The Real History of the Slave Trade in a Nutshell - Jared Taylor
Posted On: Tuesday - July 27th 2021 7:42PM MST
In Topics: History Pundits Americans Geography Race/Genetics
As you may know we LUV LUV LUV Geography here at Peak Stupidity. It's great to have a map as our header image, and this one is clear, concise, and highly illustrative, the latter meaning it may become verboten, if, say, the good old ADL has anything to do with it.
He neither generated all the data for this map nor put it together, but the writer we refer the reader to today has put together a simply excellent short summary of history of the slave trade, mostly out of Africa, but plenty out of Europe too. Jared Taylor, head of the American Renaissance website, wrote this as a retort to those woke and woke-inspired idiots who would deride White Americans, ex/current*) slave holders or not, about slavery in our country's past. After reading Wait, Slavery Is OUR "Original Sin"?, Americans should be PROUD to have had the very small role in use of African slaves, compared to almost any major section of the New World besides Canada .
Mr. Taylor wrote a very good title too, as that's what this BLM, woke, statue-toppling, name-changing, kid-indoctrinating bullshit is about, making it out like American slavery was just the worst damn thing that ever happened in the world.** Peak Stupidity explained in our post soliciting our very generous, if I do say so myself, Slavery Reparations Plan, that slavery has been a thing since the time of the beginning of the Old Testament. In fact it is noted with absolutely no abolitionist talk all over this book. We noted:
Jews have had ancestors held by Egyptians, Hittites by Caananites, Arkites by Girgashites, Sinites by Hermaphrodites, and more recently, Hindu-H-1Bites by Microsoft Windites.Jared Taylor includes the same opinion, with lots of historical examples from the Old World and the New. Some of the history, especially that of the Moslem slave-holders who took White European slaves (in the millions) along with the sub-Saharan Africans, is sickening. It truly makes the American experience a lot closer to a picnic than almost anyone would dare admit in public.
Jared Taylor is not only a brave man for being on the side of truth regarding race, but he never fails to be a civil and erudite gentleman when as he writes and talks about it. Pretty soon though, we're going to need some non-civil, non-erudite dudes to move this opinion along. This great article should be a start for those others to base a counter-movement to this Blackety-Black movement that's just building up continuously. If not any other piece of writing, White Americans who care about our future ought to spread Mr. Taylor's article far and wide. Print it out. Post it, carefully. Give it or link it to anyone who will not immediately throw it out or delete it.
* Sure there are a number of Americans who have been holding household slaves, such as Chicagoland Mom Nawomi Awoga and California couple Ijeoma Chukwunyelu and Nnamdi Onwuzulike of the East Bay, as related in The Horrible Legacy of Slavery Continues .... A Chicagoan or Californian had better learn early that once you set foot in the Bodie McMansion, you'd best setcher mind ta workin'.
That's been a thing for a while, but there are even field, well OK, temple niggras now, as we related in New Jersey Jones and the Temple of Doom. Thankfully, a lawsuit was filed against the offending BAPS Church, no not Baptist - that stands for Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha. What a weird name for an outfit in New Jersey - maybe they come from deep in the Pine Barrens.
** BTW, when you think about whether nefarious Communists are behind the scenes of these new movements, remember that anything "America Bad" is what they want to spread. Saying that this country has some particularly evil history regarding ANYTHING really, not just slavery, is their style of spreading pernicious lies.
Comments (11)
Turn signal stupidity
Posted On: Tuesday - July 27th 2021 4:06AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Peak Stupidity Roadshow
A Steve Sailer post a couple of weeks ago, Road Rage Shootings Soar During the Racial Reckoning, brought out lots of back-and-forth comments regarding the use of turn signals. It doesn't take a a complete difference in ideology, Socialism vs. the Free Market, for example, to bring out lots of arguments. Sometimes the small stuff brings out the most vehement or drawn-out discussions as we have lots of our own personal experiences to argue from.
The use of turn signals on the road is one example, and that was the discussion in that thread. There ARE quite a lot of much more important things going on in the world*, I admit, but I'll just complete my opinion here, with one great example that came up a couple of days after that post, coincidentally.
Here's my contention: Turn signals are communication devices. I suppose that's obvious, but then people often don't use them as such, if at all**. I can remember the way many of the written driver's test questions were stated. (It can be difficult to make good multiple choice questions. See Making a fair multiple-choice test.):
23: You should activate your turn signal how far before the intersection at which you wish to make a turn:I swear they had questions like that. The first problem with those answers is that most people couldn't estimate a distance within 50%. (I asked a woman at the Quicky Mart how far back down the road the barbecue place is that I missed. She told me "oh about 10 miles", but it was barely 2!.) They are also not good answers because the slight differences aren't important. It'd have been better to at least have 10 ft, 100 ft, 500 ft, and 1 mile, as the answers.
( ) A. 200 ft.
( ) B. 150 ft.
( ) C. 100 ft.
( ) D. 75 ft.
More pertinent to this post, the following last answer here ought to be on here and set as the correct one in the computer:
( ) E. It depends.Turn signals are a communication device. Mindlessly just turning them on, so one doesn't have to bother thinking about them was suggested by multiple commenters. I've got a problem with that, basically because I think of driving as a skill and a challenge sometimes, not just a mindless effort. Maybe I should be on a Volkswagen commercial ("Drivers wanted"), but VWs are not my style.
( ) F. You don't always need to use it at all.
( ) G. Both E and F are correct.
In that thread in question commenter usNthem wrote ( It's comment #33. Link isn't so great, as tweets keep dicking up the page display):
What I get a kick out of is how reflexively most people USE their turn signals even when it’s obvious where they’re going or when there’s basically no one around. If I’m in a marked left or right turn lane, there’s no need to signal as it’s clear where I’m going. Now if there’s no marked turn lane and there’s someone behind me or coming in the opposite direction where it’ll make sense, I’ll signal my intent. Otherwise I never use them unless necessary.Yes, that's the idea! Mr. Sailer, with plenty good commenters agreeing, wrote back (#39):
Developing habits like “I always turn on my left turn signal when I’m turning left” makes life a lot easier than having to think through the conditions of each left turn to come to a unique decision each time over whether or not to turn on your turn signal.I disagree, as I guess that's the difference between a driver and a robot (no wait, robots may be smarter!) or at least someone who cares about compliance with the law over safety***. I'll get to safety in a bit with one example.
As thought of as a communication device, it becomes natural to use the turn signal when you need to “tell someone something”. (That could be, “Hey, I’m forking off here, so you can go ahead and get on the road” or “The reason I’m on the brakes, you freakin idiot tailgater, is that I’m turning right in 100 ft.” or “I’m turning left, and I’m waiting for you to go straight. If you are also turning left, then if I knew that I’d start my turn, but without your turn signal on, how do I know that, you worthless asshole.” Stuff like that.) That takes thoughtfulness, but also, one must be aware of the surrounding traffic. You should. If you're not, you are not a safe driver and the most exacting driving-school-written-test procedure isn't going to stop you from getting smashed into occasionally.
Long ago one night, I was riding in the front passenger's seat in a taxi with 2 colleagues in the back, and noticed the driver signaling a right turn about 200 yards before a big intersection at which he wanted to turn. There was an entryway from the right out of a shopping center to the big road we were on, about half-way from us to the big intersection. There was a car nosing out at said entryway obviously wanting to get on the road. Traffic was heavy, so that other driver was looking for any small space to allow him to start down the road. I could see what the problem was. That guy swung out onto the road and made our taxi driver hit the brakes hard. It was pretty close.
Of course, the other driver should have looked for more of a deceleration from our car (a type of judgment people are getting worse at, IMO) or even waited until we really started to turn. However, he may not have gotten onto the road then. Oh, yeah, an ensuing wreck would have been that other driver's fault. That's great for one's insurance bill, but it could still have been no fun at all. The thing is, an actual driver on our end wouldn't be in or close to such a wreck, as he would have been thinking, without a whole lot of brain effort "let me wait on the signal, as that guy there will get the wrong idea". Yes, that guy did.
We rode with a taxi driver, but not a real driver. The problem was not that he didn't know the exact distance from an intersection to activate his turn signal off that written test. The problem was that he wanted to drive thoughtlessly. Well, I can't go micromanaging a taxi ride, but I sure enough did see that coming that night.
That taxi ride wasn't the example from a few weeks back, though. I was going to end with that, but I'll put it in a separate small post later.
* Also, the way automation is going, the self-driving cars won't need turn signals, as they'll tell each other which way they're going. Those who actually steer their own cars will be relics driving "legacy vehicles".
** The latter is the situation with many black drivers, from what I've seen. It's not that they are too lazy to flip the lever, but to think about when to use it is either too much for them or too White for them.
*** That's a much bigger issue in bicycle riding. The law should be of almost NO concern for bike riders, as THE LAW is not going to save you from head injury.
Comments (13)
Stupidity spreading east and music for the Parrotheads
Posted On: Saturday - July 24th 2021 8:43PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Music Geography Kung Flu Stupidity
This is from our "About" page:
This stupidity has reached the highest levels in these United States, western Europe, and the western societies in general. There are many theories of the origin and modes of transmittal of this stupidity, though, as often is the case, it is speculated that epicenter was the southern and central coasts of California. Other theories point to New York City, Washington, FS, and/or Karl Marx's ass.Well, from the picture of a 20 ft statue of Pandemic Lady Hero just unveiled in Riga, the stupidity has obviously been spreading east, into at least part of the old East Bloc. Latvia was under the Soviet sphere, so has experienced its share of stupidity during those years.
Many people have claimed recently that the ex-East Bloc countries had acquired a natural herd immunity, if I may, to the modern stupidity from the years of the Communist pandemic. The EXPERTS of the Peak Stupidity medical staff, through spokesman Dr. Al-Bendova, have put out an current SA (Stupidity Advisory) that covers more than just the Western World. We are to look out for a new variant of the Stupidity Virus - STUVID-21, that will attack even those with that built-up immunity.
