A Holiday for Sluts
Posted On: Wednesday - October 30th 2019 8:42AM MST
In Topics: Female Stupidity Holiday from Stupidity
Last year, Peak Stupidity commented on Halloween as a Burlesque Show, and I learned a little bit about burlesque shows off of Wikipedia doing it too. Things have not changed in the direction of chastity, per a recent visit to a specialty store for a Halloween costume*.
My only question (that I'd like to have asked) at the check-out counter: "Is this the costume store or Victoria's Secret?"** They even have the costumes wrapped up in plastic, just like the old Playboy magazines at the 7-11. Will they let you take them into the bathroom? No, no, I mean, you may want to try them on.
The women do enjoy dressing up like sluts, cause it's not everyday (most of them) can do this sort of thing.
* I know, I know, WE also used to make them ourselves, or our Mom did. It's just not happening like that, unfortunately.
** We've also discussed in these pages Victoria's Other Secret.
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Student loan debt and forgiveness - Part 3
Posted On: Tuesday - October 29th 2019 9:43AM MST
In Topics: University Global Financial Stupidity Economics
It's been a good while, but Peak Stupidity is nothing if not compulsive about finishing a series. (It CAN take a year or two, occasionally, so do keep reading with alacrity.) Here are Part 1 and Part 2.
Tough call, I'll grant you.
We do not favor ANY type of forgiveness program on student loan debt, as it will screw over the more responsible, or just more thrifty, causing a further moral hazard. That is, these people will not be willing to play "fair" anymore with anything involving government or big organizations.
What's Peak Stupiidy's short-term solution to this mess?* The laws stating that these school loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy were made a decade or more back. I don't think that they are Constitutional in the least. Bankruptcy is a State matter. Now, this may result in the same problem, assuming nobody really fears or worries about getting into the bankruptcy process. The easygoing chapters of bankruptcy law are scams often, especially the way Big-Biz uses it as a re-org tactic and to get rid of debts to the small guy.
(There are scams available for the ex-student debtor too, such as paying off the school loans with money extracted from other debt, such as credit cards, and then blowing off all the other debt in bankruptcy.)
Oh, yeah, Dad, I mean Your Honor, absolutely!
Bankruptcy should be more of a financial-life-changing event than it is now, but even now, it still is something not everyone would like to go through. Let the students work as far as they can on paying off the loans and make personal bankruptcy mean something serious. That's, to me, the best way out of the short-term problem of how to handle the $1.6 Trillion debt already outstanding. It's not elegant, but it keeps things on the up and up.
* The long-term one is simple - get the US Gov't TFO of the loan-guarantee business.
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Hanging up in style
Posted On: Tuesday - October 29th 2019 9:15AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity
Just as a quick continuation of the curmudgeonry of the previous post, I really do miss the ability to hang up with gusto. It's really needed now more than ever, with all the robo-calls and other wastes of our time. We've got caller ID for some of that nowadays, though they are getting pretty slick - using phone numbers of the same area code and prefix even - how do they do that? I tell you, if it weren't for the H-1B visa immigrants, what would we ever do?
Still, there are plenty of calls that we intended to answer but often end up intending to terminate with extreme prejudice. Wasn't it a stress-reliever to just slam that big receiver down onto the base of those big old desk phones? Even the ones on the wall would suffice for this, though you did need some good mounting to the sheetrock. I'll give the old monopoly Bell Phone or AT&T, whoever they were, kudos for specifying those solid American-made plastic phones. The engineering specs probably required a "hard hang-up" stress test as part of the quality assurance process.
Did the person on the other end ever hear that big bang that we heard on our end? We would have liked to have believed so! (The movies would have you thinking that the one on the other end would immediately hear a dial tone. That was wrong, and I don't know why they would keep getting this wrong through decades of scenes such as Mr. Floyd calling Mrs. Floyd - OK, not a good example with the long-distance operator involved.)
Well we can't do this anymore. It's maddening. You get some asshole trying to sell you a warranty for a car you don't own is running out, or some city government guy saying you need to quit working on your car out on your own driveway, or your neighbor never returned the cup after you lent her the proverbial cup of sugar ... (whaaa?) "Yeah, well, you're the asshole. Call me again and I'll take your head off and shit ..." Swipe, swipe. Hmmmm, it's bringing up fucking windows now ... Swipe. Oh. "... down your ..." dainty little pinky swipe "... scrawny little .... Do you still hear me now?"
But, we can now do this by the side of the road in traffic on our bicycles, thinking our wife had called about an emergency, so, again ... there's that ...
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From "hearing a pin drop" to "how 'bout a door slam?"
Posted On: Monday - October 28th 2019 6:16PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity
Anybody remember the old Sprint "pin drop" commercial? This had nothing to do with
The big Sprint advertising campaign for their long-distance service (10 cents a minute - it was a steal!) was the "you can hear a pin drop" TV campaign. I am not sure if they were better than the other 2 competitors on the costs, but they figured we wanted good clear noise-free audio. Now that's worth having, but then, I don't remember in my lifetime the land-line phone service having anything but trouble-free service, sound-quality-wise. Maybe a commenter or 2 could tell me otherwise.
