Posted On: Thursday - April 18th 2024 6:37PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Pundits Race/Genetics World Political Stupidity
I'm over here watching a video interview of Steve Sailer by VDare's Chief Peter Brimelow.* Between my reading of (about 1/3 of the articles so far**) Mr. Sailer's book Noticing and this interview I can see all of the many great concepts that Mr. Sailer has either originated or brought to the minds of Conservatives.
A couple of them are the Coalition of the Fringes and the Circular Firing Squad that can form from the former. I won't define these, as I think most Peak Stupidity readers know this illustrious pundit. (If not, look here and here, respectively - there's overlap, of course.)
Lately, it's the latter concept that has been coming to mind, as I've been seeing the protests by pro-Palestinian/pro-Gaza people, blocking roads to airports, getting in the faces of politicians, etc. Peak Stupidity does not take the side of either these would-be=ragheads or the leftist Jews (too large a share, unfortunately) who may be SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I TELLS YA! that recently their (other) homeland has not been completely supported by the US Feral Gov't and the Establishment.
What is going on?! Well, it's been arguably a century that you've had these stupid worries about a near monolithic White American population somehow being threatening to you and the other stupidity about some old plaque on a statue meaning America takes in all the refuse of the world. Here we are now. You all have pushed hard for this. You've had the Establishment on your side for 60 years to enable this project. Ooops, some of the folks you imported don't like you at all.
That Coalition of the Fringes that is supposed to include everyone but traditional American White people has a rift you can drive a Mack Truck through. (Well, except when the road is blocked.) I'm not sure how you thought this would hold together. This portion of the Coalition hates your guts.
This portion that hates your guts has got some political power now. Heckuva Job, ADLey!
PS: Heh! One of the first Steve Sailer posts I'd read, on The Unz Review, at least, had that sarcastic "Heckuva job, Brownie!" line which I see he's used a bunch of times. Mr. Sailer being the big movie buff, I thought for sure this line was from a Clint Eastwood Western movie. Guess not ...
* I've got Ann Coulter and Peter Theil lined up too, on Dieter's Twitter. Yes, "Dieter's Twitter" would indeed be a great name for a band, some sort of band...
** I'm about 1/2 way through Lionel Shriver's Mania after 3 hours or so, so that review will come first.
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How dare you, Hunter?!!
Posted On: Wednesday - April 17th 2024 8:16PM MST
In Topics: Humor Environmental Stupidity Zhou Bai Dien
Presented without comment:
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The old days of light-hearted politics
Posted On: Wednesday - April 17th 2024 7:57AM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Curmudgeonry Americans US Feral Government
I was thinking of this post a year and a half ago (that's when these pictures are dated), but it can now be an addendum to our recent post Trump v Bai Dien and 2020s v 1980s.
It hasn't been all that long. As with the general belief by most Americans that Federal elections were not going to change the whole country around or anything, I don't think it's been that long there since there wasn't nearly the hatred between one side and the other that there exists now. The ctrl-left has generally been more hateful than the right, but there was still room for fun not so long ago.
America's inexorable slide toward ruin was apparent to me just about 30 years back. However, it wasn't very immediate, so one could be strongly against a Clinton, Bush, even an Øb☭ma but still make light-hearted fun.
I remember these skits on Saturday Night Live. Maybe it's just my age at the time, but I didn't see this stuff as being written and performed out of hatred. The entertainment industry has been biased left as far back as I can remember, but they used to make fun of everyone they could do a good job on. You had the 3 Presidential candidates back in Summer '92, Bill, George, and Ross. I can remember the particular mannerism by which each was made fun of.
Going forward 12 years, I can remember a friend and I enjoying a cartoon-style video of Gore v Bush, something about JibJab - that was the series or the artist, I don't know, but we could still laugh at the whole thing.
Only a few years ago, I still used this one:
It's different now. When the other side is blatantly cheating, taking a thousand Political Prisoners, working very obviously completely outside the law to persecute the other guy, there's no demand for that comedy anymore. Sure, we ridicule Dementia Joe, JoeTato, what have you, but that's just because ridicule is one of the only weapons the right has left.*
* Or so people imagine. Federalism, a national divorce, or a House of Representin' with 200 MTG's, well, that's different. It's extremely late though ...
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MTG calls out Mayorkas as the treasonous asshole he is
Posted On: Tuesday - April 16th 2024 9:07PM MST
In Topics: Commies Immigration Stupidity US Feral Government
I would have called him a Communist too. Motherland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is right there implementing the plan for final destruction of this nation. He knows what he's doing and seems fairly smug and nonchalant about it.
No, Marjorie Taylor Greene alone will probably not get the Senate to even get started trying this man, as the impeachment vote by the House requires, much less to convict the Commmie. Still, this kind of thing warms my heart. Is MTG the only member of Congress that hasn't been "gotten to" yet? Otherwise, you'd think you'd see more of this. Americans are extremely pissed. A good rep should represent that. MTG most assuredly does here.
(She's so mad at this fucker that she got flustered even and confused the point on who should have been deported at 02:43. We all got the point though.)
