Red Squad - Blue Squad cooperation
Posted On: Wednesday - December 16th 2020 7:52PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Immigration Stupidity Trump US Feral Government
It's just like being placekicker Charlie Brown working with Lucy as the ball holder. You think you're gonna get help this time, as we figured with all Trump has done to boost the GOP, the GOP might help him for once. They could have helped him by getting serious about the CheatFest, setting him up for a good kick. Nope, Trump got a few decent things done to slow the immigration stupidity, and the the GOP is now pulling the ball away.
VDare's Washington Watcher II has an article posted entitled “Learned Nothing, Forgotten Nothing”—Texas Senator John Cornyn Leads GOP Establishment Rush To Dump Trumpism. But Base Doesn’t Agree.. This betrayal of what the conservative base, such as Peak Stupidity, wants is just depressing. Two of the three pieces of legislation that the author writes about are terrible for immigration control. The third is about the curtailing of Big-Software-Tech censorship via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The Immigration Stupidity is the most existential issue there could be - are we to keep our same nation, or just let be changed out of existence. On this, as we've written about, the problem is that Trump's moves have been under-the-radar, changing the policies within the bureaucracy. That would have all been fine if Trump got elected for 4 more years, but then only for just that, 4 more years. Laws can be repealed too, but if the President had had a strategy of any sort, especially during his first 2 years with the GOP-led (uh, oh) House and Senate, this could have been a little bit harder to roll back.
What does it matter when the GOP is not on your side or the American people's anyway?
These scumbags aren't even waiting until President Trump leaves office. The next excerpt is out of order from Mr. Watcher II's article:• First betrayal: Last week, the Senate passed the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act by unanimous consent—not a single Republican spoke in opposition.The bill scraps country caps on visas, which would allow Indians to gobble up all our green cards. It’s estimated that at least 90 percent of all professional, employment-based green cards will go to Indians, which is why VDARE.com calls it the Indian Overclass Importation Bill. The measure hurts white collar workers and satisfies Big Tech’s appetite for cheap labor. The utter lack of opposition was a terrible omen for America First GOP/ GAP.
Cornyn [Senator from Texas] co-sponsored the bill.
Yeah, that's what you want. Import a different Chinese contingent that may not get along with the big one, the mainlanders, already here - see Importing a civil war, in Sweden. However, a lot fewer of them will be Communist agents, so there's that ...• Third betrayal: House Republicans’ support for a flood of immigrants from Hong Kong.The Democrat-controlled House passed the bipartisan “Hong Kong People's Freedom and Choice Act” by a voice vote this week. The act’s lead GOP sponsor: Never Trumper Adam Kinzinger, who voted in 2015 for an Obama plan to let illegal aliens serve in the military. It would grant temporary protected status to Hong Kongers who flee from China, possibly allowing tens of thousands of Hong Kongers to stay in the U.S. for at least 5 years (and likely longer considering the hundreds of thousands of TPS migrants who’ve stayed here for decades). [There Would Be Nothing Temporary About TPS for Hong Kong Residents, by Dan Cadman, Center for Immigration Studies, December 7, 2020]. Of course, it would also potentially allow in Communist agents. Trump has tried to end TPS due to the large number of migrants who exploit the program to permanently settle in America. But now his own party wants to expand it.
Off of immigration, there is the Big-Software-Tech censorship issue, that President Trump could have worked on, I don't know 3 years and 10 months ago maybe? He could have used his deal-making arts to at least get something by threatening to eliminate the Section 230 cut-out for Big-Geek from that Communications Act. (See Peak Stupidity's post Big-"Tech" censorship and Section 230.)
He's baaaack!• Second betrayal: the National Defense Authorization Act.Trump urged Republicans to strike out Elizabeth Warren’s amendment stripping Confederate names from military bases and national cemeteries. He also demanded that his party put in language that would scrap the infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—which protects tech platforms from publisher liabilities—to protect free speech on the internet. Trump threatened to veto the measure if the bill was not changed. But Republicans refused Trump’s requests and voted overwhelmingly for the cucked version of the bill, in numbers that suggest it may have veto-proof support [Senate overwhelmingly passes defense bill despite Trump veto threat, by Ursula Perano, Axios, December 11, 2020].
Curiously, Georgian Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both who claim to be strong Trump allies and are desperate for his help, supported the measure. It looks like they won’t fight for Trump if they win their respective Senate races.
Cornyn also backed this betrayal.
It's not just the one guy or a few. The GOP is just the other squad of The Party, which is a party of Globalists. They may not all be personally, but I suppose most of the others have sold out their souls and betrayed Americans for money or to keep their power and cushy jobs.
On this immigration issue, I guess bi-partisanship may be back without Trump gumming up the works. They can make policies both stupid and evil, per the quip. I don't really believe the GOP is the "stupid party" though. They just are playing dumb because it looks a lot better to us than their being obvious traitorous betraying sell-out scumbags.
Comments (4)
Beat-up Old Jetliner
Posted On: Tuesday - December 15th 2020 8:29PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor Peak Stupidity Roadshow
After doing some traveling recently I had my face-diaper back balled-up in my pocket after taking it off going up the jet-bridge, balling it up, and putting it back in my pocket for the next time it's really required (oh, crap, that's another post - I'll put in a few anecdotes together).
Outside the terminal a young guy was walking back to his car with no mask on either, which was a refreshing change from most of the compliant crowd. Let me tell you, he's really sick of this too, as are a majority of the people I question about it.
In a comment I made to Mr. Ganderson regarding the Steve Miller Band, I said I would put up Bob River's humorous version of the song. This is from long after Steve Miller sang the song in the mid-1970s. In the summer of 2003 when funny guy Bob Rivers sang this, we already had the TSA but at least not the new CDC and this new sick change to America.
This is very funny*. Give it the 2 minutes it deserves.
Yeah, as per a youtube comment, he shouldn't be dissing that good old Lockheed L-1011 3-motor widebody. It was a good bird, but I'm sure it was just about the meter and rhyming. There weren't many flying people in 2003 anyway, except ATA, I think (yellow/white paint scheme.)
* The song, that is, not so much the video. The creator of the video was fixated on that cool 747 picture, and what was that Scarebus Guppy doing in there?
Comments (8)
Password Proliferation Update
Posted On: Tuesday - December 15th 2020 7:32PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity
Before I get started, let me say that I appreciate all the good comments under that previous Peak Stupidity post on this topic. I am no expert on the "TECH" stuff, so there's stuff I can use in there. The best way to handle passwords probably depends on one's habits.
For those who asked/answered the question about remaining anonymous, one could write a whole book on that stuff. One could read that book, but "they" are going to know that, unless you buy said book with cash in the mail, ship it to a P.O. box that you used a fake ID to get while wearing a hat and many facial band-aids, and retrieve it the same way on your bicycle without bringing your phone ... OK, one can get too paranoid, but then, the exercise is good for you.
The reason for this update is weird. There are plenty of other posts to write, but as I got back onto my other device (been since before the weekend) I noted a that one browser tab still had the picture I'd used for the Password Proliferation post on Friday. Well, this picture comes from an article somewhere, as is usually the case, but I hadn't read it yet. I just grabbed the picture back then. The article itself, that I just clicked on for the picture, has everything to do with my post. That didn't have to be the case and usually isn't. I just like to have an image that fits to some extent.
This article, on the Consumer Affairs (not a government agency, they proudly state) website says Man who created modern password management rules says he was largely mistaken. That's the title, actually. It's a weird coincidence, I'd say, due to opinions being like assholes, that the writer Christopher Maynard tells us that password expert Bill Burr is backtracking on exactly what I was complaining about just days before.
If I'd read this article before the post, I could have used it as a back-up source to my purely opinionated post. I feel more vindicated this way, though. About this Bill Burr, cause experts are like assholes too, not only just in the same manner, as "everyone having one." Take Dr. Fauci, please... He just IS an asshole, and yeah, he's got one, of course. OK, about Bill Burr:
Bill Burr – the man who first came up with the notion of using passwords with new words, obscure characters, capital letters, and numbers – admits that the advice he gave in an 8-page primer on protecting accounts with certain types of passwords was largely incorrect, according to a Wall Street Journal report.Well, that doesn't make him out to be a very good expert, but I'm just trying to stay in order with the short article.
“Much of what I did I now regret,” said Burr of his past work. “In the end, it was probably too complicated for a lot of folks to understand very well, and the truth is, it was barking up the wrong tree.”
Burr’s theories for password management became popular back in 2003 when he released “NIST Special Publication 800-63 Appendix A” as a midlevel manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The document was quickly seen as the go-to guide for creating strong passwords and was adopted by federal agencies, universities, companies, and consumers everywhere.See there ya' go - THE GOVERNMENT even adopted his advice, so, ...
However, the author says that many of the recommendations in the document have proven to be largely incorrect. For example, Burr says that the recommendation of changing passwords every 90 days is impractical, and that many consumers only make one or two small changes that are easy to guess.What the hell did I tell ya'? See. He's got me nailed. Why would I change the whole thing around, giving me no chance of every remembering the new one?