How do you even walk into the building with something like this out front? I guess I'd have to have fluids surging out of every orifice in my body from eating a Latvian TV dinner of Liepajas menciņš with a Soviet Era expiration date. I always remember a line from one of my favorite pop and sailing-rock genre* songwriters, Jimmy Buffett. It goes:
I don't think I'm gonna ever let her cut on me.
(OK, it was "him" in the original, a surgeon drinking Tuborg beer with his colleagues at the strip club.) Well, Peak Stupidity already featured the song with that line, Miss You So Badly, from one of Mr. Buffett's best albums, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes. That was in this post, titled with the line above.
Well, we've got to feed the Parrotheads once in a while, so we've got another one, that has even less, nothing, in fact, to do with this post. From the album Mr. Buffett put out just before Changes in Latitudes, called Livin' and Dyin' in 3/4 Time, Ringling, Ringling is pure country.
Ringling, Montana, which this song is about, is in Meagher County, Montana, which has an estimated 1,831 people, down from 1,938 in 2000, on 2,392 square miles of land.** White Sulphur Springs (been through there) is the biggest town, and Ringling (not sure if I have***) is about 25 miles south on the US-89. The name only shows up on bing maps when I get down to a 1,000 ft / in. scale.
Jimmy Buffett must have spent a decent amount of time in Montana, as the he has lines in both Miss You So Badly and Come Monday that refer to Missoula (the former) and Montana (the latter) in addition to this song.
We've got plenty of good stuff coming up - more "Peak Stupidity Roadshow" curmudgeonry, political stupidity, and a proposed Constitutional Amendment, for starters. Thanks for reading, writing and listening!
PS: Jimmy Buffett did not BS with his geography in the lyrics. The train line that goes through Ringling, does wind it's way northeast, meeting up with, then paralleling, the MT-294, then paralleling US-12 east past Roundup to Musselshell****, on the order of 100 miles away. How could it have an electric train, though?
* He calls it "drunk Caribbean Rock".
** It had its highest population in the year 1890, with over 4,700 people.
*** See I've been everywhere in this here land. ("Hello?? It's Johnny Cash.")
**** Been through there too. A big deer jumped onto the road in the other land of the #12. I'd driven 1,100 miles already, so I figured that was a sign to stop for the night in Roundup.
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[Updated 07/26:] Picture captioned changed per commenter PeterIke.
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Comments (10)
He once was lost, but now he's found ...
Posted On: Friday - July 23rd 2021 4:36PM MST
In Topics: Humor World Political Stupidity iEspionage Kung Flu Stupidity
... we're returning him 'cross the sea. ♫ ♬ ♩
There is likely no way I'll see any of the '21 delayed Olympic Games, excepting maybe a clip or two of something cool on youtube. A humorous episode that just wrapped up was an escaped Ugandan weight lifter who wandered around Japan, outside his assigned COVID workout zone. Per this article in the Kyodo News,
Ssekitoleko went missing Friday from the country's Olympic team in Izumisano, Osaka Prefecture, after leaving a note at his hotel saying he wanted to work in Japan as life in his home country was difficult, according to Izumisano officials. The city and his team had been trying to locate him with help from police.That was a week ago Friday, the 16th. His team had been training in their special "contained" area since mid-June.
Can you even defect from a shithole African country? Is there such a thing? I mean, back in the Cold War days, you'd find a way to escape Totalitarianism, and the Free World would welcome you and maybe glean some good information too. Even in the Uganda of Idi Amin, couldn't one just leave to another shithole African country? Who would care? Could those countries have control real border control? [looks away embarrassed...] Who would welcome you, though?
The Japanese are still pretty sane about not letting many foreigners in. They didn't want this guy. They especially didn't want a guy spreading that dreaded Kung Flu all over the countryside. That's the ironic thing. The Political Correctness factor, existing in Japan too, was probably thrown out the window due to this COVID-carrying breakout athlete. At least he wasn't a cross-country runner, but then those bullet trains are pretty fast too.
The mayor of Izumisano, which hosted the training camp, said at a press conference that Julius Ssekitoleko expressed hopes of staying in Japan in the morning but was later convinced to go back to Uganda during a meeting with the head of the delegation.I feel sorry for the guy, really. He wanted to stay in a decent country. Thing is, it's not his people that built said decent country. In addition, unlike pretty much any foreigner in this country, he'd stick out like a sore thumb in Japan. Unz commenter Rob McX noted, "Someone needs to tell him picking cotton is no longer a thing."
Confirming a man found in the central prefecture of Mie on Tuesday by police was Ssekitoleko, the Ugandan Embassy in Tokyo has said, "Any issues to do with alleged absconding from the duty he had been flown to perform in Japan and related disappearance from the training camp, will be handled appropriately upon his return."
Comments (4)
Buchanan v AOC
Posted On: Friday - July 23rd 2021 6:59AM MST
In Topics: Commies Pundits ctrl-left Guns
I meant to state the following in the previous post, but I'll just start off with this:
I did not mean to single out Pat Buchanan as a stupid guy, or as, more accurately, a naive guy, in that take on his old-fashioned belief in the decency of the ctrl-left. It's a common thing for people to be stuck in their old beliefs, and the political scene is changing rapidly.
It'd have not been the case for me, but I can understand those who follow politics but have not seen what the left is really like until 10 years ago, or even just 5, when Donald Trump came into the limelight. He seemed to really ramp up the anger and impatience for the fulfillment of the anti-American, Communist plans of the left. There really is no excuse for mistaking who they are now, though. Here's one:
The title of this post is a tad misleading, as I'm not making a comparison of any sort between Pat Buchanan and the Occasional Kotex lady. She doesn't deserve to be in the same
Who are they now? As I wrote above, the ctrl-left of today has gotten impatient. There is a new, younger, crowd that is very used to getting their way when they push the purposefully destructive cultural changes on Americans. There's no big conservative bloc of stalwarts, such as your Jesse Helmses that fought back civilly in the halls of Congress Jesse Helms is long gone, folks. There's nobody taking a stand like he did anymore. The Conservative, Inc. crowd of today doesn't try to fight anymore. They work to keep their jobs by showing that they are in opposition by making the left compromise ... a little bit ... till next year's new, new compromise...
Well, that's "the right". The younger crowd of the left want their way now. They don't care about Constitutions, legal rights, due process, and any of that. Sure, because it helped them 50 years ago when they fought against the Establishment, they used to use those Amendment I and IV rights, often as the slightest technicality to keep out of jail. They are putting their enemies in jail now, so they really can't keep adhering to that old-fashioned Constitution clap-trap. It would slow things way down. I don't see any tears shed from the ctrl-left about the completely unConstitutional holding of the Jan 6th protests without due process as what amounts to political imprisonment.
The ctrl-left are done with even the idle talk about that old-timey American stuff. They don't care if they are seen as hypocrites. They don't care if we can see that they are blatant liars telling those "absurd lies" that so vex the pundits like Mr. Buchanan. "Why? Are they that stupid?" NO! They don't care what you think of them. They can jail you for fighting back those who violently interrupt your peaceful rally. They are working very hard on passing through legislation that allows them to jail any one of us, for "domestic terrorism". If you don't know the definition and don't want to participate in domestic terrorism, well, they will define it when
AOC and her ilk fancy themselves the new Lenins, Maos, and Pol Pots. No, they don't really WANT to kill millions or a third of their countrymen, whichever comes last. Of course not. Neither did Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot... at first. However, as the others did, the American ctrl-left do want to finish their Cultural Revolution and implement the new Communism. If people get in the way, they need to be jailed, or worse case shot, that's all, like Ashli Babbitt, for example.
There's just a very minor detail the American ctrl-left has missed. Those other Cultural Revolutionaries, destroyers of traditional society, and leaders of the new utopian societies had everyone disarmed first. Ooops... They may not get as far this time... if I have anything to do with it. Now, sorry, Pat Buchanan, that was so uncivil of me.
Comments (3)
I pity the pundit...
Posted On: Thursday - July 22nd 2021 8:48PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Pundits ctrl-left Zhou Bai Dien
... who is faced with the awesome power of Peak Stupidity! OK, I just wanted to get that Mr. T line in, and I don't at all pity this guy - he's one of my favorite political guys all around:
(We wanted a regular picture of the man, but this one was too good to pass up.)
He's not a pundit I read regularly anymore for reasons described herein, but I have a lot of respect and admiration for Pat Buchanan. He has been a true Conservative, trying to navigate within the quagmire of Conservative, Inc, since he worked for Richard Nixon*. Peak Stupidity even wrote a special post to celebrate Mr. Buchanan's 80th birthday 3 years back. I would have loved to have met the man back during his '92 and '96 Presidential campaign especially. Even now, it'd be great to meet him.
I've commented before that this guy is just working - mainly writing now, I'd guess - with an assumed level of civility of American politics that is 25, but easily arguably 40 years old. It's no way to operate now. I mean, it's nice to read a guy that sounds so civil and calm as if that fits into current American politics. The problem is, the ideas put across in this manner are just obsolete by being written with this assumption.
I don't read Mr. Buchanan much anymore, because his solutions to our ills are laughably naive. Oh, we just need to wait for the mid-terms, get someone on our side (really, is there anyone?) into the House blah, blah committee, build up a new coalition, wait until the ctrl-left politicians reach across the aisle**, make a better compromise looking forward to 2028 ... while in the meantime one or two MILLION newcomers who don't give a damn about the old Republic enter the country yearly and the ctrl-left just introduces new programs of extreme stupidity to screw the White man continually that Conservative, Inc. won't even fight against.
In John Derbyshire's recent column Biden’s Absurd Philadelphia Speech Shows the Regime Is Really Scared, he excerpted Mr. Buchanan's writing thusly***:
Republicans seek to deny “full and free and fair elections” and are engaged in “the most un-American thing that any of us can imagine, the most undemocratic, the most unpatriotic.”Mr. B, I'm sorry to disagree, but it is NOT absurd of them to SAY this. They are NOT out of touch. You don’t understand the mentality of the modern left. They are not Tip O’Neils and Pat Moynihans, reaching across the aisle, debating civilly in front of the American people. It’s not 1980 anymore.
Un-American? Undemocratic? Unpatriotic?