OK, great. We had a bit of experience with bad signals during the time between old-fashioned land-line phones (they did start to come in all kinds of colors and shapes - like, say a red Trans-Am at least) and the time of ubiquitous cell phones, say 2003. By the end of the 1980s, there was the cordless phone. These things had a base that plugged into the land-line signal 4-conductor cable, but also to AC power at the socket to allow it to be a radio transceiver. A battery-powered handheld transceiver had your mike and speaker, and you could carry it around the house and even into the yard a ways. How cool was that? It's when we first ran into the whole "can you hear me now?" business, least in my household. (One time, I even walked outside simultaneously with a friend who lived one block away, as we both tried to see how close we could get and keep talking.)
After this, you had your cell service of varying quality. We didn't expect much more than walkie-talkie quality at the start, but things got better quickly. Verizon advertised its quality signal with their "can you hear me now?" ad campaign. Yeah, sigh, I still watched the idiot box back then.
After that little history of phone service in our lifetimes, let me get to the curmudgeonry here. Things have gotten worse. I've switched cell companies a few times lately, and none of them give clear signals everywhere they purport to HAVE a signal to begin with. I call friends and have to ask them to repeat stuff, the worst being when I lose about every 20th syllable in a regular fashion. One guy has to hold his phone just a certain way, at the house. This is not what I would have expected by 2019 in 2003.
The big network companies are doing all kind of tricks to keep profits increasing. Good on 'em - productivity increase is good. However, these tricks don't all work. The companies definitely LUV LUV LUV you to use your wi-fi, as they takes the burden of your service completely off their backs. When you don't, there are electronic methods that I don't even know the names of that help them get more data over the same hardware.
Come to think of it, www information, especially video, of course, is the big data suck, so you'd think the simple voice signal would be peanuts. When I think of that, I think of this whole texting business too, as the opposite situation. When it was just words, (not really the case anymore, though) the cell companies LUVED LUVED LUVED that too. Instead of sending so many many kilobytes of data per second to keep the voice quality reasonable, when sending text, you're spending 20 seconds sending 50 bytes if you're good! Hell, the telegraph could do better than that. This costs these cell companies just about... let me pull out the calculator ...approximately the square root of squat, in signal capacity.
You wonder why, with all the Megabytes of data being sent to your phone in a few seconds, these companies can't get the voice data coming across well enough to enable that ability to hear a pin drop. Right now, I'd be glad to be able to hear the front door slam. This stuff sucks. 1985 was way better. Of course, now we can talk while I'm talking a dump in the restroom of the O'Hare airport, so there's that ...
PS: I am no network specialist, electrical engineer, or anything like that, but I do have a possible reasons in mind. Is it that the data can be interrupted for short intervals occasionally without the user experiencing a problem, while the phone calls must continue without so anything more than a 10 millisecond or so interruption in real time, for a decent conversation? If so, the emphasis is on data now. They must know, nobody uses the phone to, like, call people, anymore, right?
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Peak Stupidity says NO to Human Trafficking
Posted On: Monday - October 28th 2019 10:12AM MST
In Topics: Humor Treehuggers Globalists Big-Biz Stupidity
This is some new cause-of-the-current-year, this "human trafficking" business. The name is just stupid, We used to say kidnapping. "Kid" "napping", weil, OK not the best term as there is nothing wrong with kids napping, but hey, I'm tired of learning new shit for nothing! That goes even for new terms like "human trafficking", "people of color", "Beijing", and, above all, "Myanmar"!
Well, no matter what the US Globalist Big-Biz has to say about it, the kidnapping of young people and transportation of same, is not a big problem in the traditional US of A. That is, unless you count Dads that have taken their little ones away from sicko Moms and the Family Court ruination of their lives. I don't count that. I wrote "traditional" US just now, as most of the human trafficking within this country is done by immigrants of very foreign cultures that do this stuff regularly in their homelands. We don't want to impose on their cultures of grooming young girls for prostitution, bringing over fully-vetted-I'm-sure young immigrants to make into slaves (sexual and just the mundane stay-in-the-house-24/7/365-and-clean-the toilets version), and other examples (read VDare on this stuff).
Outside the country though, much of the human trafficking has been discussed quite a bit on the news, using the terms "caravans" and "coyotes" instead. These are kids sent by their parents with complete strangers on 1-2,000 mile trips to sneak into our country. We don't want to use that nasty term, "trafficking" regarding this activity, as they are future valedictorians and shit...
So, let's pick on the normal Americans and make them feel that they are evil in just one more way, because kids are being "trafficked" (DAMN, what a stupid phrase!), and we should be all very vigilant. OK, I mean be vigilant, but don't go being a vigilante, now! (Hmmmm, sounds like a Mexican term, coincidentally.)
Here's the thing: Jeffrey Epstein is dead. He did pretty well with that Lolita-XPress business, when those girls absolutely, positively had to come overnight. Is this a new business "space" that we could fill? I mean, the guy had a 727, so, you know?
Well, Peak Stupidity has taken a quick look at the possibilities for human trafficking. How about a young Swedish girl?
