The town of Culpeper (formerly known as Culpeper Courthouse and before that as Fairfax) was originally surveyed by a young surveyor by the name of George Washington, and was occupied by both sides in the Civil War. So there's a lot of history there.

"Honey, I could have sworn this was part of America. Weren't we just through here 10 years ago?

Now it’s a town where a foreigner can flout American law and infect American police officers, then be released.

From Fox 5 Washington, D.C.:

Two Virginia police officers have coronavirus after they physically detained a man accused of assaulting his girlfriend. Police in Culpeper said the suspect, who is in the country illegally, also tested positive for the virus. Police said even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement was contacted, the suspect was released the same day he was arrested. [2 Culpeper police officers have coronavirus after detaining a domestic violence suspect who tested positive by Lindsay Watts, FOX 5 Washington D.C., May 5, 2020]

The video accompanying the article says the perp was previously deported twice. And that’s backed up by this WJLA article: Virginia cops contract COVID-19 after 'hands-on' arrest of twice-deported assault suspect, by Elliott Henney, WJLA, May 5, 2020.

Yet here he is again, flouting our system.

Look at the privileges the perp enjoys:
1. In the country illegally
2. Deported, returns
3. Deported again, returns again
4. Commits an assault
5. Has COVID-19 and infects police with COVID-19
6. Gets released the same day
7. Has a protected identity, his name isn't publicly mentioned.

Americans have gotten in trouble for much less in the Age of coronavirus. Is this an example of anarcho-tyranny?

Back to the Fox 5 article:

Maj. Chris Settle, with the Town of Culpeper Police Dept., said three officers responded to a domestic violence call around 2 a.m. on April 28. He said the suspect was assaulting his girlfriend even as police responded. “Long story short, we had to utilize use of force to get the male in custody,” said Settle.

And after that…

[Major Settle] said a few days later, two of the officers tested positive for the virus. “As of today [May 5], they have mild symptoms at home in the early parts of this, and we’re hoping for the best,” he said.

The third officer is in quarantine.

To its credit, the Culpeper Police Department did contact ICE. Not that it helped.

Settle said police contacted ICE to notify them of the arrest. He said typically immigration officers would pick up the suspect from jail, but that didn't happen this time. “ICE did not come get him, and I think for obvious reasons,” said Settle. “I think because he had covid-19.”

After that, the guy is released.

Two of the guys had mild symptoms and the other is hanging out in paid (I'm sure) quarantine. This is not your great³²-grandfather's Black Plague.

There is only a little bit more of Allan Wall's article that I haven't excerpted. This kind of thing goes on all the time, but it's just the Kung Flu infection angle here that makes it very timely. We are, after all, to keep proper Social Distancing, per our elites and experts who are there to tell us what to do, other than cower in fear of the CORONA. So next time the cop beats you about the body with a stick as he warns you to "STOP RESISTING", you should ask him to please keep some Social Distancing, or you'll start infecting. We're gonna need a bigger Crown Victoria.



* One I tried to explain to Ron Unz one time - nope, no comprendo, it's a riddle.

Comments (6)




The Spin Doctors - Little Miss Can't Be Wrong


Posted On: Monday - May 11th 2020 8:09PM MST
In Topics:   Music

From the 1970s band The Spinners, we move to the 1990s band The Spin Doctors. Instead of being from Motown, this next band is from New York City.

This is not a one-hit-wonder band either, but I think I'd call it a "one-album-wonder" band. That album was Pocket Full of Kryptonite, recorded in 1991. There were a number of hit songs off of it, once they got more publicity in 1992, including Little Miss Can't Be Wrong. There were a few more albums from the band, and like a lot of them, they played way past their prime, but from the Wiki discography, I don't know songs from any of the others.

What a great beat and bright sound! The early 1990s were an era of "alternative rock", and no, we didn't say "alt-rock". I don't know if you would consider this part of that alternative rock, but it reminds me of some of that - see the 10,000 Maniacs, with Hey, Jack Kerouac , Lilydale , and Like the Weather.

I don't think I've ever seen this video, stated by youtube to be their "official" one. I know I had a TV in 1992, but I doubt I had a cable hook-up. Anyway, it beats watching a vinyl record go 'round and 'round at 33 rpm, right?



The Spin Doctors:
Chris Barron – lead vocals
Eric Schenkman – guitar, backing vocals
Mark White – bass
Aaron Comess – drums, keyboards

Comments (7)




Richard Nixon and The Greatest Comeback - Pat Buchanan


Posted On: Monday - May 11th 2020 7:36PM MST
In Topics:   History  Pundits  Books



(Well, they won't let me return it to the library, so I may as well review it.)

After a recommendation by one of the unz.com commenters, I slowly read through this Pat Buchanan book, one of many he's written, while travelling. The Greatest Comeback is mostly about just a 2-year period of American political history, 1966-1968, with a smaller amount of background going back to 1964 and a little bit back to the 1950s. There are a lot of interesting small points on this history that will be some separate smaller posts. I've got the book with the pages bookmarked even still for these points, as hey, "I ain't agonna pay no toll fine".

Before I get into those details let me make this just a short review of the book. Though Peak Stupidity has discussed his recent punditry a few times - see Peak Stupidity single-question, single-side-informed interview by Pat Buchanan , Pat Buchanan on American political history - 50 years ago (like a small excerpt of this book, in fact), and Happy Birthday to Pat Buchanan (his 80th), I note there are no other reviews here of any of his books. I remember reading his Death of the West when it came out. He's a very decent writer, maybe better in this biographical-type history than in his polemics. The book will keep your interest, though the suspense may not kill you, if you know the least bit of history. (Spoiler Alert: Nixon won.)

The book is about the Richard Nixon Presidential campaign for the 1968 election. Peak Stupidity has no love lost, as we never ever found any to begin with, for Richard Millhouse Nixon. We read this book through the lens of one of his then closest associates, though, Mr. Buchanan, who, if not in agreement with him, was a loyal associate. He still has much appreciation for the man who hired him for his first political operative job, in 1966. You wouldn't expect him to badmouth the man, even about issues in which future true-conservative Pat Buchanan would no doubt disagree with Nixon on.

The Greatest Comeback is about Richard Nixon the politician. The man who'd been called a loser by the press after his loss to John Kennedy in 1960, and then his loss to Edmund Brown (Jerry's Dad) in the California Governor's race in 1962, did become the consummate politician with a lot of hard work, and well, politics over those 6 years leading up to November 6th, 1968. By "politician", though, I don't mean a man who represents the voters wishes to get into government to change the system. I don't mean a guy who is a leader for a cause. I just mean a guy who was (finally, for him) good at getting enough votes to get himself in high office. The book is the story of Richard Nixon's comeback from loser to winner of the 1968 US Presidential election.

As I wrote already, Mr. Buchanan was not about to disparage the man who hired him (for 1 1/2 the salary he'd been making as a newspaperman in St. Louis, a whopping $13,500!*). The author does, however, tell the insider truth about Richard Nixon's stand on the issues, which was "whatever will get enough votes from enough groups of people to elect me". (Those are not Mr. Buchanan's words exactly, but the gist of them all.) Lots of the 2nd half of the book, with the suspense-filled primary campaign and then general election campaign against Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, tells the story of how Mr. Nixon would work out exactly how he'd make speeches, answer questions, or treat other candidates, such that he'd minimize the pissing-off of people and maximize the support. Of course, it's not like that's not part of getting elected for any of these guys, and you've got to get elected first in order to implement any policies to change the country for the better. It doesn't sound like Richard Nixon really cared about the latter, though.

Mr. Buchanan relates the story from an era in which the press were not so monolithically one-sided, compared to today, no matter how they treated Nixon early on, through the "you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" period. It's amazing how close the politicians and print news media were, per this book. Some were on your side, and some weren't, but Mr. Buchanan would arrange for memos to be sent to newspaper editors to explain Nixon's position on such-and-such, and some of these editors would have a big influence on how he stood on the issues.

Mr. Buchanan gives a good description of the big divide among the Conservative, Goldwater/Reagan wing of the GOP and the non-Conservative Rockefeller/Lindsay/Romney (yes, Mitt's Dad) wing. This is a theme throughout the book, with Mr. Nixon being the expert politician who reconciles these wings while not letting any of these people get the nomination in the meantime. The author also brings up the big issues of the mid-1960s that haunt us today (because they were almost all decided wrongly) - the Vietnam war, the Civil Rites BS, Federal Gov. interference in housing, and the "Great Society" Socialism of Lyndon Johnson in general. Some of these will be discussed in relation to this book in future posts, as there are many interesting, but very easily forgotten points.

