Spreading the anti-panic LUV around
Posted On: Saturday - January 16th 2021 8:22AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Race/Genetics Healthcare Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
I couldn't find a picture to better represent the scene at the small gym I was working out at a week or so back, so that's all I've got. This Kung Flu PanicFest story is more encouraging though.
Before I'd gotten started on the recumbent bike machine, a black woman was already jogging on the treadmill, one of just 3 machines. Of course I had no mask on, but this lady did. No, I didn't get any shit from her, as that one time last summer. The result was far from it, I'm glad to write.
First, about this lady's butt. What?! Any regular reader knows that this blogger is anti-TV to the extreme, so I wasn't watching anything on the treadmill console. (In fact, that one, if I recall, has no screen, just red LED readouts - old school FTW.) The machines were angled left, and I was on the right, so what do you want me to look at?
Here's the thing. Black genetics matter! Hell, any genetics matter, and it's just a genetic thing that, in general, black women have larger butts. Natural selection gave them this capability and likewise the capability of black men to appreciate them. More glutenous power to them all.
However, nobody appreciates obesity, and that can't be blamed on genetics alone. That was not the case here. This lady had a larger-than-necessary rear end, butt I could tell that it wasn't all fat. The lady was not just playing at working out. She had a good pace going, and I'm pretty sure the treadmill was set at a slope, as opposed to level. That matters a lot, as Peak Stupidity has gone on and on about with our exercise machine calculation sub-fixation. (If you care, check out some posts with the Artificial Stupidity topic key.) I give her great credit for working out hard to try to keep it all solid.
From rear ends to the subject matter now, I really wondered how much that face mask affected the lady's workout. It just can't be good to breath in your own CO2 and strain more for any Oxygen. They've got those lawyer-required warnings on the machines telling you that you'd better go ask your doctor if it's OK to work out, don't keep going if it hurts (whaaaa?? Don't tell that to the drill Sergeant.), etc. Shouldn't these exercise machine manufacturers be issuing recalls or service bulletins in order to make sure there are warnings about, I dunno, keeling over and dying due to lack of Oxygen to the heart? I'm not a doctor, and I haven't even yet played one on TV, but ... I could easily play a lawyer in real life, were it me... assuming a recovery, of course.
I was not much in her view with the angle of the machines, so I don't know if was her watching me work out without the face diaper impediment or just some thoughts about it, but I looked over after a while, and it was gone. Yea!
I'm glad to have had some influence. People learn from example to some degree. I think people will learn even more from very obvious examples. Here's a guy at the Home Depot with no mask on. Nobody seems to care much, as they are helping him with one item with no fear in their eyes. Nobody's dragging the guy out of the store by his feet. Hmmmm.... Perhaps this is all a bunch of crap... [/cartoon thought bubble*]
Spread the anti-panic LUV!
* I wish I could draw better. Memes and cartoons are where it's at these days.
Comments (7)
How close to danger?
Posted On: Friday - January 15th 2021 6:24PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Media Stupidity
"How close to danger ...", as the start of a question, was what I heard passing by a TV with CNN on this afternoon. I didn't stick around long, but I heard enough in the background to know that this Capitol Gang story must still be in the forefront of the media barrage. It's been over a week now since this small effort to fight back against the powerful leftwing forces that run almost everything in this country.
As with the 3 year-long Russia Collusion, because I don't participate in Lyin' Press stupidity, sometimes I am quite surprised that some story is still going on (see Nothing but Distractions). Peak Stupidity was pretty excited, in a good way, to see what went on a week ago Wednesday.
Is this story still on the news because 4 or 5 deaths, 3 of them, maybe even 4, deaths from natural causes that the odds may favor during a stressful event attended by some older folks? By the end of this past summer, some death during one of the riots in Minneapolis, Portland, etc. wouldn't have even been on the news. There were many. It's surely not that a black cop shot a white woman who was no threat to him in the neck from 8 ft away, is it? That ought to be a big part of the story here, as she was the only one murdered during the event.
Let me go back to that one line I heard clearly. I don't know how stupid these talking heads and their associates on CNN really are. I find it hard to believe that they think that the Congressmen and Senators were in real danger there. We've all seen plenty of video, and they've seen plenty of video. This was not a crowd out to purposefully harm anyone. Therefore, the news lady was either very, very stupid, or putting out one big fat lie by implication. "OMG, luckily our priceless, irreplaceable leaders were just far enough to avoid being beaten to death by the crowd of middle-aged fun-loving MAGA people!" was the implication. (I heard something about "100 ft" in there.) The implication is that common Americans have no business being anywhere near these important "leaders", much less in the same room, without being invited.
The man with the horned hat should have made a proper appointment, on his knees, to his Congressman's secretary, and taken his hat off before entering the house of our dear leaders. Something about this reminds me of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.
PS: I have a number of more posts coming on this "insurrection" (insurrection, ha, we wish!) There are so many posts built up, but there's been not so much time lately. Thank you all for reading.
Comments (8)
Will America be looted by China? - Part 5: The Wilderness
Posted On: Friday - January 15th 2021 10:10AM MST
In Topics: Treehuggers China Economics Environmental Stupidity The Future
(continued from Part 1: Intro, Part 2: Housing, Part 3: Big Biz, and Part 4: The Fruited Plain.)
We at Peak Stupidity admit to being treehuggers* of a sort. Our Libertarianism has led us to rail against some of the treehuggers and enironmentalists for not putting their money where their mouths are. That's the case in two ways, the 2nd much worse than the first.
1) Other than the Nature Conservancy, I don't know too many of these people and groups that put their own money down to save wilderness, rather than agitating for others to give up their land or land rights for the wishes of these treehuggers. Economies have been eviscerated by some of these enviro-freaks, and they don't give a damn about that.
2) Worse than that are the organizations like the Sierra Club who care more for the money over the environment, as they purposefully ignore the damage to the environment due to massive immigration. They were paid off to not talk about immigration over 25 years ago. Besides selling out for what is still a considerable number of silver pieces (I calculate ~ 4 million of them at today's spot price), they have now joined the anti-white bandwagon, disowning their founder. (That's the subject of these 2 posts with family-unfriendly titles: Part 1 and Part 2)
I do tend to get really long with the intro, but that paragraph about the Sierra Club gets into what I want to say here. It's the White People, Stupid! Nobody else cares as much for the environment, including saving big chunks of wilderness, as white people do. Nobody. Yet, we have not been importing a majority of Swedes and Norwegians these last 55 years. Peak Stupidity has noted many times that the Mexican immigrants, illegal or not, don't have the same attitude about the environment. Neither do Somalians. Neither do the Chinese.
As mentioned in The Ugly Chinaman (just the expression about the huge influx of arrogant tourists), sure, they get around, including in the national parks, in droves. Watch out on the road! That's to say they were there, to take billions of pictures a year (hey, they're free now!) in front of this rock, this mountain, or this bear wood carving. It's not to enjoy the beauty and solitude in the forest or desert.
I've been there (11 times). The Chinese people don't seen to particularly LIKE solitude. Even in rural areas** there, the houses are right next to each other, often not even detached, when they could be spread out a bit. They like this, and more power to them. I don't care.
The country of China, due to being overpopulated*** forever or so (3,500 years is almost forever), hasn't been able to keep the enironment in any kid of pristine conditions. Years of poverty, made worse during the hard-core Mao Commie era, had people denuding the mountains and hills of any old trees. I will say that the Chinese government and people have changed their ways on this over the last decade or so. However, having old-growth forest takes some time, like centuries. In the meantime, they can come here to see it.
Another point is that we have inherited a beautiful land. Sure, China has its Snowy Mountains, plenty of big sharp mountains all over, and its share of desert. There's NOTHING like the beauty that can be enjoyed in Yosemite, Yellowstone, the deserts of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, or, yes, my favorite, obviously, Olympic National Park, though. We should be so grateful that our forefathers saved these places for us over a century ago.
It'd be nice to keep these wilderness areas, which is the point of this post, in addition not growing so big in population that we can't enjoy them as much. This series of posts is about the possible (OK, probable?) looting of this country though. I see no reason that the big money can't be spent by the Chinese to influence the population, buy the population off, or whatever it takes, to use some of this land. They just plain don't really care as much as we do about keeping it the way it is.
I already mentioned the lack of forested land in China. It is the reason one must pay for extra napkins at a restaurant, even if just 25 cents. They've mostly run out of good wood, and even wood for paper. It's already the case that the cheap shipping costs allow a Chinese company to buy trees from Canada or America, turn it into lumber, turn that into furniture, and ship the furniture back to us, and STILL beat out costs of North Carolina made furniture! Perhaps they would like to own this forest land themselves. They could determine just how better and faster it could be exploited.