Additionally, he says that the old standby of having a password contain a letter, number, uppercase letter, and special character was largely unnecessary.Is this a cipher issue or a general cryptography one. I could see special characters fooling the cipher types that work with letter frequencies, but then, is that useful for passwords, which are so short for this? As a general code-breaking issue, would a couple of # signs on either side of one's cat's name be any harder to break than other letters there? I don't know. I do OK with the special characters, but not when adding these per new rules makes me get out of my routine. (Should one have a routine? Probably not!)
To start with, they completely dropped the advice on changing passwords every 90 days and ousted the requirement of using special characters. Lead adviser Paul Grassi said that those rules “actually had a negative impact on usability.” He says that long, easy-to-remember passwords are the safest bet for consumers, and that passwords should only be changed if there is any sign that they have been compromised.BINGO! I've seen that negative impact on usability myself and even wrote a blog post about it. Thank you, new NIST committee!
To Burr’s credit, Grassi says that he is probably being too critical of his advice from 2003, considering that he was under enormous pressure to publish guidance quickly and did not have much information to base his assertions on.I hope not, myself. If you've got a document with lots of important security-related advise in it, and it's all freaking wrong, then I hope it DOESN'T last 10 to 15 years. Mr. Burr's document only held up for 10 to 15 years because he was held up as an EXPERT. I'm sure your predecessor appreciates your covering his ass in your new paper though, though, Mr. Grassi.
“He wrote a security document that held up for 10 to 15 years,” said Grassi. “I only hope to be able to have a document hold up that long.”
This is a big vindication on a small curmudgeonly subject, but, yeah, FUCKIN' A! I told you so, somebody ...
Comments (5)
The high point in human history?
Posted On: Saturday - December 12th 2020 10:08PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Music The Future
Under Part 2 of our review of the book We Have Been Harmonized, with it's rightful pessimistic view of the future, our regular commenter, MBlanc46 had this to say:
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I’ve thought for some time that I had the good fortune to have been born at the high point of human history: Early postwar America. You younger guys will see more deeply into the future than I will, and I envy you that. That said, I’m pretty sure that it’s not a future that I want to see. Sure, it might very well have a lot more bells and whistles than the 1950s, but it won’t have the potential for the development of the human character and personality—I’ll refrain from saying “spirit”—that 1950s and early 1960s America had. Of course, the entire world economy could come crashing down, with consequences too horrible to contemplate. I can’t say which I’d rather see come to pass. Best of luck to you, and especially your children and grandchildren. May they have the strength and wisdom to deal with the hellish conditions that will confront them.
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You've got to wonder if it could indeed be the case that a couple of decades of American history, the 1950s and 1960s, could end up being the high point in human history. You'd have never though it then, as that's what those optimistic times do, make you think that things will go on getting better. Is it vice versa now, that these bad times that seemingly deserve nothing but pessimism have us wrongly thinking that things will go on getting worse?
We haven't had enough Beatles on here, come to think of it. That'll get better.
Commenter Dieter Kief suggested an excellent Emmy Lou Harris song, written by bluegrass great Ralph Stanley, and sung as a duet with Ricky Scaggs.
The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn is from Emmy Lou's 1980 album Roses in the Snow.
Peak Stupidity thanks all our readers and commenters again. We'll be back with our feminism fisking and much more Kung Flu stupidity, and things not yet thought of next week.
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[UPDATED 12/15:] Added Emmy Lou Harris song and added NY City picture at top. This picture comes from a site called "Return of Kings" on the page 38 Pictures That Show The Decline Of America Since The 1950s, which is perfect for some future posts on this subject.
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Comments (11)
We Have Been Harmonized - book review - Part 4
Posted On: Saturday - December 12th 2020 7:42PM MST
In Topics: Commies Political Correctness Globalists China Books
(continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
The first general section section of Kai Strittmatter's covered the recent (last 8 year) changes in the Chinese Commumist Party and government, as it has headed in a more hard-core direction with the rise of Dear Leader-for-Life Xi Jinping. That was discussed in part 2 of our review. Part 3 of our review discussed the second general section, the Orwellian goings-on in China now. That is the part I wish more people would read.
The third general section is about how the CCP (which, for all practical purposes IS the Chinese government) has big efforts in place to spread the new Chinese Totalitarianism around the world. I won't get into as much detail as in the previous part, to keep this post's length reasonable. There are loads of examples of the Chinese government using its big bucks (that's your consumer products money they cheated you out of! [/Ron White]) to extend influence around the world.
One of these programs involves the many "Confucius Institutes" that are associated with universities mostly around the Western world, but around the rest of the world too. Peak Stupidity discussed this program 6 months ago, even including a map, in Mr. Confucius, are you, or have you ever been, a Communist?. Mr. Strittmatter notes that some of these universities, as left wing as they ALL are, have balked the influence of these Confucius Centers and are trying to kick them out. The author discussed in his first section on the policies and ideologies of the modern CCP that Confucius is a persona non grata as he was for the Mao-era Commies. The new CCP has has wrapped up some of the various "olds" into their new dogma, to keep everyone on board. The Chinese reckon a guy who is still read after 2,500 years might be a smart cookie, though Peak Stupidity begs to differ.
Besides these various programs, the Chinese diaspora that live all over the world, in fairly large numbers in many countries in the West (such as here) are being used when possible to bring Chinese influence to their new homes. It's not just about the spying of various sorts, but also that ordinary Chinamen overseas are being turned hard-core Chinese Nationalist as much as possible with Chinese propaganda.
China now has their "Voice of China", as foreign TV network CGTN has been amalgamated into the government CCTV, and likewise with radio network CRI into government CNR. The author talks about Chinese censorship in a foreign sense, as opposed to the internal censorship discussed in his second section.
Here's the bottom line of all this: China has the big bucks now, and they won't run out anytime soon, the way their manufacturing economy is going. The Chinese are using their Golden Rule now - Whoever has the gold makes the rules. We have given just a very small example on Peak Stupidity regarding maps in in-flight magazines* here with our only prequel post so far. The power situation between American and China has flipped within less than 2 decades. When China tells the NBA they are mad, the NBA bows down. This influence extends to Hollywood, not particularly affecting this guy, but still plenty of Americans.
I may be backing up into the middle section of the book again, but I gotta get back to Kai Strittmatter's chronic case of TDS, as this does relate to the ending of this long review.
On page 242, the author talks about China's new moral state which is "the worship of money and power". Fine, then we read:
One of the most remarkable phenomena during Donald Trump's election campaign and the first months of his presidential term was the growth of his fan club in China. Trump's anti-Chinese diatribes were far less important to these fans than his shameless campaign against all forms of political correctness.What the hell, Strittmatter?! Here you are, a student of Chinese history and an on-the-scene observer of what PC does to people, and you criticize US and Trump for being un-PC? Disparaging the very people who are trying to fight against the problems in the world that you rightly worry and complain about is a Fred Reed thing, I'd thought, but I guess it's contagious.
They applauded his attacks on the welfare state and other countries' refugee policies. In their minds, these things were the work of misguided and despicable Baizuo. [Baizou = Libtard in Chinese.]The author writes about how the CCP is "feeding on the weaknesses of the West" (page 331). Indeed, and this weakness comes from the PC and loads of other stupidity that our site documents daily. Who does the author blame?
The 2008 financial crisis was one such watershed moment; Brexit, Trump's election, and the recent successes of right-wing populists in other Western countries have been others. [These and other things he's full of shit on] also provided rich fodder for Chinese propaganda: "Countries that copy Western democracy end up with hunger, poverty, chaos, and bloodshed," the Party press warned its readers.I would have to agree with that particular example. If you follow what the Western world has been doing for the last half century, yeah, you'll get the chaos and bloodshed. Turning Communist tends to do that to a country ...
Aaaah, I had one more, but I'll just say, don't wear your face mask while reading page 333 either, or just make sure you throw up only in your mouth.
The big problem with Mr. Strittmatter is that he is a Globalist. He rails on Donald Trump, because President Trump is the closest thing we've had to a Nationalist in National politics since arguably Ronald Reagan. No, granted Trump is not very close, just the closest. This author is very worried that the Chinese CCP will extend their bad influence and Orwellian ways around the Globe. I am very worried myself after reading this. However, I don't like ANY kind of Globalism. The author of this book wants only European style Globalism. Does he not see that Nationalism was practiced, we wouldn't have to worry about the Chinese pulling another Mao on the other side of the world? The whole last section of the book is infected with this stupidity, but still there is much to learn about how China will be influencing the world with their new Totalitarian Globalist Orwellian ways.
After this and Part 1, I guess the reader shouldn't be faulted for reckoning that this review will end up with a thumb or two down. I ask any potential reader to just skip some of the author's stupidity and get out of it a summary of what the heck is going on in China, and is headed this way. It's the many descriptions (and Mr. Strittmatter doesn't lack for examples of any of it) of the spying, censorship, mind control, and other Orwellian practices using the newest of high "TECH" in the middle section that should be read by everyone. Do you like Dystopian Sci-Fi or Horror movies? Great, get this book - it''ll scare the BeJesus out of you.