When Sen. Joseph McCarthy challenged the patriotism of Truman Democrats in such terms in the 1950s, he was censured by the Senate.
Is Biden really saying that minor alterations in election laws, all of which would have to pass muster with federal courts and the Supreme Court, represent an existential threat to our republic?
This is beyond hyperbole. It is ridiculous. It is absurd.
Such hype is a measure of just how far out of touch with the real world the rhetoric of our reigning elites has drifted.
The people who set the old senile Biden up to this know quite well that the protests, rioting and temporary fun spent in the “People’s House” on Jan. 6th were absolutely no real threat and, except for the murder of Ashli Babbitt by Michael Leroy Byrd, a very peaceful event compared to hundreds of riots and looting events done by black thugs and antifa Commies that went on the previous year.
The people coming up with this hyperbole know what Biden is saying is absurd on it’s face. It’s not absurd that they use this rhetoric though. They know they are lying absurdly. They know that all the sane and Conservative American people know that they are lying absurdly. They don’t care. The ctrl-left will keep up with this lying because people don’t do enough about it. The good people who had a good time on January 6th are still in jail, being treated harshly, as if they were America’s enemies.
That off my chest, I happened to see the link to his next column posted on The Unz Review, titled Why Can't Biden Stop This Invasion? and clicked. Mr. Buchanan refers to the newest Blue-squad surge down there on our southern border. After giving us a short history lesson about American presidents and generals using force to quell and punish invasions from the early 19th century through the early 20th, then a mention of Ike's "Operation Wetback" in 1954, he asks:
And how is President Joe Biden handling his sworn presidential duty to defend the states of the Union from invasion?Pat, dude, the guy was lying his ass off when he swore on the Bible! Did you notice him defending the US Constitution? I must have missed every bit of that. They all lie now. The lies aren't even good ones. Again, they don't care whether we know they are lying! He asks:
Why cannot we stop this invasion?Nobody in "our" Feral Government WANTS TO! Geeze, if they did, we could have turned this demographic upheaval around in the mid-1990s, when at least the few Americans like you, Mr. B, were well aware, and the public would have been quite on-board with it. At least, in '16, even if the Blue-squad didn't want to support Trump, they could have written their own plan of border control. Believe you me, Americans don't care who gets the credit. The D's could have pulled a Bill Clinton-pushes-for-welfare-reform (of the mid-1990s) to take the glory from the Bad Orange Man, and we'd still have been dancing in the streets.
Why is he failing? Either he [Joe Biden] can’t do what is needed to be done, or he won’t do it.OK, now, that bold part truly makes me think Mr. Buchanan has just lost it. Because, Kamel-Toe SAID "Do not come!", we are to just believe that the ctrl-left doesn't want the illegals coming? That's simply laughable, unless they've change their mind just last month after 55 years of the opposite goal. They want to destroy traditional America, Pat! This had been a part of their efforts since 1965! As that border-control failure would say, c'mon, man!. They lie, Pat! Take that into account next column, and maybe you'll get a reader back.
America’s border paralysis is induced by liberal ideology.
The left does not want the illegals coming here. “Do not come!” was the message Harris gave the Guatemalans. But when it comes to the necessary toughness to stop the invasion, they recoil. [My bolding]
* Who was definitely part of said quagmire.
** Hell, they don't even give the Red Squad members a reach AROUND when they screw them in the ass.
*** From this article, which I saw no point in reading, based on the title alone.
Comments (5)
John Gruskos has a new version of "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out".
Posted On: Wednesday - July 21st 2021 8:19PM MST
In Topics: Preppers and Prepping Liberty/Libertarianism The Future
Under a cryptic post by Steve Sailer on The Unz Review, there was some good discussion by the commenters regarding the role and prospects of former members of the US military.
Commenter "Prime Noticer" usually has good comments. This particular comment of his was kind of pessimistic about things, reading:
It’s pretty alarming to see that we really have very few actual allies and half or maybe even the majority of putative allies are just grifters. the patriotic Americans who keep the country running are a really deep treasure chest to be plundered for decades. the grifters might as well get while the getting is good, because in a decade or so they won’t be able to run this scam anymore as core America will be so utterly defeated and dying off, literally. Democrats will have largely made the Republican party illegal, so that will be the end of the scams.
"Woke soldiers and Bai Dien's coming. We're finally on our own."
I can't argue about the type of people patriotic Americans are dealing with today. However, a commenter going by the name of John Gruskos replied with a very nice comment - here - with a number of ideas as prescription for our ills, prepper style, with a touch of the 55 y/o Counterculture mantra "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Here is Mr. Gruskos' comment in its entirety:
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That is why I advocate an entirely different paradigm.
Instead of “help your friends”, I say “hurt your enemy”.
Instead of “give till it hurts”, I say “force your enemy to give till he hurts”.
If your method of “fighting back” is to give money to “the cause”, you just make yourself a piggy bank for grifters – impoverishing yourself while enriching cynical frauds.
On the other hand, there are no downsides if you STOP giving our money to known and open enemies.
Wall Street:
Don’t give them interest. Instead of borrowing, save and buy with cash.
Don’t give them insurance premiums. Don’t carry any form of insurance, just live a careful and healthy lifestyle.
Don’t give them rent. Blackrock is on its way to becoming the only landlord. Don’t make your adult children pay rent to Blackrock. Let them live at home while they save to buy their own house with cash.
Hollywood:
Cancel your cable subscription, cancel your Netflix subscription, don’t go to the movie theaters, don’t rent from Redbox etc.
Sell any and all Hollywood related merchandise currently in your possession.
Federal government:
Eliminate (alcohol, tobacco) or minimize (gasoline, guns & ammo) your purchase of goods subject to Federal excise tax.
Never visit DC – don’t give the DC local economy a penny.
State and local government (if you live in a blue state):
Eliminate or minimize purchases of goods subject to sales tax (junk food, fast food, “durable goods”)
Refrain from any home improvement which would increase your property tax.
Don’t visit NYC or any other ultra-liberal area as a tourist. Never give the bastards a penny!
Academia:
Tell your daughters to get married instead of going to college, and tell your sons to use higher education strictly as vocational training, with the explicit goal of paying as little as possible. Emphasize that an Ivy League degree now carries negative prestige in your eyes.
Mainstream media:
Cancel subscriptions, and don’t click on their websites (eliminate their click-count based advertising revenue)
Big tech:
Use a $5/month “kid phone”, delete your facebook account, cancel your internet access, use the library for free internet access.
Big Pharma:
Eat healthy, stay hydrated, exercise, get a good night sleep, and when you are very old and its time to die, just lie down and die gracefully. There is no need to ever give a penny to the so-called “Health Care” industry, staffed with murderers who perform abortions, perverts who perform sex change operations, and drug dealers who sell Oxycontin.
Basically stop paying for things which not only give you no benefit, but do actual harm to you. Save your time, save your money, avoid the mental strain of being subjected to enemy propaganda, all while depriving your enemies of revenue streams.
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If we haven't already, we all need to face this now. The Establishment is hard left, Woke, SJW, or flat-out virulent Communist. It hates us. It is not on our side. It is our enemy, and we are "finally on our own." We are the Counter-culture now.
The hippies half a century ago "turned on" to drugs. We don't need more drugs. We need to turn on to freedom, in a different way as the hippies, but we need to turn on our imaginations to understand what freedom even is - the young people just don't have a clue about it.
The hippies half a century ago "tuned in" to the new (most excellent, you gotta admit) rock and folk music and the new ideas spread outside the Establishment media. We need to find ways to keep up our communications and stay tuned in to the few honest, patriotic Americans in the media. It would be nice to have some decent music too...
The hippies half a century ago "dropped out" of the "system". They wanted to ditch the traditional way of American life. They were quite in the wrong on this in 1960s America. In 2020s America, yeah, that's not our America. We've had enough! We need to drop out of the system as much as we can.
Mr. Gruskos' prescription is not all-encompassing, but it provides some good ideas for those who have not thought this all out yet. The overriding theme of his comment is: at least don't give the bastards who are trying to kill you and your country any more of your money than you have to.
Thank you, John Gruskos!
Comments (7)
Walking on the Moon
Posted On: Tuesday - July 20th 2021 7:28PM MST
In Topics: Music History Americans Science
It was 52 years ago about 4 hours ago, when Man, but specifically, 2 Americans named Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, first walked on the surface of the moon. This historic "giant step for mankind" is one of the few events that Peak Stupidity DID remember to memorialize on the right day. On the half-century anniversary, we posted Peak America - 1/2 Century Ago Today.
Even when looking back from 52 years, but especially at the time, this was not only an amazing accomplishment, but a thing of awe. Two men were walking on another world! (10 more did, and some of them drove around and even drove a golf ball.)
For years afterward, Americans had a standard complaint that I believe started out as "We can send a man to the moon, but we still can't cure the common cold!" Peak Stupidity's version of 52 years later, with help from our new hero to replace Neil Armstrong, Dr. Anthony Fauci goes "We can cure the common cold, but we can't send a man to the moon anymore!"
Upon request by commenter "The Alarmist", we feature today some more music by The Police, a great 3-piece English rock band of the 1970s and '80s. They are a favorite of ours, and we've featured at least 4 of their songs here already our posts: Of course the Russians love their children, you dumb bass player! - De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, The Carbon Neutrality of Davy Jone's Locker - Message in a Bottle, Surgeon Colonel Sting on Social Distancing - Don't Stand so Close to Me, and Ghost in the machine - Re-Humanize Yourself.
I didn't expect to find a video with the old Saturn V rocket at Kennedy Space Center and the moon landing footage - nice job by the video maker - I assume this is the official video. Also, they flew in there in a Piper Navajo, which was cool too!
The Police:
Sting – Lead and backing vocals, bass guitar, keyboards.
Andy Summers – Guitar, backing and occasional lead vocals, keyboards.
Stewart Copeland – Drums, percussion, backing and occasional lead vocals, keyboards. saxophone, and harmonica.
