Happy New Year!
Posted On: Friday - January 1st 2021 3:56PM MST
In Topics: Internets Holiday from Stupidity
2021 AD will be another year with plenty of stupidity to keep this site rolling in it. We've probably all heard the expressions of disparagement regarding the year 2020, as if it the greatly increased stupidity around us the past year had come from some kind of mathematical cause.
No, it's just been stupid people leading and stupid people following the former in a country with obviously not enough sanity and too much hysteria. It has gotten quite frustrating lately. The calm and sane among us can do our thing with our own families in our own neighborhoods for part of the time, or in on-line conversations on the right web-sites (hint, here ya' go!)
In the short and maybe medium-run, we'd be happier staying off these parts of the internet. The reason we stay on is often to reassure ourselves that we are the sane ones, but also because we think we may make a small difference by spreading some sanity around. I hope that is the case. We'd be pretty sad in the long run knowing there was more we could have done.
I'd written in comments here just yesterday that we don't do this New Year's resolutions in our household. That changed about 6 hours later! We'll see how this goes, but of mine I was bullied into was to spend no more than 3 hours on this blog and unz.com combined per day. The former alone would be doable. The latter thing, reading and commenting on unz, has been a growing time-suck for me for 4 years now*. The initial idea was to link to here and gets some traffic. That has worked, and I can see that a majority of commenters here are from the unz site**.
This is gonna be hard. I enjoy the commenting there, but also I have an obsession with finishing the reading of comment threads. With Steve Sailer's posts going from more like 50 or so comments in '16 (just my recollection of the approx. amount) to more like 100 each average, it takes time, man! I'll have to see how this one goes, but my wife (just one of them) has a good point. I could be doing more productive things, no doubt.
I hope to enjoy this island of sanity, along with plenty of others on the internet, with you all for a good 2021. Will it get saner than '20? (Yeah, we're gonna need a
NOTE: This mention of this advice that I was given regarding my time, should NOT IN ANY WAY be taken as advice to Peak Stupidity readers to lay off. Far from it! [PS Legal Department, working from
* It was right at 4 years back, ~ a month after the start of this blog, when I realized you didn't have to give away your life story to comment there, and I got to reading/commenting (initially just Steve Sailer, but I've branched out...)
** I can see stuff in the log files too for visitors here. I have written before, probably in an unz comment, that those Fred Reed columns really must get read a lot. If I get a comment in there with a link, it'll get quite a few hits. That's pretty much the only reason I read that exasperating guy anymore.
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Prognosis Positive
Posted On: Thursday - December 31st 2020 6:39PM MST
In Topics: Healthcare Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
(This post's title is a reference to the old TV shows Seinfeld* and addtionally The Office (American version)*, of which some kindly Chinese lady was glad to rip/burn 4 seasons for me for 2 bucks on the streets of Canton years ago.)
Your Peak Stupidity lead blogger has been pronounced "positive". However, it's not what you think.
I was called up about the fact that I’d worked closely with a guy who tested positive for the COVID a week or so before**. We were probably 4 ft. apart for 4 hours or so. No masks, no mess. Due to this fact, determined in hindsight, of course, I am supposed to stay home for 10 days, but then I’m on off time anyway. Were I not, I would get paid time off. I lamented to the HR guy that, damn, I was about to do some extra work for them, but hadn’t decided yet. Too late. (They would have paid me off.)
Now, this damn thing is costing me money! I don’t like that aspect of it at all. It's one thing for the Kung Flu to be turned into a PanicFest for political reasons and to screw up the entire small business economy of America. This time, though, it's personal! (Hmmm, this rings a bell. What US President does that remind you of?)
It wasn't that I tested positive for the COVID. I imagine I very well could, but I'll be damned if I'm going in for a test. I feel fine. Any Peak Stupidity reader of more that 9 months will know that I just don't worry about this thing, disease-wise. Politically, you know I do!
The HR guy on the phone was complimentary that I was so positive (see, positive, get it?) about the whole thing. “I’m not worried about this thing. Those bugs have probably been running in and out of me since March”, I told him.
The next morning, I thought of something else. Who knows if that guy I worked with recently gave me the COVID, as opposed to me giving him the COVID? Do either of us care? I think not.
PS: A 61 y/o friend just got over it. He had some diarrhea, a fever up to 100 F max, and said he just felt weak for a couple of days. I told him Donald Trump knocked it out in 2 days, so I should start calling him (my friend) “Sleepy REDACTED“.
PPS: Our family member in the healthcare field, a nurse to be precise, had this to tell us: There are various COVID patients on the regular floor she works on. Sometimes, they don't know that till additional symptoms come up, as doctors don't always catch it. The police for the nursing/tech staff is that, even if you test positive, you are required to come into work unless you have symptoms. So, let me get this straight... is that what people did during Black Plague 1.0? Just asking for a friend ... working in the hospital ... during a time when hysterical people are acting like we have Black Plague 2.0.
* The big reference is to the name of the fictional movie, Prognosis Negative, in the old show Seinfeld (thanks for clearing that up, commenter, Alarmist). Then there was the Office show in which Michael Scott was under the impression that a "negative" result on a skin cancer test was BAD.
** HIPPA laws say he couldn’t tell me who it was, but I narrowed it down, and he sheepishly said, “well, yeah.”
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Peak Constitutional Amendment - XXIV
Posted On: Thursday - December 31st 2020 12:25PM MST
In Topics: 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, and Amendment XXIII)
Amendment XXIV was proposed by Congress (as in voted "yea" on) in August of 1962 and ratified by January of '64. It reads as a very minor detail in the big scheme of Federal voting rules and rights, but, as usual, it's got usurpation of States' Rights written all over it. Here is the full text from our usual source, the Constitution Center site "Interactive Constitution" (yeah well, the less interaction, the better from what I've seen in hindsight):
Section 1Note first that this restriction on one specific restriction on voting only applies to elections for Federal office. Also, though you'd think the lawyers would have caught this, that bit about "other tax" makes me wonder: If you are 10 years behind on your State income tax, or your county property tax, will they let you vote from jail? Maybe they've got that covered.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.
Section 2
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This was mid-1962 to early 64, during the early stages of the increasing Civil Rites stupidity that we've all been suffering from ever since. The big legislation hadn't been passed yet. There were people pushing the stuff in the Kennedy administration, and the House and Senate were overwhelmingly Democrat, yet the spark by the usual crowd hadn't ignited in this still conservative government and people yet.
The poll tax, along with literacy tests and such, had been used in Southern States to keep the black vote down. However, as our usually helpful Interpretation Page notes, plenty of poor white people were prevented from voting too. The money we are talking about, even at the time the last States had this tax in the early 1960s, was 1 to 3 bucks, approximately $10 to $30 in today's money. The complaints about it remind me of the current complaints about a State ID (usually driver's license) being required. When you count the time down at the DMV, if you really don't drive, then I'd say the current complaint is about more money (time being money) today, though the principle of having honest voting overrides that argument*.
I don't think the poll tax was any big burden. As I started to note above, the particular interpretation page on that site for Amendment XXIV is not your usually unbiased factual information. Of course, they had to get a black woman, as I guess Amendment XXIV was another "black thing", really poor (or obstinate) white people notwithstanding. There are different writers for these pages, but this time they've got this Deborah Archer who is "Professor Law and Director of the Racial Justice Project at New York University Law School". Yes, [sic] in her freaking bio! The other writer, one Derek Muller, with his bio including that missing "of", is likely there to check her work on the legal stuff and the history**.
It would have been nice to see more discussion without the racial angle, as this is an issue to think about. States' rights aside for a minute, don't we want voters who can make good, informed decisions or with some skin in the game? Maybe a poll tax is not the way to go about this, but then then I see these concerns being a farce when I read about the subsequent (1965) Supreme Court decision to overrule Virginia's provision for an alternate provision for those not wanting to pay that poll tax, after this Constitutional Amendment had been ratified. This was covered in that interpretation page, but I'll take this from the wiki page on the 24th Amendment.