A few odds and ends: The Nixon campaign, or I guess, Nixon himself, had one weird quirk. The memos back and forth were written with "RN" as the stand-in for a pronoun or the man's name, even when written by Nixon himself. There are quite a number of names thrown around, some of which make the reader think this book would be better in electronic form, with that ctrl-f type feature ("Who TH is Huston again, and where have I seen Dirksen character"). A piece of American political history I didn't know is that President Eisenhower tried to dump Richard Nixon off the VP ticket for his 2nd term a couple of times.

It's a very readable book, as I wrote, for anyone interested in recent American history. Mr. Buchanan regales us with a general description of life in campaign mode, the traveling, high-pressure life of his for those 2 years, and a few funny stories. He almost got his ass beat by some cops who thought he was with the left and then some of the hippies thought he was an FBI guy. Another time, Mr. Nixon asked Mr. Buchanan to be his press secretary, but that lasted about one day! We learn of the more civil and more intelligent world of American high-level politics of the 1960s compared to today's, and one can see from his current weekly columns that Mr. Buchanan seems to think we are still in that world.

How about 4 out of 5 stars for this one?



* From newspaperman to political insider/wonk to TV talking-head to Conservative Crusader politician to unz.com blogger, what a life-cycle. (OK, I know he's all syndicated - I just read him on unz in case I want to make a comment that he's not at all likely to read.)

Comments (2)




The Spinners - Rubberband Man and Games People Play


Posted On: Saturday - May 9th 2020 7:13PM MST
In Topics:   Music

I heard something with this same beat and a funky bass like this today, which reminded me of The Rubberband Man from a black "Rhythm and Blues" band out of Detroit, Michigan called The Spinners. Before the time of this song, they had been known as The Detroit Spinners or the Motown Spinners. I would call this one "funk", not Rhythm & Blues, but what do I know? I do know I like that fuzzy bass funk sound.

This is from 1976, back before there was any MTV, and yes, we did just watch these vinyl records spin around at 33 rpm, and WE LIKED IT!



Lead vocals: Philippé Wynne
Background vocals: Bobby Smith, Pervis Jackson, Henry Fambrough and Billy Henderson
Additional background vocals: the Sigma Sweethearts (Barbara Ingram, Carla Benson and Yvette Benton)
Instrumentation: MFSB (Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers, a group of 30!)
Thom Bell: keyboards
Tony Bell, Bobby Eli: guitars
Bob Babbitt: bass guitar
Andrew Smith: drums
Larry Washington: percussion

I was about to write that the band was a one-hit wonder type, but wiki reminded me that that was NOT the case. Here's a hit from a year earlier.* It's not funky, but it's maybe an even better tune. The excellent smooth lady's voice is one Evette Benton.

This Games People Play is not to be confused with a song of the same name by The Alan Parsons Project from a half decade later, which was of a whole different style of music.





* Then they had another hit, Working my Way Back to You, in 1978, but it's not nearly of the same caliber, melody-wise and sound-wise, IMO.

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Gold found on an asteroid? Should I buy, sell, or hold?


Posted On: Saturday - May 9th 2020 6:33PM MST
In Topics:   Economics  The Future  Science



The Russia Times, for what it's worth*, touts The golden asteroid that could make everyone on Earth a billionaire . Yes, and there are a lot of Zimbabwean Billionaires who would feel lucky to eat the roaches that our cat doesn't get. (But, damn, you people sure showed the White men of Rhodesia who's boss!)

The asteroid that the RT title alludes to is Psyche-16, one of the bigger and earliest-discovered ones, is 100 to 200 miles across based on space infrared telescope imaging. Because it is large enough to perturb the orbits of smaller asteroids, it's mass was determined, allowing density calculations, which, along with albedo measurements cause astronomers to figure it's made mostly of metals. It is not at all proven to contain the precious, as that headline states, being thought to consist mostly nickel and iron. RT maybe is no better than the National Enquirer (though it's still GOTTA beat the NY Times):

The discovery has been made. Now, it’s a question of proving it up.

Whatever the fuck is that supposed to mean?!

No matter about that, were a minor planet like that, or even a 10-mile wide body to be part gold, it doesn't take a big percentage of gold to make a bigger find than there exists in human hands on earth!

Of course, says veteran miner Scott Moore, CEO of EuroSun Mining “The ‘Titans of Gold’ now control hundreds of the best-producing properties around the world, but the 4-5 million ounces of gold they bring to the market every year pales in comparison to the conquests available in space.”

Take just a cubic mile of gold, please! [Uhh, joke doesn't work here - Ed] I get 2.5 x 10¹⁵ , or 2,500 Trillion ounces of gold there. It's enough to give every American a million dollars and still finance a Micheal Bloomberg primary campaign. [What an incredible way of putting it! - Ed] Now, be careful, that is in troy ounces, so don't get ripped off by anyone making you deals on asteroid-mined gold in avoirdupois ounces.

Either way, dammit, we're gonna be rich! More on this in a bit....

The article is kind of interesting, even with the completely exaggerated title, as it's about the exploitation of solar system bodies for minerals in general. The task is arduous, I tells ya'. The article spells out the need for gravity to even do the mining, of which a 200 mile diameter asteroid made of pure gold has only 1/11** of the Earth's gravity (~ 1/2 of the moon's), so is it going go work? It's not an absolute need, this gravity, but otherwise fuel would have to be burned for a reaction force for any initial drilling done to lock the the robotic miner to the surface, where I suppose it could go on from there.

Then what? You'd need a good-sized payload to make the operation worthwhile. With that low-gravity body, at least much less fuel would be needed to leave the body's gravitational field, and all this mass could be slowed down with a very accurate entry to Earth's atmosphere. The gold doesn't burn, so there's that ... Yet, you'd need enough fuel to get a good acceleration to the 'roid, a somewhat equal deceleration for the rendezvous, and then good acceleration from the 'roid back home to get the mission accomplished before, well the price of gold went down, down, down, like a robot miner with a busted retro-rocket and tangled-up drogue shoot.

Of course, that massive engineering project, the precision manufacturing, and all that fuel would be affordable, you know, with all that money you'll have up front from selling a portion of that gold ahead of time to ... well, a bunch of suckers, because that's the point the entire OilPrice.com article by Joao Peixe (ahaa! that explains it!) missed. No, nobody will be rich, not even the man who sponsors the mission, thinking he's the modern Ferdinand and/or Isabella of Spain, who, come to think of it were already rich, but probably didn't come ahead on that whole Cristobal Columbus venture.

If a serious amount of gold could be seriously planned to be mined on an asteroid or moon and be brought to Earth, than that inflation of REAL MONEY itself would bring gold's value down accordingly. That part is pretty obvious to most of us here, I'd guess (unless you just come for the Kung Flu coverage). I don't think it would go that far either, however. The more the calculations on cost of the mission were solidified, the more that the new near-future value of gold would be understood, making the mission that much less worthwhile until some equilibrium were reached. That equilibrium would be reached at a point at which the mission wouldn't make any money!

Am I wrong about how this would go down, or up, I should say? Think back on the Spaniards' big rip-offs of the Incas, Aztecs and what-have-you other savages' gold back in the 1,500s. (Well, I mean, they weren't using it as anything but interior decoration anyway, so ...) If you were on one of the first ships to bring a load back to the Old World, yeah, you, maybe a few of your non-mutinous crew, would have been rich (shhh, don't tell the Queen yet!) This is due to the lack of information flow back in that era, with no tweets such as:

"@Carlos I: yur majest-E - got 2 mil oz of la precious for U. 1,500 Az-teks put to sword. we are rich as fuck. c. u. back in old world. #GoldLosBitchez!"

However, as information did get out, as to how much more gold (and silver) was available for use a money, it was one of the few or only periods in history where there was inflation in this money.

It's a similar scenario, but 2-3 orders-of-magnitude worse, when the FED makes dollars out of nothing. Those who get to spend them first, such as the big banks, before the information on the increase in the money supply is felt throughout the economy, get the most value out of those dollars.

An asteroid mining operation would be hard to keep secret. I know, it's so cool, that I'd likely run my mouth too. The information would be out there, and the value of the gold would reflect that.

This ain't no Robert Heinlein book we're living in, 'cept that Crazy Years part. He forecast that one like a real Nostradumbass!***




* A lot more than the New York Times in dollars, rubles, gold, and truth. However, the article is originally from the OilPrice.com article.

