On the charges of Kung Flu rebellion - I plead Immunity.
Posted On: Saturday - June 13th 2020 10:00AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Orwellian Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
I have managed to come up with a post here that again utilizes our Curmudgeonry abilities along with our usual anti-Kung Flu Panic competency, in addition to, what has become a Center of Excellence here at Peak Stupidity, our ranting regarding Big Brother / Big Data. All this came from a haircut and a shave... no, just a haircut - I'd never trust one of these people with a straight razor on my throat, especially after giving them grief right after I walked in.
It was the usual BS at the chain haircut place, same as we have noted in these pages incessantly, about giving out your made-up phone number, so the computer knows who you are. (Check out our Big-Biz Stupidity topic key, with posts such as Big Data can Kiss my Ass and Are the Millennials Retarded?, to see where where are coming from here.)
For a haircut, the excuse to have me "in the computer" is that they need to know how I like it cut. Just DECENT, or not so bad as it looks now, that' all I ask for. I guess they could type that in, but they've most of the time been reasonably cool when I just say "type in any number you want - I just want a haircut". Now, however, there is the mighty Kung Flu to worry about.
First off, as soon as I got into the place I saw a customer buying (BUYING!) a mask from the girl. You need one to get a haircut. I think he only paid a (possibly contaminated?) dollar or two, but if I had not had the one mask stuffed into my pocket for a few days, I'd have walked right out. (The problem is that I've got a card with 3 haircuts left on it, so they've got me.) OK, I can hack it for 10 minutes - I don't think they were going to push their luck in the waiting area, but I could go right away anyway ... provided I give them my phone number.
OK, no playing around this time, dammit, because now they really need the correct information for tracking, in case someone got sick, she told me, in so many words. (Do you see how these posts keep proliferating, because this may be more than the usual Big Biz stupidity, or their normal complying with the narrative. Is it a more Orwellian thing, a plan even, to use the Kung Flu Panic-Fest response to push for more tracking of everyone not just at the haircut place, to be kept in place even when this panic is officially over?)
I was sure the woman at the register would not budge on this, and that card with 3 haircuts left was burning a hole in my pocket. "OK, use this number - 555-5555. Can you type that in?" Actually, I was more clever than that, but you get the idea - still made up. "Is that one your real number?" "No." I cannot tell a lie. "I need your real number." Finally I acted like I had given up and gave her a much more realistic sounding "real" number. I mean, I might have to tell a lie so's I can get a haircut. The more I think about it, the more I think that phone number I gave is a friend of mine's land-line. I'm not Cosmo Kramer with his "Art VanDelay". I'm more like Fletch in the 1983 movie of that name. "Hey, nice to meet you, name's Harry Truman." (Come to think of it, that might work nowadays.) Well, worst case, they should be able to figure out the mix-up over the phone.
I'm sorry. It's just not their business, virus or no virus. The idea of tracking everyone without the completely Orwellian use of all the smart phone data and some serious number crunching software is silly. Most of us have been all over the place over the last 3 months, LOCKDOWN or not. Things still had to get done. There's no way the complicated web of interactions we have could be untangled to get at where I got the Kung Flu from. I suppose the Big-Biz idea of this haircut chain was that that if an employee got sick with, or maybe even actually FROM, the COVID-19, then all the customers she dealt with for 2 weeks before the diagnosis would be called up to, what, warn them? How many people have we each interacted with since then? Isn't it just asking for a lawsuit, or did Mr. Fauci give Big Biz immunity... immunity, get it? (Pun not originally intended, but I will take all credit for it.)
This is the excuse for the Orwellian idea of making use of all that smart phone position data. It'd be a hell of a project, probably with some real math guys involved, to work out a way to model all the interactions, use the (oops, a bit of garbage in here) contagion factors of any virus, and calculate who should have the virus, or at least be tested. That's some hard-core math and computer work, and it'd be very interesting to some brainy people, I'm sure. The problem is, I don't want any part of it. Lots of Americans would agree. If the rebellious attitude of us anti-panickers doesn't kill us, it'll just prove we are stronger. Whaddya', wanna sue me? I plead immunity!
Comments (11)
The current situation in gentrification nation, for your edification
Posted On: Friday - June 12th 2020 8:51AM MST
In Topics: Economics Geography Race/Genetics
Riots discourage gentrification. There, I said it. I mean, when you want to fix up that old early 20th century classic brownstone, paint it up in pastel colors (what?), then be able to amble over to the coffee shop or bicycle store, and walk to your information age workspace up that loft, it's really discouraging when you know that the street may be filled with ghetto thugs busting up windows at a moment's notice. They may not even spare any of your hard work, even though, had they read your tweets, they ought to KNOW you are on their side in the struggle against ... whatever...
I remember first hearing of this "gentrification" process in Geography class long ago. An example we discussed was a hillside full of old beat-up homes mostly occupied by black residents, that were bought and to be torn down for a development of newer, bigger houses. This hillside was close in to the city, so a desirable location.
Business is business, after all. Yeah, we get nostalgic, and some things really are a shame. "I used to ride my bike through there as a kid." "They're ruining an iconic area of town." "They gotta put up these thin pastel boxes, when those 75 year-old houses are still holding up nicely!" Sure, but one is perfectly free to put his money where his mouth is and buy up the whole neighborhood to rent out to the same people who might (and... might not) take care of the place. Knock yourself out... or let someone else do it, whatever...
Here's an important point though: Any complaints about gentrification by resident owners themselves are really complaints about the idea of property tax. After all, nobody's got a gun to your head, I mean, when there are no riots going on. You've been used to cheap living in a nice area, specifically because not many of the gentry really want to live by your sorry asses. Maybe they are wrong, but money talks.
You don't have to sell out. You can ask for a price that will allow you to get a house in a nice neighborhood elsewhere, but you may not get it, so stay then. Yeah, but taxes are going steadily up. Right, you are! That's the problem, not who's moving in nearby. Peak Stupidity is of the opinion that property taxes are the most egregious taxes of all, above even the abomination of income taxes. (See our series regarding the Federal version - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) After all, if you want to lay low, make small money (avoiding most income tax), be thrifty (avoid most sales tax) and live the minimalist life, they still will come after you if you don't keep paying on the shit you paid for in full! (If you didn't pay in full, you are really in better shape in this topsy-turvy world that rewards the irresponsible - just walk away, or leave it by the side of the road.)
Californians long ago ran into this dilemma of rapidly rising property values and therefore rapidly rising taxes, causing long-term residents to have to move out. They couldn't keep up. The revolt against this caused the adoption by the California government of Proposition 13, way back in 1978. Good on 'em!
That's what the problem with gentrification really is about, for the residents. However, we hear complaints all the time from residents and others that this is some more egregious racial injustice. (If I don't write "egregious", you can't get that Sharpton/Jackson voice in your haid raahht.)
Here's the thing, OK, black people: Most of you yourselves, and almost all the white people want to live in the safest area they can, especially if they have children. However, all the convenience draw of the city is very nice too, so they would also like to have at least teensy-weensy parts of the inner cities back. You all have had them for 55 years. How's that shit been working out for y'all?
... well, and decent neighbors and not so much of that ghetto rap music after, I dunno, 11?
For some reason, when it's Hispanic people displacing black people, say in large areas of Los Angeles, we don't hear the complaints of "gentrification". Yes, there are complaints, but Hispanics are not up for being guilt-tripped. They bought the houses fair and square, so get out of our barrio, pendejos!
You won't even hear large influxes of Oriental people or .Indians being called gentrification, even though these people put up with your asses less than the young white people. Think of the big money Chinaman that have bought up, and bid up, lots of houses in the West Coast cities of the US and in Hongcouver, BC, Canada. I just don't hear a lot of name-calling there.