Would they stop at private forest land or push for taking just small bites at at time out of even the preserved-to-a-controlled amount National Forest land and then National Park land? I've joked before about the Chinese turning the Olympic Park into chopsticks if they had their way.**** Chinese owners will not lay down for ranting white environmentalists. They don't know who John Muir was. He was just an old White Man that like to be alone in the beautiful wilderness and wanted to give that opportunity to others.
PS: I went to some HUGE cave deep in China. That is, deep in the ground, of course, but deep into the interior of China too. Yeah, it was cool, but the Chinese don't like to just light it up enough for people to see. They have to have computer monitors with one's postion, colored lighting, and of course there were way too many people in there. (Imagine working out the air changes for HVAC in that place!)
* However, there has never been any penetration.
** I don't say small towns, because that implies a couple of hundred thousand people, in China.
*** China had more people in the mid-1800's than America has even now. Real useable land there, when you subtract out the 30% or whatever of Tibet and Xinjiang, then take out the ridiculous-to-live-on mountainous areas, is a much smaller amount than that in the continental US.
**** You know, that would be a fun calculation to do, but then, no, this isn't going to be funny after our financial SHTF.
Comments (6)
Ann Coulter lets loose
Posted On: Thursday - January 14th 2021 7:50AM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Immigration Stupidity Trump Pundits
It's going to take more than letting words loose to stop the stupidity, but that's all we at Peak Stupidity have for now, as does Ann Coulter.
In Most Disloyal Man in History Finally Finds a Cause Worth Fighting For our favorite literary pundit really tears Donald Trump a new one.
When Ann Coulter gets really mad, I can see that she goes a little overboard (as with her neocon calls to wipe out the Islamic world back right after 9/11). Therefore I don't agree with her about pretty much the biggest CURRENT issue she wrote about here, the '20 election CheatFest (oh, and probably Georgia, '21 to boot).
For the items on Trump’s 2016 campaign agenda, he actually had solid arguments. On overturning the election, he has no argument at all.Miss Coulter may or may not believe that the election was stolen, but her point is that you do things ahead of time to prevent stuff like this, and had Trump fulfilled some of his campaign promises, maybe his vote would have been so high as to be beyond theft even by this crowd.
The bulk of Trump’s rally speech last Wednesday consisted of the fanatically detailed claims of a paranoid about the election being stolen. The media, of course, have barely covered this part of the speech, since they’re determined to suppress all mentions of any oting-vay aud-fray.
Not to worry, media! I’m angrier after reading Trump’s full exegesis on the election than I was when you were hiding it from me.
He cited vote tallies in this and that county, the media’s use of “suppression polls,” constitutional provisions, the precise time of day votes came in, different states’ voting rules and practices, the numbers of felons, dead people and illegal aliens who allegedly voted in various states and on and on and on.
Do you think Trump has any idea how many illegal aliens are in the country right now?I agree completely. Oh, and I already did, way before this column. For one, I've stated repeatedly that this "oh, the judges!" and "he doesn't have the power" were bogus with respect to some of the issues the President could have made lots of headway with. That goes especially for his job as Commander in Chief. He could have brought the military home.
None whatsoever. Trump knows more about the accuracy settings on signature verification machines in Clark County, Nevada, than he does about DACA.
For four years, I’ve been told that Trump couldn’t keep his campaign promises because: No one has ever faced such historic resistance! It’s not his fault. Poor Trump!
Well, how hard was it to keep his promises compared to overturning a presidential election?
Now that we’ve gotten a bracing view of Trump’s skills as a demagogue, I just want to know: Why didn’t he ever use his powers for good? Why did he never hold a rally on the ellipse and ask his supporters to pressure their representatives to fund the wall? To repeal Section 230? To penalize outsourcing?
Peak Stupidity mentioned this other trait of Donald Trump of only taking action when it's personal, in our post President Donald Trump: **the Bad**, the Good, and the Ugly. We were discussing this in terms of his last minute (3 weeks before the '20 election) talk about Big "TECH" censorship, when he had nearly 4 years behind him of doing nothing on that issue either:
Actually, if the President would take the criticisms of Candidate Trump's ideas hard and worked to show them up, that'd be just peachy with me. However, many times he seems to take things seriously ONLY when they apply directly to him. That is, he's not a man of principle. I knew that going in, and have written this before. That Donald Trump doesn't understand the Constitution like Ron Paul does, or Ronald Reagan did, for that matter, is something I figured we could live with. That is due to his bringing up the existential issue of the immigration invasion right away as THE most important issue and his fairly good stance on ending the warfare state.Ann goes on with this:
The problem is that the President doesn't fight when he has the tools to beat the ctrl-left, as brought up by many a smart policy wonk or pundit, unless it hits him. ["personally", I should have written.]
Now that we’ve gotten a bracing view of Trump’s skills as a demagogue, I just want to know: Why didn’t he ever use his powers for good? Why did he never hold a rally on the ellipse and ask his supporters to pressure their representatives to fund the wall? To repeal Section 230? To penalize outsourcing?Again, you could have read this stuff years ago, on such web sites, as I dunno, Peak Stupidity or something. However, that last sentence is hyperbole by Miss Coulter, and, again, I chalk it up to a hot feisty temper. I myself have not problem with Senators and House members fleeing for their lives. We'd rather they be more contained than that, however, so our policy statement calls for Congressional LOCKDOWNS as standard policy. Hey, we're willing to compromise a bit on this. Force them to flee for their lives via rubber raft to Guantanamo, Cuba, and hold remote Congressional sessions semi-annually from the exercise yard during exercise hour.
None of those proposals is insane. Now that I think about it, they are the exact ideas that got Trump elected. Another plus: Asking his supporters to lobby for popular issues would not have ended with senators and House members fleeing for their lives.
Yeah, Ann Coulter went overboard on this one in her now almost hatred for Donald Trump. A woman scorned and all that ... but we are on her side in general. You will probably enjoy Ann Coulter's column, as usual. Words are fun, but they ain't gonna cut it from here on. I think Ann Coulter knows that too.
PS: Don't forget the post of ours, Amazing prescient Peak Stupidity prediction that Trump will renege on policy, from last summer. We were not quite as mad as Ann Coulter though.
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Merkel reassures her countrymen Germany is safe for transitioning
Posted On: Wednesday - January 13th 2021 7:10PM MST
In Topics: Commies Trump
(No, not that kind, but I'm sure she'd be all in on that. Cultural destruction is good, and comes naturally to Commies.)
Since twitter is in relative time here, I can't say for sure, but I think Herr Merkel wrote this on the 7th.
This was to reassure the German volk that "Listen, I knew Donald J. Trump, maybe in the biblical sense, as warned about in Leviticus, and let me tell you, I'm no Donald J. Trump!"
"Do not be alarmed by the insurrection into the Volk's Hausen in Washington, FS there in America. Over in Deutchland, vee, errr, we will have a peaceful transition of power, just as we've done since before you people were ... well... quite a long time."
I can't help wondering if at this point, Herr Merkel is not so much reassuring others of, but pleading for, a peaceful transition of power from her sorry, ruinous ass, rather than her "getting transitioned", as happened at the end of the Cold War to one particular loathsome Commie:
That picture is of the execution of the hated (there were a lot of them) Nicolae Ceaușescu, with his wife Elena there too as part of a 2 for 1 deal.
Sic semper tyrannis!
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Will America be looted by China? - Part 4: The Fruited Plain
Posted On: Wednesday - January 13th 2021 1:23PM MST
In Topics: China Economics The Future
(continued from Part 1: Intro, Part 2: Housing, and Part 3: Big Biz.)
I do want to get to my conclusion on this, I swear, and now there are also a bunch more other posts I'd rather write first. However, Peak Stupidity likes to finish what we started. (Yes, we will complete that fisking of that feminist article that we started way on back in early September!) This post is about possible buying up of American rich farmland by Chinese people with fistfulls of dollars.
I refer the reader again to "There's a lot of ruin in a nation." - Part 3. I will admit my lowball estimate from that post was way too low, as Statista shows just > 30% of the US (slightly under 3 million mi2 of the contiguous US being farmland. I had estimated about 1/3 of that. I have a feeling that includes a lot of very marginal farmland. With all the near desert in the West (ranch land, if anything), and the mountainous areas, it just seems well too large. They are obviously including some poor pasture land. I'd estimated 10-15% and gotten only 300 million acres rather than the 900 million that Statista states.