** The mass turns out to be 1/18,000 of the Earth's, but with the radius being only 1/40 of Earth's, the gravitational acceleration and force on an object on such an asteroid's surface would be 1/11 of that on Earth. I did a 2nd check on this math by using Newton's law of gravity directly, and got 0.85 m/s², so feel very happy to have done this math right with a simple idiot-phone calculator (doesn't even have a square function!). There goes 20 minutes of my life I'll likely never get back!

*** I just had to use that one, a handle of one of the ZeroHedge commenters from a good while back. I liked the Heinlein sci-fi I read as a kid very much.

Comments (17)




E.H. Hail on the Numerator


Posted On: Saturday - May 9th 2020 4:22PM MST
In Topics:   Websites  Kung Flu Stupidity

... that is, the numerator of the ratio Deaths FROM the Kung Fllu / Cases of the Kung Flu. That ratio is the mortality rate for this virus. As Mr. Hail estimates some rough values for the errors in determining the numerator, the denominator remains even more uncertain. I may have gotten the Kung Flu already, and you may have gotten the Kung Flu already. We are both here, blogging and reading, respectively.



Additionally, besides being the numerator of this very important ratio (to one's perspective on the seriousness of this crap), it's the number of deaths FROM this disease that is the key number touted by parties involved in this Infotainment Panic-Fest. Mr. Hail, in Part X of his series of articles on the Kung Flu "Coup d'etat", discusses some rough numbers to figure the ratio of deaths FROM the Kung Flu to deaths WITH the Kung Flu.

I should note that the estimates in Mr. Hail's article are for the situation in Sweden, not America. This is due to his having concentrated on that country due to its lack of any LOCKDOWNs , the tailing off of the epidemic there, and the death and illness numbers being so far lower than the "experts'" numbers as to be laughable. He has been reading, learning about, and discussing the situation in Sweden in many of his other parts of the series, so this also provides continuity in his discussion.

The article (and associated graphs) include ICU (hospital Intensive Care Unit) admissions and death rates in ICUs in general along with death and recovery data for Swedish purported COVID-19 patients to arrive at the following:

This leaves us with 20% of corona-deaths as absolutely-definite “Deaths From,” against 80% being either “Deaths With” or ambiguous.

Of the ambiguous category, how many might realistically be “Deaths From”? Given that half died at nursing homes, places with short life-expectancies anyway, it’s possible that a fifth of the remainder (80%) are true Deaths From, three-fifths are “Deaths With,” and one-fifth are a coin toss, cause of death at examining doctor’s discretion. This gives us:

* 20% of deaths being those taken into an ICU who died there,
* 15% being genuine-virus-caused deaths outside ICUs,
* 50% are “Deaths With” who definitely died of other causes, and
* 15% Coin Tosses, those with severe health conditions whose cause of death is arguable.

This gives us 35% “Deaths From,” possible 40% or a bit higher. While some might say this may not be a perfect way to estimate “Deaths With the Virus” vs. “Deaths from the Virus,” the one-third figure happens to also be the estimate reported in early April (Fraser Nelson, The Telegraph, April 3):

Now, I'm guessing myself here, but it seems that these last 4 categories involve a good bit of guesswork. I have some questions that Mr. Hail is welcome to answer here, but I should probably ask on his site. I'd say the same for the Peak Stupidity reader. I'm just the "lookie here" guy on this, not the estimator.

The pressure is hard on people in the know in the medical field, say Hospital Admins., doctors, and nursing lead, etc, to keep the COVID numbers up - see just one example of ours on the motivations for this. It would be nice to get some numbers from these types on ICU recovery rates for any respiratory diseases, death rates in nursing homes from the same, and, most importantly, their own estimates of how many cases are logged as "FROM Covid-19" when the cause of death could be a myriad of problems. (Mr. Hail may have some videos or statements on this that I have not gotten to yet.)

OK, I was going to avoid the Kung Flu, and discussion thereof, for 2 days, but I blew it with this one. How about something about gold on an asteroid next? Sure, why not?


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Trayvon II - The Media Empire Strikes Back


Posted On: Friday - May 8th 2020 6:51PM MST
In Topics:   Media Stupidity  Race/Genetics

The Kid / The Perp:



Deja Vu, anyone?

Due to my my household being what some may dub an Infotainment desert, I had not even heard of that this Sequel to Trayvon had come out yet, as produced by Lion's Gate Lyin' Press Pictures. A friend told me this story, but he had already checked out enough other information to see this is another one-sided narrative so far. I then noticed the newest Michelle Malkin column. It has more information, not so much on what really happened there in Glynn County*, Georgia, but on the couple of hate-mongering race hustlers, Shaun King and Lee Merritt, along with one Benjamin Crump who are the go-to guys for starting anti-white pogroms, riots of mass destruction, and that kind of thing, based on lies.

A link there led me to what could have been a new site to peruse daily, called Information Liberation, but for the "article" in question being mostly a series of tweets.** It's just me, I guess, but that's not my favorite format for reading material. However, I like the ideas presented in Mr. Chris Menahan's 'The Trayvon Hoax' Gets A Reboot With The Shooting Death Of Ahmaud Arbery . It's his idea to compare this latest racial brewhaha to the Trayvon Martin self-defense effort of (Wow!) 8 years ago, as with a movie sequel.

There are lots of similarities between the two widely publicized incidents: (First let's just call George Zimmerman white for a bit here, not to go along with the Lyin' Press' narrative, but to make this easier to write.) Both started out with white citizen's trailing of a black man suspected to be up to no good in his/their neighborhood. (Yes, someone 6 foot tall, 200 lb at any age should be thought of as a man in the realm of self-defense.) Both of these black guys, instead of handling the situation like a rational human being (likely because they were guilty of something or about to be) went into fight-or-flight mode and picked the former. In neither case was that a wise choice.

In both cases the white guy(s) were doing nothing but inquiring and warning black guys who, in their view, were up to no good. In both cases, they were probably right, we find out later. In both cases, the black man got shot and killed for being the aggressor in an act of self-defense.

In both the cases, the media have gotten the American public, at least those who still believe their one-sided narrative, and almost all black people (because, black), up in arms. This behavior by the Lyin' Press will again motivate the law enforcement and justice system to do the wrong thing. If they were to do the right thing (which they never do) and not press new charges on the white men involved for the legalities involved that obviated that in the first place, riots would probably ensue. So, they give in to media-instigated pressure and sacrifice another white man or two in the name of diversity and temporary peace. Then, the jury gets the case, and it's the same story except with more of a chance of a good person doing the right thing, ... which will ... cause riots.

How is this even a sequel, as it's almost the same story? The Lyin' Press and race hustlers (as described in Michelle Malkin's column) are hoping to have a different outcome this time. Last time the truth came out, and the good guys (George Zimmerman and The Truth) won, after one hell of a struggle. They are hoping for a different outcome with this next innocent young black kid Ahmaud Arbery. Let's get the truth out there.

That Information Liberation page linked-to above does present a lot of good information, so I highly recommend it to our readers. In addition to focusing on the incident in Brunswick, Georgia, Mr. Menahan also brings up the many horrific white-on-black murders that never get presented on 24/7 Infotainment. This is the stuff discussed by Paul Kersey on unz.com on an almost daily basis.

This new blaxploitation flic has not been finished yet. I don't see how they can give it a happy ending, unless riots or injustice are considered happy endings. It will premier this summer at a venue (hopefully nowhere) near you.



PS: One of the tweets in the Information Liberation article was from one LeBron James, an athlete who tweeted out nonsense to support the team race. My first thought was: didn't this guy just die in a helicopter crash with a big to-do made of it? See what I mean about the Infotainment desert I live in?



* BTW, right across from the Glynn County (GlynnCo) Airport, outside of Brunswick, there lies the FLETC, where Federal employees of all sorts of agencies train to shoot, many of who make one wonder what they are doing with guns. They are not allowed to be involved in this, and rightly so.

** I don't dis-recommend the site just based on this one article. I'll have to see if I come to like it over a few days.

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Peak Constitutional Amendment - XVII


Posted On: Friday - May 8th 2020 12:25PM MST
In Topics:   History  Liberty/Libertarianism  US Feral Government  Morning Constitutional

(Continued from Amendment XI, Amendment XII, Amendment XIII, Amendment XIV, Amendment XV, Part 1 on Amendment XVI, Part 2 on Amendment XVI , and Part 3 on Amendment XVI .)