The state of Virginia accommodated the amendment by providing an "escape clause" to the poll tax. In lieu of paying the poll tax, a prospective voter could file paperwork to gain a certificate establishing a place of residence in Virginia. The papers would have to be filed six months in advance of voting, and the voter had to provide a copy of that certificate at the time of voting. This measure was expected to decrease the number of legal voters. In the 1965 Supreme Court decision Harman v. Forssenius, the Court unanimously found such measures unconstitutional. It declared that for federal elections, "the poll tax is abolished absolutely as a prerequisite to voting, and no equivalent or milder substitute may be imposed."Whaaa? This decision was bullshit. I could see that Virginia was not allowed to have the poll tax, per the new Law of the Land. Fine, but could they have just had the 6-month residency requirement for everyone?***
Our Founders did not want everyone to be able to vote. They also wanted the power to determine who can vote and who can't up to the States. It took how many, let's see, XIV, XV, XIX, 3 so far, and (spoiler alert) 1 more that we haven't discussed, so 4 Amendments to force the States to change their ways. The Feds absolutely do not like this "experiments in democracy" deal that the various States are supposed to be part of. If you don't like the poll tax, quite understandable, then work to change it in your State, rather than running to tattle-tale to Uncle Sam. Failing that, move! OK, that alone would probably be not enough to get 99.9% of Americans to move, so I suppose it's not THAT important compared to things that are better about your State.
We at Peak Stupidity are big State's Rights advocates, OK, mourners, so, again, we are not happy with Amendment XXIV. Note the way it's been
* As a Libertarian, I'm all about not needing to show any "steeenking ID" to the cops, for example, but then you could just not vote, in that case or get some other type.
** I'm sorry, but ever since Affirmative Action was in place (OK, my whole life), I will just have to assume that AA types are not the brightest in the class or office. Yeah, some are, but how am I gonna know that, with AA in place?
*** It seems like a no-brainer to have just disallowed the poll tax wording period, and taken out the phrasing for the residency requirement to be in lieu, and made it THE requirement. Nope, but that wasn't the real intention here (it was 1965, you understand ...). From this CaseLaw page on Harman v. Forssenius, which one doesn't need a law degree to read, we read from the decision:
Reaching the merits, the District Court held the certificate of residence requirement invalid as an additional "qualification" imposed solely upon federal voters in violation of Art. I, 2, and the Seventeenth Amendment.How so? Maybe I do need to be a lawyer...
2 (a) The poll tax is abolished absolutely as a prerequisite to voting in federal elections, and no equivalent or milder substitute may be imposed. P. 542.[My bolding] The residency requirement in no way violates Amendment XXIV, but SCOTUS has ruled! So let it be, cough, cough, this is bullshit, cough, written, so let it be done.
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Collapse of the Service Economy - Part 4
Posted On: Wednesday - December 30th 2020 8:28PM MST
In Topics: Economics Kung Flu Stupidity
(Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)
The last 3 posts on the service economy really didn't go along with the title, as I had initial intended to write just one post (yeah, that happens a lot here). The title is good for this conclusion though.
We all have seen small service businesses close down around us. That is, the restaurants and bars in which those aforementioned folks were selling each other, and me too, occasionally those craft beers and gourmet burgers. It's hard to tell which ones will ever re-open. I can tell you that 3 favorites, one only a mile away from us, and 2 of the most favorites in our relatives' hometown are close for good. I'm just thinking of myself here (and a family member who I knew would be just devastated about 1 of them, his favorite), I guess, but this really pisses me off now. I'm sure the readers here have their own hangouts in mind that are gone for good.
Restaurants and bars aside, hotels and motels are another big area of the economy for which the elites can't outsource the whole deal. Yes, they can import the cheap labor of course, oh, and the owners - looking at you, Mr. Patel, and you Mr. Patel, and ... x 10,000. I've been traveling just as much as before this whole Kung Flu PanicFest, and I talk to the managers of hotels in the lobbies about all this.
It's not good at all. My eyes tell me that these places, whether downtown hotels or airport types, are still pretty empty, but managers tell me numbers like 10% to 40% with only a few special nights when they get up to over 50%. In the past, many were sold out most weekends or special days. I'd hear from the people at the desk that around 30-35% occupancy rates are needed to break even, but for "full service" hotels, those with restaurants inside, the number is closer to 50%.
I am not in the hotel business, mind you, so these numbers are not comprehensive. However, on the Statista website here I found the graph shown below. In this Trip Savvy article, the breakeven number is given as 37.5%, close to what I've been told.
Here's the big number I've heard, but it's one that I haven't been able to find good numbers on on the web yet: I've been told by a few people in the business that 60-something percent of hotels in the country may close for good!
Is there something about the service industry that makes it more prone to a government/media panic-induced collapse? In this case, of course, the fact that the big hysteria is about a contagious disease makes it obvious why the service industry has been beaten down. Even with some other big bad event (or supposed one) though, the service industry, specifically hospitality (food/beverages/lodging) is bound to take the biggest hit, as it provides services that we don't absolutely need. I suppose accounting, vehicle repair work, and those services that go along with production are left alone, as the production of goods is more important.
Then, there are the F.I.R.E. "industries". They are not particularly necessary, but yet, they have been left alone, or at least still making money (I read that "E" as standing for Education.) You know, I meant to mention this, so I'll stick it in yet another post.
This Service Economy that was supposed to well serve Americans after we shipped off all that manufacturing might has collapsed due to this Kung Flu Infotainment Panic-Fest. It's pretty much all we had left, so now, as the bored kids say, "what do we do??"
Comments (6)
Millennials - Calm the Hell Down!
Posted On: Wednesday - December 30th 2020 1:59PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Curmudgeonry Muh Generation
Here I was, with another post in mind for this morning, along with the final part of the series on the service economy. I couldn't quite remember what the 1st post was to be, though I would run back into the idea later, I'm sure. Well, I just go to the auto parts store (could be anywhere, though), and BINGO! There's a post! There's another post!
The image above is from our post from 2 summers called Are the Millennials Retarded?. I can use this because (a) again, Millennials and (b) same auto parts store. Now, before any younger readers get bent out of shape, let me say that the title of that last post was facetious and that I agree with the one comment (that's wasn't mine) under that post that noted we need to all stick together. No, when I ever, if ever, get to writing my Strauss & Howe Generations/The Fourth Turning book review, my main point will be that you can't paint any whole generation with one broad brush regarding their attitudes and personalities.
It's just ... man, a lot of the young people do get offended SO easily by things that are just, I dunno, trying to do business or trying to talk normally to get things done. The point of my trip to replace a part of some Harbor Freight POCMC could be another quick post, but anyway, I was at the auto parts store, after checking in at the bicycle store, to at least find out if this was a part anyone could get anywhere. It's got a bike-pump head on one end, but male pipe threads on the other.
The thing is, just asking anyone at the store about this would be a waste of everyone's time. I needed the guy (oh, it could be a woman, 1 in 1000 maybe...) who could simply answer the question in a few seconds. I've written before that I have no problem when frustrated just waiting for the one white guy (he does commercial sales, but will help time permitting, and he knows his shit). I've written that I even asked specifically "can I wait and talk to a white guy, please" one time.
Well, it was one black guy who pointed to another black guy who supposedly knew his stuff. Fine. While waiting for the one guy, a woman clerk with a cloth mask on mouthed the words that I think were "can I help you?", but a) that's bad English, so that couldn't be what she said and b) between the plexiglass and that cloth mask, I couldn't hear much of it, and I'm still not a lip reader*.
"I'm waiting for that dude for a question. The guy there said he's supposed to know the store really well." That was a simple statement. No offense was intended. I just wanted to not waste time in there. Per her face mask, with the lips showing through and making different patterns, the woman had some little problem with this. It was probably about her being an employee and "we all know what we're doing", blah, blah. This was not something to be looked up on the computer though, or I'd have been fine getting her to help.