NAH! I mean, I know how to sail, and she's got her own yacht, but ... NAH! Greta Thunberg has probably turned off thousands, if not millions, of potential human traffickers from this idea. For that, we can be grateful to her. "Heeyy, Greta, just call me cigar Bill. Put on the blue dress, young lady. We'll get a coupla' cheesburgers and shakes, and then I can show you my, uhhh, cigar collection..." "No, I don't want any EMISSIONS from you! HOW DARE YOU?"
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The Cure - Friday I'm in Love
Posted On: Friday - October 25th 2019 5:33PM MST
In Topics: Music
I heard this one in a store recently and waited for Friday. I had no idea this was from The Cure till just now. It's a band I've got a CD of somewhere, but still wanted to hear more of. I had thought of this song being from the 1980's, but, nope, it's off of their 9th album, Wish, from 1992.
It seemed like in the era just before this, say early 1980's and maybe for a decade, all the cool new sounds were from British bands. Was that the 2nd British invasion? (OK, the 3rd, if you count the War of 1812.) The Cure is an English band.
This song has a good riff, and also a sound that reminded me of The Ocean Blue, a band who I thought was English too, but it turned out they were from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Listen to 01:30 to 01:40 - the sound right there is something exactly like that of The Ocean Blue on Between Something and Nothing from 1989, so maybe the Cure guy inadvertently copied that. Interestingly, per Wiki:
During the writing process, Robert Smith became convinced that he had inadvertently stolen the chord progression from somewhere, and this led him to a state of paranoia where he called everyone he could think of and played the song for them, asking if they had heard it before. None of them had, and Smith realised that the melody was indeed his.[3]Weird, in that the melody is not the problem here, but that sound (between 02:17 and 03:08 is VERY similar). Is that what he recollected?
Peak Stupidity has another song up from that band, The Office of a Busy Man, also from that The Ocean Blue self-titled debut album.
Anyway, this is The Cure with a catchy tune for tonight:
The band:
Robert Smith – vocals, guitar
Simon Gallup – bass
Porl Thompson – guitar
Boris Williams – drums
Perry Bamonte – six-string bass, keyboards
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Ann Coulter - echoes of Peak Stupidity
Posted On: Friday - October 25th 2019 8:47AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Pundits Race/Genetics
(Picture credit: Stolen straight off of VDare.)
Doing her best to keep her batting average above .980, our favorite literary pundit, Ann Coulter, has knocked another one out of the park, with "We, Too, Can Be A Failed Latin American State!". This latest column of hers echoes what Peak Stupidity has been arguing for quite some time, especially in our admonitions to the Libertarians*, at least those Reason magazine open borders idiots.
The left’s enthusiasm for Third World immigrants isn’t only because they vote 8-2 for the Democrats. It’s that Latin American peasants seem uniquely amenable to idiotic socialist schemes.That's just the beginning - Miss Coulter gets into accurate details, as usual, concentrating on the recent history of Venezuela, former crown jewel of South America.
You probably think it’s beyond silliness for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to keep promising FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL! NO PREMIUMS! NO CO-PAYS! ILLEGAL ALIENS, TOO! EVERYBODY GETS A PONY!
No one could be gullible enough to fall for that.
I refer you to the economic powerhouse that is Latin America.
Does Ann Coulter read the Peak Stupidity blog? No, I wish, but I don't really think so. It is very heartening to see this being written out, though, for some of the alt-right Socialists. Yes, we are importing Socialism, and even though we agree on stopping the immigration invasion, it is especially important to keep out those who would turn us even more Socialist. Read up on Latin American history, and you will see that things just never seem to work out for very long down there.
Who could immigrate here instead, if ANYBODY, that WON'T result in importing the Socialist mindset? Well, there were the Cubans and the Vietnamese, who had experienced it imposed on them and got the hell out, but that was all way back. Even Europeans are generally more Socialist than your average American, so enough of that. South African white people, maybe? Who knows? America has spent 150 years experimenting with immigrants who had different mindsets than the original British/Irish and many Germans. There is no control group to this experiment. The results are final. Maybe somebody can get a Master's thesis out of it, so there's that ...
* BTW, if this blog had started up as recently as 15 years ago even, with the Immigration Stupidity not so visible an existential crisis (at least to this still-somewhat-unaware guy), this site would have been mainly about the topics in with the Liberty Libertarianism topic key.
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Just when I thought I was out ...
Posted On: Thursday - October 24th 2019 6:49PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders Music Political Correctness Feminism
... they pull me back in!
Hold the spandex, I beg of you!
How can one refrain from noting the stupidity of the current era? I mean, you really need an outlet through which to dump it, or this stuff will rub off on you. Peak Stupidity today revisits the flavor of stupidity that we categorize under Genderbenders. We coudn't NOT comment on this one.
Per Zerohedge*, Male-To-Female Professor Wins Women's Cycling Championship Again, Taunts Female Critics. Haha... hahahahhaaa! Sorry, it's not just the stupidity of it. That was a "funny haha" along with a "pass the popcorn haha".
