Life during the final rise toward Peak Stupidity


Posted On: Friday - June 10th 2022 8:43PM MST
In Topics: 
  General Stupidity

Note: Peak Stupidity cannot guarantee these gasoline prices:



I'd seen this lady 6 or 8 times before, she being one of about 3 people that work at the counter of this particular gas station/convenience store/fast food joint. I never did like her, as this middle aged White woman talked like a whigger. I guess it's who you grow up with, but it was disgusting to listen to.

Even so, I was nice, as I just walked in the place to ask her if the price on the sign outside that said "Cash" was the same for the use of debit cards. That's usually the case, but I am never sure, and the prices on the pump itself (for each fuel grade) were not displayed.* I would have paid cash if that weren't the case, and this time, since I didn't plan to fill up, this would have been the only walk inside, so it would be simple either way.

It went like so:

"If I pay for my gas with a debit card, is it the same price as on the sign?"
"I don't know."
"You work here, though." (The niceness had worn off quickly!)
"When I pay, it gives me the same price as on the sign."
"OK, so you DO know! Thanks."

What did I do that day to deserve to be in such a stupid conversation?



PS: The reason I didn't want to fill up this vehicle this time was because for 2 weeks now I've been in the mode of waiting for gas prices to go down. That didn't work out. It has been going up about 10 cents every couple of days.

PPS: The cash vs. credit deal at the gas stations was discussed on this blog a year and a half ago, during the middle of the Kung Flu PanicFest, in Hurrah for Credit Card charges!.



* Yes, that's the case even after paying/selecting the type. It was just the usual shoddiness that one may expect now - nobody anywhere knows how to fix this I guess, or nobody thought that was worth doing.

Comments:
Al Corrupt
Wednesday - June 15th 2022 7:17PM MST
PS

Safe Now,

I’ve even heard of tradesmen who take cash will give a cash discount of up to 10% (probably half of what they save on taxes)
Dieter Kief
Sunday - June 12th 2022 1:18AM MST
PS - Alarmist et. al.
Statistician Norman Fenton's lockdown considerations are now to be found here - at the end of this paper***:

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/13847/pdf/

*** he took 'em down as the header of his twitter-thread
Dieter Kief
Saturday - June 11th 2022 11:32PM MST
PS

Alarmist - 
- you're right, 7% excess deaths in Germany is not negligible.The question is what this 7% number indicates?!Long story very short: It indicates that lots of things have gone wrong (Lots, like, wrong use of ventilators; lack of protections for the vulnerable (that was going on well into late 2020 around here - as opposed to Switzerland); the numerous downsides of lockdown, which killed thousands quite easily - see Dr. Atlas' and Professor Norman Fenton's work in this field - for Fenton's work, see the header of his twitter-thread - great work by English bayesian statistician Professor Norman Fenton about the damages done by lockdowns)...

Very short side-remark: Professor Beda Stadler, the friendly and self-ironic Swiss non-panicker, is a virologist and has worked with mRNA - vaccines for years (!) before Corona hit. - He said Professor Bhakdi and other - alarmists - are - seen especially from a technical (=biochemical) standpoint, wrong. And that this technique is - pretty cool, to put it that way. So: I followed Professor Beda M. Stadler here, I can say. And I still do, because - the incoming data showed - time and time again, that he might well be right about this one - as in so many other cases too. Don't underestimate humorous and self-ironic researcher Professor Stadler from the Emmental (great cheese there too, hehe). He is a well respected virologist - and a very nice down to earth chap of the thick-headed Swiss Berne-type.
  
Mr. Hail -
 
- I'm basically with Professores Stadler and esp. Christine Stabell-Benn in this case. Which means: No more Covid-vaccines unless people are old (over 75) and - have severe illnesses too -  - - because Omicron is a game changer, in that it is a lot less dangerous.

I'm also with Stadler/Stabell-Benn and Levitt/Ioannidis, in claiming that vaccines did help significantly during earlier stages of the pandemic.I have all the time been with the Swiss and the Swedes and the Great Barrington Declaration crowd (which includes Professor Sucharti Bhakdi), that you should not enforce vaccines on patients against their will. Just don't do that. - Vaccine mandates were wrong. And they corrode the willingness of people to take vaccines, which might be another huge damage done here with regard to severer future pandemics.
And Iagree: These thigngs should be stated as clear as possible in the hope, that the first shock, with which Covid did take almost center world-stage, and the mistakes that followed could be - better understood and - avoided even - - in the future.
The problem of the scocial state as the New Secular Authoritarian Mega-Mother-Goddess might turn out to be the biggest obstacle to sound & reasonable debates & solutions.
Hail
Saturday - June 11th 2022 7:38PM MST
PS

Mr Kief, summarizing Dr Eugyppius: "The vaccines sure did some damage - as did Corona - but overall: No reason to panic!"