Why should I have to explain myself to this easily offended young lady? We are trying to get things done, and, yeah, I want to talk to THAT guy. I think I just told her "take it easy. It's going to be OK."
I can't deal with this business of being so quick to take offense. It's not all personal, but I guess these people learn this way in school. I can't deal with it very well.
Oh, and the guy went to the right place, we looked around, and nope, they don't have the part.
* There, see, now there's another post. Should we all become lip readers to help fight the COVID-one-niner?
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Collapse of the Service Economy - Part 3
Posted On: Tuesday - December 29th 2020 8:21PM MST
In Topics: History Economics US Feral Government
(Continued from part 1 and part 2)
To wrap up a little bit, what I've concluded for myself (may be quite obvious to others) is that an economic entity cannot run a sustainable economy based on nothing but a domestic service industry. Back 25 - 30 years ago, when the idea of this wonderful service economy that America would become (see, no messy factories, no smoke, no grimy hands) was pushed, these economists and politicians thought we could be the service industry for the world, perhaps thinking of the way we'd been the manufacturing economy for much of the 1st world before. A guy at the coffee shop just this morning mentioned ex-President Clinton's Secretary of Labor with his 1991 book The Work of Nations, which extolled the idea (per coffeeshop guy, who is a decent honest, conservative, pro-White, intellectual).
This wasn't about just making each other gourmet burgers and craft beer. Americans still made all the important advances in computer software, computer networking, and had intellectual capital that still beat the rest of the world. We could get the messy, polluting manufacturing out of here and the same people could work in nice clean offices, OK, cubicles now, making spreadsheets, and filing paperwork electronically. Additionally, engineers could do their portion of the production here at home while things got made to our specs in Mexico and, a bit later, China.
Did anyone worry about the idea of these other countries picking up the clerical, computer, and engineering work themselves? I could see no thought about the internet changing everything within a decade, as I don't have that kind of foresight either. (I thought that's what some of these people were paid for though...)
Maybe some of the folks pushing this stuff didn't care either way. The Globalists were going to come out fine on this. I can remember having a discussion with a friend about all the work going on in China back in 1996, and I didn't get it. He did. However, I do know that I was not comfortable with the idea of the US converting to having a service economy.
This was in Winter of 1992. The guy pictured at the top is former Massachusetts congressman/Senator Paul Tsongas. He was one of the many (I recall 5 or so well in the running) running for the D-squad Presidential nomination in that year. I'd already had enough of George H.W. Bush for breaking his "no new taxes" pledge. He'd told us to read his lips even - guess I'm not a good lip reader Also, he'd pandered in Spanish in the previous election, turning me off long before anyway.
Mr. Tsongas was one of the old-time D's, I guess, though I didn't think about this stuff. I just knew that here was one guy in the whole campaign that brought up this stuff about keeping manufacturing here. I volunteered to help in the primary campaign in my State. All I ended up doing, as I recall now, 28 years after, is helping by driving around a NY Times reporter from the nice hotel to the local manufacturing plant where candidate Tsongas would have a press conference.*
I ended up about 6 ft. from Mr. Tsongas as the small press conference went on inside the factory. I even had a question to ask him, probably about this service economy idea which he was there to argue against. It wasn't a lack of courage to speak up, but I just thought that, as a campaign helper, it wasn't part of the deal. I kind of regret that I didn't speak up. The press conference ended well, but that campaign, as anyone could remember or look up, ended pretty soon after. It was the S. Carolina primary which put Bill Clinton, just another Globalist, up to the top of the pack.
By March 19th, Paul Tsongas was out of the campaign. He died in 1997 of the lymphoma that he had beaten off once back in 1983. Then, Ross Perot had come on the scene, also telling us to back off on this outsourcing so we would avoid that "giant sucking sound" into Mexico. During the summer of that year, he may have been "deep stated" as we wondered a few years back. Mr. Perot died just last summer.
Back in the day, there were some serious politicians who cared about Americans. Recently, we've just had the one. (Well, he cares about Americans. Serious? Not so much.) This is not going well.
* OK, now the memory gets pretty good, as I remember I drove the big-media young lady around in my muscle car with the rebel flag front license plate. While we talked a bit about politics, for my amusement I mentioned that, "yeah, and that David Duke fellow may be the guy to vote for too, I dunno." This young white gray lady reporter didn't seem amused in the least!
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Important Kung Flu Crisis news- direct from the CCP
Posted On: Tuesday - December 29th 2020 2:52PM MST
In Topics: Commies Pundits China
The screenshot above comes from my China source and is off of the ubiquitous WeChat app. The screenshot is a bit blurry and hard for me to read... especially because I'll be damned if I'm gonna learn 4,000 multiple-squiggly-lined characters just to know what the hell is going on in that place.
Here's what this piece of CCP news says though: Apparently 54 million* or so Americans are short of food and have been waiting in lines, like a bunch of ghetto-dwellers outside the COVID testing center with the free chicken dinners, for food. We are undernourshed, from the ill effects of our mishandling of the Kung Flu, says the intrepid investigative reporter of the CCP. This is from the crowd that has been importing and rationing pork due to the great Porcine Crisis of '19. (See also our follow-up on the rationing - The People's Pig.)
As we discussed in Part 2 of our review of Kai Strittmatter's We Have Been Harmonized, the President-for-life-per-constitutional-revision Xi JinPing has gone full Totalitarian on the Chinese people. (Never, never, go full Totalitarian! ... oops, gonna have to say that more quietly in the future...) As all students of history should know, the Totalitarianism usually doesn't stay domestic forever. If you want the people to remain in fear, you need to create those external enemies. China has a very good reason to see President Trump and America as the mortal bogeyman, errr enemy, of the Middle Kingdon. See, we are reneging on our deal to give away all manufacturing and engineering know-how to China for nothing. We have been reneging on the deal we had to let in military and industrial spies in on demand, and to educate Chinese visiting scholars and graduate students at the expense of American kids, all these in return for that endless supply of Cheap China-made Crap. They say it's all well worth it, so ... You are a very, bad, bad, country, America.
Where were we here, oh, yeah, well the Xi-led CCP that runs the whole place is now putting out propoganda, so that the Chinese people will understand how bad we suck. We here all happen to know that lots of Americans may be fed on the wrong stuff, but they surely do not lack for calories.**
We can all treat this propaganda with a grain of salt, or should, anyway. That's when I run into articles by people like the high-IQ Ron Unz himself, who are the biggest skeptics in the world when it comes to American political history, but will believe everything they read out of China. Hey, Ron Unz, you've got your American Pravda series, and good on you for all that reading and writing. but why would you think there wouldn't be any propaganda out of the Totalitarian Chinsese Communist Party? I'll have to drop this into a Ron Unz thread some time. Really, the guy can get pretty reasonable at times, and he TRIES to be fair. However his open-mindedness to an extreme degree coupled with his anti-all-things-American attitude make him come across like a naive imbecile at other times.
Don't be a Ron Unz. Don't believe everything you read, as my Dad told me long ago. I think it was "believe 1/2 of what you read and 1/4 of what you hear", to be precise. The numbers have probably only gone down since then.
* My China source told me the number, and I see where the blurry screen shot makes sense. The Chinese numbering system is simpler than others when it comes to counting - there is no "teen" or "twenty/thirty/forty" just a literal translation of 35 as "three ten, five", for example. It's easy in that sense. However, they don't put the commas for the big numbers every thousand-fold, but every 10,000-fold, and the wording goes along with that. One "wan"(?) is 10,000, and then 10,000 wan is one "yi" (pronounced just "eee"), meaning 100 million. The screen shot with what looks like a dash, means 5,400 wan which is the 54 million I was told.