Here's the entirety of Amendment XVII to the US Constitution, proposed in 1912 and ratified by the final state to get 75% of 'em in April, 1913:

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

This seems, just as with Amendment XI (passed only 6 years after the Constitution took effect), to be nothing but an Administrative change or "housekeeping" if you will. No, but nobody goes through the trouble it takes to change the US Constitution just for a bureaucratic rule change. Amendment XVII, providing for the direct election of US Senators by State residents, rather than State legislators, is another State's rights issue that has gone the same way as always, in favor of the Big Central "Federal" Government.

I went to my standard source, Constitution Center to see if their interpretation had anything enlightening about the history/background of this Amendment. There's a pretty good back-and-forth argument on their Interpretation page over whether putting the choice for the 2 Senators with the people versus their State legislators is a blow to State's rights or not.

This Amendment did not come out of the blue. American history had a lot of discussion going back to 1830:

However, starting in roughly the 1830s and then more dramatically after the Civil War, the vision the Founders had—in which state legislatures would deliberate over the selection of Senators—began to fray. First, politicians seeking Senate seats began campaigning for state legislative candidates in a process known as the “public canvass.” The result was that state legislative races became secondary to Senate races. The most famous instance of this was the race for Senate in Illinois in 1858, in which Abraham Lincoln faced off with Stephen Douglass despite neither being on the ballot. In 1890s, many states started holding direct primaries for Senate, reducing the degree of influence state legislatures had over selection. Some states went further and began using something known as the “Oregon System,” under which state legislative candidates were required to state on the ballot whether they would abide by the results of a formally non-binding direct election for U.S. Senator. By 1908, twenty-eight of the forty-five states used the Oregon System or some other form of direct elections. 

That's some history I had not known about. Many of the State Legislatures themselves were in favor of direct election, something that boggles my mind.

The push for the Seventeenth Amendment occurred both in state legislatures and the House of Representatives. Between 1890 and 1905, thirty-one state legislatures passed resolutions either calling on Congress to pass an amendment providing for the direct election of senators, to hold a conference with other states to work on such an amendment, or to have a constitutional convention such that the direct elections for Senator could be included in a newly drawn Constitution. Amendments to the Constitution providing for direct elections passed the House in each session between 1893 and 1912. 

This was a great shift of power away from the State legislators though. These people are pretty local. Unlike your 1 in 454 Congressman, whom you only get to see close up right near election time without an appointment and lots of time on your hands, most Americans don't know their State Senators' and Representatives' names. If these were the guys and gals that were going to decide who were the 2 individuals to go to the US Senate as 2 in 100, you'd better believe Americans would know their names. We'd make an effort to meet with them, rather than in this era, where the most important thing on their agenda this week might be to vote on the State Insect.

Much of this is due to the even greater number of powers the Feral Gov't has taken from the States, with not a whole lot of resistance, I might add. Nowadays, the point of being in the State Legislature is likely to move farther up than that in politics, not to do a whole lot for the State.

Now, as some of the argument in the Constitution Center's interpretation page goes, the idea of having direct elections for US Senator was to get the corruption out of the process. One might say that now, at least the people themselves can decide the matter, so how can it be as corrupt or arbitrary as before? Yeah, that was before TV and the women's vote (by a p-hair, it turns out). I don't know, read the arguments there, but keep in mind there were the Progressives pushing their agenda even back a century ago:

(Ironically, however, big city party machines supported the Seventeenth Amendment, largely because state legislative apportionment gave greater representation to rural areas due to districting decisions in the absence of “one person, one vote” and because machine-controlled cities could more easily mobilize voters. Many big special interests supported it as well.) William Randolph Hearst famously hired muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips to write an expose, “The Treason of the Senate,” which played a major role in debates around the Seventeenth Amendment.

There were the BS excuses too:

Further, supporters of the Amendment argued that races for Senate swamped interest in state issues in state legislative races, reducing the accountability of state legislatures on any issue other than the identity of Senators.

Yeah, that's it. It was taking too much of their time. Sure... letting them keep too much power, more like. One sentence in the middle sums up the good-intentioned (if I am to be charitable here) reasons for Amendment XVII:

The popular perception that Senate seats could be bought in backrooms of state legislatures fueled support for direct elections.

That sounds very much like the argument for party primary elections (not a Constitutional issue) over the smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear. How's that working out for us? Really, I'd rather have these Senators picked locally, no matter how it can be corrupted. At least a player would have to buy off a majority of 100 or so of them, probably not so easy, versus just throwing money at the media. (Of course, if most Americans paid attention to substance over style, well, again there are those TV and women's vote things again...)

In the old system one could go see his local Rep in the neighborhood and at least have some influence on a guy who lives in his State, rather than the Senator working solely for a gambling magnate who lives in Las Vegas. From the time of the Hildabeast in New York, this has gotten really out of hand. US Senate candidates are picked often from far away places and just plain placed in the race in a State that they have absolutely no ties with, hence these Senators will work for the Party, not their States. Talk aboutcher corruption...

Yep, this was no simple administrative change, this Amendment XVII. It was another abomination in the cause of greater power in the hands of Big-Gov, no matter how they tried to sell it, though a lower-profile abomination than Amendment XVI on the income tax. This survey of the Constitutional Amendments past the Bill of Rights is not going well at all!

Comments (8)




COVID testing and free chicken


Posted On: Thursday - May 7th 2020 7:12PM MST
In Topics:   Humor  Kung Flu Stupidity



Peak Stupidity mentioned in Government School Welfare Still Operating that whether learning/indoctrination goes on or not, the free school meals don't end. As I drove by a high school in a bad side of town*, the other day, closed along with the rest of them, I saw about 8 cop cars and lines of other cars up toward the front.

Can that be all for the picking up of a week's worth of school meals? I wondered this, but it was a Wednesday or Thursday, not the start of the week. Later that day, I learned that this line was for COVID-19 quick-testing. Interesting.

Why the big lines and the cop cars, though? Oh, yeah, cop cars were there because whatever the hell is going on, this is the bad side of town, after all. The line was due to the fact that these COVID-one-niner test-takers would be supplied a free meal for their effort in showing up. I expect fried chicken was involved, but Peak Stupidity has not yet confirmed that with our sources. As a friend noted, just in general, most parents will not attend public school events unless some kind of free food is involved.

This Chicken for COVID deal was not just for parents. The idea was to get a large sample of residents of the county. Is is a random sample? I'm no statistician, but I'd say it could be a random sample of fried-chicken lovers. Perhaps, blood cholesterol data should be obtained at the same time, as I'm guessing that the Kung Flu will not end up being as big a cause of the death of these people as clogged arteries.

Clogged arteries don't bleed though, and remember, "if it bleeds, it leads".

Well, that was my quick anecdote that I'd forgot at the time of yesterday's post. Hopefully tomorrow Peak Stupidity can get back to it's more active routine, including our Morning Constitutional.



* Maybe not the baddest, but that's arguable ... usually by dudes with custom Continentals, El Dorados too, and razors in their shoes.

Comments (2)




Perspective vs. Hysteria


Posted On: Wednesday - May 6th 2020 6:57PM MST
In Topics:   Music  Liberty/Libertarianism  Female Stupidity  Kung Flu Stupidity

Firstly, we note that Mr. E.H. Hail has put up Part IX of his series of very informative essays on everything related to the Kung Flu, data, policy and politics-wise. In this one, he discusses the hysterical Congressloon Haley Stevens of the State of Michigan, whom we laughed at in the post Paranoia Will Destroy Ya' a month back. Mr. Hail goes into much more detail on her biographical info. in this entertaining post of his.

We asked what is in all that fresh water in Michigan, with the Governor and Haley Stevens being examples. It's not just the women however, as after all, only 9 Governors are women at the present time. One can't help but think that the women's vote, another fuck-up of these damn Amenders (come to think of it, it's time for another Morning Constitutional) has gotten us in this situation.

You will hear "but the women voted for Trump" and all kinds of stats, but Trump is no Conservative, and there is a big gender gap, or, per Steve Sailer, really a "marriage gap". Married white women vote pretty Conservatively. That worked out OK until we ended up having so many single women, in the present day. Also,as we discussed in a post about our #2 literary pundit Michelle Malkin in Michelle Malkin - in the right / no sense of the big picture, it's the big picture that most women don't pay any attention to. How many women, other than that weirdo Ayn Rand are true Libertarians and Constitutionalists? I don't meet too many. (I do like that Claire Wolfe, out in Washington State - hope she's doing well.) Without that big picture, there is no perspective, an important quality to allow one to avoid panic and hysteria, such as is the case over this Kung Flu.