Who are these gentry, anyway? I've read of the "landed gentry", and the word comes from descriptions of the British classes. From Merriam Webster, we read
Definition of gentry:"So it doesn't have to be white, people, but that's apparently the modern definition. Anyone else can move in, and bid up RE prices, hence, taxes, to the moon, Alice, but that's OK, I guess.
gen·try | \ ˈjen-trē \
plural gentries
1a : upper or ruling class : aristocracy
b : a class whose members are entitled to bear a coat of arms though not of noble rank especially : wealthy landowners having such status
2 : people of a specified class or kind
3a : the condition or rank of a gentleman
b obsolete : the qualities appropriate to a person of gentle birth
This post was to be about the effect of the riots though. The gist of it is this: After the residents of different American cities had had a long time to forget, and the younger ambitious residents not knowing about, the long bout of destructive rioting by blacks during a major portion of the 1960s, many tried to move back. This gentrification is of a neighborhood at a time. It's not some planned-out, big takeover, mind you, just non-black people wanting to live the city life.
There are plenty of examples all over, but just to think of one, there is the Brooklyn borough of NY City. I don't know how long it's been - 20 years, maybe more. It takes a while to rebuild. These folks spent the effort and made a nice place for themselves.
The large-scale rioting has come back with a vengeance, and to some locations, say Minneapolis, it's come for the first time. How bad will this set back the gentrification efforts of hard-working people?
PS: Commenter Ganderson gave us a brief history on race relations in Minneapolis/St. Paul in his comment under the post Snow Town is now Bro Town:
A bit of history- in the 65+ years I’ve been on earth there has been a black presence in the Twin Cities, two neighborhoods in Minneapolis- the North Side, where there were “call out the National Guard” type riots in 1967 and the area surrounding 4th and 38th near where the current fracas began. St. Paul’s Selby-Dale neighborhood was predominantly black as well.(I added 2 paragraph breaks.)
As one other commenter noted there is a large Indian neighborhood in Minneapolis, although not particularly dangerous- run down, but the crime was mostly low level public order stuff. The black neighborhoods were more dangerous, but not on a South Bronx level- I’d never think of not driving in any part of the central cities.
Since I left, two other groups have been added, Hmong tribesmen from SE Asia, the influx of whom was beginning at the end of my time there, and the Somalis. Neither has made the area better, and added to that the pull factor of generous welfare has drawn many black Chicagoans (the weather is not that much worse). Milwaukee, BTW, has the same problem. While there are still some very nice neighborhoods in both MPLS and St. Paul, many whites have left the city- most of my HS classmates have decamped for the suburbs.
NOTE: Out 'o time! May add some more later today.
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[UPDATED 06/17/20:] I feel like an idiot for not remembering commenter Ganderson's comment of only 2 weeks ago about previous riots in the Twin Cities.. I changed the text to "large-scale rioting" and inserted a portion of his comment in the postscript.
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Comments (2)
Hiearchy of Dogmas
Posted On: Wednesday - June 10th 2020 8:25PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor Political Correctness Movies
Per commenter MBlanc46, we can call the arrangement of the various victimized groups of Americans, in some pecking order of who is more deserving... of the white man's money, the Hierarchy of Dogmas. Excellent. We need to have a pyramid, or what they call a pyramid, nothing but a triangle really, to display these in an order we can all get behind. I know we all appreciated that guidance from the US Gov't on the 4 basic food groups and all that.
Per the great comments under this post from yesterday, we need to consider especially blacks, trans women of color, with a whole lot of combinations to be sorted out. Possibly some sort of weight-function methodology should be used, and no, that doesn't refer to POLDs, People Of High Displacement, and the variant POBs, People Of Buoyancy.
While I appreciate the term, Mr. Blanc, and all the good advice on how one should start categorizing this Hierarchy of Dogmas, one can't help but missing the simple life of yesteryear when we just categorized cars. See, this talk about Black, Trans, Americans, etc. has me thinking of a great example from the middle of the 1970's:
OMG, a Rebel flag on the Georgia Flag plate!
(Sally Field and Burt Reynolds)
"Westbound and down, 18 wheels a-rollin' ..."
(See 03:38 - "Happy Birthday, America", just after the Bi-Centennial.)
... and, for the return trip, with the trailer loaded with Coors beer:
"Eastbound and down, loaded up and truckin' ..."
This (spoiler: it's the same song) song is by Jerry Reed. Peak Stupidity featured the fun country music artist Jerry Reed before (the semi-truck driver you see here in the Smokey and the Bandit movies) in a song about Amos Moses - see I should have named him after a man of the cloth.
Comments (4)
COVID-one-niner Death Count Hemoraging
Posted On: Wednesday - June 10th 2020 7:52PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor Kung Flu Stupidity
I swear we were up to 118,000 American COVID-19 deaths a couple of days back. Then, my wife showed me 115,000 odd deaths today on her phone. The usual thematic map and data below give 114 1/2 thousand as of 1/2 hour ago, as can be seen above.
How can the count be going down? That's what I mentioned at the dinner table, and we speculated about resurrections, ghosts with unfinished business, and zombies. Peak Stupidity has opined already on our view of viruses themselves as zombies (see Kung Flu vs. Zombie) However, this is different. Are there zombies back from the Corona-dead, and would they be taken off the stats? Should they be easier to kill with a shotgun or stake to the heart in their weakened states? In that case, should they be re-marked up as Corona deaths the 2nd time around?
I suppose there could be more mundane explanations. Has the funding been cut off that incentivizes marking COVID-19 as the cause of death? Perhaps there has been some nudging from up above, no not hospital administrators but EVEN HIGHER, to not implicate the riots in causing anyone to get sick. Are doctors or next-of-kin rethinking some of these calls?
Can we call the pandemic over now, take our masks off, pull millions of stickers off the floor and ground, unload our pockets full of wipes into the trash, and quit installing hand sanitizer dispensers in really odd places?
I don't know. It doesn't look good ... for those who want to remain at home ... at full pay.
Still, I wouldn't have expected the numbers to go down. I'm gonna assume zombies, but not the zombies by your standard definition. No, I'm thinking more of the evil ones behind both the Kung Flu hysteria and the newest racial hysteria, upheavals, groveling, and erasure and defacement of American history. They are who The Hooters seem to be singing about here, in All you Zombies:
That is some more early 1980s music. It's from 1982 by this band, with it's kind of unusual sound, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
All you zombies, show your faces. (I know you're out there.)
All you people in the street. (Let's see you.)
All you sittin' in high places.
It's all gonna fall on you!
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From Russia with condolences
Posted On: Wednesday - June 10th 2020 8:11AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity The Russians TV, aka Gov't Media Political Correctness
This post is directly from a comment on the unz.com site. Yeah, I don't know if this was written by a Russian. It did have Russian writing underneath it, but that could be the translation INTO Russian, or that text might not match at all. No matter - it's a pretty good description of what people in other, non-Western*, countries must think of this George Floyd stupidity.
The image above is from Steve Sailer's recent post Was June 9, 2020 the Silliest Day in American History? . Well, we go ahead and use the word "stupid" here, instead of "silly", with their slightly different meanings, but the answer is NO. We are neither at Peak Silliness nor Peak Stupidity yet.
BTW, Mr. Sailer also had a one line post with the title Uh, oh ... that goes " But what if George Floyd doesn’t rise from the dead on the third day? ". As they say, "Heh!"