** That's when I knew the Gallup poll I was a respondent to recently was getting stupid in a hurry, when I was asked that series of questions about people I know not getting enough food.
Comments (5)
Collapse of the Service Economy - Part 2
Posted On: Monday - December 28th 2020 3:38PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Economics
The comments in Part 1 went along with what I'd been asking myself while thinking about the subject, "what is wealth creation, exactly?" and "is service wealth creation?" Mr. Blanc's concise comment was pretty much what I want to continue with here.
It's hard to picture a pure service economy. Though America has moved from a mostly production economy, at least in terms of GDP*, to a mostly service economy over the last 3-4 decades, we're not a pure service economy. The big and successful agricultural industry in this country, that supplies the gourmet burger and craft beer joints from our example, is a big creator of wealth via production. So is residential construction, as we depict in the image above.
Was the transition to a service economy just a side effect of the fact that the elites wanted to make more money by outsourcing any industries that could be outsourced? Agriculture and residential construction is impossible to outsource, well, the latter only until you've got everyone living in
I'll get back to the last point in the next post, but let me also mention immigration here. If you can't outsource the work to save money, you can always flood the market with labor ... as long as the people don't rise up about it, or anything ... which barely started to happen about 20 years too late (maybe 25, when you think of VDare's Peter Brimelow's book Alien Nation having been written in 1995) and is not "taking", so to speak, anyway, as we have recently noted.
The low pay levels in the service industry, not nearly keeping up with inflation, are largely due to immigration having flooded the market with labor. One can see that this also has happened in a big way in the two production-economy industries we've just mentioned, agriculture and residential construction. One of the guys in the image looks like he might be black, but, when's the last time you saw a black guy, or many white guys other than the contractor himself, in residential construction? Agriculture had been, as we all know, the prototype of the immigrant cheap-labor influx.
It's hard to think about this basic economic issue, service versus production, because the immigration effect has been so large. Is there some economic principle that says service industries in general are inherently lower-paying?
After that digression about immigration, let me go back to this: To use the same major simplification, can an economy in a place the size of America run with people selling each other food and beer, or to be more realistic, serving each other? Were the hamburger imported too (cattle sent to China to be processed, and sent back in refrigerated containers with all the fix-ins in large jars as ready-to-sell hamburgers - you never know what's next) and same with the barley/hops into beer, no the economy can't run like this. Someone has to pay for the imported burgers and beer** and where does that excess money come about. There is no permanent wealth, or wealth that can be ITSELF used to make more wealth, involved.
Let's say all of the lumber is sent from China. (This one is closer to reality - look at the furniture business - logs are sent overseas, lumber is milled, and furniture is manufactured in China and that heavy and bulky product is sent back over here in containers and STILL they come out ahead!) Many other residential building products (at least the fixtures and what not) already come from there. This doesn't work so well as a thought experiment due to housing being "assembled", so to speak, on site. OK, imagine mobile homes coming over on the ships too. Were we all be real estate agents and mortgage brokers financing each other's, and selling each other, these "homes", it's not sustainable. Where does the wealth come from to pay for these actual products (as opposed to those "loan products" and "real estate products" - the financial shenanigans, spreadsheets, paperwork, and direct-mail postcards)?
It's really helping me to understand this all when I read the comments and then write this out. The simple examples of the service industry that I bring up make the point, but even with a more comprehensive look at the myriad modern service industries, I think it holds true that all service and no production can not work to keep an economy sustainable. Did the bright folks who told us that a service economy is America's future 30 years ago really understand, and just not care? I don't know, but we'll get into that more in the next, more politics-oriented part 3.
One more thing: I can see a pretty good rebuttal to this post that simply goes "Switzerland!" I'm not saying there isn't any production there, but just as another thought experiment, can't the Swiss economy get by fine with the banking, running of expensive ski resorts, and fixing of watches***? What happens there is the exporting (if you can think of it this way) of their services around the world - the banking being the big one. Were they to just serve themselves, back and forth, I think, no, it'd be the same story. A country can not be sustainable by with a domestic service economy only. Our Globalist elites were thinking along the lines of having a huge service sector export surplus, but that was before the internet, and before China and India got their, mostly in the first case, shit together.
* Measures of Gross Domestic "Product" (formerly Gross National Product) are subject to debate themselves, as the services involved in the calculations of it often don't represent wealth creating by my definition of it.
** Maybe the beer is a pipe dream for the Globalists, as, sorry, but the Chinese don't know squat about beer - there's only Tsingtao because that was a German concession back in the day.
*** Forgive me, commenter Dieter Kief, as I'm of course being very simplistic. I hope you can write in some more on this from your Swiss perspective.
Comments (9)
Tire Inflation by Deflation
Posted On: Monday - December 28th 2020 8:43AM MST
In Topics: Cheap China-made Crap Cars Inflation
Now, for something completely different, at least a topic Peak Stupidity has not covered in ages: The goal was to have a catchy title, first of all, but the point of this post - de facto inflation due to poor quality - is not the quite same concept as that in our original Inflation by Deflation post on food price inflation. This is about a deflation in quality.
That's dry rot on a tire.
Before getting too far into this, I'll just point out some tire basics that any Peak Stupidity reader has more of a handle on than any ex-Constitutional Scholar President I could mention, admonishing us to check our pressures now and then to save the planet. Too high a pressure and you have a blow-out due to, yeah, high pressure. Too low a pressure, and you have a blow out due to overheating and high wear.
There are normal physical/engineering trade-offs otherwise. Pressure on the high side gives better gas milage due to less rolling resistance, while pressure on the low side gives better handling due to a bigger footprint. Pressure on the high side wears out the tread more around the center-line, while pressure on the low side wears out tread at the inside and outside more.
If you treat the tires well, you may get up to that rated milage based on tread wear, 50,000 miles is a number bandied about by the ads. I can believe that. I've had tires go that many miles, though I do remember driving on completely bald tires for 6 months long ago when I was young and didn't worry my head about all this stuff...
As with many components of automobiles, and most mechanical things period, it's best to operate them regularly. Things go bad with little or no use on them if you let them sit - bearings lose their lube, rust builds, rubber belts get stiff and crack, etc.
With car tires, we all have seen cars sitting in the grass so long, the tires are almost one with the soil. Yeah, they are goners. Even jacked up, or pumped up regularly, with dis-use over months and years we expect cracking (called "dry rot") and tires will die in this way rather than having worn tread (or puncture in the sidewalls - for the tread punctures, don't forget that wonderful China-made DIY tire repair kit!)
What's changed over the recent decades is that this dry rot happens much more quickly these days. I've seen it with a full set of now-10 y/o tires that unfortunately have only 1,500 miles on them, but were sitting for 6 years or so. (I did move the car some during that time, but not over the last 2 1/2.) That was a bad deal and my own fault.
Still, my mechanic friend with over 4 decades of experience has lots of corroborating evidence that tires are not what they used to be in durability, even the good brands like Michelin now. He's got an old Corvette sitting with 1970s(!) tires that would be ready to hit the road, if only the car was. Both of us keep running into examples of customers/cars that must replace sets of tires well before their time.
Worse yet, it's the same, it seems, even if you DO drive on them consistently. We have a vehicle with tires that are no more than 6 years old, being generous. For over 3 years, this one has been on the road with only a couple of times with a week of no use, and normally no more than 2 days, and it gets up to speed on the highway at least once a month. The tires were not cracked when we got the vehicle, but I can see the small cracks now. It's not so much a problem with this set, as the treads in the front 2 have only a few thousand miles left on them and the back only 10,000 miles, tops. (Yep, I'll switch fronts to backs soon.)
It's the next set that this quality problem has me worried about. Hell, this vehicle has been going only 3,000 miles a year lately. It ought to last forever, other than rubber pieces, such as, yeah, tires. In previous times, when tires were obviously made much more durable, you could keep them until the tread wore out. We're gonna get screwed if the new tires just start cracking in 5 years.