* In-flight magazines were becoming a thing of the past even before the Kung Flu, but it has become a great excuse for ditching them.
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Trump StopTheSteal Rallies Tomorrow
Posted On: Friday - December 11th 2020 8:47PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Trump
It's not so easy to hear about these things since the censorship in the Lyin' Press and Social Media became so blatantly anti-Trump and anti-Trump-supporters. From this VDare post by James Kirkpatrick and my checking out the Stop the Steal site, I learned that there will be rallies tomorrow in Washington, FS (the biggest one, of course) and in 6 States where the election theft matters the most. Those States are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
This is a last minute post, but just in the very slight chance that we've reached someone who can make one of these rallies, we urge you to please think about getting out. Peak Stupidity hasn't kept our readers informed on the goings on in the fight against CheapFest '20, other than in 2 posts on the Constitutional aspects of this travesty (Part 1 and Part 2). The whole thing has been egregious and in our faces, but I've not had enough confidence in the rule of law in the country anymore to have hope about this.
Attending rallies is still uplifting and fun. It's good to see a whole lot of like-minded patriots around, such as I saw in the 10's of thousands in Richmond, Virginia at the gun rally, this past January - There's great power in numbers - Case study: Richmond, Virginia. This was before the Kung Flu PanicFest had started, so it seems like years ago.
We are not going to get out of the mess the country is in by using the Constitution. We're not going to vote our way out of this next time either. It sure would be nice to rile up the nest of Commie scum of the Blue squad though. The deadline of December 13th for counting of electoral votes is the day after tomorrow. I hope to hear of some massive rallies.*
* Work obligations tomorrow won't let me attend one.
Comments (3)
Password Proliferation
Posted On: Friday - December 11th 2020 12:54PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity
You're in luck today, Peak Stupidity readers, as this will be two rants in one! While writing up that latest customer
The reason I needed a password in the first place is the first rant. Listen, I get the reason for needing to log in with a PW for making banking transactions (I don't even do this), and, well, you already must have an account to need this service. Stock trading, email accounts, company intranet services/requirements, yeah, I! GET! THAT! [/Tucker].
How about needing to register, then log in, to shop though? I checked on 3 different vendors for something recently for the same type of product. The website of one of them had a home page telling me to register. Say what? OK, there were 5 links up top. One said "SHOP". That's good, so I clicked it. That page told me to call up or register. No items were even displayed on there. OK, no sale. Well, that was easy! (Luckily the other 2 sites were normal.)
Everybody wants you to sign up for something now. They've gatta have a website for you to sign up on. In that case you've got to REGISTER first, then use that username and PW that you hopefully wrote down (more on this in rant #2) to log in. Then you can finally do whatever the hell it is you wanted to do. Solution #1: Don't join SHIT! If they want your business so bad they can just let operate on the website and do it, shop, read news, whatever.
Some of the time you are at least allowed to "sign in as a guest". That is so, so nice of them. Amazon.com was smart enough to do that long ago. Sure, they do want lots of information on you, to sell you more stuff easily or to sell that very information. First, they need you to not give up in frustration though.
My recent customer care story had me trying to log in to a site that also had no reason to require me register. The information was all known by my company, and I had already logged in there. This service could have just let me enter in 2 or 3 identifying pieces of info. to get done what I wanted to. No, but every department of anything likes to have their own niche website and their own "customers". That's obviously very cool for them. I explained already though, that this was worth something like 300 bucks to me, so even a half day's worth of frustration would have been worth it. Luckily, the frustration was only for an hour.
Oh, but now [smooth segue-way into Rant #2] how in hell is one supposed to remember the username and PW that are needed only once a year? "Use your name, your birthday, the name of a kid or pet." We all know that those aren't the best passwords unless it's just something that a hacker wouldn't get any use out of. In those cases, yeah, I'll just use the username again for the password. [NOTE: That's not the way Peak Stupidity works. I promise, but you're welcome to try. Good luck! - Peak Stupidity IT department]
Oh, keep the same more difficult password, you say"? I don't think that's the very best idea. If one does join up to various things on-line, then all it takes is one good hack (doesn't mean the password was too easy - there are other ways, of course) for all kinds of havoc, even full-out ID theft, to be made easy.
Next idea: Have a core very difficult to crack part and put easy-to-remember letters that match the website before or after or both. That's pretty good... till you are told you must change the password every 3 months. No, you can't toggle back and forth. I had a system in place for that. Good. Oh, except then I have to update about 10 other passwords each time, and that's just for some of this corporate stuff. They don't all make it easy to do this, and for some, such as the yearly one discussed here, I'm not logging on 3 times in between just to do this. I'd really rather call the Philippines. It's easy, just dial 00. That worked last time, at some point ...
Another problem was that these helpful IT people wanted more kinds of characters after a while. I get the reason, but it messed up my system. With the new pattern, I could not keep straight which iterations of which pattern were required. "Hello, Philippines?"
I've been trying my damndest not to succumb to the biggest mistake regarding passwords, which is NOT TO WRITE THEM ALL IN A LITTLE NOTEBOOK!* They are making this very hard for me. That's what I told the nice Filipina girl on the phone recently: "Should I just put these passwords in a little notebook, so I don't have to call you all so much?"
"I don't mind, Sir, to help you. Could you answer just one of the two security questions?" If I could have, I wouldn't have had to call nice girl. "Nah, tried that, I don't know what I put down for the name of our cat. I make all this stuff up for a reason. Maybe I should buy a little spiral note pad ..."
I guess if you're single, this may be a good way to eventually meet a nice chick - call it "customer care dating". It's easier to use than those dating sites, it's free, and you don't need a password!
* I do know about these password consolidation programs that keep all of them together as your remember just one. That's pretty close to good, but it has the flaws of one losing, or having crash, one's device that has all this, and the general vulnerability again of having all the eggs in one basket.
Comments (9)
Your cash ain't nuthin' but trash
Posted On: Thursday - December 10th 2020 8:23PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor Kung Flu Stupidity
I've related plenty of my own anecdotes regarding the stupidity of the PanicFest that this country has been undergoing for 9 months running. I welcome all other anecdotes from the Peak Stupidity reader/commenters. I came upon a good post by the very reasonable blogger Audacious Epigone. This is one of his financial posts, which are only occasionally posted, but are ones I usually agree with him completely on.
The Audacious Epigone post in question is Cashless isn't King (Yet). This one is right up in Peak Stupidity's wheelhouse. As we have noted before (see ) forcing people to go cashless is another way for the Globalists/Commies and what-have-you to clamp down hard on freedom. Mr. Epigone (not his real name, I don't think) ended his post with a reference to the PanicFest being used as an excuse for a clampdown on cash:
Early in the coronavirus catastrophe, the idea of extracting cash from the system was floated–it’s a disease vector, the dirtiest thing in society, you know!–and there were severe coin shortages all over the country, but the powers that be didn’t go through with it. Not yet, anyway. They’ll try again.I'd strongly agree were this part of any decent Gallup Poll.
Commenter Cloudbuster had a quick anecdote along these lines in this comment on the thread:
I have heard of businesses that refuse to accept cash because if coronadoom, but I have only encountered one so far — the landfill nearest me. I had to take a load there earlier this week and it was card only. Ironically, as one might expect, the landfill is the filthiest place imaginable right at the dump face. All kinds of trash is there, of course, any amount of it possibly contaminated with coronadoom!Peak Stupidity, am I right?
Usually they have large dumpsters lower down for people like me with just pickup loads, but Tuesday they didn’t. Don’t know if that’s coronadoom-related.
I hate having to drive all the way up to the public dump face because of the stink and because of the danger that I’ll drive over something that will puncture a tire.
I have run into a few restaurants this Kung Flu season, especially in airport terminals, that told me they wouldn't take cash, based on it being this dirty breeding ground for germs. That really only worked as an excuse to push for cashless payments when people believed the nonsense about "it stays on doorknobs for 8 weeks!" That's so May 2020, as Peak Stupidity related in Hand wringing and hand waving over hand washing.
Those were restaurants though, you know, with everyone and everything in there being clean as a Chinese chip fab operation. (Well, maybe.) Cloudbuster's anecdote is just hilarious because we are talking about a trash dump! I mean, it takes a lot of damn gall to tell your customers that they can't go near your trash dump full of all kinds of mean and nasty germs and stuff and dump their nasty trash full of all kinds of mean and nasty germs and stuff in there, if they try to pay with slightly-soiled paper money and coins. Do I sound like Arlo Guthrie singing about the Alice's Restaurant Masacree?
Well you can argue at the dump all you want, Cloudbuster, but here's all they'll have to say:
We really need more Steve Miller up here on Peak Stupidity. This one is not his own, but a song by rhythm & blues band The Clovers from 1954. It was later played by another famous San Francisco bay band (in addition to the Steve Miller band), Huey Lewis and the News. The Steve Miller band did play a few blues songs, such as Mercury Blues*, but I don't think Steve Miller's voice was right for the blues. The band had a completely different sound with their synthesizer instrumentals and such, as on Fly Like and Eagle and Book of Dreams.