As for the first "haha", we non-deluded people all know that men are physically stronger and faster than women on the average. There is a reason most sports have us separated by sex. Though this bike champion may have different sexual organs than he had before getting tenure, that does not take all that made him a man away. Though I would be pretty pissed being a serious (actual) woman contender in this sport, or Dad of a cyclist daughter, I'm not, hence this is just hilarious to me.
As for the 2nd "haha", see there may not even be a long German word for this one. This is a 3-way collision of political correctness, genderbending, and also feminism. The feminists started this Fed-Gov Title IX crap many years back. They wanted just as much money to go into female sports as male sports. Since women don't take sports as seriously as men, the effect was to eliminate lower pay-off** men's teams. No, it's not right, and it's just another reason for young men to be pissed off at Big Government, if they have any sense.
Then, this newcomer to the world of stupidity, the genderbender (BLT-G) crowd, may not be feminists (in fact, they often do not like each other, as they are competing for the same goodies - yes, "goodies" of all sorts!). The genderbenders don't care about equal money into sports, but dang, if there's prize money to be had, what can people say if a former man, now "woman", enters the women's 35-39 y/o division of a bike race? About this controversy, tennis player Virginia Hood says:
The male body, which has been through male puberty, still retains its advantage, that doesn’t go away.Quothe cyclist now-Rachel McKinnon:
I have sympathy with [transgender athletes]. They have a right to do sport but not a right to go into any category they want. [Zerohedge's bolding]
Ms. Hood has expressed an irrational fear of trans women. An irrational fear of trans women is the dictionary definition of transphobia. Transphobia has no place in sport,” the release says.Here, the genderbenders are using modern hard-core Political Correctness to muscle their way into easy wins, money, and fame. Where does the feminism come back in? Well, what can these feminists say, because, after all, women can do anything men can do, right? Hear them roar! The feminists have used the PC as a weapon for decades, so they can't exactly fight it here.
Since women are supposed to be just as good, in say, cycling, as men, then even if this tranny guy now-named Rachel wins every single road-race of the tour, what difference does it make that he does have a little bit of testosterone still not flushed out of his system?
If this goes much further, women will be losers in every one of those Title IX sports, pretty much negating the reason for another bit of unconstitutional bullshit that the feminists got out of the Feral Government. They won't have a chance against these guys with no pee-pees and women's names. I don't think feminists are too awful pleased by these developments, but then, they started all this "we are all the same" stupidity.
As the old-school ZH commenters were bound to tell you, "go long, Orville Redenbacher!"
OK, "ladies", get on your bikes and ride!
I hadn't listened to that guitar ending in a long time, usually wanting to skip to Fat Bottomed Girls (a better melody, IMO) What hard-rockin' guys! If you play Bicycle Race without Fat Bottomed Girls right afterwards, you are some kind of sicko and should be banned from the airwaves, so,
Queen:
Freddie Mercury – lead vocals, keyboards, guitar
Brian May – guitar, keyboards, vocals
John Deacon – bass, guitar, keyboards
Roger Taylor – drums, guitar, keyboards, vocals
Sure, the first guy was a genderbender of sorts, being a flaming homo, but he didn't insist on trying to join The Go-Go's or something ...
* Steve Sailer had a post on this same story, as he gets into some of the details of different types of trans-gender people, and then ends with "So, a guy with a gut can make a joke out of a woman’s sports competition if he decides to call himself a woman." You're going to find smarter commenters under Steve Sailer, but funnier ones at ZeroHedge. Take your pick.
** No matter what, the alumni would not let football and basketball take a hit. That would be a circus too far.
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No posts for another day or so
Posted On: Tuesday - October 22nd 2019 5:39PM MST
In Topics: Bible/Religion
Your lead blogger here has a good friend who is in bad shape. He will not be in this world much longer. In a visit today, it sounds like he is not too worried about what's coming. Death is an unimaginably scary thing unless you have been very close to it already. Try to enjoy your time before the point at which you wonder how many exact days you have left.
Regarding all the stupidity in this world, that he and I have discussed endlessly, I told him that if this is gonna happen, it's good he will miss some of what's to come. The religious part of all this is something too personal for this blog.
They'll be more posts later in the week, and if this financial stuff is getting boring, hey, join the party, pal!
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Jingle Mail
Posted On: Saturday - October 19th 2019 5:40PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Economics US Feral Government Big-Biz Stupidity
The discussion on the "moral hazard" of handing out student loans like jolly ranchers on Halloween brought my mind back to an even bigger instance of this government induced problem. That is the housing bubble 1.0 crash of 11 years back. I'd guess that there are 3-5 times as many mortgage loans out there as student loans, and they are in the range of 2 (for the med students!) to 15 times bigger (for the student at the State U. who doesn't go crazy with it). There's a LOT more money involved.
Back from the mid 1990s through 2008, it wasn't all DIRECT guaranteeing of mortgage loans, mind you, in this HUGE market, but the US Government got very involved. It started with the claims of "red-lining" (like, yeah, a bank wouldn't want to lend money to a good risk) that were made since the Civil Rites era, but the stupidity of Bill Clinton and the "compassion" of George W. started this push on the banks. It was not just that the Feds would help these banks out when they took on the bad risks, but also that the more conservative banks that didn't want to play this game were made out to be non-virtuous and mean, racist bankers. Why fight all that, when the US Gov would back you?
