongers". (Yeah, I know, they are in all the wings now.)
This post will not argue about the stupidity involved in the exit itself. That's a done deal. Afghanis holding onto wings or trying to hole up in wheel wells of C-17s is not my problem. The poor American bastards stuck in country will hopefully get out, but from the usual crap I've heard from them about "oh, Afghanistan will go to hell... the women will have to cover up ...", I don't feel that sorry for most of them. What are you doing there? Was it about making a killing as a contractor, doing missionary work? I'm more worried about our country going to hell, which it's in the process of, and so should they!
Peak Stupidity has had not one good thing to say about Zhou Bai Dien so far, but we give him all the credit he deserves here. He has the Neocons of both squads of The Party all over his ass, from the pundits to the generals**. Conservative Americans ought to be happy about this. I am glad to see that our favorite literary pundit, Miss Ann Coulter, is happy about this too** The big question is "WHY?"
Why did this lefty puppet President end this war? It's not making him popular with his people on the left. Is it just his dementia? Did he forget what the Deep State has been trying to drill into his head for the times when he puts on his Commander-in-Chief hat?
I had another thought. The reader may be wondering why Peak Stupidity insists on using the "Zhou Bai Dien" Chinese PinYin style moniker for the guy. Well, back before the election, you all might recall all that Hunter Biden / Chinese corruption/connection business. (Well, the corruption part wasn't confined to China.) With his only living son being the screw up would-be playboy Hunter Biden, I would guess Joe would care about Hunter more than anyone else in this world (including "Doctor" Jill and his Kameltoe sidekick). The Chinese government/CCP could have anything they wanted to blackmail Joe Biden with through his son Hunter.
Do the Chinese just want the American armed forces the hell out of that land? There are important minerals in those parts. Having some control of that territory could help a lot with control of China's Moslem problem out west. Of the 14 countries**** that border China, 5 of them are a western cluster of "stans", Afghanistan being near the middle (4th one south) that all border that troublesome "province" of Xinjiang.***** They could follow up on some of those "one man's terrorist is another man's genocide victim" types.
As we have written multiple times regarding China and any possible territorial ambitions: So what? Let them. This country is beyond broke. Let's let the Chinese have a go at colonizing or running the world and then being the world's policeman. Let the Africans bitch and moan about those evil Yellow Colonists. Let's see the Chinese get mired in complicated political/military engagements. They may do better. They won't be as nice, altruistic, and accommodating as the Westerns were a century (+/- 50 years?) ago, but, and maybe for that reason, they may do better.
It's hard for Americans used to a government and military that took control all over the world, to let go of the worries about the resources and the land. However, we have a bountiful country. America has been a self-sufficient country before, though some couldn't imagine it now. If we somehow could stop the internal destruction of the country, it'd be really nice to sit back with some popcorn and enjoy the Chinese hegemonic follies.
Anyway, Peak Stupidity has no scoop here. We are just speculating if the Chinese may have had a hand in this. They have hands in LOTS of things.
* It was the first time a US President had visited Communist China (formed October, 1947).
** Boy, that General MIlley sure gives me the willies, with his woke nonsense. Were he around in George Patton's time, I would think Patton would have not only slapped the shit out of him, but likely took him out on the battlefield with his pearl-handled pistol... accidentally, of course.
*** Except for the same objections most Americans ought to have about this being used as another population replacement project. We don't want a one of these Afghanis here. I am really glad to see that Miss Coulter has become very principled over the years, BTW.
**** You'll probably need to get out a globe. You may need to count 3 times.
***** Xinjiang also has a very small border with Russia, I'd say 50 miles long, from my globe, in between its northwestern border with Kazakhstan and its northeastern border with Mongolia. The rest of China's border with Russia is way east of there.