In the video, both Sting and Andy Summers are playing guitar. Who's playing bass, doing that reggae beat, then? Stewart Copeland may have gotten kind of bored, so he just occasionally drums on the rocket, haha. This song was from the band's 2nd album, Reggatta de Blanc, from 1979
Giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon.
Comments (12)
Peak Constitutional Amendment - Conclusion
Posted On: Tuesday - July 20th 2021 11:48AM MST
In Topics: Liberty/Libertarianism US Feral Government Morning Constitutional
(Continued from Amendment XI, Amendment XII, Amendment XIII, Amendment XIV, Amendment XV, Part 1 on Amendment XVI, Part 2 on Amendment XVI , Part 3 on Amendment XVI, Amendment XVII, Amendment XVIII, Part 1 on Amendment XIX, Part 2 on Amendment XIX, Part 3 on Amendment XIX, Amendment XX, and Amendment XXI, Amendment XXII, Amendment XXIII, Amendment XXIV, Amendment XXV - Part 1: Housekeeping, Amendment XXV - Part 2: Presidential Incapacity, Amendment XXVI, and Amendment XXVII.)
Peak Stupidity hasn't had a Morning Constitutional in over 3 months. [That can't be good for ANYONE! - PS medical staff, Dr. Fauci and Uncle Salty presiding] We had promised in that last post, on Amendment XXVII, to write a conclusion about these 17 post Bill of Rights Amendments, ranging in American history from XI in 1795 to XXVII in 1992, after all that writing done about them - see all those links above.
During arguments between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists (the original antife?) at the time of the drawing up of the US Constitution in 1789, objections were made by the anti-Federalists, such as Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Elbridge Gerry, and James Madison (after his change of heart. The wanted to put limitations on this new US Federal government IN WRITING. 17 articles with the limitation that were written up were boiled down to 12 Amendments, 10 of which had been ratified by 3/4 of the States (14, then 15 at the end of this) by 1792. This was done per the Amendment Process itself, as stipulated in Article V.
Peak Stupidity has no objection to any of these 1st 10 Amendments. Without them, the Federal government would have likely become the Feral government a lot sooner than it did. Without that Article V Amendment process, the limitations on the new government would have had to been put into the Constitution body itself, something Mr. Madison and others were pushing for. More importantly, we may have been better off without Article V. Here's what we got out of it so far:
Yes, we are aware that these are over-simplifications in this graphic. It's a quick run-down, though, and, the Peak Stupidity reader may peruse the links above or go to our favorite Constitution site (linked to more specifically for each Amendment in our posts).
Let's look at the gist of these 17 Amendments, #11 through #27, shall we? Only #11, ratified just 3 years after the BoR, #22 to some extent, and #27 on a what's now a minor issue, put any new limitations on Federal power. Amendments 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, and 26 give it more power. (Regarding #24, I put it in this group because any power given to the District of Criminals* is more power to the Federal government itself.) That's 10 out of 17, 59% of them, that expand Federal power and only 2 - 3, 12-18%, that decrease it.
Of the Amendments, numbers 15, 19, 23, 24, and 26, that's 29% of them, expand the franchise to a bigger set of voters. See, this is a problem the Founders must not have anticipated. They were White, British (well the White, then, went without saying then), men. They somehow imagined they and their like-thinking progeny would be the ones carefully controlling this "dangerous servant and fearful master"**. Them more the franchise was expanded from property-owning White men (as decided by THEIR OWN States), the more voters there were who didn't care about this small government idea so much, and the more they would agree with expanding the franchise further. It ended up a big ball of cascading franchising stupidity. Not only that, but all these Amendments moved the power of determining who does get to vote from the States to the Federal government.
Three of the Amendments, numbers 12, 20, and 25 read as simple housekeeping - clean up of loose ends in procedures that were not thought out well when the Constitution was drawn up. However, it is questionable that that's what Amendment XII was only about. Then, there is Amendment XVII, which might seem like a simple change in procedure to those who haven't thought much about it, but actually takes away the States' power.
Amendment XXI was a good one, but that was only because it was not much more than a repeal of the ridiculous Amendment XVIII decreeing alcohol prohibition by the Federal government. (I wrote "not much more", because though #21 doesn't increase Federal power, Section 2 therein encourages more State authoritah.)
Many fairly young people may be surprised to learn that the last Amendment of the Constitution, Amendment XXVII, was ratified during their own lifetimes, in 1992. I'd forgotten about that myself until I wrote the post about it. It's also surprising that this latest one was one of the few and far between good ones***, actually resurrected from one of those articles discussed by the Founders way back in the early '90s, uh, that'd be the 1790s!. Well, it had good intentions anyway, stipulating that Congressional pay raises given via legislation can not apply to the Congress in session that made such legislation. Yeah, good intentions, but this would have been great for the first century or two of the country, not the corrupt government of today.
Does the pay really matter in today's world in which Congressmen and especially Senators make bigger bucks from donors for their excellent books and speeches made after the fact as payback for services rendered? As corrupt and anti-Americanss as the Feral Government is now, any decent Constitutional Amendment would have to be both proposed via State-called conventions, a very risky idea.
Is there any point in proposing and ratifying another good Amendment anyway? The Feral government officials ignore the document and the highest court doesn't even give a damn about it anymore.
I would have to say here, in conclusion from this long stretch of posts about the 17 post-BoR Amendments to the US Constitution, that our Founders really fucked up by writing Article V! Now, as written early, the 10 very important (during our serious period) Amendments were created via this Article V procedure. However, James Madison and other anti-Federalists back in those founding years would have rather incorporated these limitations within the document itself.
That could have been done nicely by including each limitation along with the appropriate Article/Section that it applied to. While they were at it, they really should have jerked out that stupid "General Welfare" clause out of those two intro paragraphs within which this touchy-feely language had been written. Who knew, though? Who of these wise Founders knew that the country would become full of people who took advantage of that language to supersede the clear enough, plain English safeguard they'd inserted as Amendment X - The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.. Is that too obtuse for modern Americans?
Listen Ben Franklin, the reason we we couldn't keep it is because YOU PEOPLE inserted that "General Welfare" crap and Article V. Whaddya' think, the country would stay a patriarchal society filled with independent-minded White people from the British Isles? Oh, ya did? Why didn't you put some immigration limitations in there?
OK, that was harsh. What is now the United States was an unimaginably huge piece of land in the 1790s, and nobody
Could good Americans possibly propose and ratify an Amendment that would nullify most of the 17 Amendments that Peak Stupidity has discussed during our Morning Constitutionals? It would have to have a final Section that also nullified Article V. Call it the Amendment to End all Amendment. For the geeks, call it "The Amendment Worm 1.0" OK, let's just hold off until Peak Stupidity proposes Amendment XXVIII in the next post of this sort.
* More common Peak Stupidity nomenclature is simply "Washington, FS", for Federal Shithole.
** George Washington quote.
*** It also had that great story behind the resurrection of the idea and the work done to get it ratified.
Comments (2)
Fool for the City - Foghat
Posted On: Saturday - July 17th 2021 9:16PM MST
In Topics: Music
Yeah, it was Aerosmith early in the blog-week and now Foghat to end it. Peak Stupidity is a fool for that classic rock. Slow Ride is more well known from Foghat's Live album from 1977. I could have sworn it was called Live - Bootleg, as I had an old 8-track that said this on the case. I wonder why that 8-track format lost out to the smaller cassette tapes - was it that really loud click made when the player changed tracks, most of the time in the middle of the song somewhere?
Foghat:
"Lonesome" Dave Peverett – Rhythm Guitar and Lead Vocals.
Rod Price – Lead Guitar and Backing Vocals.
Craig MacGregor – Bass and Backing Vocals.
Roger Earl – Drums.
All of the posts this week but one (not counting this one) were of the "look at what he wrote" variety. We'll have more original "content", as they call it, next week. Yes, I did waste a lot of time writing under Steve Sailer, PC Roberts, and a John Derbyshire post. Thank you all for reading.
Comments (5)
Paul Craig Roberts on the Kung Flu Stupidity
Posted On: Saturday - July 17th 2021 5:19PM MST
In Topics: Pundits Kung Flu Stupidity
Paul Craig Roberts is a well known pundit who has at least some experience in high level politics, what was it the Coolidge administration, no, Truman... possibly Reagan. I knew him a couple of decades ago as a real Conservative and Libertarian from the Lew Rockwell ("anti-state • anti-war • pro-market") site. He's still on there, as I just checked, something a bit surprising to me.
Peak Stupidity had written off this guy back about 3 years ago, maybe 4, due to his blow-up on The Unz Review over commenters who questioned his ridiculous panicky views on the Global Climate Disruption™. Mr. Roberts got so upset at being argued with that he turned off, or asked Mr. Unz to turn off, the commenting feature for his articles.*
I read his writing again only one more time, and learned that Paul Craig Roberts had left his Libertarian beliefs behind and was now a Socialist. That was it until I saw his column in large print on the unz site with an article I just had to check out - How the Covid “Pandemic” Was Orchestrated. Well, I gotta give this guy another chance now. This one is a really good summary of the PanicFest and possible nefarious motives behind it.
I wish I could just paste in the whole thing, or 90% of it in here. I will just urge the reader to go to his article as linked-to above. P.C. Roberts covers it all:
- The fact that this is a disease of the elderly and otherwise especially vulnerable due to other health problems.
- The pattern of all types of problems being chalked up to the Kung Flu.
- The mistakes made in treatment, including the heavy use of ventilators.
- The media/government suppression of information and treatment with "two highly successful, safe, and inexpensive treatments based on HCQ and Ivermectin."
- The problems with the use of the PCR (not Paul Craig Roberts) test.
- The dangers of the vaccines, and the suppression of information about that.
- The Totalitarianism being cranked up to force the vaccines on populations.
- The attempt at a PanicFest revival bases on the new Delta-variant.
It's a great summary. Then he had to end it with: "NOW WE COME TO THE CRUX OF THE MATTER." Nope, sorry, now we come to another who-done-it that is a distraction, IMO, from the issue of the PanicFest and hysteria. Mr. Roberts says this virus was invented in the US in '02-'04. It reads as though this politician/pundit tried to be an instant virologist, and talks about SARS in general as if it were the very same. I don't know - is this just in there to be a contrarian like Mr. Unz and be anti-all-things-American?