The non-italic text is from the unz commenter, and the italicized from the Russian:
This just in from the Russian Internet.I'm not sure if it was a dirty-trick "psy-op". That doesn't matter much either. I don't think there is a need, as, in any country of 330,000,000 people, you're bound to have plenty of egregious incidents of all sorts every week, to where the narrative can be arranged to be based on the best one. By "best", for the Lyin' Press, that means "that causes the most outrage and trouble ..., but brings in plenty of viewers and readers".
From Russia with condolences:
For how many days now the most powerful state on the planet is taking leave of one of its best sons. Even Presidents are not buried like this. A gold casket, hundreds of thousands grieving and weeping, thousands of kneeling idiots begging forgiveness from the Black population in some states. The mayor of Minneapolis holding on to the casket in order to not collapse from grief, pressed to the corpse of one of the most worthy of the worthiest citizens of America, the mayor sheds crocodile tears and excess mucus. His sobs are riddled with wailing cries of “forgi-i-i-v-e-e me-e-e-e-.” The former wife of the slain one sobs drowning in her own drool. True, the last time she saw him was six years ago when he left her with a three month old daughter. He never once sent his former wife any money for the child but the unfortunate widow has already been screaming for a week how she was left without anything to live on.
Because of this heartache, Americans have collected little by little $20,000,000 and the money is still coming in. The University of Massachusetts has set up a scholarship in the name of George Floyd. Could this learned husband read? We don’t know. Probably not. They don’t teach literacy in prisons. If events continue to unfold at this tempo, soon the Nobel Prize will be renamed “the Floyd.”
The Great Floyd was sentenced to prison for theft, for selling narcotics, armed robbery (the last time clenching the throat of a pregnant woman while he pressed the barrel of a gun to her belly demanding money)… then he went for a plea bargain, gave up all his counterfeit bills for which he received a reduced sentence. At the autopsy narcotics were found in his blood. Such is the national hero of 21st century America. We could not preserve this ray of light and so we remain in his debt. The work of Floyd lives on and grows. Massive robberies, felonies and rapes in mark of respect and grief for George whip through the Blue States of America. Reduced to rubble are the pretty neighborhoods of various cities including New York and Los Angeles. 89 policemen have been killed, a seventeen year old girl has been frightfully raped. Hundreds of Police and other cars have been burned, streets have been destroyed, squares, park lanes, swans living contentedly in city ponds have had their necks wrung… (until we meet again, Floydniks)…
With an advancing form of senile dementia, Joe Biden, candidate for the presidency of the United States, also fell on his knees today. True, he could not get up himself and needed help, but this will not daunt hundreds of thousands of admirers of Saint Floyd. They will vote in the elections for this redemption, for which, indeed, the Democrats are striving, not regretting anything. On your knees? No problem—on your knees!!! Face in the excrement?— with great pleasure!!! Anything you say, “Floydies.” And what is sad is that such is the whole Democratic party.
[What they don’t know in Russia is that this is one of the “dirty tricks” of American Party Politics, with a little help from the Deep State. Floyd is a psy-op. He did not exist like the planes of 9/11 did not exist. After all, all is fair in love and war.]
You can't blame most of the Russian, Chinese, or any non-"woke" people from making fun of the stupidity that goes on in current-era America. However, we could have done the same some years back, and DID. It's important to remember that the smarter of us didn't blame all the stupidity on the regular Russian or Chinese people. We knew where it came from. It'd be nice to have the same courtesy.
What we should remember is that the average Russian or Chinamen during their crazy times would have had a serious chance of imprisonment or death from the STATE for not going along with stupidity such as this elaborate nation-mourning funeral for this stupid violent black man named George Floyd. That's not the same here ... yet. We should work to make sure it doesn't get that far. That means having the courage to fight with words right now.
* As you likely know, and as will be discussed in another post, much of Western Europe is into this same George Floyd stupidity.
Comments (2)
A Streetcar named Karen?
Posted On: Tuesday - June 9th 2020 8:45PM MST
In Topics: Music Political Correctness Feminism Female Stupidity
Once again, we at Peak Stupidity take pride pride in our un-timeliness. This story seems ancient, anyway, though probably 2-3 weeks old. It was one of these viral deals that the Lyin' Press decided to make a part of national Infotainment. There doesn't have to be anything really important, outstanding, or unusual about any of these "big stories". They decide at this one fits one of the narratives, and, if you partake in the infotainment, well, you're going to hear about it, like it or not.
That was the girl dog-walker in Central Park from a couple of weeks back. No, I don't think she was actually named Karen, apparently a term of non-endearment these days for white ladies that take the rules (too?) seriously. "Karen" was not the best choice, in my opinion, as it's just not a common name at all for anyone under 50 or so. Because I met a young (20-something) lady named Cathy the other day, I realized that it's another name from the past, for the most part. You don't meet many young Cathy's, but maybe they go by Katherine or Catherine, which is pretty nice, or its variant Katrina. (I like the latter because it reminds me of Katrina and the Waves, which reminds me of their one hit song Walking on Sunshine.)
Oh, if you don't know who I'm talking about still, it's probably just as well. I won't go through the details, but the lady had her doggie off his leash in Central Park, NY City, a black man bird-watcher (no mere jogger, he) complained to her, she then ignored any admonishment, and he then said words, as he videoed the scene, that could have been understood as threatening. She called 911, the story went viral, blah, blah, blah.
I don't really care for either side in this conflict. To me, the quick take-away is that recording of still and especially video with smart phones just ups the ante in any situation. Could these 2 people not have come to a simple understanding, or, usually more in the case of 2 guys, said some words (a few "oh, yeah, you gonna make me?"s and that sort of thing), and then just walked away from each other, each with his own version of "what an asshole!" said under his breath as he walks away? Once the cops are called, keeping this occasional simple, mildly unfriendly human interaction to just that is out of the question. If it happens to go viral, well, then the SHTF for, not all involved, but at least whomever is lower on the PC totem pole.
That's what's happening with these "Karen" viral incidents. Even in this most feminist of societies, white women can't be assured of getting all the breaks anymore. This is not One Day at a Time or Mary Tyler Moore. There are black people involved often, and the tie, or even any close match, goes to the black party.
I kind of like the long-term implications of this. Peak Stupidity has maintained* the the Welfare State that has been implemented in American, mostly since 1965, but arguably earlier, has had a bad effect for men involved in marriages. Women nowadays have an upper hand, as they have Big State as a husband-in-waiting if they find out that they are "not happy" at some point, any point. Besides the family court lawyers and judges ready to screw over hard-working men, and the children, of course, to help poor unhappy damsels in distress and the welfare money of all sorts, there is also CPS and cops ready to barge in at their beck-and-call. The number is 911.
Well, this "Bad Karen" phenomenon is making this reliance on the support of husband Big-State, who could step in at any time, not always a good bet anymore. When there are black people (probably any other privileged folk too) involved, there is a big dilemma - will the phone call and husband Big-State, cause her more trouble than benefit? He may decide to knock her around more than Stanley Kowalski rather than bail her out. That's figuratively what happened to Central Park Karen, as she ended up getting fired from her nice finance job, embarrassed all over the internet, and even had her dog taken away. (That last part is complete bullshit - I don't care who you are.)
The way things have been going, 911 doesn't have that same cache now. I mean, cops may come eventually, sure, but you may be the one getting hauled off, or at least made to look stupid. One can no longer depend on the kindness of
If The State is no longer the White Knight for these damsels-in-distress, who they gonna call? Perhaps they should try to get along a little bit better. As far as husbands go, I suppose, as the white guy, you still don't have much of a chance ... unless you take a video that goes viral. "Karen! Karen!!!.
Well, if you don't have Elaine exclaiming "Stella, Stella!" in your head, you are probably still stuck with Katrina and the Waves. Why not? Walking on Sunshine, their hit from 1983, is a favorite of mine. It's THE hit from the album of the same name by this British/American band. (Katrina Leskanich is American.) What an upbeat song!