* That was the one I was trying to find a certain obscure rockabilly version of, for this post.
Comments (14)
We Have Been Harmonized - book review - Part 3
Posted On: Thursday - December 10th 2020 9:29AM MST
In Topics: China Artificial Stupidity Orwellian Stupidity Books iEspionage
Part 1 of this review was a deserved trashing of the author's stupidity. One can write an important book, but that doesn't prevent one from being an ignorant moron on other subjects. Part 2 was a discussion of the 1st of the 3 main parts of the book, the modern Chinese government, as run by the Chinese Communist Party.
The 2nd part of Kai Strittmatter's book We Have Been Harmonized is the meat of the book. This is the part that reads like a dystopian science fiction novel, except it's no longer in the future. If you don't read anything but this part - pages 165 through 263, you'll get the gist of how modern computer technology* is being used by the new not necessarily kinder, but maybe gentler (for now) new incarnation of Mao Zedong. If you want to read the book for entertainment too, sure, read the whole thing, but this section and some of the 3rd part, should suffice to scare the BeJesus out of you, as I have noted before.
The chapter called "The Eye" (pp 167-213) starts off with the idea that the huge Chinese push for Artificial Intelligence is supposedly another Sputnik moment for us. The author unduly (IMO) highlights March 15, '16, when the AlphaGo computer program beat the top Go player** in Seoul, Korea as "one of those dates that the human race will always remember." Yeah, I don't recall a thing about it, and I never did. Well, the point is that the Chinese have been overtaking the US quickly, or already have, and that should scare us ... to do what? Should we do what we did after Sputnik? "By the end of this da-KADE [trying to do a Kennedy accent here], we will have computers that will make you obsolete. We should all kill ourselves by the end of this da-KADE." Do we really want to keep up on A.I. and the Orwellian visions of China. This is the subject of a recent John Derbyshire article, in fact - Give Us Liberty or Give Us Artificial Intelligence Victory Over China? I Choose Liberty (I probably should have pointed the reader to that Derbyshire article already, as it could be read along with this part of our review.)
The author then describes how cameras and facial recognition are being used to their full abilities to monitor Chinese
The forecast is for China to have from their 176 million surveillance cameras that they had in '16 to 600 million of them, many of them attached to AI, by 2020. Wait, that's now! These are networked at this very time so that Chinese people can be tracked in real time, at least in the city areas (hmmm, what book does this remind me of?) Skynet is not only real now rather than just a Sci-Fi movie, but the Chinese even named their camera/A.I. network that. The People's Daily claimed back in '18 "to be capable of identifying any one of China's 1.4 billion citizens [sic] within a second..." "Masks hats, sunglasses, even plastic surgery present on problem these days, claim Megvii and SenseTime."***
This same chapter also gets into the various widely-used, as in by billions of people, apps that the Chinese use, such as WeChat. These apps do multiple things to where they are necessities of life, and you only need the few of them. Consolidation of spyware is good, per Fred Reed (same column linked-to above). Yeah, all those entrepreneurs make these cool apps, just like old time Silicon Valley, right? Wrong, these guys, such as the big ones, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and iFlytek (leader in speech recognition - that's who the world will be talking to in the future) don't do anything without the CCP approving of it.
The phones the apps run on are nothing but iEspionage and then the network is in on it too. Yeah, we've got our own NSA listening in, but that doesn't mean I want Huawei in on it too, sending every damn thing that goes on in my life to the Chinese Communist Party.
There is no longer any expectation of privacy in China, per the author. It's not just this spying though. "I'm just getting warmed up!" says Xi Pacino.**** Mr. Strittmatter documents so many different AREAS of life that the CCP wants to not just monitor but control and alter behavior in, that one should just read the book. I'm going to type in just one bit about school students in the new China (page 193, top):
Middle School No. 11 in Hangzhou drew enthusiastic attention from the press when it had "eyes in the sky" installed in every classroom: surveillance cameras with a continuous view of every student. "They are all-knowing eyes; nothing gets past them. As soon as someone nods off or starts daydreaming, he is captured on the spot, using facial recognition," said an article on Sina.com. According to the article, the cameras not only capture how often during the eight-hour school day a student's mind wanders; they also "analyze facial expression and mood -- whether someone is happy, sad, annoyed , or reluctant -- and send the data straight to a terminal that analyzes the student's attitude to learning. The system really does have magic powers."[My paragraph break, since the author failed on that.] Holy shit! I thought the face-diapering here was the worst it could get.
The school has long since done away with the school card that students use for the cafeteria or the library. "Students scan their faces to get food, they scan their faces to buy things, and they scan their faces to borrow books." Big data and facial recognition, according to the report, are helping "students to study more efficiently." A student named Xiao Qian admits that he used to be a bit lazy in the lessons he didn't enjoy as much: "You might close your eyes for a minute or read another school book under the desk." With the eyes in the sky, those days are gone: "Now you feel the gaze of a pair of mysterious eyes on you constantly, and no one dares to go off-task any longer."
Mr. Strittmatter gives lots of examples of the CCP doing their most cutting edge experiments in A.I. and control-freakiness on the Uighurs out there in what is now the boss man's dirt in the northwest. Now, I don't personally give a tinker's damn (even if I knew what that was) about the Uighurs, but the results of these evaluations of the new TECH (spit) methods will be used against everyone. Those Uighurs are expendable for the experiments.
There's lots more fun going on. Part of the effort by the CCP to get people to behave is through shaming. It's not like your Daddy's old-time shaming though - "hey quit spitting on the sidewalk next to the vegetables I'm selling. It's disgusting!" No, this is computer-, excuse me, A.I.-run shaming. Everyone can know who's behind on bills, such as the dating website or app, for example. There's no hiding anything.
That's it. I'll urge the Peak Stupidity reader to get ahold of this book one more time. We didn't know it would be in the Orient - or was the Orient that "Eastasia" in the book, the enemy of Oceania? The Chinese Communist Party and it's antiChrist leader Xi Jinping have been using 1984 as an instruction manual. Then they've improved greatly upon the "technology" in the book. Go China! Just keep that Orwellian shit over there, OK? No, they won't do that . That's the problem, which will be the subject of Part 4 of this review.
* Sure enough, this Strittmatter is clueless about the world of actual technology too. We complained before, in a footnote in Part 1 of this review, about the use of the words "TECH" or "technology" being used for computer/electronic technology only. On page 184, near the bottom of the page, we read "In the field of technology .." WTH?! There's no field of technology. Technology is the practical application of knowledge .. to ANYTHING. Is there not a whole lot of technology in fuel injectors, in tires, in welding, in textile weaving, in, yes, in automated soldering processes to make up those computers where this TECH resides too? C'mon, Strittmatter!
** Go is supposedly so much more complex than chess, it's not even funny. Chess in not funny either, at least when my kid beats me.
*** Does that sound a little overblown? The author notes that even when the claims are exaggerated, the effect on the population is the same. He starts off this chapter talking about a mental exercise about the "panopticon".
**** The movie Scent of a woman is where this quote is from.
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Kung Flu Komparisons
Posted On: Wednesday - December 9th 2020 7:41PM MST
In Topics: Pundits Kung Flu Stupidity
Writer/pundit John Derbyshire has been no Kung Flu panicker from the very beginning. I remember a column of his from back in February or so, when the worries were mostly in China, saying that we shouldn't take this as some big deal. He hedged a little bit out of caution, I recall, but in general wrote very sanely about this, just another, epidemic out of the Orient.
Additionally, he is very civil in his writing. I have been able to tell when he's occasionally intensely pissed about the issue he's writing about, but he still won't use the kind of wording seen here. If you want to read the language that those who have been causing the deepest stupidity really deserve, you gotta come to Peak Stupidity.
Anyway, Mr. Derbyshire's recent column Coronavirus Overreaction: Ruling Class Hypocrisy And Absolutism (leads to VDare - I hope it appears on unz.com too) has some of the strongest anti-Panic wording I've seen out of him since this deal started up. The first portion of his post and of the title, the hypocrisy, is something we've all read or heard about. There are the national Nancy Pelosi dinner crowd, Fauci at the ball game with no mask, etc, national stories, but we all have heard of and maybe seen personally plenty of local and State-level hypocrisy - "do as I say, not as I do."
However, I wrote this post to point out the very good point Mr. Derbyshire makes with the second half of his short article. I'm just gonna excerpt the entire 2nd part:
Take traffic fatalities as a comparison. The U.S.A. suffers around 35,000 traffic fatalities a year. Every one is of course a heartbreaking tragedy to wives, husbands, parents, children, lovers and friends. Couldn't we get the number down somewhat?Right! That's all I can say. I do have my own point to add, as this article made me think of it.
Sure we could. We could go for control-freak absolutism: implement a nationwide no-exceptions speed limit of fifteen miles per hour. That's four times faster than walking: should be fast enough for anybody. Traffic fatalities would drop to a few hundred a year.