It wasn't all just that - housing prices had been going up steadily since the late 1980s, with maybe a few very slight drops. Since house prices "always go up", banks saw no reason to fight this stupidity. Investors got in on this game, and these $350,000 mortgages to $10/hr Hispanic gardeners were all packaged in nicely into these "tranches" of funds, ... or whatever-the-hell. After years of helping out Uncle Sugar with his virtuous project (and making a killing), when the SHTF in '07-'08 (depending on where you live), well, "quid pro quo, Clarice" said the big banks, at least those officially too big to fail. "Bail me out, Clarice, uhh, Uncle Sugar!"
I'd perused one particular housing bubble web site starting in '05, so I did see this coming. The posts and comments were mostly from real estate agent types. Their being part of the F.I.R.E. economy, I'm not the biggest fans of real estate agents, but some of the details they wrote of regarding what was going on after the crash were pretty interesting.
The term "jingle mail" was used a lot in '08 - '12. This term refers to the sending of house keys in the mail back to the bank, as in "Yeah, we can't sell this thing without bringing 200 large to the closing, which we don't have, so here you go. Good luck with all that ..." Yeah, it was not always the actual keys in the actual mail, but you get the idea. There were some amazingly stupid things going on, as the banks did not want so many"non-performing" loans on their books, making them look insolvent. I have a friend who did pretty well with this. On his 2nd out of 3 foreclosures, though he hadn't paid a cent in a year, the bank PAID HIM 2,000 bucks to not trash the place when he left! "Hmmm, nice place I'm leaving you here ... it'd be a real shame if sometin' woulda' happen to it."
For years, when discussing the housing loan crisis, I'd been using the same line I wrote in the previous post on the school loan business - "Hey you signed on the line." Well, the more I thought about it later, I recalled a time when my personal finances were not so good. I didn't plan on cheating on any deal, mind you, and the last thing I got behind on WAS the house payment. The money was coming - "you'll get it when I get it" is what I wanted to say, but there was no chance to say that. In those years, you got a letter from lawyers by that point. They wanted 2 payments (not quite catching up, but on the way) together, or foreclosure would start.
Years after this (I had made 2 double payments, as I got out of the financial hole caused, yes, it was, by the US government with regard to the business I was involved in) a thought came to me. At the time in question, housing prices had already risen for a few years, and the equity in my house was likely $50,000 more than what I owed on the loan.* Shouldn't they have given me that 50 grand, were I to say "OK, I can't pay anymore"? No, that wasn't part of the deal - they just get the house. Well, quid pro quo,
It's not quite like the student-loan business in which the amount of benefit one has obtained from this education is not easily calculable, and sometimes a net negative, BEFORE accounting for the loan.
OK, it's been financial stupidity week, I guess. Part 3 on the school loans is to come next week, along with more on Media Stupidity and a book review.
* Personally, I wasn't as excited about some are about this sort of thing. All it meant to me was higher property taxes.
** OK, this whole "bitchez" thing is from the ZeroHedge commenters and I'm having some kind of flashback here ...
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Student loan debt and forgiveness - Part 2
Posted On: Saturday - October 19th 2019 10:01AM MST
In Topics: University Global Financial Stupidity Economics Liberty/Libertarianism
(continued from previous post)
(This is pretty much the same data as on the previous post, but a bit clearer and with only blue shades. I'd already saved this, so ...)
This is discussion of the ideas presented in Steve Penfield's comprehensive article on the whole student loan/traditional university education business - Student Debt Cancellation: A Good Idea and a Political Hoax. Has everyone read it yet? What?? How about at least the Cliff Notes? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? OK, I can't even ... all right, you all are Peak Stupidity's customers, and the customer is ALWAYS right, and I've got my tenure committee meeting coming, so just stay here and read anyway.
One can see from Mr. Penfield's title what was coming. After that great explanation of the problems, including hard-core Libertarian reasoning, and some good ideas for alternate methods of higher education, what's the guy's conclusion? FORGIVE THE LOANS. Let's have a JUBILEE! Like in the Bible. The author quotes one James Richards, of US News & World Report (they still make that?!) as he explains how the deal ran in Leviticus (excerpt from Mr. Richards, not Mr. Penfield):
The Bible’s book of Leviticus provides that every 50 years all mortgage debt is to be forgiven. This occurrence was called the Jubilee Year. This may seem like a shocking imposition on creditors and a free ride for debtors. Yet, consider the behavioral feedback loops. In the 10th year after the last Jubilee, lenders might lend freely for a 20-year term. By the 45th year it seems likely that long-term credit would have dried up because the lenders were as aware of the coming Jubilee as the debtors. This was a self-regulating system that deleveraged itself before credit bubbles grew out of control and threatened a widespread collapse. It was an orderly deleveraging that seems enlightened in comparison with the disorderly and draconian deleveraging our economy is experiencing today.Yeah, fine, that might have worked, but here's the obvious difference, the both of you knuckleheads: There was prior knowledge of these 50-year jubilees. That makes all the difference in the world! Just as the excerpt says, the money managers of Leviticus-day could plan and make loans accordingly. That is NOT the situation today.