Katrina and the Waves:
Katrina Leskanich – vocals, rhythm guitar
Kimberley Rew – lead guitar
Vince de la Cruz – bass guitar
Alex Cooper – drums
PS: I did watch A Streetcar Named Desire once on DVD, but the plot with all the gossip and such is hard to follow. I really only got interested after that Seinfeld episode in which Elaine, high on muscle relaxers, yells out "Stella, Stella!" No mas!
* Though, truth be told, I haven't found a post here in which this was specifically stated - perhaps it's time for one.
Comments (4)
Michigan Totalitarian bitch exercises her Social Distancing Waiver
Posted On: Monday - June 8th 2020 7:20AM MST
In Topics: US Police State Liberty/Libertarianism Anarcho-tyranny Female Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
(Nice flags, BTW!)
Michigan Totalitarian Governor Gretchen Whitmer, disparaged first in the Peak Stupidity post Governor Gretchen Whitmer - I wonder what her childhood was like, must have granted herself one of those much-sought-after Kung Flu Social Distancing waivers. (Do you have to know someone to get one of those KFSDW-1B's? Just asking for a good friend.)
You've seen the Anarcho-Tyranny all around already, but Michigan and its Commie Governor really take the cake. Those citizens above, just trying to get their business and lives back in order, and wanting to be left alone, are the bad guys in the eyes of the Governor, and some of the legislature of the Wolverine State. Thousand of rioters destroying businesses and lives, and disrupting the lives of others are the good guys. Gretchen Whitmer has her waiver so she can hang with them (see With little social distancing, Whitmer marches with protesters from the Detroit News:
She's got an appropriate mask on, mind you, so she doesn't infect the others with ... her bullshit? I thought the deal was that the masks would not prevent the wearer from GETTING infected that well, though What does Dr. Fauci say ... this week? Either way, all the homies are going to infect each other, if any one of them has it. OK, it's all part of the experiment until the riots are over due to no more black men getting violent, and Nike sneakers only on back-order, therefore providing no more reason to
Peak Stupidity will have much more on this kneeling and groveling stupidity later, but I will note now that MI Governor Gretchen Whitmer is down on her knees here. Doesn't the Kung Flu spread via surfaces like, I don't know, the ground and stuff? Oh, right, she's got that waiver.
Who will be held responsible if this experiment gives the (B) result of last post? The giving out of virtual waivers to underprivileged black people, antifa Commie white people and other assorted riffraff could result in 10's of thousands (millions, per Ron Unz) of additional COVID-one-niner deaths. What is that, murder, manslaughter, 1st-degree, 2nd? I'm no lawyer, so I'll leave these details up to guys like Steve McGarrett of the 5-0:
If the result, as I very strongly suspect, of our nice little 2-week Riot Infotainment experiment is (A), as in, "no this is not the Andromeda Strain - that was just some Infotainment for the Spring '20 season", who should be charged or sued for all the death and economic devastation in that case? Instead of Steve McGarrett, I'll leave that one up to Mr. E.H.. Hail.
Comments (10)
Social Distancing Waivers
Posted On: Monday - June 8th 2020 6:41AM MST
In Topics: US Police State Liberty/Libertarianism Race/Genetics Orwellian Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
Apparently, not all LOCKDOWNed animals are equal. There is some kind of waiver for this whole important Social Distancing code of regulations, so long as one is an underprivileged black person, an antifa Commie, or the Totalitarian dictator of the State of Michigan. These waiver don't come willy-nilly. It is backed up by the hard science of people such as MD/Phd Jennifer Nuzzo of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health:
This tweet is directly off the Hail to You blog (Nice reply, Mr. Hail!)
Peak Stupidity has been remiss in pointing out Part XIII (that's 13 for you readers in Del Boca Vista) on the Corona Panic. This part relates the riots of late to the whole Kung Flu shutdown fiasco, something we discussed too, in Idle Hands are the Devil's Workshop, just over a week ago.
About the tweet, now there’s some PhD level analysis for you. This Kung Flu is DANGEROUS, we tell you, so we need to shut down private businesses and have you stay in your homes, but .. this doesn’t apply to very important riots. It should be OK… I mean, what's the worst thing gonna happen, right? See readers, if you had gotten through the level of education that PhD, MD Jennifer Nuzzo has, you would be able to understand the scientific precepts upon which this very carefully planned-out strategy is based.
These waivers that from the economic shutdown and Social Distancing regimen we have been undergoing, as our intelligentsia guide us with utmost alacrity, are all part of an, intentional or not, grand experiment on Kung Flu contagion. If we can get some kind of decent data from area/types of populations with the largest amount of rioting, we could find out either:
a) The COVID-19 as a highly contagious Andromeda Strain hysteria was all bunk.
or
b) These antifa and BLM instigators (that includes the Lyin’ Press) just murdered another few 10’s of thousands of people. OK, MILLIONS, if you’re Ron Unz.
I suppose we'll find out more very shortly, as the riot Infotainment-fest has been in progress for over a week. I've heard local numbers for "cases" of COVID-19 are up, but here we go again: Does a case mean someone with the virus or someone with the virus who is sick FROM it? Lots of us, maybe most of us, get various and sundry flu germs every winter, and many get sick. What's the ratio? How about new, increased deaths actually FROM COVID-19? Are the incentives still in place to chalk 'em up to that? I believe so.
Another 10 minutes of fruitless searching, and I still can't get a simple graph like that for the US. Supposed Kung Flu deaths are up to 118,000. Masks on, wipe your loot!
Next, if our experiment leads to conclusion (B), who should be charged with murder?
Comments (3)
Southern Cross - Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Posted On: Saturday - June 6th 2020 7:13PM MST
In Topics: Music
I got into sailing for a while, but it was a number of years after the hippy/folk/rock band Crosby, Stills, and Nash wrote the song Southern Cross . If anything that's not a Jimmy Buffett song is going to be a sailor's song, it would be this one. I'm sure all pleasure sailors love it, with its nautical terms (well, specifically sailing ones, too).
Southern Cross is from CSN's 1982 album Daylight Again. To me, this music was quite different from the band's, and the country's, music of the hippy era that had only ended around a decade earlier. This just seems much more sedate compared to their older stuff, and maybe not quite as good musically as Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, Marrakesh Express, Wooden Ships (not about sailing, but with Neil Young and his guitar), and, don't forget Teach your Children Well, featured on a Peak Stupidity post that was about some serious sailing, A Peak Stupidity Belated HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY .
Steven Stills sings the lead part on this one. Well, I've not seen the Southern Cross (too smoggy when I was in the Southern Hemisphere for a short while), but I have been to Avalon - once on a sailboat and once in a 2-man rubber boat with a 2.2 hp Mercury. I didn't end up in a noisy bar but did come close to tossing my cookies from some spiced rum or some such...
You know those people on youtube, who formerly wrote travelogs, that spend parts of their lives on the big oceans, with no home but their sailing craft? They called them crazy, preppers, outcasts of society, whatever. Look at the world of 2020, and tell me if those people weren't right on the money.
Got out of town on a boat goin' to the Southern islands.
Sailing a reach before a following sea.
She was makin' for the trades on the outside,
and the downhill run to Papeete.
Off the wind on this heading lie the Marquesas.
We got 80' of the waterline nicely making way.
In a noisy bar in Avalon I tried to call you,
but on a midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away.
Think about how many times I have fallen.
Spirits are using me, larger voices callin'.
What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten.
I have been around the world, lookin' for that woman/girl,
Who knows love can endure.
And you know it will.
And you know it will.