(sidenote, re Dr Eugyypius: I know that Eugyppius is a disgruntled academic, but I'm not sure if he has a PhD. I call him "Dr" because he deserves it at least as much as "DOCTOR Jill Biden").

My response:

It was/is immoral for the State to force an unnecessary and experimental vaccine on people, as a manifestation of a techno-narcissistic mania which we may now be stuck in. The quasi-forced experimental-vaccines were only one of many crimes associated with the Panic monster these people brought to life and kept so well fed for two years. I agree if this is the point you intend to make, but I disagree if the implication is we should forget about the Vaccine Question and close the book on it.

As noted by The Alarmist, we don't know what the long-term medical effects of the vaccines will be.

The question I am interested in is, Why did we ("we") take this giant risk, these experimental vaccines, for a flu we knew for certain was not unusually dangerous to the large majority of people? We had enough data to make this "call" for more than nine months before the first vaccines were shoved into the systems of the young and healthy. Why? This becomes a political question, or a cultural question. But the vaccine question always returns us to the bigger Panic question. Why did it happen an stay so long?

Numbers-people will (I presume) continue to fight over the vaccine body count, but the bigger problem is that the State crossed into territory of (what I cannot imagine I am alone in thinking was) profound immorality with the Corona-Panic. Using their powers and influence to force needles into people is the kind of dystopian-literature-like imagery that sticks with people. I wish they'd gotten angrier about all aspects of the Panic, but most people don't get upset so much over abstractions like marginal losses to lockdowns in second- and third-order effects.
Moderator
Saturday - June 11th 2022 9:07AM MST
PS: Ooops, SafeNow, that was a typo.

S/B "A silver quarter - pre-1965 - has 2 1/2 times the amount of silver in it than a pre-1965 silver dime, etc."
The Alarmist
Saturday - June 11th 2022 7:25AM MST
PS

@Moderator, your solution makes sense, but they could also just put ‘x 10’ behind all the prices and roll them back so that $1.00 is actually $10.

@Dieter, back when we were in the first six months of vaxxing,I asked another German who shrugged off the EU death stat when I told her it had crossed 4k, how many vaxx-induced deaths are too many? We haven’t even gotten into the long-term tally yet. German excess deaths are running somewhere around 7% at the moment. That is a statistically significant signal, but many folks have been lulled into accepting that as a nothingburger because the authorities continue to tell the big lie that the benefits outweigh the risks. Herr Göbbels and Herr Hitler had nothing on Herr Spahn and Herr Lauterbach.
Moderator
Saturday - June 11th 2022 4:49AM MST
PS: I meant to add, thanks for that anecdote, SafeNow. Same day service instead of 6 weeks or more! That 5 O'Clock is interesting. I didn't remember when I wrote that you had written "green" (to be seen), so, yes, real cash is king.

One still gets better service, and buying property is much easier, if one pays "cash", as in no loans, and in the medical case, insurance which involves (for the office) negotiations and complications.
Moderator
Saturday - June 11th 2022 4:44AM MST
PS: SafeNow, I had one non-invasive medical procedure done years ago for which I paid cash. There were about 10 people out in the lobby, and a good share could have been illegal aliens (if I'd only asked, I know, right?)

Anyway, they called me in first, after a 2 minute wait. Oh, this was CASH cash, not a check or C-card. "Cash is King", I always tell them. I would love it if American got that mentality, whether that cash is actually green pieces of paper in '25 or '30 or whether it is .22LR rounds or junk silver.*


* For you in particular, SN, since you asked about gold under the previous post: "Junk silver" is anything but junk. It is 1964 and older US silver coins that were made from fixed amounts of silver, linear with face value. If I recall right, the percentage was ~90%, but one silver dollar was a bit under a troy oz, so a dollar's worth has 0.73 (again, if I recall right) of silver, meaning a 1962 (just any example) dime has 0.073 troy oz, a quarter has 1 1/2 times that, etc. That makes it easy to use this as money.
Moderator
Saturday - June 11th 2022 4:35AM MST
PS: Alarmist, I meant to write on here that i wonder if these electric/electronic gas price signs are ready for numbers over $9.999. If you note that extra 0.9 cents that actually meant something back in, what(?), 1973, maybe that's the solution. It'd still look funny, but people, well Californians, could learn to interpret it easily enough. Their kids would ask them in 2035, "Hey Dad, how come the 9 at the end of $47.99 per gallon is smaller?" "Well, son, that happened at the beginning of the great reset of '25." - I'm being optimistic, Dieter. ;-}