PS: Though Forbes might have intended this clip, titled SHOCK MOMENT: Marjorie Taylor Greene Outright Confronts Mayorkas About Laken Riley In Furious Tirade, to be unfavorable toward her - I can't really tell - the comments are pretty patriotic, with some standard stupidity interspersed, of course.
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IRS Deadline Looms: Women and Minorities Filing Separately Hardest Hit!
Posted On: Tuesday - April 16th 2024 6:47PM MST
In Topics: Humor US Feral Government Race/Genetics Taxes
Alternate headline: Tempers flare and fight breaks out, as Blacks! in Houston struggle to file income tax on time. Fortuitously, shots did not ring out.
Note one thing. In the title here I didn't write pay, just file.
From The Gateway Pundit a couple of days ago, we read CHAOS: Houston IRS Office Closes Early Due to Fighting .
There is nothing like waiting until the last minute to file taxes.Don't I know it, brother! I'm gonna start on the forms as soon as I finish this post.*
I had no idea that black people had this much civic virtue. I mean, I'm already a couple of days late and don't particularly give a rat's ass. Those people in Houston, man, they got to get those 1040s in by nightfall. Otherwise, you in trouble wid da man!
The IRS office in Houston, Texas closed early on Saturday because a fight broke out in front of the building. Numerous people were lined up to get help with their taxes.Such dedication!
Tempers were out of control as impatient taxpayers were waiting for assistance. The deadline to file is Monday, April 15th.
“Unfortunately, they did everything as a walk-in, no appointments and that’s really what caused all these problems,” ‘said Henry Castro, another visitor at the IRS center,'” Fox 26 reported.Regarding this last bit, I really do sympathize with that crowd. We had to do some passport business at the big post office, and it was nearly the same story. Appointments that COULD be made in this case might be upheld, but you'd still wait. In the meantime instead of walk-ins being able to sign a sheet when they came, the lady came out later and tried to get the 6 (she relented and brought it up to 10) first people in the office signed up for the day. Yeah, well, that wasn't so clear. The whole thing was extremely third-worldly, which I made known verbally. Coincidentally, I'm sure, there were lots of 3rd-world people there that day, generally the ones behind the counter, working for the Feral Government. For a short while my temper did flare, but had the situation gotten worse, I would have just walked out before those shots might have decided to ring out.
Anyway, from the original local FOX news story:
Hundreds of people were lined up at the IRS building hoping to get help with their taxes. Instead, a field assistant from the IRS said they had to shut down early because of a riot that broke out.Now, we see what this is really about. "Identity Verification"? That smacks of the illegal immigration racket. From the IRS on that:
Tempers flared outside the Internal Revenue Service’s building as hundreds of people trying to file their taxes and get identity verification were turned away.
The IRS proactively identifies and stops the processing of potential identity theft returns. You may receive a notice or letter asking you to verify your identity and tax return information with the IRS. This helps prevent an identity thief from getting your refund.Now, some may be on the ID-theft victim side here, and many may not. I also can guess that many of these last-minute filers had money coming back to them. They usually do that first time they can in January - a friend of mine worked a few seasons at H&R Block and told me how much the illegal aliens cheated with made-up or Latin-America-residing dependents for nice supplemental "socialize the losses" income. Perhaps these people just got around to it and want to make sure they've got a check coming.
So, there was CHAOS among the tax filers in Houston there, but I can't say these people were generally actual tax payers. I doubt it.
White people CHAOS is different. They may just crash Piper Dakotas into IRS office buildings. The Robert Stack-attack in '10 was also in Texas, but up in Austin. The very last paragraph of that wiki page is interesting:
The Internal Revenue Service formally designates certain individuals as potentially dangerous taxpayers (PDTs). In response to an inquiry after the attack, an IRS spokesperson declined to state whether Stack had been designated as a PDT.What do you do about a PDT, get a robot to open his forms? All this is mostly done on-line though. How about those people in Houston the other day? Potentially Destructive Taxeaters?
* Seriously, that's the case. It's not that hard but painful nonetheless. I could not cajole my son into doing it, as I did last year - see Kids Eating Goldfish and Doing Taxes and our follow-up, Kids Getting Audited and Going to Camp.
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Lew Rockwell and the 2 Smiths
Posted On: Monday - April 15th 2024 7:06AM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites Pundits Liberty/Libertarianism
Due to my loss of entertainment after, well, trying hard, at least, to stay off The Unz Review site, I have gone back to a few old haunts. I can say that my time on the political internet started right at a quarter century ago. Wow! I remember where I was that year, which helped me recall some of the various sites I would peruse in that bygone era.
I'd thought I'd gone to LewRockwell, named after Libertarian site-owner pundit/author Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., way back. Sure enough, from the "About" page, I see that the site started right then. (In that early stage of the net, I could see the writers even having paid HIM, being so glad to be someone ON THE INTERNET!) The about page says:
The daily news and opinion site LewRockwell.com was founded in 1999 by anarcho-capitalists Lew Rockwell [send him mail] and Burt Blumert to help carry on the anti-war, anti-state, pro-market work of Murray N. Rothbard. Among the hundreds of LRC writers over the years, some of the most prominent are:I won't paste in the list, but a lot of them bring back memories from over 20 years back.