The men, at least those in power, seem to have been following along with the feminism too, likely just to avoid trouble. What we have today in America is a Matriarchy, rule of the nannies. Would this Infotainment-based PanicFest have been going on in 1950's America, even with Polio, and many other serious diseases that have been eradicated since? Stable and rational men were in charge back then, so no, not hardly.

This is your nation:




This is your nation on menopause:



The only reason I wrote this kind of vague, directionless post tonight is that I forgot, for now, a good anecdote on this Kung Flu PanicFest and that I have some of this hysteria in the family here. It's getting old, and I really need this nationwide hysteria to wrap up prontomundo!

It'd be very easy for Peak Stupidity to include the song Hysteria by Def Leppard to accompany this post, but I just don't think it's a good song. I had to look it up, knowing it was by one of those "hair bands" of the 1980s. How about we just include a different hair band song? (It's not just about long hair, but you've gotta all have BIG HAIR to be officially a Hair Band.)

These guys have to what it takes, and they made a lot of good music, lots of it in the 1970s rather than '80s. We got in a 2-day Journey kick at the end of '17, with the great Steve Perry/Greg Rollie duets Feelin' that Way/Anytime and Just the Same Way and then more recently we featured Lights.

Here's Stone in Love from Journey's 1981 album Escape.



Comments (22)




Perspective


Posted On: Tuesday - May 5th 2020 6:55PM MST
In Topics:   TV, aka Gov't Media  Media Stupidity  Americans  Healthcare Stupidity  Kung Flu Stupidity



A month ago (wow, this has been going on just too damn long!) Peak Stupidity posted The Kung Flu Gap with a quick theorized explanation of why American are split in a new fashion between the pro-panickers and the anti-panickers (E.H. Hail's terminology). To put it simply, it's likely a matter of how much time the Americans on each side spend in front of the TV ("idiot plate" is our terminology) and smart phones.

I have been thinking of another factor too. In my opinion, those who have been falling for the Infotainment Panic-Fest narrative lack something called perspective. OK, they have the WRONG perspective, so by "perspective" from hereon, I mean good perspective (knowing that those railroad tracks don't meet down there 1/2 mile down the track). It means knowing that the media shark-fest summer of 2001, canceled for the season after 9/11, was never a serious problem for a non-negligible number of Americans It means knowing that that the bills being drawn up in the US Congress will end up being more important that the results of the Final 4 playoff, this one being a toughie for lots of American men.

Above all, it means knowing the the Lyin' Press loves the readers, viewers, and clickers more than it loves the truth.

There have got to be plenty of people with some vague memories, as I have, of the viruses out of the Orient in the 1990s and the 2 decades since. For some, there are memories of that Swine Flu of the mid-1970s, and well, we can read books about the Spanish Flu of just over a century ago. Did we all just forget how things were handled by non-hysterical people when the Bird Flu, the H1N1, SARS #1(?), and number of others* came around? News was disseminated, doctors and epidemiologists kept up with it, and most people really didn't give a rat's ass unless they felt that kind of sick.

All I can remember of the response to the last one is a bunch of Japanese tourists wearing masks coming off the 747 at the hub airport. I didn't know what to make of it, other than, man, keep that shit over there.

What's different this time? Is the disease really that deadly? People are following the fatality ratio (both numerator and denominator of which being VERY uncertain due to what we've explained before), the number of cases in their states, the number of deaths CHALKED UP to the COVID-one-niner, and the same for their city, county, and country, as if they had 10 large riding on each one. (Are there bookies for this stuff? They'd probably want to stay out of the news.)

This all goes back to my last explanation of the Kung Flu Gap, the media-obsession factor. There's more though. If one has kept his perspective, he will keep in mind that the media wants to work this thing until they've made a killing. He'd keep in mind that governments LUV LUV LUV to exercise here-to-fore never imagined powers. With that perspective and his remembrances of those past viral epidemics, he could easily come up with rational thoughts about this Kung Flu response being seriously overblown.

Young people don't have this perspective yet. If this is the 1st time they've read about, or listened to, something like this on their phones, well, maybe it is just like The Andromeda Strain, which they are too young to have read because, for one thing, the book's too long, and doesn't have a scroll button. Look at the even younger people, the kids, and notice that the world is new to them, and most things that you think are fairly new in the world are all that they've ever know about it. For an 8 y/o, seeing stories about shark attacks each evening would have him thinking it's the biggest problem right now in the world. Most of us are > 8 already and should be gaining some perspective.

Additionally, young people ARE the ones on their phones for significant portions of the day. OTOH, they are supposed to be media savvy, not trusting the main Lyin' Press.

For someone at the age at which this new bad strain of virus IS a threat, he's got a reason to be worried. Anyone below that age, yet old enough to remember SOMETHING, dammit, of the last few times, ought to have enough perspective to not be hysterical right now.

This time around, we've been told that this is like nothing seen before. It can stay on doorknobs for days, it spreads five feet away whenever it wants, it flies, it crawls, it slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries ...

As commenter Digital Samizdat on unz wrote: If this were a real plague, do you think we would all still be arguing about whether or not it was a real plague two months on? Thank you!!




* While searching for one of these names, I came upon the Jokes 4 Us site, and the only somewhat-non-groan-worthy one on their viral epidemic joke page: Someone once said that when a black man becomes the president, pigs will fly. Sure enough 100 days later..."swine flew"


********************************
[UPDATED: 05/06:| Ahaaa! I found the source of the quote I liked, and have substituted in the exact wording and given attribution to unz commenter Digital Samizdat.
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Comments (4)




Dashed high-hopes for China - Part 2


Posted On: Tuesday - May 5th 2020 10:22AM MST
In Topics:   China  Bible/Religion  iEspionage

(continued from previous post)



Even just a couple of years after that first, enlightening visit to China, things had visibly changed a bit to me. Upon going into one of those "cafes" to take care of some business (still well before the time of pervasive smart phone usage, here and there), I was asked for an ID in order to surf the web. I refused and left. This was not paranoia - the place is certainly nothing like 1970 (even 1980s, per John Derbyshire) China. Whatever I did on the computer, I didn't expect anyone anywhere in China to really care. Business is business over there, after all. This is just my way - as I discussed in Inflation and the point(s) of shopping by price, if people don't make their preferences known, things won't change. Money talks.

Fine, I was able to get a non-secured signal off an apartment near where we were staying. Since I stayed in the location for quite a while, I got to know the ups and downs of this guy's router pretty damn well. He needs a better router, I can tell you that right now! (Well, I'd have told him, but I neither spoke Chinese nor knew exactly the REDACTED* network broadcasting location.) I could still pull up gunowners, the American Spectator, old-timey Steve Sailer, and whatever else I was into at the time.

That's a small thing, right? More recently, I found out, as we visited China, that getting a cheap cell phone and an anonymous one (if that had happened to matter) was out of the question. Of course, it's all smart phones now, and they are tailor made for iEspionage. Face it, whatever CAN be done with them, WILL be, unless the people are very vigilant. Neither the Chinese people nor the American people are at all vigilant about it, so ... there ya' go. Here's the rest of it: An individual or family is now limited in how many phones they are allowed have on the network, and one must present his Identity card - a bigger deal than our Driver's Licenses (oops, till REAL ID, that is) - to get one.

Just to explain here, we might have gotten one of our phones unlocked to use there, but there was some reason it was easier to borrow someone else's. My point is that there is no anonymity for anything done on these hand-computers.

Well, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about, right? That sounds more Chinese-style than patriotic American, but then most Americans just don't care anymore.

Let me mention contrasts from the points I made in Part 1: The traffic is much more controlled in the big cities**. I gotta say that I can't blame them on this, but it sure ruins my image of the place.

In China over a decade ago airport security was more of a formality to fit in with the foreign airlines' requirements. There were some cuties involved for whom I was not at all adverse to being felt up by, were they up for it, I gotta admit! Now, or 2 years back, man, it was quite a bit worse than the shitshow of Security Theater in America. I think there were TWO extra stops, and then there was that big no-weapons sign, one of those big pieces of film with holes on the glass dealies. I made a point to stand there and take a picture of it, something that was perhaps disconcerting to the Authoritah around, but, well, fuck 'em.