As Peak Stupidity has explained before, the knowledge is in plain site that both the Americans and Chinese operate labs, in COLLABORATION, that are for “Gain of function” research (see Gain a function, lose a function). Though the purported purpose is to enable the creation of vaccines for viruses that haven’t even formed yet naturally (and my never), the difference between this purpose and bioweapons research is nil other than the name of the lab. Knowing Chinese Q/C practices, my common sense tells me the virus came from the lab in Wuhan.
That last bit aside, I hope this Paul Craig Roberts article on the Kung Flu Stupidity gets widely read. Along with that, I hope Mr. Roberts can get born again as a Libertarian and Constitutionalist. Good luck and God Speed, Roberts!
* There was a little bit more to it than that. I happened to have been writing on this and one other thread under his Global Climate Disruption™ posts. One commenter had spoofed Mr. Roberts and threatened to shoot one of the commenters if he ran into him, or something like that. That just made things worse.
Comments (9)
Immigration Stupidity v Kung Flu Stupidity
Posted On: Friday - July 16th 2021 4:44PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Websites Pundits Anarcho-tyranny Kung Flu Stupidity
Writer Alan Wall with his Memo from Middle America: (formerly Memo from Mexico:) and Said in Spanish: series, has been on VDare.com since before I started reading. That means at least 15 years ago, by my estimation. He's had some great writing lately. Peak Stupidity discussed a very good post of his that linked up the Kung Flu Stupidity with the Immigration Stupidity in MEMO FROM MIDDLE AMERICA includes Kung Flu sense a couple of months back. Immigration is THE purpose and single of the VDare website, but other topics get touched on. Now, James Fulford, also a long-term VDare writer, has another post linking these two flavors of stupidity.
(Graphic straight off of VDare.)
In this latest post, If El Paso Illegals Won't Take The Vaccine, Can We Send Them Back?, Mr. Fulford points out the Anarcho-Tyranny going on at the border. Some of it has been going on since well before the Kung Flu, but Mr. Trump had the Border Patrol, ICE, and what-have-you working with at least a semblance of sanity The Bai Dien administration is pushing hard to increase the Anarcho-Tyranny through insane policies.
Mr. Fulford excerpts a piece of this article from the El Paso Matters by one René Kladzyk (not a Mexican:
Despite an increased effort to vaccinate migrants held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, a large number of people in El Paso-area ICE detention have refused the vaccine, according to local officials and legal advocates.I don't blame these Mexicans/Guatemalans for not wanting the jab. I'm pretty much with them on that. However, were it regular Americans getting forced to get a shot of a possibly deadly vaccine, as the Bai Dien administration wishes, the government agencies involved won't be so concerned with our "access issues" and medical neglect. Mr. Fulford writes:
El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego [who has been leading efforts to get Americans in the county vaccinated] said that among those offered the vaccine at local ICE detention facilities, only about 33% accepted.
Immigrant rights advocates said issues with the vaccination efforts are linked to an array of structural problems with the federal agency, including: a pattern of medical neglect that fuels distrust among migrants, language access issues that spur confusion and lead to misinformation, and a lack of a systematic nationwide protocol for vaccinating people in ICE detention. ICE officials in El Paso did not respond to a request for specific vaccine refusal rate data.
“As much as we’d like to do it, we cannot force them to do it,” Samaniego said. “In the facilities they feel a little uncomfortable and they’re not trusting … because they’re captured, they’re captive at that point.”
Of course, if people in Florida refuse the vaccine, they're considered ignorant rednecks, but the concept of "ignorant wetbacks" doesn't exist in the media. It should, though. Many Mexican illegals only have fourth-grade educations, and many do not, as I've pointed out repeatedly, understand the germ theory of disease.Since these people have no business being here, it's one situation in which I don't have any problem with these people getting any kind of treatment that's good for Americans (their getting the Kung Flu vaccine or not is not a concern for me). Screw 'em - not my problem I've been following VDare for a long time, and their writers have brought up many examples of diseases not seen in the US in 5 or more decades being spread back in our country by these illegal immigrants. "Bedbugs, they're baaaack!" Duckduckgo just pulled me up 4 articles about Chagas Disease, an import from Latin America. Good old Sam Francis gave us an early warning about it in Diversity Is Strength! It's Also Disease back in '03, Randall Burns told us Chagas Disease Seeks The American Dream! in '06, James Fulford wrote about Chagas Disease in Los Angeles County in '07, and A.W. Morgan posted Baylor U Buries The Lead On Chagas Disease—“Mostly Imported From Latin America” more recently, in '15. Chagas is not fun at all, but it's baaaack! I'm telling you all, VDare really has kept up with all aspects of immigration, as THE go-to site for immigration stupidity.
This applies to Central Americans too, and even more to the Africans who use the Mexican Border to sneak into the US.
But their countries have strong public health laws, with compulsory vaccination for things like measles, as The Week noted during a 2015 measles outbreak:
Americans have been letting nasty diseases invade this country for years. Could it be because the general Lyin' Press makes no effort to report on any of this? Maybe they think otherwise, but what goes on both at the border AND with the other types of illegal immigration is not the immigration experience of a Vito Corleone. It's anarchy.
Well, this problem at the border now is just a bit of a pickle for the ctrl-left, the Blue Squad, and the portion of a Venn Diagram that encompasses open-borders idiots along with Kung Flu hysterics. Not all this is stupidity though. It's not that the evil Bai Dien people and the elites behind them are really scared of the virus. They really don't care a lot about the fate of these Mexicans and Guatemalans down at the border. They just are in a quandary about which method of destruction of the US is more expedient, the Kung Flu and further variant PanicFest or the immigration invasion. When the two stupidities (OK, evils, probably) are in opposition, they have to choose one or the other. They could tout all-out Kung Flu vaccination as part of their Police State/Orwellian push. They could ignore it for now, let the poor bastards slide, and push this latest surge in the immigration invasion.
I think the latter, the immigration invasion, results in quicker destruction of American society. Therefore, for our evil elites and their stupid government bureaucrat henchmen, the winner in Immigration Stupidity v Kung Flu Stupidity is ....
Immigration Stupidity wins by 10 fewer years of an intact America.
Comments (2)
Stupidity in everything, including the bathroom sink
Posted On: Thursday - July 15th 2021 8:05PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Curmudgeonry
Peak Stupidity has ragged on some "features" of modern hotels in a couple of posts before, most directly in a post called Green is the new Cheap-ass long ago. I do remember the writer John Derbyshire writing a curmudgeonly post or segment of one of his monthly "diaries" with about the same complaints as I've had. No, I don't go down to the desk to actually complain, because the young lady at the desk would likely tell me "this is part of the new renovation. Isn't it so cool!" (And, "yeah, the rates have gone up to pay for this cool renovation....")
It's like this: Just because there are new, different-looking, and differently-operated, appliances, light fixtures, bathroom fixtures, etc. for sale for the yuppies who want it, doesn't mean I want to figure this new crap out when I stay at your formerly reasonably-priced hotel. Yes, I am too old to think it's all cool. Somebody in management wanted to get all edgy and shit, yeah, I get it. Don't take it out on me.
It'd be OK for people staying a whole week. "Oh, HERE'S the switch to turn on the lamp! How cool. Now I know." "I see, the shower mixer goes the wrong way*. OK, I'll remember this in the morning, or if not, the next morning." I really don't want to spend all my excess brainpower, you know, after work and blogging and all, ;-} on remembering how every little damn new thing works.
The fancy sink shown above is not something I had this problem with. The mixer worked the way you'd figure. No, it's not that. This sink is different and fancy because, hey look, it's a big bowl attached ON TOP of the bathroom counter, instead of sunk in. It's the "above-ground pool" of sinks, except the above-ground pools are for the slightly less affluent folks who can't afford to get a pool dug in**. This above-counter sink has got to bring up the cost over the standard style.
Look at it, all made of beautiful thick glass. It's so pretty. it's another one of the retro products that are so popular. The retro muscle cars are popular with those Boomers that everyone hates on... because they got to drive real ones back in the day that really were cool. On the other hand, you may have to be 90 or older to be excited about this retro bathroom sink. Hasn't it been since the 1930s or so since houses actually had a separate basin one would place on top of a table, that they would fill up with water? After that, with indoor plumbing, you had your old fashioned ceramic sinks that hung off the wall (with possibly some more support below it), and then people got the great idea to sink them into the counter, with room underneath for cleaning supplies, more soap, roach spray, and roaches to go along with it.
That sink above is retro stupidity. The built-in counter sinks are much easier to use*** and space saving. This thing is just silly, has this room underneath the curve that's not useable, and it's got to be more difficult to clean to boot. But, it's modern and different. Yeah, but this isn't my house anyway. Who would I be trying to impress with this expensive sink?
I realize that this is a 1st World problem in a country with problems infinitely more serious than a stupid sink, such as turning into the 3rd World. As with the Peak Stupidity post How much electronics do we need? of long ago, regarding automatic windshield wipers, I don't like the modern practice of building something different, but of lower usability**** just because it CAN be done.
* I'm pretty sure that there used to be an agreed-upon standard of CCW motion resulting in hotter water, or more flow vs. less (CW to turn it off). Maybe that was just a gentlemen's agreement, not an ASPE spec., but then, where are the gentlemen anymore? It's anything goes now.
** OK, it may also be because you will want your yard back later, after the family figures out how much trouble a pool can be.
*** What I wonder is why the older sinks had separate hot and cold faucets for such a long period. I realize there were probably not the nice materials around to make good seals for these new mixer designs. However, could the designers not have plumbed water from both valves into one faucet? I'm guessing that people were very used to using a bathroom sink differently from the days of having to fill up a basin. You'd mix the water into the old sinks with the stopper closed, and then shave with that water, wash off with it, etc. Now we just let it run. Come to think of it, DO we all just do that? I only see people fill up the basin in old movies. I could use some input here from the commenters, if it's not just too boring a subject.
**** Reliability, in the case in that old post.
Comments (13)
The Kung Flu - just a virus, bro.