So why don't we do this, and spare ourselves those tens of thousands of tragedies? Because Americans wouldn't stand for it. The economy would be crippled: businesses can't move goods at fifteen miles an hour. Even just ordinary citizens would be up in arms: "What, I have to spend four hours driving to check on my granny sixty miles away?"
Sure, we take sensible measures to reduce the toll: speed limits, vehicle inspections, seat-belt laws. In the final analysis, though, we accept that normal life includes some number of deaths, possibly deaths of ourselves or our loved ones. We like normal life, even if it costs many deaths. We don't like control-freak absolutism, even if it saves many lives. We have found the point of balance.
We anti-Panickers have been told that we are either lazy, stupid, or selfish for not complying with the mandates for this that and the other. This makes me wonder if the Panicker crowd truly thinks this COVID-19 thing is the current-era big destructive event that World War II was or something like it. They think we should all be on the same page with some unprecedented government tyranny, because WORLD WAR!, oops, GLOGAL PANDEMIC! We must do whatever it takes, no questions asked. Let our betters make the decisions.
Our common sense and any look at the numbers just don't add up though. In "The Big One"*, of the 140 million Americans there were at the time, over 16 million of them served in the US Armed Forces (Army, Navy, Marines). That's 11%. 405,399 were killed and 671,278 were wounded. Can anyone who can estimate the distance to their nearest McDonalds within +/- 10 miles say that 11% of the people they know are fighting the battle against the dreaded Kung Flu? (That is, unless they are nurses or doctors themselves.) Has the Kung Flu killed or badly hurt 1 in 140 of the people they know? Do they know ANY young men, such as the 400,000 and 670,000 dead/wounded in WWII consisted of, that have succumbed to this disease?
This ain't The Big One. I'm not going to act like it is, just because you people have no perspective whatsoever.
* Old Archie Bunkerism.
Comments (9)
Chuck Yeager dies at 97 y/o - R.I.P.
Posted On: Wednesday - December 9th 2020 2:02PM MST
In Topics: History Americans
Peak Stupidity promises not to eulogize movie stars or baseball players*. We damn sure won't be doing it for any politicians, other than one, being Dr. Ron Paul, and hopefully not anytime soon for that one. Oh, that is, unless the R.I.P. stands for Rot In Place, a sentiment we reserve for people like Juan McAmnesty. We can't be doing R.I.P. posts daily, as it'll get boring.
However, Chuck Yeager was an American hero of sorts and definitely an American icon**. I do use the word hero, not a term I overuse like the soft American public does for anyone including everyone in the whole healthcare industry. (Would that include the healthcare billing people in the cubicles. Heroes? Seriously?) Many test pilots are engineer-pilots who push the well-engineering-calculated envelope of new jet liners or business jets. They are good pilots and engineers, but no heroes. A guy who volunteers to take up experimental planes past known flight regimes for his country in the Cold War race for air superiority is a hero.
Chuck Yeager is most known, or should be, for being the first man (hence, human being) to move through air faster than the speed of sound. That was in the X-1 rocket-powered "plane". That's in quotes because the power wasn't there yet to propel anyone from the ground up to speed like this (that came very quickly after though). This missile was dropped from the bomb bay of a B-29, as high as they could take him.
That was the first of many piloting accomplishments of Chuck Yeager. One could read the Tom Wolfe book or go watch the movie The Right Stuff instead to learn more***. I happened to watch the movie one day before spending most of a day at the Washington, FS Air & Space museum (before it became PC and woke like everything else). That was pretty damn cool, seeing some of the aircraft and spacecraft from the movie in real life just afterward.
There is a lot more about Chuck Yeager, his accomplishments, and the planes, on the Chuck Yeager site and in this article on the EarthSky site. Specifically regarding the F-104 Starfighter that Chuck Yeager ejected out of, and one scene in The Right Stuff was about, the reader may want to check out more on that on this site for more on that impressive but dangerous (in its ground-attack role) and controversial century-series fighter.
They don't make so many Americans like this as they used to. We've had it so good for so long and have been resting on our laurels. Holy moley, that accomplishment of breaking the sound barrier happened over 73 years ago, only 34 years after the Wright Brothers first flight of a controlled powered airplane! We have not come that far over those 73, or at least the last 49 since the end of the Apollo program.
One can't rest on his laurels but for so long. The further hard times will come. Hopefully they will bring out the few remaining Americans left with qualities like Chuck Yeager. Rest in peace.
* Yes, I'm referring to Mr. Sailer's Chuck Yeagar eulogy that turned into one for baseball player Dick Allen.**** It's his blog, and he loves that baseball and the movie business, the former of which I do appreciate at least, so I can't complain.
** He's got "Charley West" (Charleston, West Virginia) airport named after him. That's better than humble Jimmy Carter's Americus, Georgia Regional (where you can still just get out of the plane and take a leak beside the taxiway), but not as prestigious as Ronald Reagan's Washington, FS DC National, "Reagan Field".
*** This Tom Wolfe book and movie is not solely about Chuck Yeager, but it has somewhat parallel stories about his flight test crowd at Edwards Air Base in southern California and the 3 phase (Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo) astronaut program.
**** He has since added a blurb from his commenter Syonredux with Mr. Yeager's later thoughts about some low-level strafing/carpetbombing of German civilians during WWII.
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Kung Flu Kontroversy-less day
Posted On: Tuesday - December 8th 2020 6:30PM MST
In Topics: Kung Flu Stupidity
After all the negative crap I've been dealing with regarding the further increase of this Kung Flu PanicFest, things went a little bit better today. I guess this will make a post, just because the ending is slightly heartening.
At the grocery store this morning, where I went to buy a gallon of milk, as usual, nobody said a word about my non-masking. That was nice. Later I went to a store for a lighting fixture that had an 8 1/2' x 11" printed sign saying masks were mandatory. I wore no mask, and not a word was said about that.
Some words were said about the fact that you can't find anything anymore* though, cause the lady said on the phone "yeah, we have that", but half-assed numbers don't cut it, and her estimate was wrong on the size. These weren't harsh words at all, though, as the lady had been very helpful anyway.
To avoid my going out there a ways being a waste of time, I noticed that, yeah, I hadn't been to Harbor Freight for the Cheap China-made Crap, errrr, tools in a long time, maybe 2 years or more. The sign said something about face masks. I ignored it for 1/2 an hour, as I browsed the whole store with a few tips from some helpful young white guy who was pretty damn happy with his job there** too.
I'm just going maskless in the same way that Cosmo Kramer went underwear-less and I'm lovin' it, Jerry!.
Picking the boy up from the school could have been problematic. Because I was not looking for trouble, I wasted a few minutes I was early by, by watching some construction on a water line under the road. As I came back with my kid, I saw the fairly pretty construction worker girl, who had no face mask along with the rest of the crew (the guys were running the machinery and shoveling, and she was moving some brush around).
"Hey", I turned around and said, "thanks for not wearing a mask. Really, I mean it, you're setting a good example." I told her about the tagless recess at the school. She was surprised at the ridiculousness of it and said, "that's just degrading to the kids."
Some people get it, once they know how stupid this has been getting.
Well that was one day without any Kung Flu Kontroversy on my end. Tomorrow may be different.
* My auto mechanic friend says that he has been having an especially hard time lately finding parts for the cars he likes to fix up right. He thinks the inventories aren't being kept up.
** I had to tell him my story about DIY Tire Repair with Cheap China-made Crap, though, but I told him that some of the stuff I'd bought at Harbor Freight had worked out well.
Comments (3)
Truth in Trafficking Triumph
Posted On: Tuesday - December 8th 2020 5:51PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Political Correctness
OK, a small triumph over Political Correctness is all it is, but we'll take some good news where we can. I ran across this poster in Kentucky and snapped a photo:
I am amazed that this kind of thing can still be printed up and put on walls, even by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Peak Stupidity gave our opinion of human trafficking last year in the post Peak Stupidity says NO to Human Trafficking. We're agin' it. What we noted too was that, as with about everything, this is a crime that one can only complain about under the umbrella of Political Correctness. We must not notice that certain TYPES of people do certain crimes more than others. Peak Stupidity:
Well, no matter what the US Globalist Big-Biz has to say about it, the kidnapping of young people and transportation of same, is not a big problem in the traditional US of A. That is, unless you count Dads that have taken their little ones away from sicko Moms and the Family Court ruination of their lives. I don't count that. I wrote "traditional" US just now, as most of the human trafficking within this country is done by immigrants of very foreign cultures that do this stuff regularly in their homelands. We don't want to impose on their cultures of grooming young girls for prostitution, bringing over fully-vetted-I'm-sure young immigrants to make into slaves (sexual and just the mundane stay-in-the-house-24/7/365-and-clean-the toilets version), and other examples (read VDare on this stuff).You could learn a bit more from Ann Coulter's Adios, America and see what she was complaining about. This kidnapping of children is a lot more of a 3rd world thing, and especially a Latin American thing.