Just short decade ago, China was a mostly cash-ONLY*** economy (still continued in their Chinatowns in America due to advice from "tax accountants"). Many of them having skipped the entire land-line phone era ("Who is this Alexandle Glaham Berr of which you speak?"), Chinese people have taken to cell phones, and now the smart ones, with a vengeance. Just about anyone who is not still living out in the sticks making $500 a year has a WeChat account for all types of communication. Anything that can be done on them will have an "app for that". One of these "conveniences" is the cashless payments that can be made via the computer all but the old folks have in their back pockets (front in the big city, you know, theft and all).

This cashless payment thing, along with the Social Credit business that I've heard about but have no personal stories about, are getting very close to the Book of Revelation "Mark o' the Beast" stuff. Think about how little Apostle John, the writer of Revelation, could have imagined regarding even bar codes and readers, much less the level of electronics in the smart phone and RFID chips that can also be used to easily implement the evil prognosticated therein.

Now, I don't claim to understand all the rest of the this last Book of the Bible tries to illuminate for us. What that multi-faced beast business is about is a mystery to me. Peak Stupidity has highlighted the possible AntiChrist candidates before, some of whom may not be humans after all. The Hildabeast could easily represent something straight out of the BofRev, but then, who are the other 3 Horsepersons of the Apocalypse?

To summarize here, China does not represent the future of freedom in the world, as it did to me in some ways 1 1/2 decades back. Things are no longer headed in the right direction over there, no matter how new and cool the infrastructure is, and how prosperous the Chinese people are quickly becoming.

By this point, and with these 2 posts, the long-term reader may understand that Peak Stupidity is about the truth of stupidity all around the world. We are not particularly anti-China or anti-Chinese, and have even made one apology to our Chinese readers. (Admittedly, it's one of those half-assed apologies that you'll get often from a politician!)





* REDACTED sounds better than "this was a long time ago, and I can't remember shit".

** In Canton, what they call Guangzhou now, motorcycles are banned in the city limits (or were about 10 years back, anyway). This law was made due to too many incidents of thefts of women's purses done by motorcyclists "on the fly". Yet, they'll tell you there's not much crime in China. Bull.

*** Great anecdote here on some personal Chinese financial dealings. There I was, getting close to out of cash, and during this trip (not my 1st), the bank machines would give me no money (usually wads of the highest denomination, Chinese ¥100s, red bills with good old Chairman Mao on 'em, each like a $15 bill, roughly). (I found out later that my home bank's anti-abuse software had kicked in on this trip, and I later made sure to notify the bank ahead. Fair enough on that, as I appreciate that software being on the ball.)

Well, when the banks opened on Monday, I and a Chinese lady went inside to straighten this out, her knowing Chinese and all... "They want to see your passport." OK, well the 1st hangup is that the Chinese don't use middle names. We do. Shit didn't match!

OK, maybe we'll get past that one, but who in the heck is this gentleman named "See ID" who had signed the card? "Huh?! Just who do you think we are, lady, some rural peasants born yesterday?! Not all Gweilo's**** rook arrike" OK, that's my best translation from, you know, the looks on all their faces. "Show me the passport of Mr. See ID, and then we can get somewhere." I got no currency and had to borrow some during the trip. Did this lesson on inconvenience change my mind about the Mark 'o the Beast? Not hardly!


**** "White ghosts"

Comments (6)




Dashed high-hopes for China - Part 1


Posted On: Monday - May 4th 2020 8:11PM MST
In Topics:   China

Social Distancing and Social Credit. The new China?



The talk about China lately, with both rightful and wrongful animosity, has been regarding the Kung Flu, with its obvious origins. This post will get off that subject with just some musing about Peak Stupidity's personal experience with the place over a recent span.

I went to China for the first time almost 1 1/2 decades ago. It's not like I was under the impression that this was 1950s-1970s China, under the influence of the hard-core Communism of the tyrant/butcher Mao Zedong. I didn't expect to be followed constantly or shown around by a handler. I didn't expect to have my stool analyzed by some poor cadre for the purposes of intelligence, as a) I'm have neither the clout nor the intelligence, and b) after drinking some non-boiled water, I got a feeling he'd have turned in his resignation instead. I didn't know what to expect however.

What I found in China was what I thought of as "the Wild, Wild East". It was a blast. Just a first glimpse of the traffic and the free-for-all, with cars, pedestrians, and motor-scooters all mixing it up, with no one stopping for stop signs, not always for the lights, and apparently some interlock built into the cars making them impossible to run without beeping the horn ever 10 seconds, gave me a good impression. (Oh sure, you wouldn't want to live like that for good, possibly, but still ...) Additionally, I barely saw a cop on the road doing any traffic enforcement, which, yeah, explains a lot.

Early on, I thought about getting my cell phone working there (didn't end up needing it). One could go anywhere around this big city (hell, they're ALL big cities for us) and find a shop or just booth on the street with SIM cards for sale. The funny thing is, that superstition still runs high, with 4's being very bad and 8's being very good, so prices varied considerably depending on the phone number*. The main thing I liked is that there was complete anonymity. Try the card out, pay your cash, which was all they took at those places, and you're on your way with anonymous service. (Well, nobody's gonna call or answer anyway, it your number ends in quadruple 4's!)

It was the same for the internet. To take care of some business, I went into the old internet cafes a number of times, laid down 2 ¥ (RMB), equivalent to ~ 40¢ then and now** for an hour with, yea, BROADBAND, dontcha' know! Nobody asked for a name or ID. In fact at 5 in the morning, because I couldn't sleep when it afternoon at home, I went into one internet cafe to check email, and the young lady was slumped over at the desk, sleeping away. I had to tap her shoulder, she held up 2 fingers and I gave her 2 bills and sat down in front of the nearest computer (sum yung guys were playing video games nearby).

On a trip a year or so later, I'd had to get a 1st class ticket to assure getting a seat on a flight (it wasn't too bad a price, but I don't know if they were just telling me some BS - no way to know). If I'm gonna ride there, yes, I'll get my free drinks. I had 2 beers and brought the a 3rd can with me. 10 days later, on the way out at 8 AM, I remembered right outside the security line at the airport "oh, yeah, that beer - it is a liquid, so..." ... so I grabbed it out to drink it up. Ooops, I'd forgotten that my luggage had been rolling up curbs with me and so forth, so splooosh, it was a geyser that I probably only caught 2 or 3 ounces of. No yelling, no freaking out, and no problem occurred. It may have been slightly amusing to a few nearby Chinamen, is all.

I'm trying to describe a place that I noticed was lots freer than I expected and in many ways, more than the US. OK, the roads, the internet, and phone service is not everything by any means. I was, BTW able to pull up gunowners.org, one of my favorites at the time and noticed nothing that wouldn't come up. (This was well before youtube was known to me, so I did no experiments therewith.) OTOH, for a Chinaman to post some political things on a blog, well, I found out more about that later.

There's lots that a foreigner who doesn't know the language is never going to learn about. However, my first impression was that China could possibly be the new land of freedom, as I'd known America was continuously heading in the wrong direction since 1995 (see When did the Feral Government get OUT OF CONTROL? - Part 1.) It was exhilarating to see this place. As much as I was already so disappointed in my native nation, I hadn't lost hope yet, but China screamed out "SHTF bug-out location" to me, not like they'd just let me waltz on in, though...

I've been to China a number of times since (various places too). By 10 years later, all that exhilaration and hope was gone. First of all, I'd learned some more about the history, the people, and the CCP government, especially noting that respect for central government authority ingrained in the whole culture meant nobody was ready to earn that Citizenship in the Nation merit badge anytime soon. It's not that there aren't plenty of rebels (see Fireworks from China and A Great War never even heard of - the Taiping Rebellion.) They know that there are plenty of corrupt people in power. They just want to replace them with non-corrupt people next time rather than with no people at all. I doubt that the Chinese people have listened much to the REAL WHO, so they most certainly WILL get fooled again.

They ARE getting fooled again, in fact. Because the Chinese people have come out of extreme poverty for most citizens very rapidly from 1985 to now, the extremely materialistic attitude that has resulted precludes the asking of important questions, I guess. Those questions should be about the way the new electronic technology is being used to convert the country into a place the bad guys in 1984 could only dream about. Cell phone tracking, cashless payments, and Social Credit are the big trends in China now. I wonder if anyone there is worried about it all.

I will include some differences from later trips to the Middle Kingdom in Part 2, as this one ran on a lot longer than expected.




* I'll get a post going soon on this superstition business in China v America.

** Yes, 1 1/2 decades later the exchange rate is within 10-15%, due to the Chinese government pegging the Chinese Yuan to the US Dollar. Here's what that "RMB" (renminbi - i.e. "the people's money" old Commie terminology there and Mao is on almost every one of bills) terminology is all about. "RMB" is like saying "US Currency", while "Yuan" is like saying "dollars".