When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,
you understand now why you came this way
'Cause the truth you might be running from is so small.
But it's as big as the promise, the promise of a comin' day.
So I'm sailing for tomorrow. My dreams are a dyin',
and my love is an anchor tied to you, tied with a silver chain.
I have my ship, and all her flags are a flyin'.
She is all that I have left, and music is her name.
Chorus
So we cheated and we lied, and we tested,
and we never failed to fail. It was the easiest thing to do.
You will survive being bested.
Somebody fine will come along
Make me forget about loving you.
At the Southern Cross.
Comments (7)
Different venues for TSA Security Theater
Posted On: Saturday - June 6th 2020 8:49AM MST
In Topics: US Police State Peak Stupidity Roadshow
As mentioned 2 posts back, I want to add a bit more about the Police State Security Theater outfit known as the TSA, you know, those blue-clad goons. Really, after traveling quite a bit, I can only hold so much animosity toward the individuals working there themselves. Decent jobs are scare. They are just people trying to make a living. I've been even friendly with the people I run into a lot there, but it doesn't make the whole thing right. "It's just my job" and all that ...
What I've noticed is the various stages of sickening (at least to me) these unreasonable search-and-seizure operations are, depending on the venue, the size of the airport being the main thing. There are the big hub airports, the medium-sized out-stations, and the small out-stations (some with 4 airline flights per day, even in normal times).
We can all see the sad mess of cattle lines, indignities, and general mayhem at the big airport hubs. The lines can be as long as Disneyland's Space Mountain, but with a loss of privacy and possible groping at the end of it, rather than a cool, scary ride. (You get the hopefully-not-E-ticket ride later on, for, well, about the same price as Disneyland nowadays.) Its loud, it's shameful (to me), and we all are glad to get into the big terminal and forget about the whole thing. That is, until the occasional time, these people go to the airline gate for "extra-special screening".
The medium-sized airports are probably the best for my liberty-minded sanity. You see, the TSA area, retrofitted in the early '00s for most airport terminals and set up in the design of new airport terminals, are usually in a central wide hallway area. The ticket counter [WTF is a ticket? - Ed] and all that is well outside from there, with TSA guys still involved in checking and moving around the checked luggage that rides in the aircrafts' bellies, or other cargo bins. When you get past the TSA area, you can get into the nice quiet gate area(s) and not see the whole mess.
It's the small airport terminals that look the most like medium-security prisons. I have not seen any concertina wire... .YET. However, the way these place are set up, in their small buildings, passengers go through the TSA lines into what is nothing more than a holding pen. OK, it's a holding pen with two bathrooms and usually a couple of coke and nabs machines. "They don't have THOSE in prison, so there, you muh-Constitutional freak!", I will be told next time I mention this, the vending machines, that is.
You can't just walk up onto the airplane until the gate agent is working at it. However, that door to outside or the jet bridge will be locked whenever the agent(s), who do double duty going outside "security" to the ticket/baggage area a lot. Without even an agent there part of the time, it's just a pen, with no way out besides back past security, and, no, you don't wanna' do that.
The passengers coming off the plane that does a 30-45 minute turn-around will walk through a corridor that guides them out past the TSA. Many times, there are glass walls between the holding pen and the exit aisle. If you see someone you know, it's like some old movie or the prison visitation areas - you hear each other from the space over the wall, and you press your faces to the glass and give a kisses, hugs, or handshakes through the glass... then, of course, you pull out a stack of wipes, cause, you know... Corona and all....
PS: I don't have a good picture right now of the small airport terminal layout, but I'll get that later to illustrate my point... vs another 1,000 words.
Comments (4)
Good old Instapundit
Posted On: Friday - June 5th 2020 8:44PM MST
In Topics: Websites Pundits
A few weeks ago, I'd decided to ease up on the addiction I've got for the Unz Review site. That didn't take as much as I would have liked. However, in the meantime, I felt lost without a go-to website for whenever I got a hankering to sample some stupidity. (That's not the sites themselves, but what's discussed in the stories therein.) It's been quite a while, but I went to check out my old 15 years-ago-favorite, Instapundit, possibly the longest-running decently-known blog out there.
Glenn Reynolds, a Professor of Law at the Univ. of Tennessee, has written many short posts a day for something like 20 years! He has had to at least skim a bunch of articles in his down time, in order to at least point out the gist of each one, and sometimes a pretty good blurb about them. In the last few years, maybe as much as 10, for all I know, some other bloggers have taken up some of this work. I recognize some of the names but not all.
Anything by Helen Smith, his "insta-wife", seems to be her advertising of various products from Amazon. She used to write some normal posts in the past. Hey, I've got no problem with these plugs - it beats the heck out of little boxes or videos jumping around the screen, stuff getting grayed out, or the whole site bouncing around like a pinball until it stabilizes almost a minute later to graciously let me finally read the damned text.
There has been commenting on the site for a goodly number of years, but I still think of the site as one without comments, as it was in the old days. It'd be a different story if I could just put in a fake email address and start writing (actually it'd be a bad thing, as I waste enough time), but one needs to be a Facebook member, twitterer, or one of 2 other icons that I can't make heads or tails out of to comment. I looked through a small sample of comments, for just one post, and they sure look pretty civil, informative, and erudite.
The content of the posts is still to my liking. I remember Professor Reynolds being something of a neocon way back after 9/11, but I didn't notice any of that. Instapundit is still a great site to spend down time perusing, as it highlights the stupidity of this world just as good as back in the day. You won't run out of things to read (the posts almost always refer to other articles/sites), as often by the time you look into a post and come back, there's more!
I guess that was an updated review that I can paste under the Peak Stupidity site review here.
It's great to see that Instapundit is still doing a nice job and hasn't gone stupid over the years. Glenn Reynolds is a big dose of sanity in this world of insanities. Thank you, Professor Reynolds!
Comments (3)
COVID / TSA twin peaks of stupidity
Posted On: Friday - June 5th 2020 8:09PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity US Police State Kung Flu Stupidity
(I ran upon this one in a mess of TSA photos. Couldn't help myself, gotta have those eyeballs!
It's a real squeeze... uh, for Americans right now between the LOCKDOWN stupidity and the normal everyday stupidity, or at least that's what I saw at the airport today. The long-term reader will know that Peak Stupidity has a real problem with the TSA and other Police State functionaries of the US Feral Gov't. Really, if you don't fly much, these thoughts can be left behind, but for those who do, it's just more sickening each time.
To illustrate the scene to be described in this post, picture a checkpoint situation like shown below, for a small-sized American airport*.
First, there was the one guy with just a minor indignity. "You can't take these in carry-on luggage", I overheard. Looking at the "output" conveyor there was a can of deodorant and a tube of toothpaste. I guess they were both over 3 ounces, the lower bound, apparently, of the amount of gel and aerosol that terrorists can make good use of. "Just keep it", the guy said. He really wasn't angry but just disgusted with the stupidity of the whole process. I had a quick conversation with him, not caring who overheard, about the fact that this organization is not associated with the airlines (a lot of people don't know that).
Next, I overheard a younger guy, back before all the x-ray/metal-detectors/what-have-you, asking the TSA people when he could get through. I heard the guy tell them (not for the first time, I gathered) that no, he didn't have a newer driver's license for an ID. See, he was not able to renew it because the Motor Vehicle Department had been closed for months. If he tried to get whatever other form of ID he might have from home, he'd miss his flight, as he lived an hour and a half away. He had even called the airline** ahead, who'd told him he should be OK with the old ID.
In the meantime, masks may or may not have been required (I didn't wear one), and people were told to stay 6 ft. apart, and there were those damn stickers on the floor again. ("I have one word about your future, Ben." "Yes, Sir?" "Stickers.")