I suppose this could be considered "good" engineering. Why put more durability into these things when you can make 'em cheaper, and with a lifetime that fits with the average customer? See, I've seen numbers like 12,000 miles or so as average annual milage Americans put on vehicles. So, 4 - 5 years is all tires need to last at that rate. Cracking will occur at the same time the tread has about worn out. We are not average Americans, obviously.
Who else notices this stuff but my mechanic friend and I? Is that what manufacturers count on, as with the deflation in food packaging?
Should we just throw these things out so early? I've had my share of blow-outs with old/bad tires, not long ago and on the same car, but I can say that each time I really could have known it was coming. When my wife commented about the noise from the trunk, and I said "it's just all those wrenches - they're always there", perhaps I should have thought sooner "yeah, but we don't usually hear them like this". (We got about 40 miles...) Another time, I felt a vibration from the front end, so I even jacked up the car to feel around the whole tire. I DID find a noticeably weird, bubbled-out place in the tread, but "well, I dunno, maybe that's normal". (I got about 75 miles that time...) BTW, those donut spares will take you a long way at 60 mph - it's often hard to find the smaller diameter tires for replacement.
What I ran into recently, when I got a puncture fixed at the shop (slow-leak, and I couldn't find the source) is some fear-mongering by the personnel there on the phone. These are the slightly cracked tires on yet another car (well, the one with the 2 blow-outs, hence fairly new tires, no more than 5 years old). "Listen, you should just replace all 4 of these." "What, they're pretty new! "These ones are no good. Look, if not, just come get the car. No charge." "No, I'll pay you the the money for fixing it. I just don't want new tires yet." "Just come get it." Geeze! Was this some kind of psychological salesmanship that maybe works on women? Hell, a free fix - fine, but, no, you don't have me freaked out so I won't keep driving on these tires a while. What a weird way of handling this. In saner times, I could see the guy just giving me a warning, such as "I'd stay under 75, and please come in if these look any worse." or something like that.* These tires have gone another 5,000 miles at least, but now the car is laid up for other reasons.
This is just another form of inflation, the manufacturing of Cheap China- (and elsewhere-) made crap. We have to buy the same items more often. If this new set of tires coming, at almost $100 apiece because they are on the now-ubiquitous 17" rims, last 1/2 the time, then that's a 100% mark-up, in my book.**
As an afterthought, I've been kind of hopeful that some high-speed driving could heat up these tires to heal them up. No, I don't know how it really works, but this IS plausible. It's be nice if that were the case. "Boy, you know you were up to 88 mph when I pulled you." "Just healing my tires, boss, and oh, doing a little social distancing."
* I'd bought a whole set of tires from this store before, so it's not like they didn't want to deal with me.
** As mentioned before, if you are a typical 12,000 miles on one vehicle American driver, than I suppose this is not a form of inflation for you.
Comments (8)
Collapse of the Service Economy - Part 1
Posted On: Saturday - December 26th 2020 9:50AM MST
In Topics: Economics
Peak Stupidity has fixated lately on the Kung Flu stupidity, especially the Totalitarian face-diapering LOCKDOWN business. We haven't had a solid economics post in ages. ("Ages" in internet time, that is.) We have written before with this topic key about Inflation, debt of all sorts, and most American's terrible financial ways and current state. This time, the subject, one we've wanted to write on for, ages(?) is slightly different, and enough for at least a 3-part series. At some point, it will come down to the Kung Flu PanicFest too, yes.
The question long ago was: Can you really have a good economy that consists of guys serving gourmet hamburgers to customers whose livelihoods are the serving of fancy craft beer to customers who run or are employed at said gourmet hamburger joints? OK, that's probably not exactly the way this was put in the early 1990s. The gist of it, however, was can America have a great economy just based on service industries? Can we be an economically powerful country just by serving each other?
The answer from most of the pundits and politicians at the time was "sure, why the hell not?" (There were exceptions, such as THIS GUY - your blogger here, without an internet to blog on at the time - and this guy - H. Ross Perot - and your Buchanans and another guy that I will highlight in an a personal anecdote in Part 2). "What exactly is wealth creation, and do you really need that stuff?" was never asked, by anyone I was familiar with.
The 2nd question may have been understood by fiscal conservative types, those who understood that you can't borrow from the world and each other forever. The 1st question is kind of a doozy, which is due to the fact that after one gets through that 1st semester of Econ, supply & demand, elasticity, the Laffer Curve, and that, the "Science of Economics" can be seen to be no such thing at all, but more a hazy cloud of bullshit.
What is wealth creation? I admit that it's hard for me to wrap my mind completely around this subject too, hence my passing grade in a 2nd economics course. It's pretty obvious that when a company produces cars for a profit, there is wealth creation going on. Those cars produced are more wealth in the world. Then, the steel, glass, plastic (LOTS of it), and electronic components (LOTS MORE of that!) that are components were wealth produced by other people beforehand. One could go back to the digging of the sand, the mining of the iron ore and coal, and the drilling for oil (plastics) as even lower-level wealth creation too.
It is wealth creation when the Australians dig out all kinds of minerals from what is otherwise unusable Outback and send it to China. The manufacturing that goes on in China using these materials is higher-level wealth creation that obviously makes for a stronger economy than the lower-level type. What goes on there is that Australia is being used as a colony of China*, just as the Western Europeans used the colonies for lumber, tea, sugar cane, etc.
It's hard to separate some services from production wealth creation too, especially when the terms are purposely confused - see Services are now Products. (Ex: "Let us introduce you to our newest life insurance product!") American ag is the best in the world still, so there's some wealth creation in producing the beef, bread, and veggies for the gourmet burger guy, and production of barley, hops, and berries/chocolate/whatever-they-put-in-the fancy stuff for the craft beer is wealth creation. There is cooking and brewing (obviously at the big-swill breweries with their own amusement parks, the latter is production), but what about service with a smile? Again, is a nation with lots of people serving others with a smile (well, not all the time) creating wealth at all?
This is interesting stuff to me. Hopefully it's the same for readers here - please feel free to comment.
I will continue in Part 2 with the same question as put forth by pundits and pols back 3 decades ago, as asked more in the context of Big Biz and the already burgeoning computer technology business. Then, there is the subject of the current Kung Flu PanicFest doing a number on this service economy of ours. Stay tuned. I hope you all are enjoying some masks-of family time, if possible.
* In more ways than this too, as the Chinese are immigrating to Australia in big numbers (not big for China, but big for Australia), changing the good character of the country.
Comments (17)
Merry Christmas from Peak Stupidity
Posted On: Friday - December 25th 2020 1:32PM MST
In Topics: Music Bible/Religion Holiday from Stupidity
I don't know enough about the Mormons to comment, except that they sure can sing.
When's the last time people went house to house singing Christmas carols? I can remember that. This is not the same country as then though. Christmas carols reminded me of a song sung between then and now, when even one of the most famous rock bands could sing about Christmas without worrying about being twittered about and canceled.
This was sung and played by the final Eagles line-up, unless you count after hell froze over:
Lead vocals and drums: Don Henley
Piano and backing vocals: Glenn Frey
Electric guitar: Don Felder
Electric guitar and backing vocals: Joe Walsh
Bass guitar and backing vocals: Timothy B. Schmit
This one was written by, yes, I kid you not, Charlie Brown. No, not THE Charlie Brown. This songwriter was a blues singer from Texas, who had a hit with this song of his back in 1960.
We wish all the Peakers a Merry Christmas. Thank you for making the season brighter for this blogger!
Comments (5)
What's the matter with Sportsball? - Part 2
Posted On: Wednesday - December 23rd 2020 8:04PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Americans Race/Genetics Bread and Circuses
(Continued from Part 1.)