The rich dark soil of the ex-tall-grass-prairie States*, and the California central valley, and a few other small areas with great farmland, add up by my estimate** to 300 - 500 thousand mi2. That's around my 10-15% of the contiguous US per my old post, and this is the good stuff. For these States, such as Illinois and Iowa, with almost nothing but good farmland, it was pretty easy to look up average cropland prices. In general, the web comes up with $7,500 +/- $500 per acre. States with a mix of tough farm land and some good, such as Georgia, Alabama, Miss., and Louisiana, you see from $2,000/acre to $4,000/acre for cropland. Sure, you've got the Willamette Valley in Oregon (~ 5,500 mi2), the smaller Snoqualmie Valley in Washington, and other river valleys with some fertile soil, but they don't add up to much.
Let's take all that rich farmland, at the top end, 300 million acres, at $8,000/acre (going up as I type), and the rest, 600 million acres at $3,000/acre. We get, wah-lah, America has around $4 Trillion bucks in farmland. That is quadruple my old estimate because a) Land has gone up and b) My previous estimate was only including the good stuff, and c) I'd lowballed it before, and for this one I've gone to the high side.
How much American [sic] farmland do foreigners own right now? Freedom Outpost (May '19 article) says 30 million acres. That is only 3.3%. No problem, right? How about just China? The same author on the same site, one Michael Snyder, has no numbers in his '14 article, which is more of a (perfectly fine) rant: Chinese Buying Land In US Communities All Over America. There are no numbers there, so is this a real problem?
Now consider this:
It looks to me like a less than a decade of China's pocketing this money, as a conservative hard-working couple would on a house down payment, would do it. Unlike the conservative couple striving to purchase that nice cottage on the top of Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, for China, this would be enough for it all, not just a down payment. We will suffer greatly if this goes on any longer.
Again, one can bring up proposed new law against the purchase by foreigners, well not for the next 2 years, I'm sure, and that sort of thing. The money talks though. Even if indirectly, the American Fruited Plain of song and story*** can be controlled by the Communist Party of China. How's that future strike you?
I'll get to more of the speculation about the future of this in the conclusion, but there's got to be one more part, I realized, on the preserved wild lands of America.
PS: Well, I like doing the back-of-the-envelope calculations on my own, but it was about 1/2 hour of work looking things up this time. Then, I just did the obvious (well, non-obvious to me, apparently!) and looked it up. I came up with a Statista page again as number 1 (duckduckgo) and it says $2.7 Trillion, but this counts farm buildings too, which I've got no problem with. Not bad, as that was between my low and high. This number is for '18.
* This what the wetter side of the Great Plains was called vs. the dryer short-grass prairie farther west back in the day. The eastern portion of what we now called "the Great Plains" was the Prairie, and the western portion was the Plains.
** I took nearly the whole land area of whole States like Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, etc. and parts of others, plus that CA central valley.
*** It's the name of this non-fiction book about American farming that I read long ago - I lost the library book at a laundromat on a long road trip ... across the fruited plain.
Ha! Even amazon doesn't have this one available themselves, or even a review from when books were their main thing. I wonder if one of the 15 resellers got that book from that laundromat in Grand Junction, Colorado back in the 1990s. I can see an email coming. "Give me back my book, you bastard! I was busy loading the whites and just forgot."
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So as not to speak ill of the dead ...
Posted On: Tuesday - January 12th 2021 8:11PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Globalists The Neocons
No comment...
... though there are plenty of good ones (>90%) here on Instapundit. Feel free to write your own about this man, and I'll be obligated to respond then, ill feelings or not. This Ed Driscoll is too kind.
Comments (8)
Playin' that Georgia Rhythm
Posted On: Monday - January 11th 2021 5:07PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Music Southern rock
Something in my head got me to the lyrics ("I got a job to do") of this old Atlanta Rhythm Section song a few days back. It was almost right at a year ago when Peak Stupidity posted Rock & Roll Never Forgets about Rock & Roll songs that either complain, glorify, or just comment on, life on the road as a rock* musician (as it was, anyway).
Georgia Rhythm is such a song, this one with an upbeat, pros-and-cons look at the group's life on the road playin' that Georgia Rhythm. I am partial to the songs on the band's Are you Ready? live album from 1979, though this song was originally from their 1976 studio album A Rock and Roll Alternative. That one had their hit So Into You, not one of my favorites, and it was the album just prior their breakout album Champaign Jam.
Peak Stupidity has featured these good old boys from Doraville, GA before and another cut from this album, Sky High, from our early-on post Inflation and Interest.
Yeah, Doraville, where this band got its start as session musicians at Studio One, was really a good old Southern town back then when the band started out. It didn't take long to get ruined, once it started to be. Atlanta has had massive sprawl out of the city, as decent people move farther out to get away from the racial riffraff, and even some of the riffraff follow to get away from the worse riffraff. Doraville, on the NE section of the I-285 beltway, has exurbs all around the intersection with the I-85. It looks in no way like the small town as imagined in the song.
After large-scale immigration from Asia and Latin America (per wiki, over 1/2 the residents don't speak English as their 1st language!), a Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta light-rail station being build to bring in other vibrant folks, and then the long-running GM plant closing in '09, the Atlanta Rhythm Section would be the first to tell you that you can't go home again.
Let's get off of all that sadness for what's lost, and just enjoy this old song from 42 years back. I don't believe in lyrics being very important to a good song, but I like these ones. What a great attitude (especially as compared to Bob Seger's)!
So, lay down a back beat.
Crank up your trusty Gibson, son.
Let's give it everything we got just one more time.
We are lovin' the life we're livin',
playin' that Georgia rhythm.
Nothin' else ever made me feel so fine.
The Atlanta Rhythm Section:
Ronnie Hammond – vocals, background vocals
Barry Bailey – guitar
J.R. Cobb – rhythm guitar, background vocals
Dean Daughtry – keyboards
Paul Goddard – bass guitar
Robert Nix – percussion, drums, vocals, background vocals
* OK, it was more like country wrt Willie and his On the Road Again.
Comments (10)
Will America be looted by China? - Part 3: Big Biz
Posted On: Monday - January 11th 2021 11:30AM MST
In Topics: China Economics Big-Biz Stupidity
(continued from Part 1: Intro and Part 2: Housing.)
The worry in the 1980s about foreign takeover of American industry was directed at Japan. The Japanese way of doing big business in America, since the 1980s, was opening plants in this country. Americans have been placated with those efforts. "The jobs are here." Yeah, well the decent line and lower/mid- level management jobs are, but the important engineering jobs aren't.
It's been the same with Nissan, Kia/Hyundai out of Korea, Mercedes, BMW,
and VW out of Germany, etc. They've all got auto plants here, almost all in the South for the cheaper labor. The control of the enterprises are foreign though, though it's nothing like looting, of course.
Perhaps the Chinese haven't done any of this because their car manufacturing hasn't been up Western and Japanese (for sure not!) quality standards, and 25 years ago they hardly had an auto industry. Secondly, they don't care about placating Americans and getting along. That is so 2000s. The way things are going, they may be able to just buy one of the big 3 lock, stock, and barrel.
CNBC here lists 10 big purchases of American "iconic brands"*.
Smithfield Foods, bought by Shuanghui Group, now called WH Group, for $7.1 Billion in '13 remained the 2nd biggest at the time of this > 3 y/o CNBC story, but who knows since then? (Well OK, the internet knows, but I've only done a quick DDG search.) It's the most famous case of the selling off of American industry. From that article we are told:
The deal spurred controversy and concern at the time, but Smithfield has thrived, adding jobs and hitting a sales record in 2014.Oh, sure, it's all fine then, right?
No, it's not alright, though. This is all about control. For the sellers of this big American food firm, and the Chinese buyers, yeah, it's about money. For regular Americans it results in essentially working for the Chinese CCP, when it really comes down to it. Once could bring up laws or proposed laws against holding of stock by foreigners, residency requirements for corporate boards, or what-have-you, but the Chinese are in charge. Follow the money.
For anyone in government actually trying to help Americans with regard to foreign influence and the trade imbalance (like President Trump has), face it, it's gonna be tough curtailing exports of pork in a trade war when the Chinese own Smithfield Foods. You'll have the whole State of Virginia against you. If you think that Big Biz is unpatriotic, and it sure is, imagine he case when it's owned by the Chinese. They'll be plenty patriotic .. to China and the CCP, though.