Let me back up a bit and just mention that this student-loan forgiveness business is being bandied about by various members of the Young Turds and Old Pharts of the blue squad. Promising to rob
Steve Penfield's solution to basically just do this this ONE TIME, and then implement an entirely different method of higher-ed, or, at least, financing of it, reminds me of "It's just this one Amnesty, and then we control the border..."* or the Savings & Loan crises of the 1980's, and lastly, and most destructively, the big-bank bailouts of 2008. Beside the fact that the promises to "now go ahead and fix it so this won't happen again" are not usually kept, there is the moral hazard.
Yes, I like that term "moral hazard", and that Steve Penfield, with all his other great Libertarian writing to get to the root of the problem, should really have known what this means. Mr. Penfield writes that those who did the responsible thing, paying off their loans, will at least have learned a lesson that the forgivees will not:
As for the college grads who honorably paid off their school loans, how would granting Debt Forgiveness to other people harm you in any way? If the word “education” has any meaning at all, you’ve gained a great education from the discipline of working, saving and paying off your obligations. Now maybe use those skills to do something even more productive. Unlike the conservative writer Matt Walsh, who worked to pay off his wife’s student debt, there’s no reason to be bitter about “an awful lot of unnecessary sacrifices” made in the past. Look how far that great experience has got you (and him) already?No, I don't think that's the lesson that the average responsible guy, the one who worked in the evenings to help pay at least for the dorm, used his old beater car, if any, and bought the cheap swill instead of going to the brew pubs (you really can't tell anyway after 2!) to keep his loan down to $20,000, instead of $50,000, will learn.
We can’t change the past. And reckless college graduates who are over their head in bills from a worthless degree won’t get a chance to learn from that particular mistake. But they may get a chance to start over. If debt-relieved graduates make the same foolish choices in the future, they will be the ones to suffer.
The actual lessons he will have learned are: Don’t live by the rules anymore, don’t trust the US Gov’t (at least that’s a good thing to learn), and next time, screw the system any way you can!. It screwed you, and who knows what the next thing will be, forgiven mortgages, car loans, CC debt, what? Student loan forgiveness will create even more irresponsibility in a country that already has too much due to 5 decades of hard Socialism.
You think there is a lack of social trust now in America? Wait until more responsible people get screwed, and that’s exactly what your solution is. Don’t try to rationalize it, Steve Penfield.
No matter how much of a scam American higher education is these days, and it's a LOT of one, the fact is that these students and/or their parents signed on the line. Yes, maybe the older "boomer" parents still had the antiquated ideas in their heads about "just get any degree - they'll be white collar jobs just waiting for you", and "hell, I saved for all my tuition, just delivering pizzas during the summers", etc. I know, they were, and still are, deluded about the modern costs and rewards of a BS degree. I would hope these would make up a majority of the cosigners, as they deserve to pay for their inability to keep up! If they didn't sign, but still gave their kids bad advice, well, I guess these kids can learn some truly valuable lessons. Why didn't their baby-boomer parents teach them "don't trust anybody over 30", right? ;-}
Then there are the bogus complaints about "hey, the amount keeps going up, it was just 4 years of grad school." "Then, I didn't borrow any more and took a year off to tour Europe, and it STILL went up!" Yeah, the US Gov’t does lots of criminal things, but accumulation of interest during forbearance (see the difference between forbearance and deferment here) is not criminal nor is accumulation of interest during a decade of non-payment.
Even with all the time spent on the PC, SJW crap, isn't there any time left at college to learn how to use an compound interest table (P, A, F, Rate, etc.)? You can learn this in 10 minutes. These calculators are on-line – don’t tell me modern students don’t know how to “search it up”.
(Of course, 8% versus 10% makes a difference, especially if you don't pay for 10 years.)
What's my solution, or attempt at one? I guess it'll be in Part 3, next week.
* See also 1986 Illegal Amnesty - Ronald Reagan's regrets..
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Student loan debt and forgiveness - Part 1
Posted On: Friday - October 18th 2019 7:26PM MST
In Topics: University Global Financial Stupidity Economics Liberty/Libertarianism
Is it really some kind of crisis? When you compare $1.6 Trillion to the US national debt of $23 Trillion, and maybe 5 x as much as that in Feral Gov't obligations that can't be paid, it does seem like a drop in the bucket. Well, the holders of the US debt are treasury bond holders, and most Americans wouldn't even know whether they are indirectly, or maybe occasionally directly, holders of this form of debt that cannot be paid in full. As the debtors, on the other side, Americans see that the FED can just create more money, and the Congress can just up the deficit. It's been working fine like this for 5 decades, so ...
For the student loans, the last-resort holder of the debt is the US Gov't, and again, nobody worries about that either. It's only on the debtor side, as students come of of the Universities with a small mortgage-sized debt load while just entering the working world, that has anybody worried. You can see the numbers, either going up, up, up, or, once you finally get to paying, down very slowly as you pay off an interest accumulating loan.