Comments (3)
Peak Stupidity Brain Teaser: Choose the REAL insurrection
Posted On: Friday - August 20th 2021 2:52PM MST
In Topics: US Feral Government Anarcho-tyranny World Political Stupidity
20 years of war at a cost of something like 2 1/4 Trillion dollars spent by a beyond-broke Feral Government resulting in C-17s scrambling out of Kabul to escape 19th century-style goat herders vs. a few hundred rambunctious patriotic Constitution-loving American citizens spending a few hours in the chambers of Congress uninvited one January afternoon. Hmmm, tough call.
"I'll take land wars in Asia for 2.26 Trillion, Alex."
You have 30 seconds. Make sure you frame your answer in the form of a question. Whaaa? OK, just pick A or B.
Our commenter The Alarmist gave the idea to Peak Stupidity in the comments section. There's gold in them thar comments!
Comments (9)
Solidarity at the Fitness Center
Posted On: Thursday - August 19th 2021 6:21AM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media
This post is only peripherally related to the subject of exercise machines and to the Kung Flu stupidity. The reader can find a number of posts on the former subject with the Artificial Stupidity topic key, as our concern* was the stupidity inherent in some of the consoles and their calculations of work/power/etc. The gym in question here has the very nice, solid Precor machines with the excellent consoles. As for the Kung Flu Stupidity, it only applies in that the gym in question in that every other machine was marked off as unusable due to the COVID one-niner.
However, this was a nice-sized fitness center, and there were only 2 of us in there, so neither of the other 2 annoyances were a factor. This time, it was the usual force-fed TV aspect of life, documented likely near a dozen times in posts with the TV, aka Gov't Media topic key. Even that one was not much of a problem, as the only operating TV I saw in this big place was at least 15 feet away, attached to a pillar and set to a fairly low volume. That other guy was doing some weight stuff, right near that TV. He had some kind of earbud/bluetooth/what-have-you things in his ears. (Man, people stick a lot of stuff into their ears these days!)
There didn't seem to be any reason to bother this guy about the TV, such as asking him nicely whether he was watching. I got going in the workout, figuring this TV at that low level wouldn't bother me. At 3 minutes in, I realized it kinda did, but I don't stop on this kind of workout. I don't know, it's probably because we did not watch ANY TV during daytime when I grew up, other than when my parents got into tennis and matches were on during the day. Back then, since that time, and right now, a TV on in the daytime just seems out of place and annoying. It is the case that the daytime TV, at least in the morning (the case here), often has the blabbing women in front of the cheering and hooting audiences, and it's just sickening to listen to.
OK, it was on low, but when I got done I went over there to get something to wipe the machine off with and looked at that TV "set". Hey, it was probably just my lack of effort, but I swear I could find no normal buttons or switches - the usual ON/OFF, Channel +/-, Volume +/-, etc. That's not the first time though. I didn't look for the remote, as I was leaving anyway and not trying to make a statement.
Then, with no prompting, this guy working out talked to me about it, wonder of wonders. "Hey, I can't find the remote to this thing. You may have to pull the plug." Awesome, a like mind! I'd already noticed the wiring set up. Usually, there are 4 places to cut the deal off - either end of the power supply and either end of the signal. That stuff was crammed behind there though, so my best, maybe only easy, option was to pull power from the wall. There ya' go!
PS: I've often done this when they don't make it easy, and I'm the only one in there. However, I try not to be seen doing this. It may piss off the management, as others may complain later about not being able to get the TV working. Haha, tough titties!
* The reviews therein don't cover the mechanical reliability aspect of the machines.
Comments (11)
Our corner of the internet - Part 2: Ending up at the Peak Stupidity blogroll
Posted On: Wednesday - August 18th 2021 7:27PM MST
In Topics: Internets TV, aka Gov't Media Websites
(Continued from Part 1.)
I found some information that could have been in the Part 1 post after the fact. From Forbes magazine this 2000 article, The Decline of the Major Networks, by Karlyn Bowman, has some information to bolster our view that these 3 TV networks were a large portion of Americans' "news feed" for the first 4 decades of television, leading up to the internet age.