In reply to some of the comments under the previous posts, I want to make it clear that I'm writing about spectator sports too. I understand that if it's a sport you play, you'd want to watch the pros at it also. I understand the idea of learning teamwork and having camaraderie. Most American men who spend so much time on the sportsball spectacle and hype have likely played some in high school and that's about it.
I'm getting a little bit repetitive with respect to that post SportsBall as the Circuses in the "Bread and Circuses", as I'd forgotten I'd covered some of this, so let me just get to the racial stuff that wasn't covered.
These aren't your people, most Americans. Look at the thugs that they've got playing and their unsportsmanlike behavior. I especially mean football and basketball here. What do you have in common with most of the players in the NFL and NBA? How do they represent America? Why should you care about there well being, as you know they don't give a rat's ass about you?
They are glad to take your money, but that's all they care about out of you. What does it say you care about when you wear some jersey with your favorite player's number? (How about a MAGA hat instead?) The purchasing of the merchandise and the TV ratings are supporting guys that are getting unearned glory, while white engineers and scientists are seen as geeks. How does that help our culture? Unfortunately, even if it is only hockey or Communist Kickball you pay for cable to get, you support the whole circus with that money.
It's gotten worse than just that lately. With the leagues' managers and players turning political on us, and not in a good direction, now they are actively saying that hate our kind. I haven't seen any of it, not being any kind of fan, but I do read about some of this on Steve Sailer's blog. They are just rubbing the anti-white agenda in our faces now (for those who watch, so not me). Why would you want to let them?
So, here we have still tens of millions of American White Men who spend more energy, time, and money on this sportsball than they do on anything that may help what's left of the country politically. What are our enemies, mostly domestic, but foreign too, to think of, regarding our will to fight back? I guess they figure Bread & Circuses worked to distract the Romans during their fall, and it's working again here and now.
That's what Peak Stupidity thinks is the matter with sportsball. No doubt men need to learn teamwork and camaraderie. I think there will be new venues for that in the near future.
Comments (6)
More Face Diaper anecdotes
Posted On: Wednesday - December 23rd 2020 2:00PM MST
In Topics: Salesmen Big-Biz Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
Peak Stupidity may just have become THE go-to site for face diaper* anecdotes on the entire World Wide Web. True, this is a niche (pronounced "nich" for those not of the French or latently-homosexual persuasion) market, but we'll take all the accolades we get out of this.
Ohhhh! Pets Mart, duhhh!
I went into the Petsmart store to get some pet medicine last week, figuring it might be cheaper than at the vet. I didn't get far before the young lady behind the counter told me I needed to wear a face mask. "Nah, I'm not gonna, but if you can check on this medicine, whether you got it and how much, I can just wait right here at the front." That compromise seemed eminently reasonable, at least to me.
It apparently wasn't reasonable to her, another young lady, and then the manager guy. All of these 3 were under 25 years old, or at very most, 30, so what were they worried about? One thing they were, too, were obese, all three of these white "kids". I mean, they were all at least 50 lb. overweight and not that tall to begin with. Still, did they have a reason to worry about the Kung Flu at their ages? It wasn't about the other customers, as I didn't see anyone else, and I was going to wait at the front.
It was either blind obedience to the word from Petsmart corporate, or a lack of common sense that was the problem. Sorry, then, no sale, roley-polies!
This is a file photo. It's Whole Foods Organic, per bing images. They've got to have that Pee Wee Herman style bike in the picture, that the hippie chick rode over in, to save the planet and show off her granny dress. This whole picture smells like Patchouli
It wasn't Whole Foods, but I went into the health food store nearby to get a few items that we can't get elsewhere. I like to support these people too. No mask, no muss, well almost, as the damn bulk food feeders were really hokey, and the customer was supposed to handle the baggies differently, ya know with the Kung Flu surge all around. I didn't spill much though, and what I did I scraped off the floor.
At the register the dude behind the plexiglass told me I needed to have a face mask on. "Oh, no, I'm getting health food. We're all really healthy in here. It shouldn't be a problem" I told him. This guy told me that he couldn't' check me out if I wasn't wearing a mask. Was this a vague threat to put the mask on, or is it really just at the register that the problem lay? Where the hell is Dr. Fauci when you need him?!
I took it as a vague threat. It took me 3 seconds or so to decide: Leave this bulk food at the counter, which would be thrown out, I'm guessing, even before the Kung Flu PanicFest just to show him, or mask up like a cowed peon. The problem was that there's no other place but Whole Foods to get this stuff, and I'll be damned if I'll support them either. I also am really against wasting food, no matter who does it. I put the mask on, yeah, that same one that'd been balled-up in my pocket for a week. As soon as the guy took the money, I pulled the stupid thing off.
What are these fools thinking? You work at a health food store, so you should be healthy with that 20% discount. Being healthy means you are not about to drop dead from every little thing. Otherwise, what would be the point - might as well eat pizza, steak, and ice cream with Coke for our 4 basic food groups.
It's not getting any less stupid, people. We'll keep you posted.
* Disclaimer: The term face diaper was not coined by the Peak Stupidity or any staff thereof. We will use the term with zero attribution and whenever we like, as we OWN NOTHING and we now know better than to take registered letters, so don't bother suing, bitches! [PS Legal department intern working from home - other staff are off for Christmas.]
Comments (10)
What's the matter with Sportsball? - Part 1
Posted On: Tuesday - December 22nd 2020 7:50PM MST
In Topics: Americans Bread and Circuses
Just from our use of the term "sportsball" here, the astute reader may already figure that we think there is a lot the matter with sportsball. Peak Stupidity commenter Ganderson defended the ubiquitous American obsession* with spectator sports, big and small, in one of his comments under our R.I.P. - Chuck Yeager post.
I appreciate all commenters here (so far!), and this is a minor disagreement I have, if any at all, on the topic. Anyone who follows Peak Stupidity coverage regularly on the myriad types of stupidity going on out there is bound to read something offensive to him. Also, for those who keep up here, I doubt any following of spectator sports as an enjoyable hobby detracts from their understanding of the importance of our miserable political situation too.
That is my first point, and the one with which I replied to our commenter friend. I run into too many people, who even to this day, spend so much more attention to the sportsball games, players, stats, etc., then they do to politics. Well, it may be true that there nothing you can really do regarding politics, but one could say the same for the next NFL game too. Is your fandom going to change the results?
Who cares? It's just a pleasant hobby for people and better entertainment than some of the other crap on TV. I get that. If it's a game that you play yourself, I can't knock your watching the pros for tips.
That said, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. (No, I did not make that up, but I really like that one!) America has had such a great run of peace (at home, anyway) and prosperity that people may rightly figure that they don't need to pay attention to politics. That time is over. Any thinking person should see that by this point. I think there is always something one can do to affect change, even if it's only bringing things up to friends and neighbors. However, Americans have had the luxury of not having to worry so much about politics that it is considered rude to rile people by starting in about politics. Talking about sports is so much more polite.
At the same time, because some American men spend so much brain power and emotion on "their team", I've seen guys that would get in drunken fights over insults to their team or idols. Yet, had you just told them that a new law against free speech had been passed or the legislature is instituting more gun control, you'll likely hear "it is what it is" and "you can't fight this stuff". Lots of Americans are spending their time, effort, and mental and emotional energy on the wrong things. In a 2-year-ago post we discussed SportsBall as the Circuses in the "Bread and Circuses", and wondered if this distraction is purposeful.
Another thing I will note here is that as the country has been homogenized by region at least as far as traditional Americans are concerned (for example, the South is not so distinct a cultural region as it was 50 years ago), and Americans are so mobile, what is the point of the "home team" anymore? Those Baltimore Ravens players, are they really long-term residents from Baltimore families who have any connections to the community? Nah, there is no connection and loyalty for most of the players. Hell, there's an ice hockey team in Charlotte, N. Carolina. Did those fellows used to play out on frozen lakes in the winter with some guys you knew from high school? Haha, not hardly, as nobody ice skates in Charlotte, unless it's a one-time novel treat or he isn't really from Charlotte and gets his doughnuts at Dunkin Donuts instead of Krispy Kreme.