Other names I recognize are GE Appliances - now that's iconic. The manufacturing facilities are still there in Louisville, Kentucky, but those employees work for Qingdao Haier now. It cost these Haier folks $5.4 Billion. You can buy ~ 200 such companies with a cool Trillion bucks. The Motorola mobile phone division has been owned by Chinese Lenovo (who also bought the IMB laptop business) back in '14. That was an ~ $3 Billion purchase.
Then there are the movie theater chains that the CNBC page lists as big purchases by Chinese companies. Haha! That was dumb! Nobody expects the
A 5 y/o Yahoo (yeah, I know) page lists The Biggest American Companies Now Owned by the Chinese. The biggest purchase, money-wise, was of Starwood Hotels, bought by Anbang Insurance for $14.3 Billion in'16.
There's probably a lot more of this by now, and it doesn't help matters at all that American small business is getting creamed by the Kung Flu PanicFest. What about the big "TECH" guys, like Amazon, Google, etc? Would you bet any serious money that some of them won't be Chinese-owned within 5 years? Not this blogger. I value my money more than ... OK, it'll probably lose so much value that I don't have much to lose anyway.
* It's in quotes because I don't know 1/2 these companies. That's partly due to that I don't give a rat's ass about "League of Legends" and also the movie industry, but I guess it's a sign that they haven't got too far yet.
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The East German uprising of 1953
Posted On: Saturday - January 9th 2021 11:24PM MST
In Topics: Commies History Socialism/Communism World Political Stupidity
A few months back some unz commenter mentioned the uprising in East Germany for a few days in the long ago summer of 1953. (The war in Korea would be "settled" in another month, and Ike Eisenhower had only been President for 5 months - that's how long ago.) I'd never heard of it before, even though I do know some history of the Cold War.
This was pretty interesting reading, here on Wiki. In case the younger Peak Stupidity readers (if we haven't pissed them off too bad) don't know anything about the Cold War in Europe, let me give a short bit of background:
Just after the end of World War II, by 1946 anyway, it was clear that the Communist USSR and the US were enemies already. It was also clear that the USSR would not give up any land that it had taken while defeating the Nazis and other Axis countries. The "Iron Curtain", a term coined by Winston Churchill (or his speechwriter), had descended, and was in place north to south from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea. This means that the countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia (peacefully divided into Czechia and Slovakia 28 years ago), Hungary, Yugoslavia (split into an ungodly number of pieces, also in the early 1990s), Albania*, Romania, and Bulgaria were all under the Soviet influence. "Influence" sound too mild, though. These countries may as well have been part of the USSR, militarily speaking. Communism of sorts was installed in all of them. They were the "East Bloc".
I left out one country though. Whatever portion of Germany the Russian Army had taken, they also kept. Since they came from the east, it was the eastern portion of Germany that was made Communist, with that weird exception of West Berlin, 120 miles inside East Germany, which had been formed from the American, British, and French controlled zones in place when the city fell in May 1945.
These countries all had to suffer from Communism for 45 years or so, which was better than the situation for the poor Russians (and Ukrainians, Belorussians, and the 3 Baltic countries), who had to endure it for over 70 years. That's 3 generations growing up under the poverty, oppression, and other stupidity.
There were uprisings against the strangling yoke of Communism in a number of these countries - Hungary and Czechoslovakia being cases in 1956 and 1968, respectively. They didn't take.
The economic situation in East Germany had gotten bad in 1952 due to, well, the usual Communist stupidity that is to be expected. Wiki describes it:
The result of this change in the GDR's economic direction was the rapid deterioration of workers' living standards, which lasted until the first half of 1953, and represented the first clear downward trend in the living standard of East Germans since the 1947 hunger crisis. Travel costs rose as generous state subsidies were cut, while many consumer goods began to disappear from store shelves. Factories were forced to clamp down on overtime: in the context of a now restricted budget, the wage bill was deemed excessively high. Meanwhile, food prices rose as a result of both the effects of the state's collectivization policy – 40% of the wealthier farmers in the GDR fled to the West, leaving over 750,000 hectares of otherwise productive land lying fallow – and a poor harvest in 1952. Workers' cost of living therefore rose, while the take-home pay of large numbers of workers – many of whom depended on overtime hours to make ends meet – was diminishing. In the winter of 1952–53, there were also serious interruptions to the supply of heat and electricity to East Germany's cities.To try to solve the problems and with Stalin having just died, a "New Course" was prescribed by the USSR for the East German economy. It wasn't left up to the Germans. It was an end to forced collectivization, and a switch from subsidization of heavy industry to subsidization of consumer goods. It was still a top-down 5-year plan. You can't please everyone this way, as you can with a free market, so workers were not happy. It was then that they started strikes and demonstrations:
On 12 June, the next day, 5,000 people participated in a demonstration in front of Brandenburg-Görden Prison in Brandenburg an der Havel.The full-bore uprising happened on June 16th, and I'll let the reader go to the Wiki page for that.
On 14 June, more confusion followed as an editorial in Neues Deutschland condemned the new work norms, yet in that very same issue, news articles praised workers who had exceeded the new norms in contradiction to the editorial.
On 15 June, workers at the Stalinallee "Block 40" site in East Berlin, now with their hopes raised about the possibility that the work norms would be rescinded, dispatched a delegation to East German Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl to deliver a petition calling for a revocation of the higher work norms. However, Grotewohl ignored the workers' demands.
The word spread. Protests were held in 24 big East German cities.
The demand was initially about a certain type of pay scale, called the "norm", which was obviously too low. Just as during the Tiananmen Square protest, 36 later in China, once you go all out like this, marching in the streets and confronting government officials, you may as well go in for a pound rather than just a penny. Some of the demands were about the re-forming of a different political party. No, you just don't do that under Communsim.
The Soviet Union didn't wait even till the next day to make the decision to send in the tanks.
The Soviet army with its infantry and tanks arrived in E. Berlin on the morning of the 17th. Not all of the Soviet soldiers complied with orders to attack the troublemakers. At the end of it, 10,000 people had been detained, and 32 - 40 people were executed.
What's this post got to do with ANYTHING, the reader may very well ask. Well, I already had the pictures saved, so... More importantly, the East German uprising of 1953 is just another example of an uprising that failed. That is, most of them. The lesson is to not let things go so far to begin with. Once it goes so far, the tools (as in guns and ability to safely organize) have been taken away. It's hard to have a successful uprising, it seems, as the time to reverse course has passed. Communism and any other kind of Totalitarianism must be nipped in the bud. Just nip it! Nip it, Andy! /Barney Fife]
We are at that nip it stage in America right now. Peak Stupidity included a very famous passage from a famous book in our post Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Gulags and avoidance thereof. We'll just include it again:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat.Nip it in the bud!
* Albania was a bit of an even weirder deal, a place like N. Korea where nobody knew what kind of really stupid shit was going on and how deep in Communist hole they were. It was a bit more independent from the USSR, but that didn't make it any better. OTOH, Austria, even though part of "the West" was just a little closer to the East Bloc.
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Will America be looted by China? - Part 2: Housing
Posted On: Saturday - January 9th 2021 6:23PM MST
In Topics: China Economics The Future
Yesterday's Part 1 of this series was an introduction to what I think could happen as the US goes more into financial ruin, and China has the dollars for looting. I want to add one thing in answer to commenter Alarmist, as he noted that the same fears were present in the 1980s as Japan had been building up a big trade surplus with America.
From that 3rd "a lot of ruin in a nation post again:
Hey, it [the Japanese conquest of a big portion of the US auto market] WAS worrisome, and tensions were sometimes high (see the 1986 humorous feel-good movie Gung Ho - not even a Japanese expression, it's Chinese! -with a young Michael Keaton). I mean, they Japs bought Rockefella Center for cryin' out loud! OMG! Well, this all faded when the Japanese stock market collapsed like many paper/computer types of wealth do. Japan still has a large economy and we all know they have kept up the high-quality and heavy-duty manufacturing as opposed to Americans.SNIP
That's ancient recent history; let's discuss China here. The country's population is an order of magnitude larger than Japan's, and 1/2 order of magnitude larger than ours, so when they do get economically powerful, things are DIFFERENT, as I said. The 2nd factor of big numbers mentioned above it that, though the Japanese grew economically mighty by the late 1980's our economy was multiple times bigger AND we still manufactured a majority of American-bought consumer and industrial goods. The situation is completely different now, and we don't have our economic/manufacturing base of even 1995 left.