Posted On: Tuesday - July 13th 2021 7:00PM MST
In Topics: Music Science Kung Flu Stupidity
I am very thankful that Peak Stupidity has been able to safely let the subject go for a while. Let's see, it's been just over a month since the last post with the Kung Flu Stupidity topic key, but the last one about the hysterical panic fest, the real "issue", as it were, was back on June 3rd. I read this article on a site called Medical Express a couple of weeks back:
Man, who woulda thunk it? So, with this virus, see, if you get exposed to doses of similar virus, maybe in small amounts, your body can, like, fight off the current virus going around. Whaaaa? I took biology, but that was a long time ago. I do remember something about "building up your immune system" from my Mom, along with a roommate who told me how he used to throw hamburger meat on the ground before eating it* occasionally while on the hiking trails to build up his immune system, but I thought these were all old
A study by Stanford University School of Medicine investigators hints that people with COVID-19 may experience milder symptoms if certain cells of their immune systems "remember" previous encounters with seasonal coronaviruses—the ones that cause about a quarter of the common colds kids get.The middle of the article gives the details about the antibodies, T cells, peptides, and so on that I'm sure I should have heard about from the HS Biology teacher, if I hadn't been perusing the female reproductive system chapter so much during class. It really is amazing stuff, all these complicated goings-on that happen in our bodies while we are only concerned with the female reproductive system part, eat all manner of crap, and go around with our mouths and noses all exposed to the AIR, and occasionally leave all manner of other things exposed.
These immune cells are better equipped to mobilize quickly against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, if they've already met its gentler cousins, the scientists concluded.
The findings may help explain why some people, particularly children, seem much more resilient than others to infection by SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. They also might make it possible to predict which people are likely to develop the most severe symptoms of COVID-19.
After the science behind the idea of building up immunity is explained, we read:
As the pandemic progressed, Davis mused, "A lot of people get very sick or die from COVID-19, while others are walking around not knowing they have it. Why?"A description of the observational analysis performed follows. ("There's that fag talk again.")
Memory cells are by far the most active in infectious-disease defense," Davis said. "They're what you want to have in order to fight off a recurring pathogen. They're what vaccines are meant to generate."From everything I've read this "vaccine" is a lot more than your simple small dose of active or "dead" virus material that will bring out the right antibodies, memory cells, what-have-you. Speaking of memory cells, have people all lost those memory cells of theirs that had the knowledge about how the human body deals with viruses?
Killer T cells whose receptors target peptide sequences unique to SARS-CoV-2 must proliferate over several days to get up to speed after exposure to the virus, Davis said. "That lost time can spell the difference between never even noticing you have a disease and dying from it," he said.Right, so best to have been exposed to something before, which I have been. So, wait... then it wouldn't be so prudent after all to walk around forever with a face diaper on, because my immune system may not be ready for the next strain of virus? But, but, Doctor Fauci told me ... This is the guy that may have cured the common cold forever, as long was we only take the masks off for quick bites at 6 ft. Amazing, we can cure the common cold, but we can't even send a man to the moon ... anymore!
But, Uncle Fauci told me ...
Uncle Fauci told me, stories of a lonely,
virus with a deadly life to lead.
A narrative was dusted. Economy was busted.
the scientists are trusted while the story bleeds.
Now, on TV at night, no one cares....
Now, the TV at night, went insane!!!
Oooh, it's a sunny day outside my window...No, this Aerosmith song, one from the most excellent Toys in the Attic album from 1975, has squat-all to do with the rest of the post in my opinion too. It's just that once I wrote "Doctor Fauci told me..." it got in my head. Peak Stupidity has featured this band only once before, in the post called The Origins of Rap. Instead of the well known Walk this Way from the same album, we embedded the obscure song Adam's Apple. They do deserve to be on here. Some don't like Steve Tyler's style, I guess, but they put out some pretty good music back in the day.
Aerosmith:
Steven Tyler – Vocals, keyboards, harmonica, percussion.
Joe Perry – Lead guitar, rhythm guitar, slide guitar, backing vocals, percussion.
Brad Whitford – Rhythm guitar, lead guitar
Tom Hamilton – Bass guitar.
Joey Kramer – Drums, percussion.
* I couldn't get myself to do that on purpose, but I do remember an incident in which two slices of pizza slid right off the paper plate onto the floor of the busy pizzeria restaurant, unfortunately, face down, and I went ahead and ate them up for lunch with a colleague. No bad effects resulted, and keep in mind that this was the good stuff, NY style. Whaddya' supposed to do? You don't just go asking Mario "may I have some more" like you're Oliver Twist or someone. He was probably in with the mob, maybe a made pizza man.
Comments (13)
Fudging the markets - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Posted On: Monday - July 12th 2021 7:58PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity US Feral Government Socialism/Communism Zhou Bai Dien
Zhou Bai Dien's pick for HUD Secretary is Marci Fudge shown above. It's that Fudge Factor that got her the plum job, I'm sure. HUD Secretary is a Black Position, period. White people wouldn't understand things like Housing and Urban
"Housing is important infrastructure.", the lady says. Other than in remarking that this stupid broad doesn't know the difference between private property and infrastructure, as doesn't the whole Bai Dien Administration, I'll leave her out of this post from here. This is more about the people that run the Fannie Mae's, Freddie Mac's and the like pieces of government Central Planning stupidity.
The title here was taken directly from this Steve Sailer post, as is the long excerpt from Politico that I'm including from that post. However, Mr. Sailer is not known particularly for free-market Conservatism, so he means that title in a slightly different sense. His astute (as usual) point is that the Bai Dien Administration sees nothing wrong with implementing a bigger version of the iSteve termed "Minority Mortgage Meltdown" of '07. I mean it in the sense that no Central Planning of the housing market should be implemented at all. Our Feral Government has been Fudging with the housing markets since Great Depression 1.0.
Here is the long excerpt from Politico's report on this by one Katy O'Donnell from July 7th:
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s move to fire the top U.S. mortgage regulator is triggering calls from fellow Democrats to use the agency to expand access to loans for lower-income people, who have struggled to buy homes since the financial crisis.Mr. Sailer didn't have much to say about this one. He had one great line of sarcasm - "The equity agenda will inevitably focus on your home equity because, as Willie Sutton might say, that’s where the money is." You'll read good points in the comments about why this is all being done completely wrong. There's not much about how the housing market in the US can work right when the damn Government has been fucking with it in every conceivable way for most of a century! Here's my take on it:
… The president installed as interim director an agency veteran who says she’ll make affordable housing and combating discrimination a top priority, but who has underwhelmed those on the left, who say she is a mere caretaker.
Progressives are concerned that Biden will be too timid in changing course at the powerful agency overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two companies that stand behind half of the $11 trillion U.S. mortgage market….
The pressure from the left poses a tough choice for Biden. Democrats for years have pushed the agency responsible for Fannie and Freddie to expand homeownership and narrow the racial wealth gap. But making mortgages cheaper and more accessible could also raise the risks of defaults and increase the odds that the companies would need another bailout in the future. Fannie and Freddie were seized by the government in 2008 to avert their failure during the subprime mortgage crash. …
While Biden has proposed a raft of home-affordability measures, having control of Fannie and Freddie might be his most effective tool.
The FHFA director “is the most powerful and consequential job on housing in America,” said David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference. “There is no close second.”
Dworkin and other housing advocates want FHFA to allow Fannie and Freddie to take on more financial risk — meaning more government intervention backed by taxpayers — in the name of expanding access to mortgages.
Among their ideas: Giving Fannie and Freddie free rein to purchase mortgages with lower credit scores, allowing private lenders to make more of those loans; cutting fees; and expanding investment that supports the construction of multifamily rental properties.
Advocates want FHFA to immediately do away with Trump-era limits on Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of “high-risk” loans — characterized as having some combination of low credit scores and high debt-to-income or loan-to-value ratios.
Allowing the companies to purchase and guarantee more of the loans could lead to lenders issuing more of them, which would extend credit to more low-credit-score, low-income borrowers without requiring higher down payments to compensate for the risk. Fannie and Freddie would pick up the tab if the loan defaulted.
… On her first day at the helm of FHFA, Thompson said she was committed to ensuring that the housing finance system operated “in a safe and sound manner” while keeping a “laser focus” on community investment. She said there was a “widespread lack of affordable housing and access to credit, especially in communities of color.”
Erika Poethig, special assistant to the president for housing and urban policy, said the administration is “committed to expanding access to affordable homeownership, especially for low-wealth borrowers and communities of color that face challenges in the housing market.”
“In the coming months and years ahead, we look forward to working with FHFA leadership to use the levers of housing finance to address the racial wealth gap, expand housing supply and ensure housing affordability,” she added. …
That 4th paragraph about the "tough choice" the stupidity in a nutshell. It’s a tough choice, see? You can screw around with the markets even more than the Feral Gov’t already has, in order to force prices and sales to where they benefit the poor money-challenged Americans that you’d like to favor. However, it sometimes takes a while, but often when you screw with one part of a market, the damn basic economic laws start kicking in and messing your plans up. It’s tough to get it right, or at least have it go right until you are out of office, so the damage to the economy can be blamed on someone else.
Thinking that one can do Central Planning and the disregard for the handful of basic immutable economic laws that must come with it takes a lot of hubris. OK, it’s a mixture of hubris and stupidity, and the amount of it in these would-be Communists and the real Communists is amazing to me. They really think that people with a different ideology really just don’t want to help people. Those other people, the Conservatives, Libertarians, and such, just must hate people, because they don’t want to use the great power of the Government to help them. They are just plain hateful!
So, like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao before them, these modern Central Planners will again put that heavy Government hand into the markets, this one being one of the biggest. When you do this, you face those tough choices about which moves will trigger those damn economic laws again. All you can do is take a deep breath, build up your hubris level, and you try A, then, if it causes havoc somewhere, somehow in the economy , you try B and A, then, if that doesn’t do the trick, you add C to A and B, and so on, all the while crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. It’s pretty tough, I’m telling you, but if you’re gonna make things fair, you know … you gotta break some markets, errr, eggs, that is.