It was just one frustration after another for the guy, who was paying good money to simply go from point A to point B. He got through eventually, as I saw him get on the flight. His destination, after 2 legs, would have been a 2 day drive, but I wonder if he was considering that for next time.
These were two decent guys, trying to live with the BS piled upon more BS of 2020 daily life. Yet, somehow, they weren't about to riot. There's a lot of tolerance in Americans, perhaps too much.
* I wanted to add more about this, the scene at different sized TSA "venues", but I'll leave that for later.
** Again, the TSA doesn't work for the airlines, but that guy would have never gotten a hold of someone from the TSA in some Washington, FS office to get his concerns answered.
Comments (8)
High Stupidity from one Mark Levine
Posted On: Thursday - June 4th 2020 8:59PM MST
In Topics: Lefty MegaStupidity Pundits Race/Genetics
I think I've heard the name, but I don't know much about this guy. What is he, one of those pundits? I haven't spent the effort to check Mark Levine's occupation, but speaking of pundits, Mr. Steve Sailer is back to his usual self, after 2 or 3 months of heavy Kung Flu worry posting. I am quite relieved.
If you click on the link above, the list of his recent unz.com posts, you'll see that he's got a slew of great stuff now. One of the posts DOES mention the Kung Flu, but it's in a much more lighthearted manner - "Remember Coronavirus, Stay-At-Home, and Social Distancing? Well, Forget It, That's All So OVER".
I'm just too tired to write up one of the numerous other posts I've got on the front burner, so this will be those (much more rare than 2-3 years back) "hey, look what he said!" posts. Mr. Sailer points to a bitch-fest in the form of an open letter, proclaiming that black people have been screwed over by the Kung Flu AND by, well, about everything else in this white man's world. It's these tweets by this Mark Levine character that really display the stupidity for all to see clearly:
It's our fault that they had to have these
About 4 months earlier, Mr. Levine praised the Chinese people for showing up in a big close-together-for-support crowd in NYC to fight anti-Kung Flu racism or something, as ridiculed in our post Be Strong, Wuhan!:
(I'm pretty sure, at least I HOPE, that this Huxley's Ghost guy is also being sarcastic. How do you know on twitter?)
It's one thing to be stupid, but if you're gonna be stupid, Mark Levine. could you at least be consistent about it?
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Just when you thought you were out ...
Posted On: Thursday - June 4th 2020 6:03AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Big-Biz Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
When the world hands you lemons, you write a blog post ... or something. OK, the world is just handing me blog posts now - that's a better way to put it. All I have to do is go into a store or business, it seems.
The grocery store had lots of Social Distancing, anti-germ, cover your ass, errr, face, procedures in place yesterday. That's what Big Biz LUVS, LUVS, LUVS, procedures. We will conquer this Kung Flu, one procedure at a time. Right now with our 10 anti-Kung Flu procedures in place, and counting, we are GROCERY STRONG!
The fact that this Infotainment Panic-Fest hysteria flared up at home again did not have me in a good mood. That was what got me out of the house to go to the store to begin with.
Peak Stupidity conjectured just 2 days back that this Panic-Fest Infotainment was being cancelled for the (flu) season in order to run more popular 24/7 Infotainment, Riot-Fest Week. I mean, we aren't even close to breaking 2 million cases yet or 110,000 deaths of people with the virus, so the eyeballs are thin on the ground (whaaa? OK "the eyeballs are dull and hazy"). We were supposed to wait for fall with anticipation of the next season - it's never as good as the pilot episode, though.
Yet, it's not over, the hysteria, that is. This trip to the store, then, was made in a most foul mood. I was not about to put on any mask. Upon seeing the stickers on the ground even OUTSIDE the store, I purposely went in the wrong entrance out of the 2 similar air-powered doors. I asked the cutie (far as I could tell from her hair) who was bringing a basket outside to just hand that one to me - no wipe-down required for me. I really had either not seen or not noticed the one-way aisle stickers before, which I promptly made an effort to violate. I got my stuff quickly with no attempt to avoid touching anything I damn well felt like, in the produce section.
Upon checking out, after being asked about having a nice day (or not), I just went on a rant for about 30 seconds straight. No, no yelling was involved, but I came damn close to "this whole place is full of retarded-looking people".
There was only one thing that was going to calm me down. That was to hawk a nice big COVID-free loogie onto the big circular sticker outside the store exit. BULLS-EYE! (The Chinese got nothin' on me.)
I don't wonder why people are running around smashing up store windows.
Comments (2)
Beating heads - 52 years ago
Posted On: Tuesday - June 2nd 2020 11:57PM MST
In Topics: History Movies ctrl-left
Unz commenter Joe Stalin, who's chimed in here before*, pasted in this scene from the 1969 movie Medium Cool in a comment under Mr. Sailer's recent post The Sacking of Fifth Avenue, about NY City's experience with the current rioting. (Yes, Mr. Sailer's pun was intended.)
As it turns out, Peak Stupidity noted this obscure movie as the 3rd try in an attempt to watch a decent, well un-Politically-Correct, movie in our post Tried to watch a movie - here's 3 reviews in one! from 2 summers back. Man, that was right at 50 years after the action in the movie - I just realized that now.
From the youtube notes and comments, I learned that this scene in Medium Cool was almost all real footage from the area near the 1968 Chicago Democrat political convention in that turbulent time. The lady in yellow, one of the movie's stars, played by Verna Bloom (deceased early this year), is looking for the guy that appears briefly up high inside the arena. (The scenes inside the arena must be real too.) Apparently, this was a major new thing in the movie business, as the director Haskell Wexler did all this filming right in the middle of the action.
One could just skip right to 10 minutes in, near the end, to see the real action, but I've got this starting at 6 minutes, so the viewer can get the flavor of the whole scene. Starting from the beginning may be boring for you, but you can just skip back, of course. If nothing else, just the picture of the cars, the scenery, and the Americans of 52 years ago is cool to see. It's no depiction, this is THERE.
That Happy Days are Here Again brings back memories. I wonder how long one can go back and find that played at campaign stops and conventions in American history. As far as I know, it's a thing of the past. Young people don't go for this kind of music, but then, I don't watch these things anymore, so I can't be sure. Also, Peak Stupidity reader/commenter Vic Lougheed wanted to hear some Frank Zappa, and this movie has the song Oh No in the soundtrack, played as the two reporter (stars) are riding around Washington, FS.
The young people (mostly) in the crowd here chanted about Vietnam, as it was the US heavy involvement in that war by summer 1968 that was the biggest reason they wanted to disturb the D political convention. Candidates were truly picked at the conventions back in those days, albeit with delegates mostly chosen via primaries. It was no done deal already, as is the case now. The left in America did not want Hubert Humphrey, the favorite, as he was too Conservative for them.
This story is just one of this time in American political history told in Pat Buchanan's The Greatest Comeback. (Peak Stupidity has a short review, but we promised more posts to originated from this interesting book.). Many of the protesters seen in this scene were hard-core leftists and flat-out Communists, as I suspect of the crowd today. Because they had a lot more of a cause back then and actually knew something about the issues, I have a little more respect for the agitators 50-odd years ago then the idiots we've been seeing this past week though.
The cops went overboard in Chicago that day (or days?). They were backed up by their major (one of the Daley's that keep on being mayors there), who wanted to keep Chicago known as a place with law and order. This is the opposite of the case today, in which the mayors are generally not on the side of the cops, until, of course, things get really bad, and they will need them to save their asses.