Reading some of these people a quarter century later makes me think that either I've gotten smarter since then or some of them have gotten dumber, no, wait, probably have not ever been quite as smart as I'd thought they were then. There are a few good writers whose work still rings true, but most are disappointing.
LewRockwell.com has a prepper bent. That makes sense for a site full of economic pundits who have been seeing the encroaching ruin for so long. One prepper lady is pretty simplistic, so no more reading from her. Then, lo and behold, the same 2 "Smiths" as I remember from way back still write on this site. One would be Charles Hugh Smith, with his articles from his Of Two Minds blog. I always liked the guy, but then, the first post I read of his in many years, on gold and the dollar, did not seem particularly right to me.
There's also still one Brandon Smith, about whom I have a funny story from that long-ago era. On his own site, now defunct*, this Mr. Smith had some article that included a short bit about the War Between the States. This one mentioned South Carolina "marching on Fort Sumter". Uh... no... I was fairly polite with my correction, as unsnarky as I could be, noting that it would have been difficult for these soldiers to march across 2 miles of the Atlantic Ocean (Charleston Harbor) to the fort. I explained that I liked the article and did not correct him (solely) to be snarky, but that readers may discount his good points due to this error.
I'd want to be corrected on something like this, as embarrassing as it would be. A thanks would be due to the commenter, one would think. That wasn't the case, as this Brandon got mad and gave me a hard time about my correctional comment. I'm glad we weren't on twitter! I did not relent, but those were my last comments and my last reading of Brandon Smith's writing.
I can't forget this, apparently, as it came back to me as soon as I saw the name still there on Lew Rockwell - it's such a good example of how not to treat a "customer". However, it's time to forgive after 20-25 years. He might have something well worth reading in his economics-oriented posts.
Such was my experience on the internets in days past ...
* LewRockwell links to Brandon Smith's own site Alt-Market, but this one says it started up in '11. It's not the old one in this story.
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Noticing, the book: Overview
Posted On: Saturday - April 13th 2024 7:00PM MST
In Topics: Pundits Books
Peak Stupidity has been looking forward to this new book by Conservative pundit and Noticer Extraordinaire Steve Sailer. As we noted at the bottom of this post regarding another favorite writer of ours, the 3 copies of Noticing arrived.
This post's title says "OVERview". An actual REview will be coming, but it might be a while. I can imagine reading this book in 6 ± 2 hours straight, but I want to savor it. I also like the idea that I'll be reading it while traveling some soon, so others may just "notice" the book. "Oh, yeah, it's the book by Steve Sailer, you know." "Steve Sailer?" "Well, yeahhh.", as if everyone should know him. Maybe people do. "Oh, he's the guy who just wrote a couple of posts about O.J. Simpson recently." "O.J. who? I think it's Bart or Homer you mean."
Anyway, I'll lay out the "chapters" here. The quotes there are to explain and avoid possible confusion - these chapters are not the smallest sections. Besides some introduction and afterwords, there are 14 sections called chapters. Each is on one of Mr. Sailer's favorite, or maybe more like one of his most important, areas of expertise, with 3 to 6 of his articles from the past (this is an anthology) in each. (The average is 4.2 articles per chapter.)
There's a foreword that I think would have been better called "Background" or "My Background". This is a quick occupational, political and literary background of Mr. Sailer. I just finished it, and it's pretty interesting - I hadn't known the half of it before. However, a foreword ought to be a few pages that explain his motivation for writing this anthology and maybe relate the chapters to each other in some way. Only the the last page and a quarter has this, but, if you've got an afterword, you've got to have a foreword, I suppose. That last bit starts with:
In contrast to the new inegalitarianism, I believe in the equality of the moral worth of all individual humans to be the subject of empirical analysis. In my ethical system, everybody counts and thus everybody is fit to be counted.A few of his very good examples follow, then:
That's not a popular attitude, to say the least.
When it comes to data analysis the contemporary rules are also plain to see. You are encouraged to notice some disparities but not others.
But it's hard to think up these kind of potentially constructive approaches under the current mindset in which the only permissible response to pattern recognition is to blame the pre-defined Bad Guys: straight white men.Yes, I do! However, we do all need to keep in mind that the people making these rules are well aware of what they are doing and aim to keep the rules they way thay are. They hate us, the "Bad Guys", and want us dead. That's how Communists operate.
Not surprisingly, American intellectual culture has tended to get dumber and duller under the reigning rules.
I hope you find my anthology a refreshing contrast.
Anyway, the 59 articles come from various publications, but I'd say more than half of them were published in TakiMag. I didn't realize he'd been on there for that long - from just skimming through, it seems like it's been 12 years or so. Other articles are taken from VDare directly, and then the older ones come from National Review (a few especially well-written ones), The American Conservative, and a couple of other publications. Those were from the time before Steve Sailer was unPersoned. The Unz Review is not one of the sources cited at the beginning of any articles, though I swear I saw the site mentioned within one of them when I skimmed through earlier. No UR commenters are mentioned - sorry, guys.