Let me just respond against a couple of general arguments. "Yeah, well, that's what they said about Japan." Besides the order-of-magnitude larger problem there is this time, as already explained, are there any signs that the Chinese economy will just fold, and that ours will get right back on it's feet? I don't see it.I wrote that > 3 years back, and China's economy is growing even more quickly, as ours has been devastated more quickly than expected with the Kung Flu PanicFest LOCKDOWNS. China has 10 X the population of Japan. Their economy is bigger than ours. (I don't trust GDP numbers, neither our BLS ones nor the CCP's numbers, but they are beating us in almost every kind of market - the amount of air travel going on there is amazing!)
Now, on to housing. Note that the city of Seattle, Washington* is one that we have mentioned as having lots of foreign investment, causing problems for regular Americans who just want to, like, live there. It has been the same story in other West Coast cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, BC, Canada (now called Hongcouver, and yeah, not our problem).
From my Chinese sources, I've learned that the Chinese people that come here to purchase these nice houses all over these cities (along with in university towns all over) are not the Jack Ma's. There aren't enough of the entrepreneurial rich, as good as the economy is doing. No, China still has a very non-meritocratic system, contrary to what unz writers will tell you, when it comes to the big money. It's corrupt officials at all levels of government, members of the CCP, that have the money for the houses on the hills of San Francisco and Seattle. The buyers below may be from a Chinese family whose breadwinner father makes $600 monthly. "Man, how are you gonna make the payments for this place?!" Guy puts his arm around your shoulder. "Got one word for you, for your future, Ben ... bribery."
It's corrupt money, graft, bribery, whatever you call it, taken from the much greater number of actual hard-working Chinese people and non-State-owned factory owners that makes these $600/month Chinamen into Capitol Hill homeowners. As we noted in some of those previous posts on this topic, the idea is to get that money the hell out of China, for when/if another round of anti-corruption campaigns happens. See, those campaigns are righteous and just when YOU run 'em, to punish your CCP enemies, but watch out for that Karma. Get the money out, send a child to an American university, have a wife and anchor baby pre-bugged-out in that nice place, for when you just got to get out. After all, China is corrupt as hell, and you don't want to spend the rest of your life there, right?
With those piles of money ready to bid on these investment/bug-out places, it only takes some tens of thousands or a hundred thousand Chinamen to change the market. The American middle class, or what's left of it, will be left living in apartments, commuting from far out, or leaving these beautiful West Coast cities. "Affordable Family Formation" is a term Steve Sailer uses a lot, one he may have coined, and it's an important idea. Being able to afford an actual detached house is a big part of this. Sure, kids grow up in Manhattan in apartments, and a few in some big cities, but parents want safe play areas and privacy for their kids.
The graph below from the Seattle Bubble site is fairly current, or as current as The Tim gets, from summer 2020.** Note that the blogger defines "affordable" at what a median price house costs, but his left axis represents the income required to make payments at today's LOW interest rates. Better buy now, right?!
(The big increments are $25,000 income, and because the guy let the software break up the $800,000 in house cost into the same 6 increments, they are $133,300 each - hard to read here, I know)
For a family with household income of just under $100,000 to buy that just under 3/4 million dollar house, it'd be tight. Even with a reasonable property tax rate, I can't see the payment being under $4,500 monthly on a 3.5% loan, after some small down payment. Geeze, after taxes (though WA does not have income tax - for now), the family will take home maybe $6,500 monthly and $4,500 goes to that median "affordable" house! That's not your father's affordable living, I can tell you.
From this site, I found that there are ~133,000 detached housing units in the city of Seattle.*** That's just in the city, but it's all I got. Now, take a Trillion bucks to be spent by Chinese investors on housing (the rest for other goodies like manufacturing plants and farmland). That's coincidentally right at 10 X all of that housing in the Seattle city limits at the median price****, as in, all of the detached houses. Take 10 Seattles, and since Chinese people like living in the city, they can buy up 10 whole cities of housing.
What I'm getting at is that $1,000,000,000,000 is a LOT of money, even when compared to big city real estate. NY City is an exception. We're still saving it for looting by the Japanese, when they ever get their shit together again.
I suppose you might not call this looting as of yet. We ought to have laws that prevent foreign ownership of property at all, but then, as we'll discuss regarding other assets, there are always ways to do it. Wait until Americans are poorer than they are now and the dollar goes down the toilet. We'll see what looting looks like. Anyway, the realtors don't care:
PS: Seattle in particular also has the big money from the stock options of the Amazon/MS/etc. crowd.
* I ended up with the picture up top (on these posts) due to a search for images relating to Seattle. I'd kept up with the housing market there just out of interest during the bubble years, on a site called Seattle Bubble. A guy who calls himself "The Tim" has been running that blog since a few years before the '07 crash, and I had started reading it in '05. You gotta put some credence in a guy who used that URL early in the 00's decade. The graphic below is from the site, and I will change to the housing bubble (2.0) topic again in a post to come, again using The Tim's data and very nice graphs.
** He's slowed down in posting a lot from his heyday before, during, and for a few years after, the housing price crash of '07. This data is for all of King County, which includes Seattle, but spreads far and wide. E-W, it's from the crest of the Cascades -Snoqualmie Pass - to the Puget Sound, and N-S, it's from Kingston and just N of Lake Washington to Federal Way, just NE of Tacoma.)
*** Believe it or not, I had estimated 125,000 based on a really rough calculation: 3/4 of a million people, 1/2 a million live in detached houses, and average 4 to a household. It was just luck.
**** I know that median is not the mean. If we had the mean price of detached houses, than that calculation would be more accurate. We're just ballparking it here - bear with us.
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Congressional LOCKDOWNS as standard policy
Posted On: Friday - January 8th 2021 11:47AM MST
In Topics: Humor US Feral Government
From a term heard 2 years ago only in maximum security prisons and occasionally airport terminals, but I repeat myself, LOCKDOWN is now familiar to everyday Americans. We are supposed to not be free in our movements during these prescribed periods. (Well, the start times are known well in advance, but the end times are up in the air.) It was really fun to hear of the US Senate, maybe House too(?) being placed in this LOCKDOWN state due to fear of a hundred or two unarmed Americans in THEIR House of Represntin'.
It would be great if we could expand on this Congressional LOCKDOWN policy. Perhaps Americans could LOCKDOWN the House and Senate only during important policy-making days, using the venue for more constructive activities, such as performances of the Vagina Monologues or more politically correct versions. The Senators and Reps could work in deeper levels of the parking garage under 10 kiloton resistant desks.
When it comes down to it, why does the Congress have to meet in person at all now? They seemed scared shitless of Black Plague 2.0, wearing their asinine face diapers and keeping the filled seats down to 1/2 or less. There’s zoom, and no, the Chinese CCP doesn’t need zoom to infiltrate – they already have via Zhou Bai Dien.
Really, it would be better for all of us if these Congresscritters “worked” from home. They would be more accessible to their constituents, provided they don’t put up concrete barriers and fencing, they’d save taxpayers’ money, and, most importantly, the wouldn’t be able to smooze and make underhanded backroom deals without fear of being hacked. Oh, yeah, and those among them that start out principled wouldn’t be prone to going native, as per Peak Stupidity‘s theory, see The Cocktail Party theory of Political Stupidity.
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Will America be looted by China? - Part 1: Intro.
Posted On: Friday - January 8th 2021 9:48AM MST
In Topics: China Economics The Future The Neocons
Until recently, Peak Stupidity has maintained a "live and let live" attitude about the superpower nation China. With a decent amount of first-hand information, much of it obtained in that country, we have written of the good and the bad since this blog's beginning > 4 years back. During the early stage of the American portion of the Kung Flu PanicFest, one can read about our attitude in America v. China. Sure, we have to get back to reasonably fair trade dealings for America, but it seemed that it ought to be pretty peaceful between us.
There were some pundits/politicians up in arms about the spread of the Kung Flu from that land, putting blame on that country for that. In Hate the Bat, not the Chinaman, one can read that Peak Stupidity doesn't agree. This is another of a long series of bad bugs out of the Orient, whether due to bad Q/A at a lab, or those "wet markets" in which diseases first get from animals to humans. Either way, blame can be placed on lax control of our borders/entry points, but I never saw it as a reason to hate or even oppose the country of China.
Peak Stupidity's sanguine attitude about the place has been changing as of late. The first problem with China is their shift toward and Orwellian society from what was (seen first-hand) the Wild, Wild, East, a decade and a half ago. For more on this, see Dashed high-hopes for China Part 1 and Part 2. China should no longer be considered anyone's bug-out location, unless he really, really LUVS Big Brother.
OK, still, let them do that Big Brother shit over there, and we'll just not emulate them, as pundits all around tell us we should. That's be fine with me.