Outside the country though, much of the human trafficking has been discussed quite a bit on the news, using the terms "caravans" and "coyotes" instead. These are kids sent by their parents with complete strangers on 1-2,000 mile trips to sneak into our country. We don't want to use that nasty term, "trafficking" regarding this activity, as they are future valedictorians and shit...
That's what's so surprising about seeing the poster with this highly-Hispanic guy on it. Would you not have expected those same white guys that appear as the burglars in those alarm commercials and in the workplace aggression videos? I guess this guy was just doing the posing as a human trafficker that Americans just won't do, por menos dinero.
I did wonder for a bit if the guy in the poster was not supposed to be the human trafficker we've been looking for, but actually Daniel Cameron, the Attorney General of Kentucky. Nope, Daniel Cameron is a black guy. This ain't him.
Comments (2)
Horrible Numbers!
Posted On: Monday - December 7th 2020 9:18PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Kung Flu Stupidity
All I did was walk by a TV hanging from the ceiling at an airport. I'd thought that a lot of them were gone, or used to display seating for 1st-class or stand-by passengers, but no, there are still some blaring out the Government-TV narrative.
I was really moving I tell you, because I only caught 2 words from the time I heard the thing before it faded into the other noise in the terminal:
blah, blah, blah ... horrible numbers... blah, blahhhhI didn't have to look and see. I didn't have to stop and listen. I knew right away that more Kung Flu PanicFest Infotainment was on.
What number is it now, that they were freaking people out about, cases, people testing positive, what, what should we be scared of now, talking head?! Yet, I look around my neighborhood, and there is nobody I know among plenty of older people who've had this thing, at least sick enough to where I'd have heard about it. I know nobody who has died of this. My company gives out numbers regularly of how many people are out (with full pay) from the COVID. I am so close to replying to all: "OK, just write me back when anyone is dead, so I can send flowers." ("Was that wrong?" [/George Costanza])
20-40 y/o parents are all wearing face masks to drop off and pick up their kids, though they don't have to. They must be listening to these people, like the guy I heard the two words from.
It wasn't Fauci on the TV, I don't think, though I've probably only heard his voice 2 or 3 times. I just put that picture up to say I hate this fucker and all of the panic-mongers like him. I would not feel at all bad about it if Dr. Fauci caught the COVID-19 and kicked it. I'm sorry. I'm just getting so sick of this crap! It's my blood pressure. Horrible numbers!
PS: Remember Pearl Harbor, 79 years ago today.
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We Have Been Harmonized - book review - Part 2
Posted On: Monday - December 7th 2020 8:52PM MST
In Topics: Commies AntiChrist China Books Socialism/Communism
(Continued from Part 1)
After the 1st part of this Peak Stupidity book review of We Have Been Harmonized was basically was a verbal thrashing of author Kai Strittmatter*, we'll get on into the interesting and important material of this book about modern China now.
The first two chapters of this book, entitled New China, New World and The Word are introductory material. Anyone who hasn't been asleep for the last 20 years knows about the tremendous rise of China economically. We can hope not, but I would bet along with most others who are aware of what China is about that whatever happens in China in the near term will influence the future of the world.
Before I go on to the meat of the book, I just noticed again Mr. Strittmatter's stupidity regarding President Trump at the beginning of that 2nd chapter. He was starting out writing about autocratic societies, such as modern China is unfortunately turning out to still be:
Anyone who has lived under emerging dictatorships -- in Turkey, Russia, or China, for instance -- will be only too familiar with deliberate, sytematic, and shameless perversion of facts. Donald Trump shows how you can apply that technique successfully in Western democracies if you are unscrupulous enough. His method is taken straight from the autocrat's handbook, in which lies are first and foremost an instrument of power. Fake News? Alternative Facts?We WISH President Trump was an autocrat for a while! We'd have had a 1,900 mile-long border wall, the end of (partly Chinese) anchor-baby citizenship, legal immigration limits written into LAW, wars ended in all kinds of places, and so on, if that was the case. "Fake News"? Yeah, possibly Mr. Strittmatter should be wary of the Communists at the NY Times as much as he does of those in China. This was just the first of the author's silly TDS ranting, but let's move on ...
The first part, per my independent review and, as it turned out afterwords, the author's, is about the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Peak Stupidity, from experience, can tell you that China is not ECONOMICALLY Communist. They learned from the 30 hard years under the butcher Chairman Mao that the economics of Communism don't work. I suppose they could have observed the USSR before their attempt, but you just don't go telling Chairman Mao what he doesn't want to know.
This doesn't mean that the country is not autocratic though. It didn't have to go this way. The author maintains that the opening up of China politically under Chairman Deng hit a high point before the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989**. There was plenty of more hope for a different, non-autocratic China after that time too. Peak Stupidity had high hopes for the place not that awful long ago, even 3 years ago - the reader may want to check out our 2 posts Dashed high hopes for China, along with Part 2 for more. Mr. Strittmatter pins the slide into a new Totalitarian regime mostly on the rise of the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jingping.
There IS a striking resemblance though. No, no no, I LUV, LUV, LUV the new Chinese President for life, just sayin' ...
Mr. Xi, a CCP apparatchik from the get-go and the son of a "revolutionary" friend of Mao and Deng, Xi Zhongxun, claimed to be a son of the soil. He'd been sent to the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi Province to be one with the people and tell them how to do shit better. Like many American politicians too, it helped the guy in politics to claim to be a man of the people. He became President of the country in 2013 and is head of the CCP.
One thing that I didn't understand before, and that this section of the book drilled home, is that the Chinese Communist Party RUNS the central government. Originating just under a century ago, in 1921, the CCP had its heyday during the Mao period. It kept a lower profile as things opened up after Chairman Deng took over. Kai Strittmatter says that the CCP is now running the place in a more Mao-era style.
It helped the CCP out a lot that President Xi had the Chinese "constitution" changed, with a YES vote from 99.79% of the National Party Congress, to make him President for life. ("Constitution" is in quotes, because anything that can be changed that easily is no constitution at all!) This first big section of We Have Been Harmonized is full of anecdotes, some personal of the author, about the increases in censorship, control of the CCP narrative, including revision of history, and clamping down on dissent. Things have changed much for the worse in the time Mr. Xi has been in power. This is even since your blogger has been to the country 3 years back, though I can't say I could follow much of what was going on politically.
I have an acquaintance who is a member of the CCP, in fact. No, don't worry, she is in China! She's one of those outer, orbit-of-Neptune-outer, party members who joined because in a State-owned company, one can't get raises or get promoted easily without being a member. One thing that members do is toe the Party line, more than your average Chinaman (yes, or woman) must. How far this will go as this President Xi goes full Mao is anyone's guess.
Modern-day China seems nothing like the place was in the Mao era, as, again, economically, China is not run as under Communism. Mr. Xi and the CCP are in good graces with the Chinese people because they've never had it so good materially. If you have a problem with the policies of President Xi, though, it's getting less and less likely you'll be able to speak out about it, much less do something that's not suicidal.
The author even discussed a President Xi "app" that is one of the most downloaded in China. The more speeches or writings of Xi that the user listens to or reads, the more points he gets. It wasn't said what these point earn the loyal Xi-app reader. Perhaps it's some General Tso's chicken. Oh, the app is spyware, BTW, sending back info on what the user has on his
The more I read of this first section of the book, the more I wonder if Xi Jingping could be a candidate for AntiChrist. As Peak Stupidity noted in China roves Big Blother rong time, Revelation 12:3 says:
And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads."Red" and "dragons" are Chinese colors and symbols, respectively. So what, the guy looks like lovable Winnie the Pooh? We don't expect the AntiChrist to come out and tell us who he is.
If President of China/CCP Chairman Xi is the AntiChrist, with powers (as to be described in our review of more of this book) that the old-time Red Chinese couldn't dream of, than perhaps Mao Zedong was just his anti-John-the-Baptist. After the sick miserable horror that was the era of Chairman Mao, we should probably dread what's coming. What used to be called the Mandate from Heaven may turn out to be a Mandate from Hell with this guy.
Sure, you say, but as long as they just do their thing over there, such as was unknown deepest yellowest China in the 1960s, I don't care. Well, that's part 3 of the book, with a review coming soon ...
* Rightfully, of course, as this guy is a Globalist, feminist, Kung Flu Panicker with a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
** See Freedom in China? On the Tiananmen Massacre 30 years ago.
Freedom in China, Tiananmen Square, and and Freedom in America, and Tiananmen Square and the American Press.
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Dreamboat Annie - Heart
Posted On: Saturday - December 5th 2020 9:42PM MST
In Topics: Music
We've not featured the rock band Heart on Peak Stupidity before. This band from Seattle, Washington, another 1970s band for the most part, was fronted by the two Wilson sisters, Ann and Nancy. It was these two beautiful women singers that drew the audience, but I also appreciate that these two could really play guitar too.