I see a slight chronological progression here (not necessarily with the individual articles), but otherwise not a real pattern. That's OK. Mr. Sailer says that many of his general topics are orthogonal to each other. (How many dimensions can he think in?) Anyway, here you go. The quick notes are mine:
Chapter One: Citizenism (4 articles)
Chapter Two: Invade the World, Invite the World (6 articles)
Chapter Three: The Sailer Strategy (3 articles)
Chapter Four: Villains and Heroes (5 articles) Note: Heroes and Villains is a Beach Boys song that Mr. Sailer must know and like. I guess he didn't want to use it directy.
Chapter Five: Human Biodiversity (4 articles) Note: This is not a Sailer-coined term. I just learned that it was first the name of a book by one Jonathan Marks.
Chapter Six: The Level Playing Field (4 articles) Note: Within this chapter (3rd article, p. 183) you will find, YES, an article on Golf Course Architecture! I DID try to read it. No can do.*
Chapter Seven: The Half-Full Glass (5 articles)
Chapter Eight: The Blank Screen (3 articles) Note: These 3 are about Øb☭ma.
Chapter Nine: World War T (4 articles) Note: Great prediction, I gotta say.
Chapter Ten: Sailer's Law of Female Journalism (3 articles) Note: I wish he had a few more in here. His getting into the minds of women is very illuminating to me.
Chapter Eleven: Jews and Gentiles (4 articles) Note: It could be "Jews v Gentiles", in the Peak Stupidity style, but that would have quite a different meaning.
Chapter Twelve: The Coalition of the Fringes (5 articles)
Chapter Thirteen: Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings (4 articles)
Chapter Fourteen: The Great Awokening (5 articles)
Look for an actual review of some sort in the medium future. In the meantime, we're bogged down, what with more Climate Calamity™ stupidity, fallout from the 4 year-ago Kung Flu PanicFest with a new attempt being made, that Babylon Bee style true story, and more ... depending on just what kind of war will be ongoing come Monday ... Thanks for reading!
* It's perfectly fine with me that he's got his niche obscure topics. After all, I doubt that discussion of the erroneous physics calculations done within exercise machine computer chips are the most exciting thing for our readers either! (Ask me more! I mean, if it is...)
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We are all Miamians now
Posted On: Friday - April 12th 2024 5:30PM MST
In Topics: Commies Immigration Stupidity History Zhou Bai Dien
I looked back and saw that Peak Stupidity has never had a post specifically about the Mariel Boatlift of 44 years ago this Spring/Summer/Fall. We did mention this important early battle of the immigration invasion in the following posts: Said in Spanish - Allan Wall with some encouragement (Sept. of '19 with Trump in office), Governor DeSantis fights the Bai Dien/Mayorkas-run Invasion (May of '23), and Spies Like Us, starring Manuel Rocha.
The reader with no knowledge of this even may want to read a very short summary on this Britannica page, a slightly longer summary on History.com, or the much longer wiki page.
There's some background I won't get into (see the links) behind the reason this mass exodus of 125,000 Cubans* happened at that particular time. Instead of preventing Cubans from sailing to freedom, for those months Communist Fidel Castro decided to cast out political prisoners and ALL kinds of prisoners. Nobody will ever know how many of each type came. Americans had respected those who extricated themselves from the evils of Communism, but then the numbers from anywhere (even Vietnam, I would say) hadn't been high enough to be considered a serious immigration invasion yet. This Mariel Boatlift, enabled by President Jimmy Carter, was different, and it had a lasting effect. Oh, and, some of those "Mareilitos" were mental patients - "Why not?" would be a good point made by Castro. "They weren't sending their best", that's for sure.
Because south Florida is the nearest part of the US, as some had been doing for years, since the Commies took over Cuba in 1959, this mass of humanity consolidated in the big city of Miami. It changed the city greatly. As an slight aside, Steve Sailer did some great noticing about this. He rebutted those economists who claimed Miami had such an amazing boost to its economy due to IMMIGRATION! with the point that it was the whole drug war run by these criminal "newcomers", with the cocaine and later crack, that was the big "amazing" economic boost. (Americans before didn't do this sort of work so much. Colombians did too, though.) However, all the big money and violence was not a good thing for your average old-time Miaimian.
I find this period pretty interesting, especially the "transportation" aspects of drug importation, and a friend has urged me to watch Cocaine Cowboys, a documentary of the period.** The excesses were amazing, what with guys buying 10 Italian sports cars for their friends on a whim and, per my friend's viewing, the amount of cash money in Miami was greater than all that floating around the rest of the country!
Well, fine, but when we used to drive down to The Keys, we'd gas up in Ft. Pierce, Sebring, wherever, depending on the route, and avoid the whole Miami area like the plague. Avoiding the areas of the few lost battles of the invasion was doable 30-odd years back. One didn't have to live there, so, OK, you had south Florida and southern California, and maybe a few other places that were not-exactly-American within America.