Twenty-seven million to 29 million viewers, on average, tuned in every night to hear Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Today, though, the viewership of evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC combined is smaller than CBS' when Cronkite sat in the anchor's chair. In a 2008 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, just 8% reported regularly watching Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News broadcast.I didn't find it easy just now to find relative viewership numbers, but if CBS news was ~ 1/3 of the national news viewing than that 28 million x 3, or ~85 million meant from 35% to 45% of Americans were watching the TV news during this era. (Going from the beginning to the end of the Cronkite era, that is.)
There were those 3 guys, telling it "the way it is" (supposedly) to over one third of Americans each night, for a few decades in what was a very unified country.* Was it more unified due to our watching the same guys tell it "the way it is"? There were newspapers, and our lyin' eyes, for alternate opinions, but I would say those trusted TV figures united Americans around a common narrative, not always right, but mostly agreed on.
A 1973 poll by Oliver Quayle--much cited in coverage of Cronkite's death--labeled Cronkite the most trusted man in America. In the poll, he earned higher marks than then-President Richard Nixon. A 1975 poll from Roper Starch Worldwide found that more than 90% of respondents could identify Cronkite, and around 90% had a great deal of respect or at least some respect for him.Uhhh, higher marks for trust in a man than in Richard Nixon. What's that like, the amount of trust I have that our cat will not jump up on the table and eat a piece of broccoli when we turn our backs?** The stat on Dan Rather rings pretty true to me. Had the pollsters just asked me a simple question, I'd have been in that other 79% even a decade earlier.
In 1981, when Cronkite announced his retirement, 81% had a positive opinion of him. By comparison, shortly before Dan Rather delivered his last broadcast as CBS news anchor in 2005 just 21% of respondents to a Gallup poll said that they believed him all or even most of the time.
That brings me down memory lane which finally leads to the internet. Already 13 years or so after Dan Rather had started his news anchoring gig, I first got on the internet. No, I didn't understand what the hell was going on with it (the univ. library had a 1 hour class which just confused me more, as they didn't have a clue either), but I do know that there were these certain few websites you could read stuff on. I tried to find out where to buy a few shirts of a brand that Wal-Mart didn't have anymore. I looked up stuff on my hobbies where there was any. My same favorites and "clicked links" were still there on a university computer a week or two later. About 4 years later, one could, like, buy a book on the computer! I didn't. I'm no early adopter.
A couple of years later, yahoo had their front page, as the other search "engines" did during the .com 1.0 heyday, but I had already sickened of the hype there. (I only went for the free email, and unfortunately, though it takes about 5 x as many clicks to log in now, I have some legacy accounts there.) For a couple of years, other than during a stint reading the Wall Street Journal for a while, trying to get though even the "Marketplace" section to learn something***, I was off the media period. It was mid-2002 at the latest, because I remember where I was, when I was reading Instapundit regularly. Yeah, he was a Neocon in the early days, but Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds has always been a pretty fair guy. He linked to all sorts of stuff, and he had his whole extended family of blog-children, as he called them. I remember Tim Blair from down under, for one.
The web news and opinion "space" was still small enough to where I'd see a new site reference others I already knew most of the time, and one could go in circles. That doesn't mean there wasn't a lefty "space" with their own circle of opinion givers. The right referenced the left, but I have no idea if the left referenced the right. I wasn't in that space and didn't want them in my face.
Well, the Instaman got me to FrontPageMag by David Horowitz, the ex-red-diaper Commie, and other sites with regular daily articles. During the first half of the '00s, I did a stint of a guy named The Agitator (Radly Balko), two gun guys - Massbackwards and Alphecca (gay gun guy, to be precise), some high-strung gal named Rachel something, the excellent Libertarian/Constitutionalist Vin Suprynowicz**** in the Las Vegas Review Journal (met him in Lost Wages and he gave me a book). I almost forgot a few other gun guys - the Western Rifle Shooters Blog, Sipsey Street Irregulars (I met Mike Vanderbough at a rally in Washington FS.), and Kim Du Toit, that I kept up with along the way.