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Chauvin:Floyd !:: Byrd:Babbitt
Posted On: Saturday - July 10th 2021 7:04PM MST
In Topics: US Police State Race/Genetics Anarcho-tyranny
Remember those SAT analogy questions? Does anyone use the above symbolic syntax anymore? Even math geeks?* Well, I stuck in a little C/C++ syntax there (the "!" for the NOT in a comparison), as they couldn't have asked SAT questions the other way around, could they?
No, Minneapolis city cop Derek Chauvin v George Floyd is anything but analogous to Capitol cop Michael Leroy Bird v Ashli Babbitt, as perhaps we are to think, per Lyin' Press narrative. Well, actually, even that is not ludicrous enough for them. We are to believe that jailed-for-22-years Derek Chauvin did something WORSE to the late George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis last summer than Scot-free did to the late Ashli Babbitt in the US Capitol building past January 6th! Can the narrative GET any stupider? Are we there yet?
Let's drop the SAT question talk, switch to TV shark-week-style mode, and consider Chauvin on Floyd v Byrd on Babbitt today.
"In this corner, known to ALL, with a Federal Holiday motivated by his passing, we have George Floyd ... loyd, oyd ... oyd...." Even those who avoid TV and try not to hear still heard a whole lot about this George Floyd and his death a year ago May in Minneapolis, Minnesota:
Cops CAN get out of control. White people don't like it anymore than black people, but they don't have proportionally nearly as many dealings in bad circumstances with cops to begin with. They aren't stupid enough to let average wrongful detainments or arrests get violent, as they hope, sometimes futilely, but alive at the time, to get justice later. Some of us call it "calming the fuck down". At the same time, the total number of black people wrongfully shot by cops is said to be in the neighborhood of a dozen times a year, versus the shootings of black people, many innocent, by other black people which is in the many thousands annually.
This one guy, George Floyd, is not exactly the guy you'd want for the poster child for police brutality, as he was a criminal reprobate well before the incident in May '20. Could they have found a better poster child? Apparently, it's not so easy.
There was a cause to arrest Mr. Floyd. He had passed a counterfeit 20 dollar bill, and that's still illegal, at least for us White and Oriental folks. Maybe for the black guy, they were just doing the arrest for old time's sake, and, well, he was a violent criminal to begin with. As I wrote in the caption above, it's not even clear that Mr. Floyd's death was a result of how he was restrained by Mr. Chauvin. Not only that, but nobody can say that his death was intentional on Mr. Chauvin's part. He was on camera(s), for crying out loud. What a really corrupt cop out for murder would have done is, at some point inside the squad car: "Hey, quit resisting! Let go of my gun! Owww!" to get that part on tape, shot the guy straight out, and then later "Ooops my body came failed in all this melee! Whatddya know?"
"And, in this corner, a name remembered only by American patriots and others who respect the rule of law, the purposefully forgotten MAGA insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt ... abbitt, ectionist... ist, ... ist ..." I've had to pay attention for half a year to get the name of the cop who killed her.
Nobody in Ashli Babbitt's close vicinity was being detained or arrested. They were perhaps too exuberant, as getting inside the Capitol was making a statement about the ridiculous 3rd-World-style '20 election, and patriots wanted to DO SOMETHING. (Nobody else was gonna, as has been proven out.) However, there were cops with rifles right along side many of these people, just in case it ACTUALLY got out of hand.
Mrs. Babbitt was carefully climbing through an interior window that the glass had been broken out of. She wasn't moving quickly. She wasn't armed. She wasn't threatening, as if there were that much of a way that a short, slender 35 y/o woman could be, to armed cops with freaking body armor on. There was no physical contact between Mrs. Babbitt and the Capitol cop Michael Byrd who was on the other side of that door/window divide. Any one of the cops could have grabbed her by the neck with one hand, in fact, not that it's the way to handle things. Yet, the cops behind her were not getting involved, and not trying to detain, much less arrest her, at this point.
Therefore, the stupid, viscous black Capitol cop Michael Byrd up and shot Ashli Babbitt in the head or throat from what now looks like closer to 5 ft. away to me and killed her. He was not under attack. He could have pushed her back through the window with one hand, if he really had something to worry about regarding her getting further into the building. He could have tazed her, though it wouldn't have been warranted either. Michael Leroy Byrd just plain murdered Ashli Babbitt right then and there with no cause.
George Floyd's death was in national and international headlines for months and even a year afterwards. The incident caused months of destructive rioting and looting all over the country in the inner cities. (That is, unless you're Portland, in which case it's now a continuously operating city attraction.)
Ashli Babbitt's death received attention only from patriotic Americans who made an effort to keep up with the murder. Her death was put behind that of Capitol cop Brian Sicknick, who was a decent man by all accounts, but died of much more natural causes the next day after the Capitol gang excitement rather than from the throwing of a fire extinguisher at him. There was talk of 3 total Capitol police officers who died later, but not so much about the near-point-blank murder of Mrs. Babbitt. Her name has not been brought up in the Lyin' Press daily. She's getting no statue of her paid by any taxpayers. There will be no Federal holiday.
There were investigations of the George Floyd death, with lots of taxpayer supported parties involved. The cop that possibly unintentionally killed him got a 22-year prison sentence. In the other corner, there has been NO investigation into the murder of Ashli Babbitt. The cop that can be, and has been, seen on video killing her has not only not been arrested, but his name has been kept from the public for 6 months by the Lyin' Press. We're supposed to just plain forget about it. Forget it, Americans, it's
Winner by a knock-out in round, I dunno, it just keeps on going: Michael Leroy Byrd! As a prize, Mr. Byrd will receive a "Keep out of jail for free" card, signed by the Capitol Police Internal Affairs Department and Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. His victim will remain dead and infamous as an insurrectionist.
The loser, Mr. Derek Chauvin, besides his 22 year jail time, will be hounded as a "Gasp, Racist!" for the rest of his life out after prison. His victim will be memorialized until our memories are gone due to dementia, or else!
Oh, I forgot to clarify the definition of winning and losing in this contest at the beginning. Winning means one is on the Anarcho side of the Anarcho-Tyranny. Losing means one takes it up the ass from the Tyranny side. Oh, and in these contests, due to the horrible legacy of slavery, it helps to be black. It's only fair.
* I'll try to get an answer from John Derbyshire in the comments section of one of his columns on the Unz Review, but he doesn't usually respond.
** I don't know. I've not been a cop, and I don't know many cops. Perhaps the Lyin' Press could have enlightened us on the police tactics in Minneapolis, had it fit in with any narrative of theirs.
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Ann Coulter on the attitude of the Globalist elites
Posted On: Friday - July 9th 2021 9:02PM MST
In Topics: Globalists Race/Genetics
(Header image taken from VDare yet again.)
With no time to write much of a post today and tiredness setting in, I will publish this quick "lookey here!" post to the most recent Ann Coulter column. It can be read here on VDare. VDare's title is Ann Coulter On Anti-Populist Elites: NYT—Why Are All These Racist Losers So Angry? Even for Peak Stupidity's favorite literary pundit, this column one of the best.
I'll excerpt here the mid-section of the column, in which Miss Coulter is referring to the bilge out of some Globalist NY Times columnist named Thomas Edsall:
But ever since the 2016 election, there’s been a frisson of viciousness to the elites’ usual contempt for ordinary Americans. Never mind that Trump ended up betraying his voters. The establishment is appalled that the issues he ran on were popular. Five years later, they still sputter in rage, unable to comprehend why Jeb or Hillary didn’t end up in the White House.She even went THERE! (That last part.)
To explain this calamity, Edsall rolls out all the Timesian cliches about losers being upset about losing. He calls this the “ubiquity of loss,” as if we’re talking about a natural phenomenon, like beach erosion.
Trump voters, he says, are people who are angry about:* their inability to achieve “a standard of living as high as that of their parents,”Edsall acts as if these things are immutable laws of physics. Actually, they result from the deliberate policy choices of our ruling class to benefit some Americans to the detriment of others.
* “the decline of the gender pay gap … and other types of loss relative to women,”
* and losing “employment and earnings to China and other countries.”
Specific policy decisions were made to import an endless stream of low-skilled workers. Employers got boatloads of cheap labor, while ordinary Americans saw their wages plummet.
Oh, and if we’re pretending to care about “democratic norms,” Americans have voted for less immigration over and over and over again. If anyone in the establishment gives a crap about “democratic norms,” then why do they keep foisting more immigration on us?
Specific policy decisions were made to explicitly discriminate against white men in order to give jobs to women, simply because they were women.
If you don't read Ann Coulter regularly, I highly recommend doing so. She is not the pro-GOP part-Neocon she was 20 years ago. Ann Coulter has grown in punditry.
Comments (7)
Murderer of Ashli Babbitt revealed: Michael Leroy Byrd
Posted On: Thursday - July 8th 2021 8:04PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 US Police State US Feral Government Race/Genetics Anarcho-tyranny
I watched a clip of Tucker Carlson talking for a few minutes with Ashli Babbitt's widower and the guy's lawyer. You can watch the clip on Gateway Pundit's post about the murder here.
What's interesting is that not a one of these three men would name names, when the name could be determined after a simple search after their discussion. What they did note is that the Capitol cop who shot Mrs. Babbitt from close range in the neck or head is the same one who was in the news in February of '19 for mistakenly leaving his gun in a Capitol restroom*, with no punishment allotted to him. (He was black, you know, so ...) See, here's the weird thing: the name of the absent-minded Capitol cop from '19 is KNOWN. His name is Michael Leroy Byrd. It's a simple step in basic logic to move from "we know the guy that left the gun in the restroom" and "we know that the guy who murdered Ashli Babbitt is that same guy", to a big-ass headline saying:
EXTRA: Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd found to be murderer of Ashli Babbitt !
A blogger/pundit Conservative activist who was right there in the Capitol when this happened, one Tayler Hanson, has either broken or is trying to break this story. I can't believe I'm linking to a twitter page from some Millennial with a misspelt first name, but that's the way they do it now - His page here is worth scanning through**. I see this Mr. Hansen as a brave young patriot trying to get through a media blackout on the simple important very-easily-determined fact. It ain't a "Who shot JR Ewing" mystery. Hell, he was tweeting about this murderous cop back in late April, 2 1/2 months ago!