Over the ensuing 3 decades, the high level and steady flow of illegal and legal immigrants, at 1 to 2 million yearly slowly created not-exactly-American zones all around the country. Even with the social and cultural destruction we could deal, I suppose, as it's gotten slowly worse. Dark Brandon and his handlers and minions, however, have been running a Mariel Boatlift on steroids for the last 3 years though. We're talking a factor of 100. They are not all just one nationality, but the 12 million (that'd be 100x) contain a sampling of criminality from all over the world!
With all those nationalities, I noticed something during this Bai Dien invasion surges. I'll see some story about a horrific murder by an illegal alien, one of the "newcomers", or a rape of a 7-year old girl by one of the same, etc. I'll just guess the nationality as Venezuelan, and, whaddya' know, YEP, that's what the article will say. EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! Of course, other nationalities, such as the Salvadorans with the hyper-violent MS-13 gang, get in their share too. In the long run, the current mass importation of Africans, legally*** and illegally, will result in more violence here. However, the Venezuelans seem to have taken first prize as of late.
There's a similarity with that particular contingent and the contingent of Cubans that came 44 years ago. These people have left countries that have long been Communist. In the case of the Mariel Boatlift, it was only one generation by that time. In the case of Venezuela, the former crown jewel of South America, it's been a generation and a half now.
Communism leaves a long, lasting mark. Ask me about the long-term effects on the Chinese people sometime. The countries have not been the kind of places where a straight-arrow Jose Blose can get ahead in life. Violence pays in places like this. These are the people turning America into one big Miami. We're all Miamians now. Thing is, if we don't like it, we can't just all move up north to Ocala anymore.
* Something I hadn't known till now is that some of those coming during that period were Haitians, 25,000 of them. Also from the wiki page on the boatlife, one can read that America, and the Presidents of the era, were still serious people regarding this issue. Of course, the Black! politicians were up to their usual tribal stupidity:
Before 1980, many Haitian immigrants arrived on American shores by boat. They were not granted legal protection because they were considered economic migrants, rather than political refugees, despite claims made by many Haitians that they were being persecuted by the Duvalier regime. U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford denied claims of asylum in the United States for Haitian migrants by boat. A backlash by the Congressional Black Caucus ensued, which claimed that the U.S. government was discriminating against Haitian immigrants.Yes, it sure was. So, what's your point?
** I want to watch it, but the 'brary doesn't have it, so I'm waiting for a free on-line version... Anyone, anyone, ... Smith? ;-}
*** Post to come. I'm getting so behind.
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O.J. Simpson - No more running...
Posted On: Thursday - April 11th 2024 8:58PM MST
In Topics: Music Bread and Circuses
Later on, O.J. Simpson didn't do much running for 9 years, instead cooling his heels in Nevada's Lovelock Correctional Facility for armed robbery. He got out in '17, but he just died, so, change is coming, no more running ... blind.
I can see how not everyone would like the voice of Kevin Cronin of 1970s -'80s rock band REO Speedwagon. (That's as with Geddy Lee of Rush.) This is not the best song off of this band's cleverly-named 1978 album You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish, as those would be Roll with the Changes and Time for Me to Fly, but it fits this post somewhat.*
* We already featured Jackson Brown's Running on Empty, but there's a Doobie Brother's song ...
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They're baaaackkkk... the Yellow Pages
Posted On: Thursday - April 11th 2024 9:50AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity History
I really like the slogan.
How weird! I am sure it has been 8 - 10 years (as I wrote before) since the Yellow Pages would still be delivered to our porch yearly. Now, just 3 and 2 1/2 weeks after Peak Stupidity's posts Let your fingers do the walking. and The Yellow Pages - Factoids and Fun, respectively, there came another one. It's about the time of year they used to come too.*
This one is 5/8" thick max, as compared to the old > 2" thick ones. I think I'll keep it for the times bing lets me down.
I am low on extra time today, so this will have to be today's only post. More on books for what's become book week here, and something on the invasion to come the next couple of days.
* I believe I recall from my business that one had to get ads arranged by some deadline in February. That gave a month of more for the mass printing and distribution.
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Day Pass
Posted On: Wednesday - April 10th 2024 4:48PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Big-Biz Stupidity
We really ought to have a Bureaucratic Stupidity topic key here at Peak Stupidity, but back-filling in topic keys into older posts is something we are loath to do as we near 3,000 posts. This post would have such a topic key.
Overwhelming bureaucracy is a form of stupidity that has been building throughout my life, and it has even greatly affected my career path. It's gotten worse with all the Artificial Stupidity involved, that is, the computer systems that every business great or small (thinks they) simply must use. (We've noted some of this at the auto parts store, pizza joints, etc.)
This is about the YMCA, where we've been going regularly for a children's program. Since this is far from home, I end up staying for 3 hours. No problem - they've got wifi, and I'm here using it right now. They've also got a LARGE number of exercise machines, which is what I'll get to.