There are a number of more popular songs we could feature, such as Magic Man, Crazy on You, Heartless, Barracuda, and Dog & Butterfly. This song, Dreamboat Annie was not a hit but was the title track of an album that I think could be called a concept album. This song is a reprise of the only 1:10 long Dreamboat Annie (Fantasy Child) earlier on in the album. This is similar to the way the Eagles had a reprise of Doolin Dalton and Desparado at the end of their album, Desparado, my favorite concept album and one of my favorite albums period.
Heart was:
Ann Wilson - Vocals, flute, guitar
Nancy Wilson - Vocals, guitar, mandolin
Roger Fisher - Guitar
Steve Fossem - Bass guitar
Howard Leese - Keyboards
Michael Derosier- Drums
More about the the band Heart can be found in a real fan's comments, that is, those by Mr. Cloudbuster in the comments section of this post.
The rest (3 more posts) of the review of the Harmonized book will come next week along with more Kung Flu PanicFest stupidity (it's endless) and whatever else comes up. Thanks for reading and possibly listening.
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I've been polled!
Posted On: Saturday - December 5th 2020 7:00AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Media Stupidity
No, not poled, as in up the ass, with more government/lefty/commie/feminist/ PanicFest stupidity, such as we have been writing about for 4 years running. I was polled with 2 "L"s, as in by the big un', Gallup Polling. This call to my cell phone* was at least 1/2 an hour long, maybe even 45 minutes. This was about 2 weeks back, so I need to write this now, before I forget more of the questions I was asked.
I have lost more of whatever confidence I had that these pollsters knew what they were doing after this call. I don't mean the young lady asking me questions, of course. She was as polite as can be, but would cut off any extraneous part of any answer. She had to be as patient as all get-out to keep that job, as I'm sure she hears all manner of ranting (not me, this time) and if anything went seriously wrong during the call, I'm guessing the whole set of answers gets trashed. That's not a successful call, and it's not likely an employee there gets any kudos for having too many of those.
I'm not sure if the pollsters in charge have ever heard the simple saying: Ask a stupid question; get a stupid answer.. That applies to the call I got, for the most part.
The first 1/3 of the call consisted of questions to ascertain who was this guy she'd called. "Do you make between $X and $Y?" "Would you say your race is white?", "Are you between 35 and 55?", etc., each with a set of 4 answers (probably so she wouldn't get "what was the middle one?" all the time ;-}) Sure, you've got to get that info. for the independent axes of the graphs, such as with Audacious Epigone's many bar graphs.
Within all that were mixed-in other questions, possibly to get the respondent to figure "we are getting somewhere". There were 4 questions in a row about "have you not had enough money for food due to ...?", as an example. Really, is that ever the case in this age of welfare? What was the point of that series of stupid questions. How about "how much have your health plan costs gone up?", you know, something that is a real problem?
For a while, we got down to business. Still, the questions just made me roll my eyes and wonder who made these up? It's not the subject matter. There were at least a couple of political subjects that the pollster wanted opinions on.
A series of questions was about feminism, for instance. Again, it was another set of stupid ones though: "Do you strongly disagree, slightly disagree, slightly agree, or strongly agree with the statement "women should be allowed to work outside the home"? "What is the percentage of your friends, would you say, who would agree with "women should be allowed to work outside the home", under 50%, between 50% and 90%, over 90%? There were 2 more of the same. It was just tedious and stupid!
How about "do you think it's better for society if most women stay at home with their families?" and "what percentage of your friends ...?"? Give me a non-stupid question, and you may get some important data! Was the point to use this question to tell the users of this data that pretty much all Americans were pro-feminism? Or, did they ask non-stupid questions to other respondents, and I just got the stupid ones as part of some control group? Are they very very smart or very very dumb? I'm going with number 2 for $800,000, Alex.
We got to immigration even (yea!), but most of the questions were stupid-obvious there too, as in, with only one non-completely-stupid answer. I finally got to one that was straightforward. "Do you strongly disagree, slightly disagree, slightly agree, or strongly agree that there is too much immigration?" There's one for our side. That was the only question I remember to which the answer could be used to actually determine something useful.
The poll wrapped up with "what's your zip code?", and that was it. The process was extremely disappointing, and I see it as at least 1/2 hour wasted.
Is it possible that Gallup Polling asks so many stupid questions as just part of a long series gradated among respondents from stupid-obvious on one end to stupid-obvious on the other, with the discerning questions in the middle? Nah, I doubt that. I believe it comes down to the same stupid question I asked above. The stupid answer again is: These people are very very dumb.
NOTE: If I remember some other questions later on, I'll update this post.
* I still answer calls from numbers I don't know. It's hit or miss. See Modern Peak Stupidity telephone etiquette, along with Hanging up in Style.
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Telenovelas are Hell - Teresa's drama in ole Mexico
Posted On: Friday - December 4th 2020 6:14PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Humor
They (whoever "Funny or Die" is) have Telenovelas are Hell videos for all over Latin America, or at least the places where people have TV's. Oh, I know, Fred Reed, you guys are pretty damn advanced down there. I just can't be sure about parts of Bolivia and Paraguay though - and then those uncontacted tribes of the amazon - they've got their own drama - no firearms and falls through glass, just blow guns and big sticks.
The first one of these that Peak Stupidity featured was about the star named Rubi and here we've got Teresa with no "h. (Nobody ever said Latin America was a haven for spelling bee champs.) They are both hot Mexicans.
A novella is a short novel, if my Spanish or Sci-Fi memory hasn't failed me. "Tele" is for TV, so just think of these as television versions of the Cliff Notes of Dicken's Wuthering Heights, with dirtier streets and characters with 50 points off their IQs and 2 letter increases in bra sizes.
Enjoy Teresa in Telenovelas are Hell:
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We Have Been Harmonized - book review - Part 1
Posted On: Friday - December 4th 2020 11:56AM MST
In Topics: Commies China Orwellian Stupidity Books
Part 1 of Peak Stupidity's review of this important book on modern China, We Have Been Harmonized by Kai Strittmatter, will be an introduction and part of the conclusion. I'll wrap things up a little bit in the last part, but I want to write about the author first and may as well give the recommendation now.
I'm going to point out some things about author Kai Strittmatter here, but as far as biographical information goes, this guy wants to remain pretty anonymous. This is odd for a book that even this blogger has heard of (though only #82,000 in ranking in books on amazon, for what that's worth). The amazon biography is sparse, with nothing but the same 2 sentence bio that's on the inside of the book jacket back cover (with a picture there). Amazon just copy/pasted it:
For more than a decade, Kai Strittmatter was the China correspondent for Germany's national newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung". Fluent in Mandarin, he has studied China for more than thirty years, including extensive stint is Xian and Taipei. He lives in Copenhagen.As Mr. Sailer would say, "he is based in Copenhagen.". He is not based though, as I'll get to. Amazon shows that Mr. Strittmatter has written at least 4 other books, but in German.
I can't tell how long the guy actually lived in China, because you can study the place from elsewhere, I suppose, though not as well. No other places in China are mentioned in the bios, but in the book the author mentions meeting with/visiting with (some in jail) a number of important Chinese dissident types in various places within mainland China, but it seems to lean towards Peking. As Mr. Strittmatter would be the first to tell you, Taiwan (re: his extensive time in Taipei) is not China. Well, it's not yet, anyway.
I looked around a bit on the web and really couldn't find much more on this author.* I can see every reason why he wants to remain semi-anonymous or hard to find, based on what he's written about the Chinese Communist Party. I have a lot of respect for the man for having the guts to spell out what's going on there, though I will describe shortly how I think he is flat-out wrong regarding certain ideas. This reminds me of our beloved Ron Unz of unz.com. I have the utmost respect for his publishing a well-working website full of controversial commentary with all sides being allowed access, but that doesn't mean he's not far into the deep end with some of his ideas.**
Mr. Strittmatter is a German living in Copenhagen. He's spent time in China and Taiwan. Where he obviously hasn't spent much time is in the good old U.S. of A. This guy comes across very ignorantly in what little he does write about America, which is only about the Chinese influence and about 10 instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It is really surprising to see an erudite writer like this embarrass himself with his ignorant (often) one-liners about Trump taken out of some talking points somewhere.
I won't include all instances, but I did mark them in the book. The first one is some stupid comparison of Trump's estimation of the crowd size at the inauguration in '17 to propaganda in Turkey. Trump is somewhat of a bullshitter and exaggerator often, but then here's the author taking the word of our Lying Press, who have been balls-to-the-wall anti-Trump for 5 1/2 years. This idiot Strittmatter has a line later on in the book which basically states that the NY Times is The Truth. This is right in the middle of his descriptions of the extensive Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Yeah, he gets modern China, but as for the US, and this NY Times worship, Strittmatter comes across as a complete rube.
This author compares President Trump to the extreme villain of the entire book, Chinese President-for-Life Xi Jinping at one point, and rails on the Nationalism of the President and his supporters. He is even against Trump's Chinese trade policy, at the same time the author warns us about China's global influence. In this way he sounds like the idiotic side of Fred Reed, who rants about real problems and then rants against the only people getting off their asses to fix said problems.