I'm also not any kind of Neocon, so I don't see China as a military enemy. (See, the left has it's "the Russians, the Russians!", like it's 1955, and the right (of sorts) has it's "the Chinese are going to take Hong Kong, then Taiwan", capturing all those OTHER CHINESE PEOPLE!" My feeling about it is: So what? America is way beyond broke, what, at $27,000,000,000,000 right now, but that's not including unfounded obligations (your Social Security money they tricked you out of) and the budget problems of individual Americans and families.
We've got trade deficits with about everyone in the Orient. Even those poorer countries, Viet Nam for instance, are manufacturing for China now, with the Chinese getting the big profits. Why in the hell should we keep up Cold War protection agreements with places that kick our ass economics? They are one sided, at that. Would Taiwan be expected to help us fight the Chinese if it ever did come to a shooting war? Ha! I doubt that's even written into the deal. Oh, and regarding Hong Kong, in particular, they have lost lots of cultural ties with the British who installed the rule of law in the place, so screw 'em whatever happens (see Big Protest in Little China.) Oh, and while we're at it, get those 25,000 soldiers, sailers, and airman who've been in Korea for 67 years - no, not the same guys! - and use them at the Mexican border.
The Chinese are all over Africa, to exploit its huge amount resources, and I see nothing wrong with that either, as the natives are not going to every do anything constructive with it by themselves. We could be jealous that "hey, we should have control, like we did for half of the 20th century". We're not 1950s America though. Secondly, regarding Africa, American and all the Western Euro countries have been cursed out by the Africans for half a century, since they all left upon request, for this colonialism. Let the Chinese give it a go. I doubt the Africans are going to like it any better in the long run, so let's just stay here and enjoy that entertainment.
OK, so what's the problem? Can we let China do it's new Totalitarian thing, while we do our thing, which is really going to have to be a second American Revolution, the way things look right now?
Here is the big problem, and this is even beyond what I think is the smaller problem of China exerting it's cultural influence throughout the world*: It's the economy, stupid. China's threat to the US is economic, not so much military. President Trump may have helped just a little on the trade imbalance, but Big Biz wants to make money in China, not here, and this deficit is still huge. Each excess dollar that gets sent to China is money that the Chinese can use to BUY UP THIS COUNTRY.
In our Part 3 of the There's a lot of ruin in a Nation series**, we did a quick calculation on how much US farmland the Chinese could buy with $2 Trillion of our money. A back-o-the-envelope calculation says pretty much all. I'll put more calculations in a subsequent post, along with an explanation about why this is not just stoppable by law.
One thing I personally did not pay any attention to during the 1990s, even with my perusing the Wall Street Journal during the latter part of that decade, was the looting of Russia by the American finance crowd. To me, this period just after we'd won the Cold War (the external one) was a time for gloating. (Wait, is that even in Ecclesiastes, or at least the Byrds song?) I didn't care what happened to the place. Yet, I've read lots in the last 5 years (thanks, Ron Unz, for some of this), about how Russian companies were just broken up for the cash for the equipment and materials. A friend who'd done a lot of traveling during the 1990s told me how he met a Russian on the plane to Moscow who told me about his factory being bought up for less than the steel inventory was worth.
Could that all happen to America? It's not possible during good economic times. It may not be during rough economic times if we were still unified politically. Both are not the case now.
I will break up the rest into these parts:
- Housing
- Manufacturing assets
- Land
OK, with this China posting, and plenty of down-home turmoil about to happen with a Feral Government to consist of a Blue-squad Executive branch and both-house Legislative branch, we've got plenty on our plate. I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer or anything, but ...
* I won't get more into this, as it's discussed in Part 4 of our review of We Have Been Harmonized.
** See Part 1 and Part 2. The title was lifted from the OTHER Adam Smith.
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Patriots Breach the Senate!
Posted On: Wednesday - January 6th 2021 2:15PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Americans US Feral Government
I should have been there, dammit!
I am very pissed at myself right now for not being part of this historic event. For the last day and a half, I was thinking of logistics on-and-off to get to this big rally in Washington, FS. There's something in me that wants to be a physical part of the events unfolding right now in our country, rather than simply blogging about it. I learned from a friend just now that the Senate has been breached. I went on-line to see some video of the riot cops (of some sort) trying to block the big steps, and I'm sure we'll see some more of every step on the way to entering the building and scaring the shit out of "our" politicians. (They need lots more of it, too!)
This is one case in which I regret very much that I and Peak Stupidity (and you've read this before) are not about "current events", so much as just thinking/writing about trends. In this case, I only really learned anything of substance about this rally on Monday, and I did not get myself enough time to work out the logistics. As of yesterday, I thought still about being able to go, but it didn't work out. With some earlier planning, even by the weekend, it could have. I should have been there!
Your blogger here was able to make the big, no, HUGE, gun rally in Richmond, Virginia just under a year back - see There's great power in numbers - Case study: Richmond, Virginia with the pictures I took and a follow-up post Richmond gun rally - a lesson about ignoring the narrative. The plan there, by the organizers*, was simply to inform and show numbers, hence, power.
This was different. Lots of patriotic Americans have got to know by now that we are not voting our way out of this, "this" being the direction in which we've been taken for 50 years and the direction we are being further taken. This was the first purposefully big non-compliant protest that I have seen or read about. Maybe that wasn't the stated goal of the rally, but what else was? Did all these people (in the millions, perhaps), think that they were going to influence those Senators in there to just change their votes cause Electoral College, State's Rights, CheatFest? I think most knew that it'd HAVE to come to what happened today, if not today, soon enough - the sooner the better.
This is history being made today. The reason is am so angry at myself for not properly arranging to be there is not that I expect to be written into this history. I just want to be there when history is being made and on the right side of history.
Thank you, patriots, for coming out in huge numbers. Thank you, tough guys, young and old, for finally going non-compliant. Thank you all for doing what needed to be done today. Thank you for causing the US Senate to be in LOCKDOWN!
Just a minor couple of more notes: It is really great to hear of the US Senate experiencing the LOCKDOWN process, whatever the hell that means each time, after they didn't seem to care that the country has been under various random LOCKDOWNs at the whim of whomever. I noted also that the UK Yahoo site (just happened upon it at my first attempt to check this all out) had a remark about how many of the patriots didn't have face masks on. Yeah, right, that silliness can stop right now, when the SHTF. I'd have not worn one either.
Zhou Bai Dien is on the youtube right now telling Trump that he must DO SOMETHING and tell these violent people to stop. Did this same Chinese-run puppet ever say anything through 3 months of BLM thug/antifa-Commie violence and destruction? He just said something about "rule of law". Every single line is hypocritical BS made with this soft sensitive tone he's got right now. Haha, fuck you, Biden. Karma's a bitch! We're just getting started, and I want in next time.
PS: The reason there was no posting yesterday is that my thoughts werre still about this rally. I'd forgotten it by the time my friend called, at which time I'd just started a post about China. I'd never had an urgent one to write like this before.
* They'd been having these rallies that same time yearly for a long time, but this one was more specifically about the latest out of their traitorous Virginia legislators involving "red flag" laws and such. That's what happens when your state "turns blue", and the latter is what happens when you let anyone and everyone come into your country.
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Site Note: SSL certification in progress, geeks at work
Posted On: Monday - January 4th 2021 8:31PM MST
In Topics: Websites
OK, we've been throught this saga here at Peak Stupidity before, 3 months back. It's a Secure Sockets Layer thing.. you wouldn't wanna understand, honestly*.
The reason I am a tad worried is that 2 months ago I ran into problems with this SSL deally because I apparently had never "installed" the certificate in October correctly, having not completed the very last step per the helpful dude at our hosting outfit. He did it for me, but I did not ever get what I'd missed.
Now, I'm back to that step, having followed my notes and even added a bit more for next time. (I am using free SSL certificates** from the pretty helpful ZeroSSL site that are good for 3 months. Oh, and I have to keep downloading a new trial version of WinZip each time too, haha.)
I wrote "installed" in quotes, because the terminology is the problem here. Things get downloaded - I get that. After that I can't tell the difference between "installed", "active" and other terms like that, because none of these represent any reality to me. What this reminds me of is a long time ago being told that our company was going to "port" the database from SQLserver to Oracle. OK?? Was there a big cable that they woud just hook up to one server and the other and open a valve, OK, a gang of switches? That's what I envisioned because, damn, how the hell to you get "port" from "change over the code"? The computer folks do a lot of this misuse of wording, and I think they like taking terms from the engineering world.