I'm not really picking sides here on this Medium Cool footage. One can't help but wish that these cops** were around today though and given orders to bust some heads as 5 decades ago. Yeah, in this case I am picking sides, not so much in what originally happened in that one event in Minneapolis but with respect to busting heads of these black and antifa rioters. Back to Pat Buchanan, Peak Stupidity noted in this short post and in Mr. Buchanan's description in The Greatest Comeback that he kind of enjoyed watching the scenes such as this from his 19th floor of his hotel room in Chicago, Illinois that long-ago summer day. It meant his immediate boss, Richard M. Nixon, had a better chance of getting elected. Is there a parallel with today?
* We haven't heard from Mr. Stalin in a while, but I note that he wrote in under the Peak Stupidity post about the movie in question, in fact. Mr. Stalin has been a stalwart for the 2nd Amendment on the unz site, something Steve Sailer does not bring up much, if at all, from what I've read.
** Note the huge difference in the lack of body armor and militarization of the cops 52 years back. The National Guard, of course, is a different story as seen in this scene.
Comments (4)
Chinese grad students and airbag espionage
Posted On: Tuesday - June 2nd 2020 7:23PM MST
In Topics: University Trump Cars China
From what I follow on VDare of his immigration promises and inaction on the same, President Trump bats about a .100. That is, it seems that only 10% of his threats to the open borders crowd, i.e., promises to Americans, get past whatever roadblocks or just our realizations that the man is mostly a bullshitter, to get set in place.
The latest threat, i.e. promise to us, comes from a Chinese source, at least for me. The news is probably out there, but in China the folks who are interested in America know that a new program will be the kicking out of about 3,000 graduate students from programs at American universities. If you're not familiar, though "students", in graduate school, these people mostly do research. Graduate students used to split their time among their own studies, research, and teaching (with research and teaching alternating in some fashion). In the case of the Chinese graduate students, it's best for all concerned if they DON'T do much teaching. Therefore, they are heavily involved in research*, where much specific technical knowledge can be gained.
Our government may be using the current animosity between our countries as an excuse, or vice versa, as in, using this to add fuel to the fire. Either way, the point is that these 3,000 are people thought to be involved in industrial spying. 3,000 is somewhat less than 1% of the number of Chinese university students in America, near 1/2 a million, counting undergraduate students. It's a pittance, and I'd venture that 2 to 5 times as many could be doing the same thing.
This is not something new. This kind of thing should have been being done on a regular basis for the last 25 years! That's at a minimum (since mid-1990s) the length of time American universities have been letting the Chinese students and Chinese government take advantage of us.
It's not just the universities though. Military research installations and all sizes of American industry (what's left of it) have plenty of Chinese graduates. I'm sure a large portion of them are just decent hardworking engineers and scientists, but a country really can't afford even a fraction of a percent being industrial or military spies. By afford, I mean both militarily and economically.
An acquaintance of my Chinese source in this matter worked in Detroit in the automobile industry until about 10 years back. At that point he went back to China as an expert in airbag technologies. This
What could the folks back in Detroit do about this? The guy's gone. They could have done something about it ahead of time, with some foresight, but it'd mean discriminating, OMG, in hiring. Perhaps, their short-term thinking didn't involve any worries about competition 10 years thence.
(I mean, is it just me, or does that driver dummy have a decent rack?)
It's got to take a good poker face for any Chinese official tasked with making official complaints about these 3,000 agents of espionage being kicked out of the universities. "I am shocked, shocked, I tell you, that there is industrial espionage being carried out by our graduate students!" "Go ahead. Arrest the usual 3,000 suspects. See if I care. We have 20,000 more ... oops did I say that out loud?"
I will say here that this may be one of the hits that brings the President's average up to that .100 range. It souunds very definite. There are said to be a bunch of charter flights set up to take these ambassadors of goodwill back this Thursday (that's only 10 flights on the wide-bodies).
* Yeah, it's another cheap labor program. It's work that apparently Americans only USED TO do.
Comments (4)
Non-idle hands
Posted On: Monday - June 1st 2020 7:40PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Treehuggers
There was a group of about 6 guys, with a whole bunch of expensive equipment, at a nearby house to take down a large tree today. This kind of work is not for the soi-bois. It is a dangerous job, even with all the great equipment they have today.
The group that I saw was indeed diverse, though I doubt out of political correctness. The tough guy way up in the tree was a white guy, and there was another, probably the owners. There was a Hispanic guy that was operating the chipper and a few other guys to drag wood around. I think one was black.
After having written the post on Saturday, called Idle Hands are the Devil's Workshop, I thought I'd add this one to help bolster the point. This is real man's work. It's hard and dangerous, but with good money involved. You need to take care of the equipment and repair it sometimes. It keeps the mind and body well occupied.
Therefore, you wouldn't expect any of that crowd, whatever color, to be part of the rioting crowd (either faction, the black looters/vandals or the white commies). Some trouble around the area was only a few miles away, but you wouldn't know anything about it, and I doubt these hardworking guys had time to check up on their phones (maybe just at lunch).
There was nothing said about any of the trouble by the neighbors as some of them chatted for a while while watching this work get done. Outside and away from the Infotainment is a good place to be. It's that hard work and sense of accomplishment afterwards that clears the mind of any thoughts similar to those of the nutballs and thugs doing their thing in the inner cities of America. I've been there (no not way up in the tree, but doing hard manual labor). Too bad more of us can't be employed in this manner, or employed at all, for that matter.
Comments (7)
I miss my Kung Flu TV
Posted On: Monday - June 1st 2020 7:18PM MST
In Topics: Media Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
(I really wanted to get a nice bar or line graph of the data up to last week or so, but bing was pretty sure I didn't need to see that kind of data.)
With a new source of Infotainment now, black and antifa rioters all over the country getting
My wife hasn't showed me the numbers in most of a week, as they are struggling to get up to 110,000 COVID-one-niner deaths, lots of which may be bogus and 1.8 million "cases", a number which is even more bogus. (Yet, they give it to the nearest person - now there's some precision .. without accuracy.) I went into a fast food jernt (old Archie Bunker terminology), and no customers inside had masks on, and only the cooks had masks on in a serious manner. How can you hear the cashier when she's wearing a mask? So, she had it looped over her ears and around her neck. Well, these things do go for the jugular some times.
I talked to an employee at the job with a bandana and asked him if there was to be a robbery in Dodge City I should be worried about. He took it very well, luckily, as he could have had a six-gun for all I know. He took it off and told me how ridiculous he thought the whole thing was. He wore the bandana like a High Plains Drifter out of facetiousness. We then had a nice conversation as he kept his small water bottle in his hand. For anyone who may have wanted to rat on him about his not wearing a mask, he had "plausible deniability", he said, with his needing to hydrate all the time and all... Nobody questions hydration these days. Keeping hydrated is the new wiping your ass, or something.
Regular people seem to be past this hysteria now, maybe due to having seen the stories out of the experts go back and forth like pinballs. The web is still somewhat stuck on stupid, as I still get this same thematic map here, whenever I search on bing for "images" and "corona" or "COVID:
Look how HUGE those orange circles have gotten! That one based in New York is swallowing up land from Ohio down to northern Alabama! The whole country is toast, toast, I tell you!
It probably is the warm weather everywhere, helping attenuate this virus or the spread of it, along with the fact that it's pretty much a bad flu. Possibly, we'll have another spurt of it in the late fall. The Lyin' Press can only hope these riots go on that long, unless they can get that number up a lot more, somehow. I think this old standard is a lost cause, though, sorry to say:
If you can even believe the numbers fully, we are up through 5%, that's five percent of the numbers bandied about by the idiots that made that graph. What kind of percentage do you have to be below to where an apology is in order?** Just asking for a friend.