Your Peak Stupidity blogger happened to run into a member of the Capitol Police Department while traveling a couple of months ago. This guy was very nice to spend the time to talk, as he was on the way from some guard-a-CongressRat detail. I asked him about the deceased Brian Sicknick, and this guy happened to know him quite well.*** I was hesitant, due to the politics, and that this guy could be considered a customer, but I did ask him "do you know the guy that shot Ashli Babbitt?" He said yes, but he didn't know him well at all. There was no way he was going to give me a name, so I saw no reason to put him on the spot by asking.
That inside information wasn't given to me is to be expected. I'm not an internal affairs investigator. I'm no beat cop asking questions. I'm no Grand Jury, and I'm especially not a Congressional investigative committee. How come there ISN'T one of the latter, for that matter, seeing as the normal police investigation and arrest process has simply not occurred? You had a guy shoot and kill an unarmed woman from 10 ft or so, while other cops were right nearby with rifles, getting along just fine with everyone, and NOTHING HAPPENED! Again, this isn't some mystery that requires the services of Jim Rockford or the 5-0.
This is USSR or Mao-era China behavior here. I wouldn't have expected it in America.... so soon! On the other hand, we have that free and independent press, right? For some reason, they all are independently deciding not to look into this story that even a Journalism major could figure out. Apparently, the information about the culprit of a high profile murder right inside the US Capitol is not part of the news that's fit to print.
Then there's the race angle. Were it a White man who murdered Ashli Babbitt, the Capitol Police might have thrown him under the
Or, is this really something bigger, with the Deep State and Feral Government having decided to teach us a real lesson here? Anyone does something like this again, and we will just shoot whomever we want with no repercussions, lock others away for months and throw away the key, and create a widely-spread narrative that this simple slightly out-of-hand protest or minor riot was TERRORISM and a threat to the US Constitution, Dammit! (Like they give a shit about that document.) In the meantime, other groups, on the correct side of the ideology, can do much more serious damage with no one spending a single night in jail The Anarcho-Tyranny is palpable.
What is this teaching us? The lesson many patriots will learn is that if you're going to raise a little hell, you may as well go all out and raise a whole lot of hell. There will be lone wolves at some point. Michael Leroy Byrd ... well, I'll stop here.
* This news can still be found, as there was no effort to hide this smaller story - see this Fox News story, with the name Michael Leroy Byrd right out there.
** This page by The Deplorable Patriot is a bit more like a story than that series of tweets.
*** It's not part of this post's discussion, but more pertinent to the one just linked-to, that, in answer to my question or musing, he said that he didn't know of his friend Brian having any medical condition. In writing that post, I'd read that Mr. Sicknick had a heart condition. Would a friend not know that? That IS possible, though, as when you have a job that could be terminated due to medical problems, you may very well hide a problem from everyone. (Even a friend might accidentally mention it at the wrong time.)
This post of mine was from mid-February, so almost 5 months ago, well before I talked to this other Capitol cop.
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When things get real... minor jet bridge version
Posted On: Wednesday - July 7th 2021 7:47PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Feminism
These posts pop in my head out of almost nothing sometimes. In this case it was just a few words said by a lady being wheeled up the jet bridge into the airline terminal.
There's probably a special section of building code for it, but these airport jet bridges must be limited to a certain maximum slope. To embark on one of the big birds, one often goes up slope, while the people going off need to go down ... down to the customs/immigration* hellhole. For the smaller birds, usually you go down slope to board, and uphill to get into the gate level of the terminal. As hooked up to a 757, they may be fairly level, if it's a fairly small terminal, as in not so high off the pavement. These jet bridges come in an amazing number of configurations. Additional length can be used, of course, to decrease the slope.
The slope is important not just for ambulatory passengers, but especially for the wheelchairs. I noticed a blue-died-hair lady getting help off the plane in a wheelchair the other day, still near the bottom. (It was a regional jet.) First of all, she was not that awful old, maybe 55-60. She could have had lots of misfortune, but more likely she was diabetic. That blue hair thing just put me off, for that age, I mean. Geeze, what's that about, is she planning on going to some raves like that? Anyway, that's not the point here, but it made me look and pay attention a bit.
Now, I have helped a few people off the plane and into the terminal by pushing them in wheelchairs up top. I have pushed people weighing 300 lb. even. I was glad to do it, but it's a quick cardio workout, let me tell you. With these chairs with nice bearings and rubber tires, it's all ΔPE = mgΔh these days.
The small airport terminals may have 2 or even just 1 person available each shift to do this work for all the gates (along with other passenger service chores). In this case the airport employee was a smaller lady. She had blue haired mama pointed in the right direction there, and was pushing hard to get her going.
All I heard as I went by was the passenger in the chair saying "are you sure you can get me up there?" Now, see, I'd bet money that a lady looking like that had leftist, feminist, and PC tendencies. She would likely be the first to tell you that there are no "man's jobs" and that women could do anything at all just as good, and often better, than a man could. She shouldn't be questioning or bothering this small female employee. She should be glad that a woman had taken that airport service job. Gyrrlll power!
However, her ass was on the line here. If that wheelchair tipped over going over one of the joints (they are steeper), or worse yet, got released and headed back down backwards or forwards, it would be a bad day** When it becomes real, and you're worried about your butt getting busted, oh, all that PC, feminist crap goes right out the window. "Are you sure ...?" Hahahaa! Enjoying the ride?
* As I've written before, it's a GOOD thing for a country to have tough-asses in the immigration hall though.
** With the help of a good lawyer, it would be a bad day for lots of parties, the assisting employee, the airline, the airport management, the jet bridge manufacturer ... and I'm sure I'm missing a few parties to be held responsible to make this lady whole.
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RayOVac batteries are a scam
Posted On: Tuesday - July 6th 2021 10:41PM MST
In Topics: Preppers and Prepping Curmudgeonry Inflation Scams
I wish I could include the Cheap China-made Crap topic key with this post, but as, I hated to find out, these batteries, are (Proudly?) "Made in the USA". That is, the AA's at least.
You try to be a prepper or at least "be prepared" as much as a former Boy Scout knows he ought to. Batteries are part of it. This was about kids' toys at first, as I realized years ago that you really need a load of double-A's, triple-A's, quite a few D's, and a few C's and 9 Volters to keep all the toys running.
As with lots of things that I have bought over the years, I've seen the price of batteries go WAY up. I just seem to remember prices while most people's minds are more forgiving and forgetful about them. Peak Stupidity has noted the big increases in lots of products and services, especially over the period from the mid/late-1990s through recently. (It's going to get much worse soon.) Though we noted the big increase in car battery prices, we haven't covered small batteries, as I don't have hard data. I just remember that it wasn't that long ago - probably in the mid-1990s - when one could get multiple D or C cells for a buck, while now you're paying 2 bucks EACH!
"OK", one, might say, "but they last much longer, so you aren't comparing apples to oranges here". Well, first of all, we've noted before that BLS inflation calculations don't seem to take the reverse of that into account, when products last for shorter times - see Tire Inflation by Deflation. But additionally, and as the original point of this post, "they lie!"
I don't expect Duracells to last the 10 years on the shelf as they tout, but they've been OK for me. However, with all that battery purchasing, I decided to by a couple of cases of Ray-o-Vacs. The case of AAAs has 1 1/2 gross (216), and the case of AAs has 2 gross (288). I should say had, not has, as after something like 4 to 5 years, they have almost all corroded in their original packaging! Now, I didn't expect them to go the 10 years that is advertised right here, as an example, for the exact Alkaline AAAs - part # ALAAA-18 (ALkaline AAAs - 18 pack). Maybe they'd be weaker and last 1/2 as long in a toy or flashlight. I just didn't expect them to all corrode like this.
This is disconcerting for a number of reasons. One way to fight inflation, something we all ought to be ready for as if this were 1975 again, is to buy in bulk when things are on sale. We discussed this a bit in The different levels of prepping. This is only worth doing for items with a long shelf life, as I found out the hard way with sneakers long ago. (The glue fails over time.) Batteries are one of THE prepper items*, though, not just something bought for the sole purpose of saving the paying of higher prices later. I was happy to see those long life-times advertised, as that would make them a very worthwhile prepper item. That seems not to be the case.
Even if one is not concerned with any Shit Hitting any Fan, just normal Boy Scout style "be preparedness", he would say you need batteries for emergency use. You need flashlights for emergency use, kept in the appropriate places, with, yes, batteries in them. Nowadays, even for Duracells, after a year or so, the damn batteries have corroded to where not only is the flashlight not going to work with them, but it won't work with any more batteries, as they have corroded all the contacts and more! They are a preppers and a Boy Scout's nightmare, as the flashlights now must be kept with batteries next to them, I guess. One has to put the batteries in when needed, in the dark, and hopefully when in not too much of a hurry. Sure, that's what you want.
No, I don't live by the beach, and the 2 cases of RayOVacs were inside the house in a closet not near open water, in temperatures varying from the mid 60s F to the low 80s F.
Just for the record, here are the AA's. Note "Made in the USA"!:
I might have sworn that these cases came from one of the Batteries & Bulbs stores, but I don't see them on the web site. This was a few years back, and I will check my records some more soon to see if I did get them there. I don't know where else i would have bought so many. If I find out where, I WILL be bringing them back, if nothing else to let them and maybe other customers know about this scam.
I'm not sure where to turn to now, for the good stuff. I suppose it's time to get back to reading some of the prepper sites regularly. This kind of thing is a concern to the good people that prepare, if nothing else, for the next hurricane or earthquake, but most of the time for long-term trouble.
AVOID RayOVac batteries. They are crap!
PS: It's not just me with the problems. When I brought this up to a friend he told me that one mechanic friend of his that I am also acquainted with has the same complaint.
* No, buying a few cases will not get one through decades of hard times, but it were a couple of years, it'd be nice to have 5-10 cases of various types.
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