At the YMCA, one must have an account, see? OK, but my wife had signed up for various things, and she somehow had 4 accounts, unknowingly. They ask questions on the app, and she answers them. That's all. We didn't care about "no steeenking accounts". They did, so they spent 20 minutes with me as I was ready to take my boy home a month or so ago. That was frustrating, but I guess, we're straight now.
"You're fine" now, as they say these days, but since I'll be spending some time here, I asked about using the work-out machines. Getting a membership for this won't be worth it, but the lady suggested I use a day pass for just one time for free. That was to be the deal today. The gym entrance is 20 ft from the counter, so... "What's your full name." She looked stuff up. "OK, I'll need some form of ID." I pulled out my wallet to show her my driver's license. That wasn't going to cut it. She was deep into the software, figuring out how this all was to work and ...
"Forget it. If it's gonna be that much bureaucracy, I'll just stay over there again and get on my computer.". (I got a big bowl of fruit too - thanks, REDACTED, my wife!)
Come on, man! I see 50 to 100 machines over there, but no exercise for me... beside the typing. What in hell is wrong with just giving me a bright yellow card?! Put a date on it. She'd recognize me were I to come in next week and try to weasel in with another one-time pass. The day that (I shouldn't!) hope comes when all this software stops is the day these people will all die inside. Good! Shoulda' put in more cardio, but ... the computer won't let them.
PS: More of this: We came here mostly for the swimming. It was getting near the end of the morning, and no kids were in the pool. I came to the desk to ask. I kid you not that 2 minutes or more had already gone by with the woman checking "stuff" in the computer to tell her when the kids would go swimming, if at all! I had to say it this time. "OK, you all keep checking stuff in the computer all day. This will go on till noon, too late for swimming. Let me just get him, and then we'll go in the pool." I had to sign a tablet, and luckily I knew the right phone number, or we'd be at the YMCA all day.
PPS: O/T from the bureaucratic stupidity, yet pretty apropos here: I've mentioned there's a nurse in our family. She told us that on a recent shift, all patients on the floor had no pain medicine for about 4 hours. The computer password had been changed. See what I'm talking about, but worse?
PPPS: No, I won't embed the Village People song. Go see 'em in concert. I imagine they're still playing, like everyone else, at least the ones that haven't died from AIDS.
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Come Fly the World - Julia Cooke
Posted On: Wednesday - April 10th 2024 8:26AM MST
In Topics: Feminism History Race/Genetics Books Female Stupidity
I got this book out of one of the LittleFreeLibraries nearby over a year ago. I finally read it at least 3 months ago, so it's time to write this review before I forget everything and time to return the dang book. Even if you all don't get entertainment value out of these reviews, at least I can save you some time by explaining why you'll not like a book here and there that you may have seen.
Julia Cooke's Come Fly the World* is one such book. Note that the title is not Come Fly with Me (of which there are many books and a song**). Were it the latter, I would have expected a story of mile-high club events, and all kinds of fun on the overnights, i.e. sex, sex, sex. I really was neither looking for nor expecting that, but I figured this might be an interesting history of the aviation world of a half century ago.
What I didn't expect is that this book would be political. As I look now, I see that I should have read the back cover blurbs more carefully.
The first section of 3, The Wrong Kind of Girl is interesting enough. It goes through the motivation for young ladies for getting into a Stewardess job, the interviews, the uniform/fashion aspect of it, and the lifestyle, especially the travel benefits. This is written using the stories of 3 girls, Karen, Lynn, and Tori. The author skips around among the stories of these girls to paint a picture of this portion of the world of American commercial aviation in this long-ago era, and more specifically that of the storied Pan American Airways - Pan Am, whose last flight was operated over 32 years ago.*** Speaking of pictures, there's a very nice section of 30 annotated B&W pictures in the middle of the book. Now, THERE"S some history. (There are also 2 1968 Pan Am route maps at the beginning. I like maps!)
Well, the feminism comes in early on. The author makes sure to tell us that these women were ABSOLUTELY NOT in this business just to meet men and have sex with various crew members and whomever on layovers. They did, the latter, she admits, but not the nice ones, Karen, Lynn, and Tori, who were in this business to help the world, not so much anyway. These 3 were very intelligent and could have done other things, per the stories, but then, were they representative? I know about this business, and I know about women. They were exceptions.
Julia Cooke can't seem to handle the truth that she described herself (end of Chapter 7):
Competition snuck into the field and Pan Am had no play. "We must add to [our excellence] 'a new dimension' -- that is, emphasis on what pleases people. And I know of nothing that pleases people more," Halaby [Jajeeb, successor, after a year, to the famous Juan Trippe] said in December of 1968, "than female people".That means pretty women, who were indeed the norm at this time, well before the woke HR departments took over. Women can't appreciate these "female people" working the airplane cabins like men can, but they still would rather be in this world than today's.
The feminism in this book comes to the forefront in the 2nd section, You Can't Fly Me. There you go. The 3rd chapter within this section is titled Open Skies for Negro Girls. That's enough. I had to skip that one. As pretty as Hazel Bowie looks in the B&W picture in her cute Pan Am cap, I didn't need to read more anti-White crap.