Comments (4)




Michigan v Sweden in Corona Challenge


Posted On: Saturday - May 2nd 2020 11:54AM MST
In Topics:   US Police State  Liberty/Libertarianism  Socialism/Communism  Kung Flu Stupidity



I've got a number of non-Kung Flu posts that ought to be written and posted. Upon reading through more of Part VII of Mr. E.F. Hail's essays a while ago, I noticed a number that stuck out. That is, the population of Sweden, per his number is VERY CLOSE to that of the State of Michigan, per my looking up of it to get a rough deaths/year number. I mean, they are within 1%*, just over 10 million, by 50,000 or so. That they are "very close" is not really my point, but it got me thinking of this Michigan v Sweden post (yeah, the "v" per modern lingo, as with Sharks versus Saltwater Crocs and Coronavirus versus Communism.

I'm not going to get into the population densities, which may be kind of similar, as Michigan has one BIG city like Sweden (Detroit v Stockholm**), a few more decent-sized ones, and plenty of rural area. (One can, of course just get average population density for each from their land areas - 30,000 mi² for Michigan versus 160,000 mi² for Sweden - but that average doesn't mean much.) This is not a technical or particularly numeric post, but a polemic, if you will, about how this purported crises of the Kung Flu was handled in each place.

Who would have thought it would have gone the way it did? As recently as 20 years back, Americans would have laughed at a scenario of Governors and other officials around the country declaring LOCKDOWNS and closures of private businesses, recreation areas, and other property willy-nilly. The commenter Jack D on unz noted that it reminded him of the scene in the Woody Allen movie Bananas in which the Esposito, absolute dictator of this Banana Republic, dictated:

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now... 16 years old!

(Yes, this was 1971.)

OTOH, even 50 years back, Americans knew Sweden as a Socialist society, with lots of rules that could be dictated from above, and a compliant population of Socialists themselves who were fine with all this. It's been a welfare state, basically, where those on the bottom economically get lots of (mandatory) help from those doing well, and an entrepreneur would find it harder to operate than he would have in the US. (It helped very much that the US military had been protecting the place from Communism, for free!) Not only that, but those of us not all that enamored with feminism saw Sweden as the ultimate feminist society, where men were asked to sit down to pee***, boys were raised as girls (and vice versa) to prove a point, and other such nonsense. Sure, it wasn't everyone that wanted this, and they did have ABBA, but still.

How about Michigan in the past? If you go far back enough, to the 1950s, the Motor City, Detroit, with it's busy, prosperous downtown on the Detroit River, was known as the "Paris of the West". NO! They were absolutely NOT joking. (Then the 1960s and the riots happened - no time in this post for that - see .) With all the fresh-water shoreline, Michigan is a sportsman's paradise. All of America, not just MIchigan, had lived under the wonderful US Constitution, when it was still really operating, and so of course the society was much more free economically than Sweden.

Just yesterday though, Peak Stupidity noted and disparaged the extreme Police State tactics that Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been using on the Michiganders due to the "emergency" that we call the Kung Flu Infotainment Panic-Fest. It's been more extreme than in most other States, and it's caused some pushback by decent non-authoritah-kissing residents. I really meant to include more on this in that last post, but got distracted writing about reasons one might become a Governor Whitmer. Therefore, I'll point the reader again to the CBS article with information on some of the resistance by the State Legislators of Michigan:

GOP legislative leaders say the legislature has the authority to extend the state of emergency, not Whitmer, and declined to do so Thursday. Republicans have pushed back against some aspects of the stay-at-home order and urged Whitmer to restart parts of the state's economy soon.

[SNIP]

"Any attempt by Governor Whitmer to unilaterally extend the states of emergency and disaster past April 30, 2020, without legislative approval would be contrary to both law and Michigan's constitutional system," both resolutions say.

On the Senate floor Thursday night, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican, indicated a court battle would be coming.

"If she does not recognize the end of the emergency declaration, we have no other choice but to act for our constituents," Shirkey said.

Whitmer's office said in a press release that she intends to veto a bill passed by the Legislature on Thursday which would have codified some of her coronavirus executive orders until their expiration dates. The bill would not have extended the state of emergency and did not codify her stay at home order.

It's very dangerous to give a loophole for one authority to use emergency powers to override all other rule of law, at ANY level of government. No doubt, it's hard to codify this into law, as there may be some REAL crisis that requires someone to take full charge. You don't give that power out lightly. Perhaps these Michigan Legislators, if they can remain some type of majority as demographic changes happen for the worse, can change this crap before next time around.

The tensions between the governor and the legislature over executive emergency powers have been simmering since a large protest in Lansing earlier this month against a previous version of Whitmer's stay-at-home order. The current order removed some restrictions that critics viewed as arbitrary, such as a travel ban between homes, rules prohibiting certain activities and requiring certain areas of stores to be blocked off.

Unbelievable. The people of Michigan are fed up too:

As the legislature met on Thursday, hundreds of protesters gathered at the Capitol building in Lansing to voice frustrations about the stay home order, including some who were armed and entered the Capitol. Democratic State Senator Dayna Polehanki tweeted a photo of armed protesters in the Senate gallery. People are allowed to openly carry guns inside the Michigan Capitol building.

As well they should. A pro-panic, pro-Authoritah D-legislator sounded pretty perturbed about this, as well she should be, as that's the point. From a tweet by State Senator Dayna Polehanki

Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us. Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our Sergeants-at-Arms more than today.

This stuff is very heartening. Not all of America is lost, or at least, not all of Americans are lost.

Meanwhile, back in Sweden, with the Socialists, Mr. Hail, in his Part VII essay summarizes:

Sweden’s Triumph Over the Corona-Cult
When the dark clouds of the CoronaPanic were looming in late February and early March, most found it hard to resist the then-building international chain-reaction of Panic. At the national level in the West, Sweden alone distinguished itself, from beginning to end, and led the West’s best response to this flu-strain pandemic.

“We, the Swedish government, decided…in January that the measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence-based. When you start looking around for the measures being taken now by different countries, you find that very few of them have any shred of evidence basis…”

— Dr. Johan Giesecke, world-renowned epidemiologist, adviser to the Swedish government, and the man who hired Anders Tegnell to direct the Swedish coronavirus pandemic strategy, speaking April 17.

The anti-Panic side argued for this approach all along. All but the most panic-addled and committed of the pro-Panic side were beginning to recognize, by the second half of April, that Sweden was right, that there was no need for the shutdowns, that this flu-virus is not fundamentally different from any other flu-virus in its behavior.

From what I've read on that site and elsewhere, the Swedish government has implemented a hands-off policy with almost no restrictions, though the citizens have used their own measures and common-sense to protect their own selves (what a concept!) Business is very much down, and people are not out and about as if this were 2019, but that's their choice, and a lack of restrictions lets small business react accordingly. Though I praise the policy highly, it was still the authoritah from above in Sweden that MADE this wise decision Is it not always the most wise move to let the individuals decide how they want to handle it? That’s basically how it was left for them, but there need be no government to leave the people this. That is definitely too much to ask in a Socialist country, but, as a country, we are in no position to criticize!

After all these polemics about the ideology, what about the results in these similar-sized entities?

From the CBS article:

As of Thursday [meaning April 30th], Michigan has reported 41,379 cases of coronavirus and the virus has caused 3,789 deaths in the state. More than a million Michiganders have filed for unemployment, as businesses have been forced to close to slow the spread of the virus.

That last sentence was stricken from the record, due to "THIS IS AN EMERGENCY!" (... like a gunshot victim stricken with the COVID-one-niner.) That's 10% of the entire population of the state, working people, kids, babies, grannies, that just now filed for unemployment.

From Mr. Hail:

With the epidemic-arc in sustained decline as of mid-April, coronavirus-positive deaths stood as 2,427 as of this writing [he included through April 26th], perhaps rising to as high as 3,000 to 3,500 by the (imminent) end of the epidemic.

Mr. Hail gives "ICU intakes" as the best data for Swedes stricken with the Kung Flu and in bad shape (He should feel free to correct me, as I gathered that this was ICU patients tested positive WITH the Corona virus.)

The number of people reported (as in Michigan) doesn't mean that much, as I've seen other graphs (cannot find them for attribution right now) that show the number of cases, in lots of countries being linear with number of people tested! All that means is that likely lots of people are already infected. Mr. Hail see the "herd immunity" state being arrived at already in Sweden. How about in Michigan? Plenty of people DO disregard the Governor's orders, but it would take longer there, I'd guess.