Yeah, you don't want to run out of gas, but I have some stored up. It's just that I spend time to get the no-alcohol gas, put the right amount of PRI-G (stabilizer) in it, etc, so using that is a last resort, unless it's time to change it out. It went 3 years last time and worked fine - I put it in an older vehicle to use it up though, just to be on the safe side!
Dieter Kief
Saturday - June 11th 2022 12:24AM MST
PS: Mr. Hail - it's funny, but I thought of Steve Kirsch before breakfast today - and not for nor reason.His take on the work of German pathologist Professor Peter Schirmacher about the vaccine side effects (one of those who actually look into this stuff with scientific methods), is nearing Peak Stupidity Wrong on the alarmist side.

- Where Pathologist Schirmacher states, that a third of the .u.n.u.s.u.a.l. Covid deaths he has seen in his Clinic happened around the time people were being vaccinated, Kirsch trumpets, a third of .a.l.l. Covid deaths Schirmacher would have looked into would have been .c.a.u.s.e.d. by vaccine side-effects.

 To make things look even darker, Steven Kirsch referred to German - hold your breath for a second - Homeopathy-leaning Professor Harald Matthes from the superleft Charité-clinic in Berlin, who would have also found very high numbers of vaccine side-effects, according to Steve Kirsch. Now: Professor Matthes has made a collection (!) of hints and statements - provided by anonymi not least... You could phone in (!) to Professor Matthes hotline and just tell your story and Matthes' team would somehow add your claims to his long and longer ... list...That was his - öh - scientific approach: Highly individualised - homeopathic approach to loook into vaccine side-effects...



Seen from a rather scientific standpoint, the US-German science-blogger eugyppius wrote about Professor Matthes' work, it is far away from being - scientific. - What did not hinder Steven Kirsch to embrace it with his warmest welcome...

eugyppius - a harsh critic of the Corona panic, wrote yesterday in his article Against Coronadoom about the vaccine panickers: The vaccines sure did some damage - as did Corona - but overall: No reason to panic! - Neither about the Corona-virus nor about the vaccine side-effects.That's also what John Ioannidis and Michael Levitt write, by and large.
Here is a link to eugyppius' quite good article - and below that is a short quote about his take on the vaccine side-effects

It’shttps://www.eugyppius.com/p/against-coronadoom?s=r

 eugyppius' summary: ...really hard to articulate, in a politically relevant way, the somewhat-bad reality. SARS-2 is not harmless but it’s nothing worth closing society over. The vaccines have been ineffective and they’ve had a terrible side-effect profile especially compared to other vaccines, but their excess mortality signal is fairly weak.

What dwarfs, by orders of magnitude, these merely somewhat bad biological and pharmaceutical threats, is the extremely dangerous public health response to this midlevel pandemic, and the emergence across the West of deeply stupid and terribly powerful technocratic hygiene dictatorships, which threaten to destroy our economies, our lives and our cultures in their single-minded pursuit of a pathogen that just doesn’t matter very much.

UPDATE: In response to commenter objections that I’m going too easy on the vaccines, here’s excess mortality for Eurozone countries in 2020 (grey), 2021 (dark blue) and 2022 (light blue): I’ve circled in green the most probable vaccine effect: The youngs were vaxxed in most countries beginning in late Spring through late Summer, and you see a steady rise in mortality in this cohort. If they were all due to the vaccines, we’re talking about 3,000 excess deaths across all the countries tracked by Euromomo.

The similar rise in the 0–14 cohort is striking and may also be related to vaccines, but it involves very few deaths, so it’s hard to know. From about week 45, the increase in mortality is increasingly tied to rising SARS-2 infections.

So - what eugypius says is: Stop inductive reasoning (speculating!) about vaccine deaths as well as about Covid deaths (Run Unz et. al.) and stick to the reliable metrics: Especially excess deaths.

I add: When doing so in the US, consider what Canadian researcher Professor Denis Rancourt has found out about the pattern of the US excess-deaths for those under 65: That it looks a lot as if those would have been caused by these four big factors combined: Poverty, obesity, heat and not beeing given antibiotics when the patients had needed them most badly (for the completely misleading reason, that those antibiotics would somehow be bad with regard to - Covid-treatments... (a huge medical... error).
SafeNow
Saturday - June 11th 2022 12:15AM MST
PS
Paying cash gets me faster and better service from various self-employed tradesmen. “I am too old to save paperwork, just tell me what I owe you.” They smile because they are ready for that line, they know I always use the same line as I take a wad of bills out of my pocket.