Where this book gets really political, though not really one-sided about it, is with the story of Vietnam. This is part of the story of these years of Pan Am, as that airline did quite a big of flying to that country during the war, flying American soldiers there and home. The story of the Nixon-arranged baby-lift is told here. All this is indeed a story worth telling, but it encroached deeply into the main story. That might be a good story in its own right, but it takes the book way off track.
The Vietnam story goes on into the last section, Women's Work. More Women's Vietnam memorial, civil rites, racism, etc. Ugghh... I got through it just because I'd gotten this far, well beyond the point of diversion back to the origin.
Come Fly the World is not the book you might think you're picking up. It helps to read ALL the blurbs!
* The subtitle is "The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am".
** ... which is played in one fun scene in the the movie Catch Me If You Can, one of my favorites.
*** It was Boeing 727-200 service from Barbados to Miami, Florida.
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New books!
Posted On: Tuesday - April 9th 2024 8:42PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Books
In my digesting of VDare daily - before the big hiatus that is coming - I will read most of the Steve Sailer posts. I can't help it. I try not to get over to unz.com, but in this case - Lionel Shriver's Novel ”Mania”—Alternate History Of The Great Awokening Era - well, come on!*
Even though she is the only author I come close to following in any sense, I didn't keep up enough to know that Lionel Shriver had a new novel out. In his quick post, Mr. Sailer excerpts a bit of a review from the Washington Post** and provides a few remarks. I am excited, and the book is on the way already!
I'm a big fan of Mrs. Shriver. Peak Stupidity has written about her in other contexts - her political talks, her bugging out of England, to Portugal, and some of her articles (such as one good one in particular against the Kung Flu PanicFest) before. It's her novels though, that we have written the most about: I wrote a 6-part review of her prepper novel, The Mandibles: Introduction - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - Part 4 - - Part 5 - - and Conclusion.
We featured a review of her dark suspense/drama novel of "kids gone wrong" called We Need to Talk About Kevin. Then, we featured a review of the movie too, with comparisons to the book. We also reviewed The Motion of the Body Through Space. It's from the latter that I will provide a long excerpt here. That is due to the fact that Mrs. Shriver's newest novel is about Political Correctness' successor-on-steroids, Wokeness. From what I can tell from Mr. Sailer's quick take, it's a parody of the most stupid example possible, the cancelling of the idea of stupidity itself. Of course, it's very hard to do parody now, due its very limited shelf life.
In the Motion of the Body ... novel from a few years back, I really thought Lionel Shriver was going in that same direction, but let me just excerpt 3 paragraphs of my review:
Now, let me discuss a really interesting part of this recent novel for us Conservatives, but, unfortunately, a theme that plays only a fleeting part in this story. Likely it's her childhood background from old-timey North Carolina, but Miss Shriver brought up a topic in The Motion of the Body Through Space that could really put her on the outs with any of the NYC or London (her current residence) woke crowd. In the story of why Remington Alabaster, the narrator's exercise freak husband, is retired with time to do any of this to begin with, we learn it's due to the most extreme Affirmative Action, immigration-driven, feminist wokeness that even a Conservative could think of! Oh, yeah, this author goes there. It turns out that Mr. Alabaster's nice and somewhat rewarding city government engineering career got canceled by one sub-standard African immigrant lady. There are a few pages about this, then later some racial discussion in the form of conversation, as usual, between husband and wife. That latter conversation (pages 205 - 207) could have easily been part of a Steve Sailer HBD comment thread.In hindsight, I may have been too harsh. The author had her story, and AA couldn't be a big separate story in the same novel for the sake of ... something I can't explain because I'm not a writer. However, that last bit of back-tracking completely from the point on anti-Whiteness was NOT OK. Really, I wonder if some editor threatened her with the withholding of publishing of the book if she didn't insert that last AA conversation.
To add more anti-woke goodness to the pot, we find out toward the end of the MettleMan exercise madness saga that Serenata's voice-over-artist job is being slowly and surely cancelled, as it has now become NOT OK to appropriate foreigners' or non-anyone-plainly-normal's voices. That puts the kibosh on her part-time, but lucrative, gigs, basically. Though the narrator does mention financial worries, after that anti-White damage to the couple, I honestly don't see how the family was planning on staying in the black - the numbers just don't seem to add up.
It was disappointing to me that this amazingly honest White-people-getting-screwed (twice) background story became nothing more than that, a small sub-plot. The author went nowhere with it. In fact, she reverted at one point. At some point Serenata noted that the MettleMan competition, the business of it, and the family and fans too, were predominantly White. She didn't make anything of that, until one paragraph that I couldn't find right now, in which she seemed to see that as a problem. OK, that was the book character, but was this an effort at plausible deniability by Mrs. Shriver? I don't know why she brought it up in the first case then.
I look forward very much to Mania. Then, I was getting worried again, but finally my 3 copies of Mr. Sailer's Noticing came to the porch. We've been anxiously awaiting this one too. I skimmed through it for 1/2 an hour and learned that I will later definitely be reading this rather than skimming*** it. I'll write both an introductory post on the sections and chapters and then a review of some sort.