For both of these political entities, the death rate per population with an assumption noted in the postscript here, is ~ 0.03%.

Before we get our results of this final bracket contest, folks, let me put a word in about the management. The post yesterday focused a bit on women leaders, their tendency toward hysteria in rough times, and the nanny trait. Michigan has this hysterical woman Governor right now. Not all women are like this - I give you Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher as Exhibit A, but then here's the plaintiff's attorney with the Commie Globalist bitch Angela Merkel as his Exhibit A. There are men in the Michigan legislature trying to stop the madness there, as we've already excerpted reports of.

What about Sweden? You wouldn't think it, would you, with the high level of Feminist Stupidity seen there over the years. However, per Wiki, the Prime Minister right now is one Mr. Stefan Löfven, and there are men who are heads of departments of Justice, Defense, and Infrastructure. When you get to Finance (uh, oh!), Health, Environment, Culture, and Education, well, whaddya expect, they are infested. I don't know who was in charge during most of this 3rd-world immigration invited-invasion, but could the male PM have something to do with this common-sense response to the Kung Flu? (Commenter Ganderson has chimed in once, so hopefully we'll get more out of him - wiki, and the whole web, for that matter, is only good up to a point.)

Let's sum up this Michigan v Sweden Corona-Fest, shall we, as this has been an extremely long post for Peak Stupidity and I'm getting hungry:

- The State of Michigan, still supposedly under the law of the US Constitution, with Americans, some whose forefathers rebelled against tyranny: Locked down to an extreme. Full authority used by a tyrannical Governor claiming emergency powers. ~ 3,800 dead with the Kung Flu and supposedly rising like hell per the Governor. Economy in shambles. People being bailed out by the Feral Gov't using a few Trillion more dollars of made-up money.

- The country of Sweden, seen by Americans as the nanny-state, ultimate in economic Socialism. People left to make their own decisions. State authoritah not needed. ~2,500 dead with the Kung Flu, and tailing as in any other bad flu season. Economically hit hard but subject to rise per efforts of the people.

WINNER in a KNOCK-OUT: Sweden ... eden... den ...


PS: Note in the results that I used the phrase "WITH the Kung Flu", as even these, the actual low number is Sweden and slightly higher number in Michigan, could be high. Michigan would have more of a reason to inflate them, so perhaps the results on deaths per population are about equal.



* Is that counting Somalians in Sweden and Mexicans in Michigan? We don't know. That's not the point in this post (for a welcome change).

** Even with the Moslem immigration, I think Stockholm wins this one by forfeit - Detroit boosters have not shown up due to being car-jacked on their way to the match.

*** See, I don't get that. Was it just for fairness and equality? I mean we do fine leaving the seat down here and never moving it, except for cleaning. You've read it before in the restaurants: "We aim to please. You aim too, please."

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[UPDATED: Later 05/02:] Added 2 paragraphs on the sex of the current politicians in these 2 entities.
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Comments (22)




Governor Gretchen Whitmer - I wonder what her childhood was like.


Posted On: Friday - May 1st 2020 2:27PM MST
In Topics:   General Stupidity  US Police State  Female Stupidity

In Lansing town they love the Governor, boo hoo, hoo..



...but we didn't do what we could do.

It's great right now not being a Michigander. I say that not because I'd be stuck in my house or neighborhood through the months of May now, per CBS news*. I just don't know if I'd end up in more than just a house arrest after refusing to comply.

I haven't been keeping up with all the individual State's news on the Kung Flu panic (even mine, because I don't care enough). The current Governor of the State of Michigan is one Gretchen Whitmer. Peak Stupidity has already displayed a big bout of hysteria already from a US Congresswoman from MIchigan named Haley Stevens. Is there something in the water there? Well, not just the lead in Flint, I mean. Bouts of hysteria are characteristic of females, although America has become more diverse with bouts of hysteria with this Kung Flu Infotaiment Panic-Fest. Diversity is our strength, of course, so that's gotta be good, right?

You can't put it all on the women. There are still mostly male Governors, thankfully, as currently, in the 50 States, 41 governors are men, versus 9 women. Amazingly, for this day and age, there are 20 States that have never had a women governor. (My source is Wiki which is pretty good with this kind of thing - it even has 2 nice maps on this.) You would think, just based on normal sex traits, that the male Governors would be the more power hungry. You see that out of Governor Newsom in California. Even though that state, with it's generally low small-scale population density, at least for Other-Than-Hispanics, has helped them keep the Kung Flu (or reported Kung Flu) numbers low, that guy has been closing beaches**, I think just because they've got a lot of beaches to close. It reminds me of Major Major Major in the Joseph Heller book Catch-22 who was not allowed to arrange for parades, due to war and all. That was his kind of his thing though, and he felt down about it, until he was allowed him to at least to CANCEL parades.

This abuse of power is not the same as hysteria, but the effect on the population can be the same. There is the nanny effect though too, with the women, and that's why we can't have too many of them , or better yet, have none of them, in power, at least during hard times. For these nannies, you can never be too cautious. Never mind that the economy is grinding to a halt, and millions of people in Michigan will be poorer for it, it's her FEELINGS!

"We remain in the state of emergency," Whitmer said during a town hall Thursday night. "That is a fact. For anyone to declare 'mission accomplished' means that they're turning a blind eye to the fact that over 600 people have died in the last 72 hours."

600 people! 72 hours! Yeah, but, but, Michigan has an even 10 million people. The general average death rate is near 1%. 100,000 Michiganders will die in an average year. That's 820 people every 72 hours on average. Is it really 600 extra people that are dying that would not have otherwise? From the State of Michigan's own web site, that Governor Whitmer ought to read:

The case fatality rate is the number of people who have died from causes associated with COVID-19 out of the total number of people with confirmed COVID-19 infections.

See, but instead of getting hysterical, you just have to read it carefully, Governor, even if it IS with a blind eye. See that bold on "causes associated with"? That means if one died of respiratory problems, one condition associated with COVID-19, even though he'd have passed on without having the virus, that counts. It's some weasel wording alright. It doesn't even say the dead individual even HAD the virus! They are just dividing it by the number of people that have been tested for, and have, this virus. Of course, the more people you test, the more you find out have this thing.

For any readers who want to see this whole ridiculous guesswork on death rate of this disease, with it's unknown, often-fudged, numerator, and even more uncertain denominator, see our post with Mr. E.H. Hail's writing. Better yet, Mr. Hail has written 6 good posts (with number 5 written mostly by a guy named Allen) on his site on the Corona-Panic and the Corona Coup d’Etat (his terminology). They have lots of graphs and numbers, along with links to some good videos - see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

OK, back to the nanny Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. I just learned about some of the worst of the Police State moves made by this hysterical woman, but it's the small stuff that gets to me, regular people doing small business, as per this comment comment under iSteve article The Atlantic: China Is Right About Free Speech by Anon7:

We’re much more seriously screwed than we think we are.

Some entrepreneurial guy in Detroit figured out how to have an outdoor theater, cars socially distanced, the whole nine yards. Beautiful!

Our state governor, Gretchen Whitmer, shut this guy down. Nope, no business for you. Most women in the state reflexively support her – she just wants everyone to be safe.

Just imagine living in a state where some woman can just point to something she doesn’t like and just outlaw it. There’s no recourse.

Glad you don’t live in Michigan? The joke’s on you! She’ll be president by next year, because she will ace Joe Biden’s hair-sniffing test for vice-president. And Joe is cognitively impaired.

The reply, by commenter Stan Adams is classic:

Lots of men live in such a state. It’s called marriage.

Anon7, you're scaring the crap out of me with that VP-candidate talk. Stan Adams, nice job!

My take: How do people get this way? What happened to little Gretchen in elementary school? Did too many girls pull her hair or make fun of her shoes? Some of these problems start early, maybe in the womb. Perhaps her Mom listened to the Communist Internationale too loudly while fetal Gretchen was trying to nap in there after getting a quick snack from the placenta.

I think we need to ponder the same question that Tom Petty did:






* Standard LYIN' PRESS ALERT applies, but this one seems to have pretty much just facts.

** What a rotten-ass thing to do while people are stuck at home and not making any money. Many cannot find the time to hang out at the beach during normal working weeks. During the 2 months-and-counting unpaid vacation, lots of them would want to go to one of the few inexpensive attractions of California.

Comments (18)

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