OK, whatever, but I am NOT SURE that this site will work the day after tomorrow yet, because I have not done any new steps. Per the instructions, I'm finished. I will put a call into my homey over there at Maggie's Server Farm and hopefully get this straight.
It the site is down on Wednesday, you may be relieved to know it's not the Deep State or Zuckerburg that done it. I only wish Peak Stupidity was big enough to have these types hate our guts. Hell, we can't even get on the $PLC Hate List! Who do you have to know on this internet, anyway?
* No, really, I had a number of commenters with great suggestions last time, and even the unanswered one of "do I really need this crap?" I swear the site wasn't going to work without it before, but I'm just going with the flow now on this.
** Free, yeah, it ain't like they are anything real or something, so I don't feel at all a cheapskate about it.
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New Years New Yorker - WE! GET! THIS! ONE!
Posted On: Monday - January 4th 2021 8:01PM MST
In Topics: Humor
I've picked up the New Yorker magazine a few times back in the day. They have these one-panel cartoons that people don't get. I'm not sure you have to get the articles either, you just have to get the magazine ... to lay out on the coffee table ... it's a status thing - you people west of the Hudson wouldn't understand ...
In the Intro section of his latest Radio Derb podcast (I just read the transcript), John Derbyshire brought up this old cartoon from The New Yorker. Yes, I GET one of them! I'm somebody now!
That IS a good one, unless you are under 35 or so. "Like, what's a check? I don't get it. This isn't funny at all. I agree with Elaine Benis." "Like, who's Elaine Benis?"
Elaine on Seinfeld goes into the offices of The New Yorker to pin this guy down on what's funny about the cartoon. She thought that just maybe she was missing the joke:
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ClusterFuck Nation with some predictions for a lovely '21
Posted On: Monday - January 4th 2021 3:04PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Websites Trump Pundits Dead/Ex- Presidents
... just lovely. Commenter E.H. Hail of the Hail To You blog pasted a link in a comment here to Mr. Jason Kunstler's blog with a very long* post of predictions for 2021. Sorry for the cussword in the title - I try to avoid that, but it's in his URL after all, and it's almost as good a blog name as Peak Stupidity.
After a quick intro., the blogger starts off with predictions of political happenings in the short term, as Jan 6th (the date for the voting by our electors) goes by. Just as Mr. Hail noted in his comment from his reading of Mr. Kunstler's post's comments, I got the impression from this portion about President Trump's possible getting satisfaction and winning this re-election, the putting of the Deep State back into its place, arrests of perpetrators of the recent witch hunt against Trump, etc. as a wish list rather than a prediction.
I really like an optimist, so don't get me wrong. I liked blogger Kunstler in the beginning of this post. It's just that, nah, none of that's going to happen. I'm sorry. I'd like to believe half of that. Upon looking at the writer's picture just now, I see he wasn't born yesterday. Maybe he hasn't been following politics as long as this blogger. Otherwise, I don't see how he wouldn't have noticed that a) there's no real rule of law on the high political level in the country and b) States' Rights is ancient history. Even the rights that have as yet been officially still left to the States, the complicated (for a reason) election process, as this example, are NEVER made use of by the States. As Peak Stupidity has noted numerous times, when Big Fed says "jump", State officials say "high high, Sir?!" (Much of the blame for that can be chalked up to the stupidity of the ratification of Amendment XVI, BTW - see also our posts Amendment XVI - Part 2 and Amendment XVI - Part 3.)
Mr. Kunstler gives Donald Trump a lot of credit in his hopes for the near future that I just can't give Mr. Trump credit for. There's no 4-D chess going on. If he were trying to play it, he'd be playing with the black queen and black rooks, bishops, and knights that HE HIRED as the white king!
As for the rest of the post (of which I admit I just skimmed (saving for later, through the last 1/3 of to look for anything about China, I'll say this.
1) I don't agree completely with the Mr. Kunstler's take on oil and the American production thereof, with it being the driver for the economic turmoils of this century. I see this view as seeing cause & effect backwards.
2) I almost had more criticism of everything econ related, thinking "where is any mention of China in here?" However, China is discussed later down in relation to the US economy and Trump, and I think the blogger does a fine job with that.
3) I really like James Kunstler's prepper mindset. However, as he discusses (this is fairly near the beginning) his predictions regarding the American economy going back toward "let's get small", I think he's missing one thing: China. Peak Stupidity has a post coming on this, but let me foreshadow it with this. Mr. Kunstler has discussed his prediction of how the American economy will change, as if we exist in a vacuum. With businesses, equipment (and maybe land too?) selling for pennies on the dollar, does he not see who may buy up this country of ours? Yeah, China can plunder this place as if it's a fire sale** at a wet market in Canton. American financial types did the same to Russia in the 1990s (and there's yet ANOTHER post long-time coming). Our future may not be so much up so us, Americans, as this blogger seems to think it is.
Therefore, I see the financial reset/prepper pep talk portion of the essay as another piece of wishful thinking. Believe me, I like those ideas, but I'm not at all optimistic that outside influences will let Americans go in that direction.
4) There's no mention of large-scale immigration and deteriorating race relations in the post. (If I missed it in my skimming of the final ~1/3 or so, let me know.) These two issues have had major influence on America's economic and political state, and they will after whatever type financial reset occurs, and yes, there will be one.
In summary, I hope our readers here have the time to read the interesting forecast-for-2021 essay on the ClusterFuck Nation blog. Were I Siskel or Ebert, I'd call it a "feel-good" essay. Thanks, Mr. Hail, for the recommendation.
* 7,000 words, per Mr. Hail. Give yourself an hour.
** Mr. Kunstler used the idiom "Chinese Fire Drill", while I'm using "Fire Sale to the Chinese". You'll never run out of good idioms.
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[UPDATED 01/06:] Corrected Mr. Kunstler's name 8 times. Really, that was not intended to be a slur, though it sure would be a good one. (would have left it in, if I din't like this guy) Thank you, Commenter Hail.
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Comments (6)
Our Lips are Sealed
Posted On: Saturday - January 2nd 2021 5:58PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor Kung Flu Stupidity
In that post a few days back about Millennial angst(?) at the auto parts store, I mentioned the fact, well, maybe it's opinion, that it's often hard to get what people are saying through these face diapers. That's especially true with the cloth ones. No, my hearing is pretty good. 120 decibel rock music hasn't phased me a bit over the years, so ... it's not me, it's them!
I mentioned trying to read the lips of the woman, that were trying to push through the mask. I don't know if that's really the way to go, learning lip reading to get by in this panicky age. Upon thinking about it, the tongue position is probably critical - that's what she said - and furthermore, the face masks probably block small details that actual lip readers would need to see.
I'm particularly talking about the deaf, of course. For those only somewhat hard of hearing, I believe seeing faces has got to help with conversation. It could have been the noise in the background, or his way of speaking through another of those thicker cloth masks, but I had to ask a guy to pull the mask off so I could understand recently. That was after asking him twice already to repeat the last part. Was it really that I could see his lips better? Communication is important in some lines of work, and it is suffering right now due to this BS!
I'll tell you what though, lip reading would really be a great skill to have, face diapers or no face diapers. There was a scene in The Mechanic where the main character Charles Bronson read someone's lips from way outside of hearing distance in a park. (I tried to find the scene on youtube, but no joy.) It was an important piece of info. Mr. Bronson got too, like whether the guy was out to kill him or something, as I recall from long ago.
George Castanza of Seinfeld found a very good use for the lip reading skills of Jerry's girlfriend-for-the-show in this, one of the funniest episodes ever. Please take the < 5 minutes for this one:
(In this case, the small detail missed with the lip reading was just one consonant. It could happen to anybody!)
Just to fit in with the title, and for a fun end to the week, Peak Stupidity presents The Go-Go's from way almost 4 decades ago. They sure were having fun in this video, and the wiki says that Belinda Carlisle was still under the impression that the music video fad was nothing important...
Damn, this song has a great bass line! It's simple, but it's good, and LOUD. I can't believe I listened to this on a tablet speaker. It's time to get a real stereo again.
I looked all around the dBase and could not find any posts with the Go-Go's and Our Lips are Sealed. This song, from their 1981 album Beauty and the Beat, was written by Jane Wiedin. I really haven't put in any music from those fun girl bands of the 1980s - to me, that means this band, The Bangles and Bananarama.
The Go-Go's:
Belinda Carlisle – lead vocals
Charlotte Caffey – lead guitar, keyboards, backing vocals
Gina Schock – drums, percussion
Kathy Valentine – bass guitar, guitar, backing vocals
Jane Wiedlin – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Comments (22)
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!