There's also a review Peak Stupidity has been meaning to post for some months on a totally different book. Luckily the LittleFreeLibrary I got it from a year back does not levy LittleFreeFines that result in LittleFreeLiens on my LittleFreeHouse.
* I've kept up with the comments for this special case. I really wanted to chime in, but I won't.
** Upon reading Mr. Sailer's title, I first thought, "Hey, why didn't John Derbyshire alert me to this book?! He's the guy who turned me on to Lionel Shriver a few years ago with her The Mandibles. I get it. John Derbyshire reads the New York Post, while Steve Sailer reads the Washington Post (along with The New York Times, The Atlantic, and what-have-you).
*** The latter was anticipated only if this book was a collection of short columns of which I'd already read the majority of. That's not the case.
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Peak Oil Price
Posted On: Tuesday - April 9th 2024 6:06AM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Trump Economics Inflation Zhou Bai Dien
"Peak Oil" is a theory and phrase that has not been heard of much in the last 10 - 15 years. It IS the impetus for our site name and URL, Peak Stupidity, as the idea of "peak oil" was still more in internet pundit's and readers' memories when this site started.
I have a post in mind about the demise of the peak oil idea, but that's not what this post is. I'm talking peak oil prices and really only a local maximum is what I'm hoping for.
The image above is from a nearly 2 y/o post of ours, You didn't inflate that! We went through the argument that, no, Zhou Bai Dien wasn't a whole lot more responsible for the increasing price of gas than Trump and the Feral Gov't in general. It's not the gas, it's the Dollar.
As we noted at the bottom of 2 posts already here and here, 2 silver dimes will get you about a gallon of gas... as they did in 1964 when they could have been newly minted dimes. Gas is gas, and silver is silver, but fiat is funny money.
There have been the usual lefty stupid moves by Dark Brandon, killing pipeline projects, draining down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve*, working against Fossil Fuels** using the fairly new Climate Calamity™ excuse instead of just Peak Oil. (We've got to scrimp - we're running out!)
However, the public is not so wonky and knowledgable about these behind-the-scenes economic factors. When their big Lincoln Navigators and monster pick-ups take $150 to fill up, they start thinking very simply that "This President sucks!" That's true, he does, but they don't know the half of it. Anyway, though, as a follow-up to this past Friday's post Trump v Bai Dien and 2020s v 1980s, I'd just like to add one big hope and dream of mine.
I would really, really, like to see a local maximum, a Peak Oil Price, of $5 a gallon, nation-wide average, around, let's see, 6 months and 3 weeks from now. I want to see $150/bbl on November 4th, or some number that can beat 2,000 mules. Let's go, Brandon!
* In the short term, that may have kept prices slightly down, but there never was enough in there for this to be good long-term policy. I will add that Bai Dien (this is one thing that IS directly under the President's control legally) brought the reserves up very slightly, from 346 to 358 Billion barrels, since that post. (The data on this good site is 3 months old, so this is from end-o'-July '23 to end-o'-Jan '24.) In case you're interested, we wrote a lot about the SPR - more here - - here and here.
** That brings me to a video interview on Tucker Carlson's site, to be mentioned in the post on Peak Oil to come.
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Peak Totality v Peak Totalitarianism
Posted On: Monday - April 8th 2024 10:57AM MST
In Topics: Science Totalitarianism
Our family got to see the total solar eclipse of August 21st of '17. For me, my son, and 2 friends, it was worth traveling a little ways last minute to get to an area of "few" rather than "scattered" (or worse) cloud cover, one cloud of which could have ruined the whole thing. My wife didn't care so much, but she got lucky.
It was fantastic, and a great time was had by all. However, nobody here (my family) seems to care enough this time, so we'll miss this one.*
Peak Stupidity was less than a year old that last total solar eclipse with a good path across America.. That afternoon we posted Eclipses in History: Learn some science - it may save your ass some day.. We also linked to a great book by one Duncan Steel - Eclipse.
We hope some Peak Stupidity readers will find the right spot weather-wise and enjoy this amazing** astronomical phenomenon this afternoon. Because the moon is closer to Earth than it was during the eclipse in '17, the path of totality is wider, and, in the transverse direction, the duration of totality will be 4 minutes instead of just over 2.
Peak Totality is one thing, but we will continue to focus more on Peak Totalitarianism here. You don't need special glasses*** to see the latter.
* For you would-be doxxers, this is a tough, challenging puzzle. "So, he's not IN the path today, meaning he doesn't live along this 110 mile-wide curve here. In '17 he DID see it, so he was right about here .." Yeah, but what if we'd traveled a ways .. both times. Yeah, but it's about the weather too. Keeping an eye on the TAFs, are you? Gotcha! (Being paranoid can be fun at times.)
** It is really miraculous, as what are the chances of the moon in your world being this close to the same apparent diameter as your sun? (30 minutes of arc = 1/2 degree)
*** They're for viewing the phases of the eclipse around totality, not during. You won't be harmed looking at the moon during totality with the naked eye.
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