I was a regular reader of The American Spectator and used to comment. My favorite memory was of a drawn out discussion with some lady in the comments there on why I felt perfectly fine saying "I'm glad Ted Kennedy is dead". That really narrows the time line down for that one. (Yeah, it was because the fucker was still in office. I told her that if he had been just a retired Senator, as much as I hated his policies, I wouldn't have written that. Yet, if his dying was the only way to be rid of him from the US Senate, then, hell yeah, I was glad he'd died.*****)
I had a couple year stint reading Reason magazine's Hit and Run blog, commenting there too, as I still got the paper magazine. That was right up until that I not only realized that these people were Open Borders proponents but how stupid an idea that was.
I must have started reading VDare, per my wise Dad's conversations about immigration, though not particularly that website, during that time reading Reason and the end of that time. The financial state of this country really hit me a few years later, as I got into Zerohedge sometime in '11. I mean, I was heavily into it, reading each post and all comments along with them. One could do that still through '12 sometime. I was wise enough not to sign up to comment, just because, well, that time-wasting thing that has now hit me hard on... well, you know....
What was next? I know I've left out some, but I'll just go up now till the founding of this blog in late November of '16. A month later, I ended up on The Unz Review and realized that one doesn't have to give out his life's story (or real email address even) to comment and put in links to Peak Stupidity. Yeah, I do comment too much there - people will tell me as much, but those aren't the people I'm up for listening to. In the words of South Park's Eric Carman, "I do what I wan!"
I hope that wasn't boring, as possibly some of those sites are ones you all have perused over the years. Anyway, that all leads to the very small blogroll on the right. I could definitely fill up the column with more - that's just a matter of laziness about writing reviews of them.
I have my current corner of the internet that I have become comfortable with. It is a very small corner. Others are in their own corners, of which there are many. How can a people be united in any way with this method of getting news and opinion? As far as news goes, that's what I do like about this internet world - one can go as far as he wants in seeking the truth. I am not really knocking that part. As for opinions, well, yeah, they are like assholes, but not all assholes are equal, to paraphrase a certain group of pigs in a George Orwell book.
The stupidity goes as deep as one wants to follow links down to. It's up to each of us to get to the truth. I don't see too much wrong with this, other than what would have been coming anyway, the dividing of America due to completely unreconcilable opinions . Would it have happened this way if still over a third of Americans gathered around to watch one of the same three guys for a half hour each weekday evening? So long as we let the Commies infiltrate and the hard-core foreigners come in massive numbers, yeah. Walter Cronkite sure wasn't going to do anything about it!
We just better do all we can to keep the internet from being controlled even more than it is. That's a big worry.
Thank you all for visiting this little corner of the internet! There was a commenter in that great and funny group on Zerohedge in '11 with the handle "Seek the Truth". I like that one.
* due to that 1921-24 halt to significant immigration, only cranked back up in earnest in 1965. That 1965 disaster of a law took a while to take, though, meaning there had been a full 4 to 6 decades of assimilation.
** He loves it. Yes, we have a weirdo.
*** Yeah, I didn't know how much of the "trading" talk was just bullshit. See our post on "technical trading", which is anything but technical.
**** More on Vin here and here.
***** I wrote this thing about Ted Kennedy up in Speaking Dead of the Ill - re Juan McAmnesty with more about the latter in Juan McAmnesty - Rot In Place
Comments (10)
Tweet of the Century
Posted On: Tuesday - August 17th 2021 6:16PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders Political Correctness Feminism US Feral Government World Political Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
Well, OK, we didn't have a winner the previous few dozen centuries, mainly cause, tweeting is like, stupid. However, I would have signed up to tweet myself had I thought of this first:
There's not even an exaggeration in there.
Fuckin' A, "Bronze Age Kashi", Fuckin' A!
Comments (12)