Posted On: Saturday - January 2nd 2021 11:22AM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Pundits Media Stupidity Race/Genetics Anarcho-tyranny
I'm recycling the Godfather-reference title here, as I see that Peak Stupidity already had a post titled Just when I thought I was out, SHE! PULLS! ME! BACK! IN! three years ago. (That one was about Ann Coulter's writing, and yes, I did make one joke from the title but could have done better, something about "that's what she said", I guess.) Wait a minute, we had the exact same title, except with the 2nd line not in the title itself, already, with the Godfather scene - here.
This time, I am referring to a couple of bloggers, the two best on the unz.com site by far. In that New Years post yesterday, I wrote that I've vowed to spend less time on that site. Today, I want to give two examples of why it's hard to quit.
Yeah, Steve Sailer has been far overly worried about the Kung Flu this past 9 months, and this has reduced my enjoyment of his blog to some degree. He only occasionally writes anything about the cost of this PanicFest to the economy and Americans in general. As a numbers guy, at least regarding social phenomenon, this ought to be right in his wheelhouse. I never did think of Mr. Sailer as a great principled Constitutionalist to begin with though.
The reason Steve Sailer always pulls me back in to his writing is that he comes up with posts like his What Can be Learned from Differing Rates of Suicide Among Groups? of 3 days back. Even the title is sarcastic, as he knows damn well that the writers of this (another) NY Times article aren't going to learn anything, at least not if it's anything that should make us care about the White Man.
Whites have higher rates of suicide than Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks. It's lower only compared to Indians (feather-type/casino style, still haven't found a good ASCII symbol, sorry.) Yet, the NY Times writer, one Austin Frakt, doesn't want to learn anything that might help here. As usual, in the most twisted fashion, which is probably the only way that works, that writer puts the blame on racism against the black people, who after all, have the lowest suicide rates.
Steve Sailer "fisks"* Frakt handily, and it's enjoyable to read. Mr. Sailer likes to speculate on root causes of social phenomena (often with some numbers to back his ideas up), and he keeps his usual sense of humor in there:
Maybe blacks have low suicide rates because they externalize more than they internalize, as seen in their having a homicide rate 8.2 times as high as nonblacks in 2019? If somebody disses you, rather than dwell on what’s wrong with you that that person said something so unkind about you, you go get your Glock and start firing into the crowd of people eating BBQ in the general direction of your disser, well, that apparently relieves a lot of stress.Heh! Yeah, see, this is why I go back to his blog often. Mr. Sailer comes close, but being a civil and, sometimes I think, naive guy, he doesn't get to the simple fact of THEY HATE US!
I've already noted that in order to not be bombarded with bullshit from these NY Times/ Washington Post / Atlantic blowhards, one can simply not subscribe and not click. However, I appreciate Mr. Sailer's doing the reading so we don't have to. His writing gets read all around the political sphere, from what I read about occasionally, so maybe he can red-pill some people.
Speaking of those red pills:
Now, between these two bloggers, and among the COMPLETE set of all writers on the unz.com site that I've ever read, this Audacious Epigone comes across at the most common sensical and level-headed**. I haven't mentioned him that many times on this blog though.
Mr. "Epigone"'s (hey, what the hell kind of name is that anyway, Sicilian?) big feature is to give us numbers, usually in graphical form, of results from polling of all sorts regarding political and social views in America***. My one problem with many of the posts on his blog is that I just think many polls are done with worthless questions. Your blogger here has just recently been polled (no not poled, as in by the IRS or something, and, yes, I used that joke too already, thankyouverymuch). There's also the cases in which I don't believe respondents will necessarily be that truthful.
With those concerns in mind, I keep up with the Audacious Epigone's blog regularly. He keeps it quick, with a nice thoughtful analysis of why the opinions are what they are. I will say that the commenters under the blog, many overlapping or overflowing from the iSteve blog, are very polite and civil, as Mr. Epigone made it clear he wanted long ago. I still like better the worldly knowledge and expertise that I see in the iSteve threads, along with the digressions on music, etc. (though not the Hollywood stuff). There are a few consistent Socialist commenters under AE, but one can put up with them, as they are very civil in their idealogical failings.
Not all of AE's posts have polling data and bar graphs though. To get back to the article, the blurb of which is shown above, 2020 Red Pill Review, this is some of AE's best stuff.
I guess I like the blog because I happen to agree with that blogger's political opinion on almost everything, especially regarding what Peak Stupidity calls the Global Financial Stupidity. In this post, Mr. Epigone lists the 3 biggies of obvious examples of total hypocrisy in our political class from 2020:
1) The obvious Lyin' Press's transition to nothing but a "lapdog" instead of "watchdog" (Mr. AE's doggie terms).
2) The blatant hypocrisy of having Black Lives Matter / Antifa-Commie errr, large peaceful protests during the summer of the Kung Flu PanicFest.
3) The election 2020 fraud.
My only argument about the post is about the "red pilling" part. This type of thing should have clued any patriotic American that THEY HATE US! Are people taking these proverbial red pills? Are they doing any good? Like a lot of medicine, medical marijuana for instance (though I would in no ways know), people can build up a tolerance after a while. Maybe these red pills were shipped over from China like everything else and are just made of rhino horn and dehydrated bat semen in a substrate of brick dust.
All this very obvious hypocrisy, and the Anarcho-Tyranny that has come with it, should have been swallowed as a red pill by any sentiment American who is not himself a party to the destruction. I'm not gonna believe these pills are working until I see crowds of millions in the streets. How much more do people need to take?
* Old, old internet term - see more in this post of ours.
** I'm even including ex-Congressman Dr. Ron Paul here. He's a great guy, and I agree with him 99%, but he never does bring up the immigration/race questions that the other guys do.
*** His favorite style of graph is having a bar graph with the usual categories of age/political leaning/race/ethicity/sex, and with nice color coding for a welcome change too! White will be white, black, black, Hispanic, brown etc. If there is Oriental, it'll be yellow. Hey, don't like it, get a tan or do that Michael Jackson thing. I don't care, but I just don't want to have to keep going back and forth to the legend - in AE's case, you usually don't even need one.
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[UPDATED 01/02, evening:] Wow, while searching for the Go-Go's (the band, to see if they'd been on here already - for next post - I found a post with the exact same "Just when I thought I was out ..." title. I sure didn't remember. The post was about the genderbender BLT-G business.
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Comments (10)
Reading InComprehension
Posted On: Friday - January 1st 2021 6:29PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Educational Stupidity
The above image is from a workbook for a 3rd-grader. It's a new year, but he's catching up on some school work from last year. We didn't make a resolution on this procrastination thing for him, as he's got a number of more high-priority resolutions.
The reason for the procrastination is perfectly understandable to me at this point. The blurb there is from a writing assignment, more than a reading assignment. With his math skills top notch, and his interest in, and understanding of, a little science satisfactory also, it's the writing that's come last for him. He seems to hate it.
It's not the handwriting, which is C- level on a good day. His spelling is pretty good, and, as I told him, "the more you read, the better you'll be at spelling." He's been putting this writing off, though.
"Hey, it's just a couple of sentences that they want. Look at me on my blog here. I think about what I want to write about, get some sentences in my head, and start writing." "No, but I can't just write about what I want." "OK, just answer the questions they've got about the thing you read." I looked at the book to help him out or at least see what the hold up was.
I saw that blurb of hifalutin Ed School brain-storming out of a Master's Thesis hypothesis. "Inferences"? Really, for a 9 year-old? Listen, I know the writer of this book spent a lot of his or the taxpayers' money on an advanced degree. You want to get your money out of this. Putting this kind of thing in the elementary school kids' books is, I'm sure, a big feather in your cap. Please, though, just STOP!
You can leave that Big Ed stuff in the book proposal, or in your resume in which you note how you used advanced teaching methods in your book, so it's simply the best, a paragon of excellence, in fact. Fine, but please don't actually put this crap in the book itself!
The first idea is for the kids to just plain READ. My kid can read very well, thank you very much. Then, since this is even more about writing, you ask questions about the passages to test both reading comprehension and writing ability. He'd have been able to accomplish that. However, when you put in this Big Ed theory of reading, or whatever it is, you just confuse even the smart ones... and their parents! I can't help my kid with this stuff. I get the terms, but I don't even WANT to think of clues and inferences. I completely understand his procrastination on this shit now. I hate it more than he does, I think.
Homeschooling looks better and better by the year and with each passing PanicFest.
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