As I wrote to Mr. Ganderson, baseball is one piece of American culture that I appreciate myself especially at the Little League or minor league level. It's a pastime, as they say, as much as a sport, and one that I hope stays around at least as long as this country does.
The rest of what I have against "sportsball" is the racial and, as of late, political aspects of this "industry". I'll address those problems in Part 2 tomorrow night ... after the ball game.
* Note that "obsession" is my term, not Mr. Ganderson's. He likes his hockey, and more power to him.
Comments (9)
Coconut Tree - The New Humblebums
Posted On: Saturday - December 19th 2020 7:00PM MST
In Topics: Music
I was reading over an old post on here that has the great Steve Goodman-written Jimmy Buffett song Banana Republics. (I'd linked to this post on unz and wanted to make sure the youtube-embed song was still there.)
My point in that post, directed at pundit Fred Reed, who won't be Reeding it, was that the idea of bailing out of the shitshow here is very tempting, but may only be pleasant until the US dollar tanks. That's not "if", but "when". For a single guy, I do understand the temptation and would be seriously considering it.
I am blessed as of late to have a wife who is well on-board with my worries about what will happen in the not-too-long term to our home. Everyone in the family is close to being on the same page.
Jimmy Buffett's song made me think of another song about leaving it all behind. In this case it's about leaving the family behind too, something that a guy in an unpleasant marriage may be tempted to do. It may not be as easy as it was in 1969 to never be found again.
I left home because of my nagging wife.There was the Scottish band The Humblebums first, but this one has to be from The New Humblebums as the original 3-man band did not have Gerry Rafferty in it. As scratchy as the sound is, there is no mistaking his great voice, the smoothest in pop music, in Peak Stupidity's opinion. The New Humblebums was a duet with Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly, the latter becoming a stand-up comedian and actor later.
Man, oh man, it was a terrible life.
She took all my money and she left me with none.
So I packed my bags and decided to run.
My wife and family are looking for me,
but they'll never ever find me 'neath the coconut tree
Hey hey, it's good to be free,
'cause they'll never ever find me 'neath the coconut tree.
We have featured our 2nd favorite Gerry, this guy spelled it with a "G", before 4 times, with Days Gone Down, Patrick (also the Humblebums, in fact), Welcome to Hollywood, and this post with both Benediction (Stealer's Wheel was his band then) and I was a Boy Scout.
We miss this Gerry too.
Comments (4)
Peak Constitutional Amendment - XXIII
Posted On: Saturday - December 19th 2020 11:57AM MST
In Topics: History US Feral Government Race/Genetics 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, and Amendment XXII)
It's been almost 3 weeks since our post on Amendment XXII, as we continue this series to its ultimate
Section 1[My bolding and my asterisk.] I'm surprised the writers didn't put that 7-year ratification time limit on this one, as they had for 3 other of the amendments**. The 23rd Amendment was proposed and ratified during the lifetime of some of our readers, so one might think of it being in the modern day. It was proposed by the 86th Congress, while Dwight Eisenhower was still President (Dick Nixon as VP), just before Kennedy, in June of 1960. It was ratified by the final State to put it into the document in March of 1961. I suppose the idea was simple, so there needn't have been much hard thinking involved.
The District* constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as Congress may direct:
A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
Section 2
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This was purely political, simply about which party wanted some more electoral votes. That party would have been the Democrat Party, seeing as they had overwhelming numbers in the 86th Congress, that is 282 - 153 in the House of Representin' and 64 - 34 in the Senate. Wow!. This Congress was in session when Hawaii was admitted to the union, a place NEVER known to be any kind of Republican stronghold. That must have just whetted the appetite of the D's, and they were hungry for more electoral votes.
I won't delve into all the politicking involved, but perhaps it would have been a bridge too far to push for representation in the House and Senate from the Federal
Amendment XXIII was proposed and ratified just a couple of years before the Civil Rites era began in earnest. However, upon looking into Washington FS population demographics of the time on this urban.org page I read this little tidbit:
1950 also marked the start of the white exodus to the suburbs. In only two decades, the white population fell by over 300,000; DC became majority-black in the late 1950s.There's as simple graph on that page (can not put that image in right now, sorry) that shows a very steep decline in white population of that city from 1950 to 1970, and a concurrent very steep increase in black population from 1940 to 1970.
What else would you expect the D-party to do but take advantage of their huge majority in Congress to get another electoral vote or 2 for next time around***? The R contingent in Congress likely had not much say in this, as they were overwhelmed, but one wonders whether many of the State legislators involved in the ratification voting were either too naive or already cucked out enough to not stand up against possible "racism" accusations. This stuff goes back a long ways.
The interpretation page at Peak Stupidity's usual Constitution Center go-to site had just a few more details, but no political angle this time. There is this piece of history, showing that things could have been worse for us, as far as Washington, FS is concerned:
In 1978, Congress adopted “The District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment,” which provided for the District of Columbia to “be treated as though it were a State.” The proposed amendment would have given the District seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Only 16 of the 38 States needed for ratification approved the proposed amendment before the seven-year period open for ratification expired.We can give thanks for the ratification time-limit again, as this would have a better chance of being approved today, knowing the cucks that exist in modern American politics.
Does anyone remember the "Domino Theory" that was prominent in discussions of Communism during the Cold War era? The worry was that once one country fall to the Communists, say Korea, and later Vietnam, but it could have been the city of Berlin, Hungary, etc., then that's just that much more power in their hands to use to take over the whole world. No matter what the modern-day unz know-nothing commenters say, yes, "international communism" "national communism", whatever, they wanted the world. One could rightly argue if Korea or Vietnam was worth the wars, but the Domino Theory was no joke.
It would have been really nice if the Conservatives back in the day of the adoption of Amendment XXIII to our Constitution had been able to transfer this idea to the domestic struggle against the left, or the internal Cold War. Hello, Hawaii, or Aloha, I should say, here come a couple of electoral votes for the left, KER-CHING! Hello, Washington, Federal Shithole, there's another, KER-CHING! The more they get, the better the chance to bring in more.
I guess letting in 25 to 30 million illegal aliens is a whole lot easier than the pesky Amendment and Statehood adoption process. The left got a good break with that, along with the greatly increase legal immigration starting in 1965.
Well, they are pretty much there, as the right is beatable just via vote fraud alone. They could still speed things up with the adoption of Puerto Rico though.
Amendment XXIII? 2 thumbs down.
* By "District" they mean what some call the "District of Columbia", more recently often called the "Federal Shithole", FS for short ... well, at least by this blog.
*** 3 in a row, numbers XX, XXI, and XXII had the time limit language in their 2nd sections. Why not this time?
*** The number of black vs. white residents in the FS, with almost none in the Hispanic or "other" category back then, was 410/345 thousand already by 1960. Were you to go back just 10 years, it was 280/520, lopsided the other way!
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The Mayflower Landing at Plymouth - 400 years ago today
Posted On: Friday - December 18th 2020 6:18PM MST
In Topics: History Americans
(See previous 400-year anniversary posts about the Mayflower and the Pilgrims here, here, and here, in order.)
Yes, it was 400 years ago, on December 18th, 1620, when the Pilgrims first set foot on the land that would be the Plymouth Colony, to be incorporated into the Massachusetts Bay Association 71 years later, to become an important site of the independence movement from, and scene of the first shots fired in the Revolutionary War against, Great Britain 155 years later, and to end up a great bastion of left-wing Socialist policy and Totalitarianism about 400 years later.
There is a short page on the History.com (from what's now the Pawn Star channel) site about this important historical event here.
We learned about the famous Plymouth Rock, at the site of the landing, back in elementary school. I've never been, and now in this time of "woke" anti-tradition and historical erasure, I don't know if we'll get to see this rock.