Look even the rioters, who should know better, what with all the new TV's they've got to watch now, are not wearing masks. How do you Social Distance during a riot anyway? Do you need to stay 6 ft. apart while smashing up a Target store***? That just takes the fun right out of it.
And then there's Sweden. Mr. E.H.Hail had lots to say about the HUGE disparity between predictions and the reality of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden on his blog. A picture is worth 1,000 words, they say, so here:
No, that blue smudge is not just an attempt at hand-drawing the x-axis. That is the actual death data! Sorry about the lack of resolution of all the text. Please got to Mr. Hail's site, or just his here to see it much better.
PS: I kid somewhat, as I do OWN a TV. It has never been hooked up to cable so is just used for playing movies on the DVD player.
* Like a lot of shows, it really did start to get too stupid and unbelievable at the end there.
** Last I read, Ron Unz is still sticking to his story and calling people who doubt it ranting right-winger hoaxers.
*** See earlier field reports from our excursions to Target here and here.
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[UPDATED 06/02:] Added E.H. Hail's graph of the Swedish Kung Flu experience.
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Comments (4)
Tough times demand tough talk ...
Posted On: Saturday - May 30th 2020 6:47PM MST
In Topics: Music
... demand tough hearts, demand tough songs.
Look in, to the eye of the storm.
Look out, for the force without form.
Look around, at the sight and the sound.
Look in look out look around...
These tough times demand tough men, with tough talk. I'm not seeing a bit of that, especially up there in snowflake land of Minneapolis, but not really anywhere else either.
Rock band Rush's Force 10 is from their 1986 album called Hold your Fire. I can remember the band being on the old MTV quite often back then, mostly from the albums previous, especially the one with the kid riding on that cruise missile. (That was Distant Early Warning from their 1984 album* Grace Under Pressure.)
They were no 1970s band anymore, at least from their looks. I can't remember which mid-1980s videos they were, in which Geddy Lee played this bass guitar that had the left-hand end chopped off. IOW, the winders must have been tucked inside or on the other end. They couldn't have been behind the neck, right? Anyway, it was quite the modern look, for the mid-1980s, that is.
Force 10 must not have had an MTV-like video, but here's the song:
Almost as with Journey's Feeling that Way / Anytime that absolutely must be played together, as with others named here, because Time Stand Still follows Force 10 on the album, one cannot just play it by itself. The 2nd song has a better melody, I think, and it was a hit song, too.
Thanks for reading this week! More stupidity is backed up in the pipe for next week.
* Though not as prolific as your Credence Clearwater Revivals with 8 - 10 albums in their 4 years of playing together (see Our patience for last 3 decadal Golden Earring songs is wearing thin.), Rush created 14 albums in the 16 years 1974 through 1989.
Comments (15)
Idle Hands are the Devil's Workshop
Posted On: Saturday - May 30th 2020 11:12AM MST
In Topics: Economics Race/Genetics Bible/Religion Socialism/Communism Bread and Circuses
Subtitle: Kung Flu LOCKDOWN, Trial UBI, and Black Riots
Site note first: As the reader may have guessed, your blogger here really is not a customer of the 24/7 news cycle Infotainment. There are things I hear well after the fact. One that I heard about, then read about, just a short while back, is that the Minneapolis rioting has spread to other cities. I may not have written the lighthearted post on hand washing yesterday knowing how serious things are getting. This one is an attempt at an explanation for what's going on.
Thinking back on what the subjects have been of many of the Peak Stupidity posts has me realizing I"m putting a number of our favorites together here. Socialism is a big one, and what's wrong it for America is the main point of this post.
I don't thing the Corona virus itself was part of some big plan. The response to it, what I call the Infotainment Panic-Fest, may or may not have been to some degree. I think that'd be the case less so on the Lyin' Press end (they are just stupid, sensationalist, and hungry for viewers), but possibly more so on the government, maybe Deep State side. Other than all the advisories about warding off the Kung Flu that Governors and such have taken too much to heart, it's the quick implementation (billed as temporary) of Socialism that has been the Feral Gov't's big response.
After State and local jurisdictions mandated the LOCKDOWNS, came out with shelter-in-place orders, and generally went all Totalitarian-like on us, the US Gov't reaction was to "help" us out of the bad situation all that caused by throwing us borrowed money. (Welfare used to be up to the States till 30 years ago or so, in general.) There were the CARE stimulus checks. The $600/week Federal unemployment money was the bigger factor in implementing temporary(?) Socialism, however, as it has been a big incentive for people to take those leaves or stay home at least till it ends. What it is really is a trial run of the UBI (Universal Basic Income).
Going back only 20 years, going at least through the moderate left, no serious politician would have proposed the UBI, and not many Americans would have had anything but disdain for it. We all know that's the beginning of serious Socialism. On the other hand, over the last 2 decades, Americans have realized that the good or decent jobs are no longer there for all Americans who want them. Not coincidentally at all, this was the time of the giving away of America's manufacturing ability and prowess to China.
Even knowing this, I have major problems with Socialism and a permanent UBI, and the rest here will explain one of them. Without even considering whether it's economically viable in the long run for lots of Americans to sit home or go out for the Bread & Circuses at the expense of work done by others around the world, what will be the effect of having a hundred million Americans on the permanent dole?
Here's some opinion about black males, when it comes down to the truth. I see these rioters, and the type is in all American inner cities. Yet I know plenty of hard-working black men who I can't imagine would participate in this, at least the real rioting part of these protests. My thoughts from observation over many years tell me that these men are a perfect example of the Biblical Proverb "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" (Proverbs 16:27). The "idle hands" part really does seem to matter, as it seems the black guys that do physical work are the ones with the best attitudes. There IS something about doing physical work - it does make us too tired to be up for raising hell.
Now, the Biblical book of Proverbs was not written specifically for black men, but it sure seems to apply here. I've known white men out of work for long periods. There are whole regions of the country with big numbers of rural white men that are not really participating in the productive economy too. They get on drugs sometimes, they may steal from Wal-Mart on occasion, or even jack cars. However, they just don't seem to get into this mindless* violence, as the black men do.
Was this current spread of rioting really caused by the death of George Floyd alone? Well, there's always a reason to loot a Target, I guess, but this time, we need to remember that a significant number of Americans have been home with no work for the last 2 to 2 1/2 months. That is in addition to the already significant number of already unemployed men (again, I don't believe BLS numbers**), always higher for black males.
In the meantime, along comes the "free" money from Uncle Sugar. Did that keep everybody satisfied? They could stay home or visit here and there, with plenty of money for food, bills deferred, and all this time on their hands. It's been a trial run of a Socialist UBI-America. This unintended(?) experiment seems to have some unforeseen results, there in Minneapolis, now New York City, Washington, FS, Los Angeles, Atlanta ...
Is this what we'd see from the black areas regularly as a Socialist economy with a large mass of unemployed, but fed, sheltered and clothed Americans? About the only thing missing during this experiment is much of the Bread & Circuses, due to the shutdown of normal life because of this bad Kung Flu year. Could that be the missing ingredient that would allow a UBI-powered Socialist society to flourish in diverse 2020's America? People who push it had damn well better hope so.
* "Mindless" is important, as, sure, the riots are supposedly about this one guy, likely killed due to the militarized manner of some cops nowadays, but that doesn't explain anything more than loud protesting. The rioting and looting is mindless violence. Now, the reader may bring up the antifa types that are out there. It's political for those people. They simply wish for destruction of American society. That's not mindless.
** The reason here is much simpler than my problem with their Inflation numbers. The numbers come from unemployment benefits counts. People who roll off the end of those benefits, after 1/2 a year or 1 year are simply not counted anymore. Others do not bother applying. It's been a pretty bogus count for a long time.
Comments (8)