$1,600,000,000,000 is a lot of money hanging out there, still, and something like 15% of it is in default (with varying definitions of default status). Student loan debt, along with the other consumer debt, is much more real to us than the other, bigger, financial holes America is in. It has also become political, for the blue-squad party of free stuff.
Look at that, well more than half of the loans have less than $10,000 due. We could say also that the median (1/2 above and 1/2 below) loan amount is somewhat under 10 grand (without more data). Either way you put it, what's the problem? The problem is that this chart is for all student loans outstanding, not at all for currently-graduating students in '19 or so. The low amounts due by those 58% are mostly owed by people that have:
a) been dutifully paying off their loans for 5 or 10 years already.
and/or
b) graduated quite a while ago, when tuition was lower and 10 grand might pay 1/2 your bill.
You can play with the numbers in various ways, but the important one, in my opinion, is that steadily growing $1.6 Trillion.
A writer named Steve Penfield has written a very comprehensive article on American student loan debt - Student Debt Cancellation: A Good Idea and a Political Hoax. I really recommend the reader go through the whole thing, as Mr. Penfield does a SUPERB job of discussion all aspects of the student loan problem, with a couple of minor exceptions, one being his conclusion!
I don't want to make this into a review, but I may point out some problems with, and highlights of, the article first, before my own arguments about the conclusion. Mr. Penfield covered a lot of ground, but as he described the financial stupidity of this country, in which we are told debt is a healthy thing, he never drilled down the real root of this particular debt problem - the guaranteeing of student loans by the US government. I've written this sort of thing before, but I'll to explain the moral hazard again: The guaranteeing of the loans means the banks cannot lose. Why wouldn’t they loan $73,000 to a guy who will major in Art History for 5 years … and climbing?
Before the moral hazard of the US Gov. backing the loans, any bank loan officer who made such a move as that loan speculated-on above would be fired. It’s not a good risk. Sure, $5,000 over 4 years to help an electrical engr. student make it through, even back when tuition was $1200 yearly, yeah. That, and loans like it, are a good bet. I see shades of the 11 year-ago mortgage crisis here.
A 2nd minor but very annoying problem with the article is that I suppose stuff doesn't get published* without some little bits of PC SJWisms, so Mr. Penfield had to add his stupid obligatory notes about "institutional racism" and "disparate impact on minorities" out of the blue. That detracts from the quality a little bit.
The author makes a great case for obsolescence of the University system, run as it has been for a century or two, but with the attendance of a large portion of the American population nowadays vs. only the brightest, and I suppose, most elite, back in the past. He lays out other ways of credentialing people for white-collar jobs and other ways of learning, without requiring the huge monetary outlays.
Part of the article is a great Libertarian explanation of the mess America is in due to central banking and the big banks in general. Steve Penfield reads as if he's read or heard a heaping helping of Ron Paul, and he does just as great a job of explaining the financial side of Libertarianism as Dr. Paul could, or, say, Peak Stupidity.
Now, I've gotten this far, the post has gotten long, and I see the need for a 2nd part tomorrow to detail Mr. Penfield's erroneous conclusion, and our explanation on what's wrong with it. Sorry about that. Tomorrow will have the good, ranty stuff. In the meantime, I hope the Peak Stupidity reader will take 1/2 hour to an hour to read the article, as there is lots of great stuff in there.
* I assume Mr. Penfield wrote this long article for other publications, not just the Unz Review. Mr. Unz features all kinds of viewpoints, and would not at all be the type to screen for PC.
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[UPDATED 10/19:] Added a bit of discussion of the annular pie chart.
Why make it annular? Is that trending? It's not how you make a pumpkin pie.
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Scandi-Anarcho-Tyranny and the Commies
Posted On: Thursday - October 17th 2019 9:22PM MST
In Topics: Commies alt-right/MAGA ctrl-left Anarcho-tyranny
VDare reported today on a Scandinavian Nationalist conference that was harassed and attacked by their ctrl-left very much as VDare conferences themselves, along with the American Renaissance ones, do. The letter writer who reported from this Scandza conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, compared the way things went down to the happenings in Charlottesville 2 years back, using the term Anarcho-tyranny. This stuff is now world-wide, or at least anywhere Conservatives want to have a say in things.
An interesting thing told by this Scandinavian VDare letter-writer was that some union leaders of the police force that refused to keep the peace, letting the antifa goons attack the peaceful private conference with only 4 arrests on minor charges (sound familiar?) are Communists. (The picture above was taken directly from the VDare letter/report.) But, but ... Communism is dead, 'cause the Cold War is over... that's what they say.
Peak Stupidity knows better. We have stated the following before: It's not like the antifa worthless misfits and the SJW groups of all kinds are full of students of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. They don't memorize Chairman Mao's little red book, except for likely the unz.com resident Commie Godfree Roberts. OK, so that means they don't know the whole Commie program about "to each according to his needs, from each according to her fertility" and the definitions of the "proletariat" and the "bourgeoisie" and other strange European words. They don't have to. They've had their successful long march through the institutions of America, so they can just speak their anti-American bullshit in plain American English, with the power of Big-Ed, the Lyin' Press, and the Feral Gov'ts behind them (the institutions they have taken over).