I don't want another picture on the phone to prove that, yeah, I went there and am not just saying I went there. It would be neat, as with the Roman Colosseum, to just be there to imagine what happened 4 centuries back. The 100-odd pilgrims had made that rough 66 day journey to a land of vast wilderness with unknown creatures and natives. They'd been holed up on the ship for almost a month and a half and were finally setting foot on this land that would be the new home for themselves, their families and the future of a new way of life for their progeny.
Just imagine it! This wasn't the surface of the moon. Instead of a greatly technical achievement, watched and applauded by and amazed hundreds of millions of fellow humans, these people were in a livable place, but on their own, way out of range of any form of communication with the place they'd left. The future for them was a big unknown. I like this painting below of these settlers wandering around checking out this new world of theirs.
This was no reality show. This was no meme. This was real - 4 centuries ago, today!
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Ann Coulter: Breonna Taylor—The True Story of a BLM Hero
Posted On: Friday - December 18th 2020 5:26PM MST
In Topics: Pundits Media Stupidity Race/Genetics
This was just one of the many police stories this past spring and summer that were used as pretexts for riots, I mean, mostly peaceful protests. The Lyin' Press has taken each of these and run with them for weeks or months, sequenced into the Infotainment during short breaks in the Kung Flu Panicfest.
I imagine even if you live in Louisville, Kentucky, unless you live in the neighborhood in question [We cannot recommend this - PS Legal Dept.], you may have heard nothing more than the Lyin' Press narrative.
Peak Stupidity appreciates our favorite literary pundit, and lawyer, don't forget, who has just written a column explaining what happened during the fatal shooting of this Breonna Taylor, woman of color (which is the most important thing):
Hey, guys, I found out the true facts in the Breonna Taylor case!That's bad ... but go on, Miss Coulter:
Remember the “botched raid” (New York Times) on Breonna’s apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, last March, when police officers killed this innocent black woman as she slept peacefully in her bed?
Yes, apparently, without announcing themselves, the police smashed in the front door of the WRONG APARTMENT. Their warrant was for a man Breonna had dated eons ago and barely knew anymore, and whom they already had in custody! Assuming the police were home invaders, Breonna’s boyfriend pulled out a gun—again, police were at the WRONG APARTMENT—whereupon the officers opened fire, killing Breonna and wounding one of their own in friendly fire.
You probably won’t believe this, but it turns out, none of that is true.In lawyer mode, Ann Coulter explains herself with many details of this shooting. Most of them contradict the Lyin' Press narrative that was used to incite riots.
Contrary to the repeated claim that the police “had the wrong address and the wrong person and the person was in custody”—as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it—the police were not at the wrong house at all.
It seems that Breonna Taylor was knee-deep in the criminal enterprise of her sometime-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, who was running a massive drug operation, selling crack cocaine and fentanyl to the citizens of Louisville.
The gist of the ending of that police raid on an apartment housing the drug dealers was that Breonna's squeeze Jamarcus shot at the cops after they entered the apartment after knocking (admitted by Jamarcus). OK, there are plenty of times that one feels the cops fully deserve to get shot as they act like Police State minions. We've all seen videos of a few of these. Peak Stupidity does not have any love for Police State, USA and the drug war. This was not one of those times, though.
One would think that the Lyin' Press would have gotten ahold of at least one or two egregious, riot-worthy* cases of relatively (at least) innocent black people coming out on the bad ends of police encounters. I'm guessing that the general impulsiveness of these black guys doesn't let them get as far as some cool-headed white guys who peacefully push their rights in the face of the cops, some of who murder them anyway. At that point, for the white guys, the Lyin' Press doesn't care. They don't care about the white man's problems, and plus, there wouldn't be riots anyway, so what's the point?
It's great to have Ann Coulter to set the record straight. Too bad about the nice business you built up over 25 years in Louisville that got smashed up by rioters. You won't be reimbursed by the inciters in the Lyin' Press.
* Of course, that doesn't mean I'm against Americans shooting dead rioters that invade their property either.
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JP Sears reports on why small businesses MUST close
Posted On: Thursday - December 17th 2020 7:25PM MST
In Topics: Humor California Socialism/Communism Kung Flu Stupidity
This guy is pretty good. Sarcasm can go a long way, for 7 1/2 minutes in this case. With an emphasis on California, where I suppose JP Sears is from, this is a great evisceration of the business LOCKDOWN narrative.
3:50 - 4:00 especially cracked me up.
The amount of Kung Flu PanicFest stupidity we will continue to report on seems infinite right now.
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I had a dream ...
Posted On: Thursday - December 17th 2020 9:52AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
Not, don't worry, it's not Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, CPUSA-Board-Cerified day come early. (He didn't get it anyway. People had been judging others by the color of their skin, because, lots of the time, it was a pretty damn good way to judge the content of their characters. Nice try, Martin!)
Nah, this was just a plain old dream sequence at night, with no speech to be given later at the Lincoln Memorial. It doesn't involve sex with either of my parents or bathroom issues either, so I don't know if Dr. Freud would have much of a comment, even he were alive today with some internet.
It's weird, right, as if you wake up right afterwards, some of these dream scenes are so vivid, but they easily fall right out of memory. Is our brain telling us not to remember the stuff that wasn't real? That'd be a good feature. Often I can hold onto just a few images a day later.
Maybe it's from the COVID pizza-joint post that brought this up, but I was at a pizza joint with a work colleague that I don't' see very much. He had one of those personal pan pizzas, perhaps 10" diameter (between NY and Chicago style. I was not impressed.). I didn't have one due to having eaten already so I bought a coke. As is the case now, the place was empty except for us two and this Millennial guy, who I asked in a friendly manner "what's up with you kids these days". Something like "nothing much" was the reply, which is to be expected during these times, plus with his wearing of a mask, I couldn't tell for sure that's what he said.
The bearded young guy (you know how dreams are - first I saw a beard, then I saw a mask) rang us up from behind the piece of plexiglass. I gave him a 20, and got a buck and some change back. "You've got to be kidding me, for a small pizza and 2 drinks?" "Yeah." I already heard this 10 years ago, but a twenty is indeed the new fiver now.
It turned out that we were on a long road trip, something like 1,000 miles from home at this point. "Let's go check out the campus." As we walked a couple of blocks from the car then well into the campus, I realized I'd lost my friend, who'd been behind me. I have a good sense of direction, but I already didn't remember where the car was, and I had just the old clunker retard phone. "Whoa, without the phone, I don't know how much trouble this would be", I thought.
Well, this campus was just full of people. Nobody was face-masked up, and the people were as close together as is normal. It was great seeing the place. I figured I'd just roam around and call my friend later on to get back. I headed toward some buildings that housed some of the, what we now call STEM, departments. On most campuses, these buildings aren't the fanciest, as those professors and students just don't give a rip. They've got interesting work to do. It was the same here.
I was really enjoying the magical normal times on the campus. As I was taking a short-cut toward what I figured was the way back, I ended up in some high bay (say 40' x 100' with a 20' ceiling) that housed the math or physics geeks' offices or labs along with lots of surplus crap of all sorts. That's typical - you can throw the math guys in a basement somewhere, and start storing old lab equipment and computer punch-card machines. They don't care. Just don't mess with anyone's red stapler.
Being in a good mood, I ran down the metal on the edge of some stairs, where there was no railing. As I got to the bottom, some long-haired math or physics grad student came out of an office and was so happy to see someone. He had a huge smile. For a second I thought he was gay, as he was so friendly, but nah. He was glad to see an unmasked normal individual. I made some anti-Kung Flu Panic smart-ass remark, and the guy was even happier.
"Well, I gotta go back", I said and left. What was "back" in this dream, to this PanicFest world of ours? That's what I think. Of course, I'm no Sigmund Fraud, and you can't do any Medicare billing by analyzing your own dreams, so ...
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