That last part foreshadowed my next point against Mr. Strittmatter. He is a Globalist through and through. What he doesn't like about China's influence is that he doesn't want them to be in charge of the Global government. He wants Globalist Europeans to be in charge. That way, it will be all much, much, better, I suppose ... Hence the words against President Trump's Nationalism (as if!!) and that of his American supporters.
This is a brand new book published this September, so the Kung Flu PanicFest is mentioned just a few times. Mr. Strittmatter doesn't praise China for their LOCKDOWN fu, like Ron Unz and other clueless writers do, but he also came across to me as a Pro-Panicker. He manages to get his TDS and Pro-Panic licks in here (page 333):
But China's propaganda media were even more pleased about the ever-erratic US president Donald Trump, whose ignorance and hostility toward science soon made the US the center of the pandemic*** ; the Communist Party could not have wished for a better partner in its plans to make its own sins forgotten.Oh, wait, so the US didn't create the Kung Flu and send it over there? Paging Ron Unz, Mr. Unz ... white courtesy telephone, pick up the white courtesy telephone, ... use your wipes first ... Still, it's just more of this author's own ignorance on display here.
Another piece of questionable material in the book, and I hope Mr. Derbyshire** mentions this, is that the author has a distinctly "magic dirt" opinion regarding the HBD idea. This occurs only in his section about the differences in the societies in Taiwan and mainland China. That would make for a good subject for a post here, but, again, Mr. Derbyshire, who I believed coined the term "magic dirt" could expound on that better. I believe he has been to Taiwan in addition to having spent some years in mainland China.
Luckily, both the TDS and the Pro-Panic business are not a major part of the book. However, one can see in the amazon.com1-star reviews that it sure pisses off people who seem to quit reading due to this. The Globalist stance is a big problem with the last portion of We Have Been Harmonized, so I'll get to that when the time comes.
This last beef about the book is not political. Mr. Strittmatter noted in the acknowledgements that he had a great editor, one Matin Janik, and another guy Bernhard Bartsch, "who was the first to look through the manuscript..." "They have all made this a better book. But its failings are my own." Not to start a sentence with "but" or anything, but you're on the hook then, Strittmatter, for the many, many instances (> 20) of non-sentences in this book. He started with a number of them. Like this, see. He got better during the middle of the book, and then that stuff started cropping up near the end again. The author then had the nerve to throw in a "[sic]" in a quote of a Chinaman. The Chinaman's got an excuse, buddy. What's yours?**** You can't blame these on your editor, as "its failings are my own". Face it, Mr. Strittmatter, you've failed in grammar. You've failed in your ignorance of Americans, American politics, your TDS, your Globalist stupidity, and your falling for the Kung Flu PanicFest (in a book partially about propaganda, for crying out loud!)
However, the material on the situation in modern-day China is top-notch. i urge the potential reader to ignore Kai Strittmatter's stupidity regarding these failings, and plow through it.
As I thought of a way to split up this review, I came across the idea of 3 main sections. I opened the book to work the arithmetic to check my estimate of how much of the book was each, and amazingly to me, I came across pages 13-14 in which the author laid out his 3 parts. (They are not formally laid out, as in Sections of the book.) It's amazing, because I'd completely forgotten those 2 pages about it! I suppose the author ought to have the say on this, but his 3 sections about jibe with what I was going to write anyway.
I will put in my terms, however, and this is not counting the intro which is the first 2 chapters:
1) This first section is material that I didn't have too much of a clue on. Yes, I knew there's still a Communist Party, but I didn't know how much power they have. Per the author, the CCP runs the Chinese central government. The President appointed himself President for Life a couple of years ago. I'd heard that but I didn't know till now how big a deal that was. He is the new and improved Chairman Mao. This first section is all about the usurping of even more power after Chairman Deng's long period of relative enlightenment. (This is 45% of the book, not counting the introduction chapters.)
2) The second section is about all the Orwellian things going on in China, helped immensely by their huge advances in "Tech".***** This to me, is the meat of the book. It is the part that ought to scare the living out of you, unless you have already learned to love Big Brother. Peak Stupidity readers, I know you hate that bastard. (This is 35% of the book, not counting the introduction chapters.)
3) The third section of the book is about China's spreading of their new culture and their Orwellian society to the rest of the world. (This is 20% of the book, not counting the introduction chapters.)
Those will probably be the rest of this review. Yes, it's a serious book. As much as I've just trashed the author, Kai Strittmatter has written an important book that may change the mind of any Chinaphiles, as I used to be - see Dashed high-hopes for China - - Part 1 and Part 2.
Peak Stupidity recommends We Have Been Harmonized to anyone who cares about the future of the world. Still, the author is something of a tool...
* Perhaps the good Peak Stupidity commenter crowd could help out.
** In fact, Ron Unz has an extremely rose-colored-glasses view of China himself. I think it would do him some good to read this book. John Derbyshire just wrote to me in a comment, upon my questioning him about this book, and told me he'd be reading it soon. I look forward to his review and will link to it when I see it, of course.
*** Oh, maybe he meant "center of the US pandemic Panic-Fest", perhaps? Sure, we're #1. USA! USA! USA!
**** Peak Stupidity's excuse is that we are just a country blog, Captain, and we don't HAVE an editor.
***** I'm sorry, but I will have to put that in quotes often. There is plenty of high technology out there that has nothing to do with software or electronics. I HATE HATE HATE that term "tech" used that way. That there's another post. These posts are proliferating like Russian ICBMs!
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More Kung Flu Kontroversy
Posted On: Thursday - December 3rd 2020 10:20PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Educational Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
(I am not being sarcastic this time.)
This new flavor of stupidity just won't go away. Sure it's good for the blogging business, but I really want it to be over. What will it take? Many thought that due to the anti-Trump factor, this whole PanicFest would be quietly tailed-off once Biden and President-in-Waiting Kameltoe won the Election. They haven't won yet - don't get me wrong - but there's lots of people who maintain they have. Are they waiting for the inauguration, one way or another?
I can't say I want Trump to lose this thing just for that reason, because:
a) They may double-down on the Kung Flu stupidity, with different plans that we'd thought.
b) Decent Americans don't want what's coming from the D's, and the Kung Flu stupidity could be ended during a Trump administration. I'm sure Mr. Trump would want this, but it's not all up to him anyway. Americans have got to get over their hysteria. By beating the Establishment and their Election '20 CheatFest, we'd sure feel a lot of power to beat the PanicFest too.
I'll include 2 minor pieces of Kung Flu Kontroversy here that I got into. The first is a follow-up from my incident with the Brit woman scold that didn't like my (rash, and kind of silly, I'll admit) action outside the school a couple of weeks back (last portion of It's
I've really tried to avoid the elementary school due to anger issues brought on by seeing the face diapering stupidity at the place. I had to pick up the boy last week, though. I walked up maskless to stay across the small road from most of the people so as not to cause trouble. The School Resource Officer, aka, cop, came over to talk to me. Apparently the Brit scold was a tattle-tale too and must have gotten freaked out by my not listening to her, or else by that major biohazard of my kid's face mask buried in the bushes. (Why was the bush still there even? If this disease is so contagious and deadly, shouldn't all the shrubbery have been burned with a flamethrower? Believe me, the school district has got the money!)
This masked cop was pretty decent about it, I must admit. I'm sure he didn't want to be involved at all. He told me that my cussing and littering were a problem. I told him I didn't remember cussing at all, but when I think back, I don't know ... I apologized for the littering, as it's really something I would normally teach the boy not to do.
"I was pretty pissed off at seeing the kids in such a sad state. This whole thing is pretty sick. Aren't you getting sick of this whole mask thing?" I asked him. The guy was pretty decent about it. He nodded, though he didn't say much besides a "yeah", probably for political reasons. "The school district wants all this, so this school is just doing what the district wants." is how he put it (to paraphrase). I know, this cop would get fired if he just stood out there looking normal (with no mask) in defiance of what his department wanted. What CAN he do?
This week some friends and I met inside this coffee shop I normally avoid, as it was the only one allowing to people to sit inside, and it was freezing-ass cold outside. The place is owned by extreme lefties (which ones aren't?), so I wasn't that pleased to be in there anyway.
"Hey, you need a mask" said the one guy who I assume is an employee or owner. There wasn't a single one in my pocket, and people eating/drinking weren't wearing them anyway, of course. I checked my pants pocket and found no mask. "I don't have one." "You need one if you're standing up." "Whaaa?" "I don't have one." "We sell them for 50 cents." "Hell with that, let me look in the car." I really looked hard and had to settle for one sitting on the passenger side front floorboards, looking a little worse for the wear and tear.
I wore that old mask in there, and went up to the guy. "Hey, are you doing this because the city is all on you, or are you just hysterical." Well, he didn't like this at all, and we came really close to a fight. He could have told me nicely that "it's the city. I can't do anything about it." No, he used words that meant he was a part of the Kung Flu hysteria.
Of course, I need to stay out of that place. Things are not getting better. The Infotainment must be relentless. I wouldn't know.
What's that Bible Proverb again? 25:24 - "It is better to dwell
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