It’s even been the case occasionally with doctors and dentists.
I was on a trip out of town when a rash acutely developed. The front desk at a dermatologist I called told me they are booking new patients six weeks out. Me: “There would be no insurance for you to bill. I will be fee-for-service. I will be paying you green money at the front desk, before I am seen.” Receptionist: “Please hold.”. Receptionist, two minutes later: “Can you be here at 5 today, Mr. SafeNow?”

The Alarmist
Friday - June 10th 2022 10:44PM MST
PS

I’ve had prices change considerably between the time I pulled up to the pump and when I actually started pumping. It is indeed painful, but these are not times to leave empty space in your tank.
Hail
Friday - June 10th 2022 9:59PM MST
PS

The Canadian pop star Justin Bieber revealed early June 10 that his face has been half-paralyzed for some time now due to a vaccine side effect. He released a picture of himself with his now-paralyzed face, looking pretty gruesome.

He has been diagnosed with "Ramsay Hunt Syndrome," something about as likely to hit someone like Bieber as the obscure old-man's disease Kaposi Sarcoma was likely to his 25-year-old San Francisco bathhouse-regulars in the early 1980s.

Here is a discussion of the derivation of the 300,000 Covid-vaccine-deaths estimate:

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/a-cool-new-way-to-get-an-estimate
Moderator
Friday - June 10th 2022 9:50PM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, that is a HUGE number. I can find "The Bad Cat", but what site does this Steve Kirsch publish on? I don't keep up with people like Justin Bieber - barely remembered the name from, what 10 years back(?), but what an idiot!
Moderator
Friday - June 10th 2022 9:46PM MST
PS: Re your first comment on the not taking of cash. I have succumbed a few times, but I get pretty adamant on this one. Obviously you wanted to see that movie, and it's hard to change all plans to fight your battles. However, this is a battle that SHOULD be fought, a Book of Revelation level battle.

I like it best when the product or service has been partially rendered. "Take it or leave it!", I say.

Yes, the PanicFest was an excuse for a little while, as in "you're gonna infect me with that cash that carries all those COVID germies", then it changed to "we can't get the cash", now what "the supply chain"? Really? Americans had better starting fighting SOMETHING, and this is one that they can fight.
Hail
Friday - June 10th 2022 9:30PM MST
PS

Vaccine news

El Gato Malo and Steve Kirsch have recently concluded, by independent means using new data, that +/- 300,000 Americans have died due to vaccine side effects.

That is around 15 deaths for every 10,000 Covid-vaccine-recipients. The new estimate is towards the upper end of the long-established range of vaccine-risk, which was estimated at between 2 to 20 people per 10,000 who receive it will die from it. We'd known it was likely something in that range for a long time, and it was the basis for the confident statement that no one under 60 or so should ever have gotten it, which you heard Anti-Panickers making by this time in 2021.

The number in the US who have been injured enough to qualify as disabled from vaccine side-effects is reportedly near 2 million, or just below 1% of Covid-vaccine-recipients. Lesser injuries not included here, only disabling injuries. This number also from El Gato Malo and Steve Kirsch.

With Justin Bieber revealing that he is one of the unlucky ones and is now disabled due to his stupid and moral-cowardice-based decision to get an experimental vaccine he never needed, and with the Biden Clown-Car Corona Crew finally lifting the international-travel testing requirement, it may be that even the stragglers have finally overcome their Panic-mental-disease. Maybe the momentum against their position is so strong there won't even be Monekypox Lockdowns after all...
Hail
Friday - June 10th 2022 9:17PM MST
PS

Am noticing a disturbing trend in businesses that state directly and proudly that they REFUSE cash payment.

Some proclaim this proudly in signs on their front door or window.

And then this: About two weeks ago, having been talked into seeing a movie The Northman in the theater, was surprised to learn I could not pay in cash at all. All tickets are now sold only via kiosk screens. There is no cash payment mechanism available.

I asked the only employee around, he confirmed, No Cash is the new policy. I asked what's with this, why isn't there some way one could just pay in cash and be done with it. He said No. I must have thn had a negative reaction because he said "Well, there is ONE way...I can sell you a gift card over there for cash, and then you'll have to take that gift card, activate it by phone, and use the gift card in the credit-card slot in the ticket machine." That process being a little demeaning and a complicated-hassle, and being that time was ticking to be sure to see the beginning of The Northman, I gave up on it. I did ask since when had there been a no-cash policy. He said it's been a rule since they reopened, after a long period totally shut down by Corona-Panickers. I (of course) think the extreme Panickers who ran the show during the two-year "Covid" nightmare overplayed their hand in a lot of ways, and this is one.
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