What makes them Commies is simply that, in the same way as the Bolsheviks, the Red Chinese, and the followers of Castro and Pol Pot, they don't think life is fair to them and therefore want to see all traditional conservative institutions of people's lives be destroyed. It's the same type of people a century, 70 years, 60 years, and ~ 45 years later, respectively, that are involved, whether they use the official Communist catch-phrases or not.
We can see these people showing their true colors (bright red) in the photo from Copenhagen. Sure, Western Europe has always had more tolerance for Communism than old-fashioned America has. We had our tail-gunner McCarthy's and John Birch Societies, and I, for one, am damn proud of them all. I just read a comment 1/2 hour ago under one of John Derbyshire's articles on China (from his recent trip) that applies:
UR ["Unz Review"] attracts a lot of ageing Cold Warriors who are still obsessed with searching for commies under the bed. They still think it’s the 1950s. Everything is a communist conspiracy. You can’t reason with them.Oh, it's not really a conspiracy, and they never were under beds, just in Sociology Departments, newsrooms, Feral Government agencies, that kind of thing. They are just coming out of the woodwork, as their time comes again.
They will need to be put down with extreme prejudice at some point, as the Anarcho-tyranny is definitely not working for us.
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Revisiting the Financial Stupidity
Posted On: Thursday - October 17th 2019 10:03AM MST
In Topics: Websites Global Financial Stupidity Cars Economics
Possibly our topic key Global Financial Stupidity, should have an offshoot for just the American part of it. Most of the posts have discussed America's and Americans' finances. However, though declining, our economy still impacts the world. We'll just stick with this key on this subset of stupidity that Peak Stupidity has not visited in a while. The student loan business will be discussed specifically in an upcoming post.
Hey, the really big area of consumer financing, the mortgages, along with CC debt, doesn't look like it's a real problem. It sure helps, for the former, that one can still get loans at 3.5 - 4% for a house. (Yeah, the banks get their money a lot cheaper at 1-2%, so don't worry too much about them.) Credit card debt is one I'd have thought would be worse, but then I'm a Zerohedge reader (more about ZH in a bit).
That auto loan debt doesn't look that good though. It's not like the population has grown 60% in a decade, though it's not for lack of trying by the implementers of our immigration-invasion. Zerohedge had an article a couple of weeks back about the growth in the PERIODS of car loans - "Auto Loans Stretch To Eight Years To Accommodate Irresponsible Car Buyers". Do a little reading of the posts under Peak Stupidity's Economics topic key, and you'll soon see that we are in agreement about the irresponsibility. You undergo 5 decades of Socialism - what in hell would you expect, really? Zerohedge laments:
About a third of all US auto loans issued today are stretching out to seven years, according to the Wall Street Journal. By comparison, a decade ago, the seven-year loan only made up about 10% of all loans.Haha, sneakers and sweaters on installment plans? In my day, it was the Red Ryder steel wagon or Schwinn Sting-Ray bike. Sneakers were cheap, and sweaters were gay. On, and we weren't grown-ups.
Why? Because that's the only type of loan increasingly more Americans can afford to amortize.
The longer loan durations are a clear sign that the American middle class is growing broker by the day, and, as we pointed out in our recent article about millennials putting items like sneakers and sweaters on installment plans, the US consumer's creeping debt burden is, among other things, the result of auto prices growing rapidly while real incomes have barely budged. It is also the result of little to no financial education piled on top of a pathological shopping addiction.
Despite so-called hedonic adjustments, new safety and technological features being included with vehicles, like larger and more intricate multimedia displays, have made even the most basic vehicles unaffordable... without the help of debt that is. And of course, in true debt-laden American fashion, broke consumers are also drifting towards higher priced vehicles, like SUVs.
Now as an aside on Zerohedge, that site is written by the black-pilled, formerly called "Debbie Downers". A commenter on unz gave more info. that I need to put in the ZH review, along the lines that the site came on big during/after the crash of '08. Many of the commenters were people from the financial industry. I can vouch for that, as the talk under most of the posts was about detailed financial matters. As was discussed in "The Non-Science of Economics", the hypocrisy of some of them was that they were discussing ways to still make money in the very markets that they rightly criticized as rigged (by the FED, etc.)
Financial folks shouldn't be Debbie or Tyler Downers, as that's not good for sales, and, anyway, were they still employed, they'd be making money whatever their specific financial markets are doing. That's the whole thing about the F.I.R.E. "industries, excepting, perhaps the Insurance sector. They all make money on the ups and the downs. "The market's crashing, you say? Fuck you, pay me! (my commission)" "Oh, the whole block's turned dark and dangerous, and you need to sell in a hurry for a loss? Fuck you, pay me!" It works great! Why so down, Paulie?
Anyway, if you keep up with ZH daily, you will be surprised to hit each new year without the collapse of the US dollar, gasoline delivery trucks being driven by Mad Max and some Feral Kids, and the local neighborhood militias patrolling the streets. Still, the numbers don't lie. Where were we? Let's show ZH's auto loan graph:
The article give a number, that the average car loan pay-off period is 69 months. That's 5 3/4 years. Just eyeballing off of this, one of the better of ZeroHedge's normally worthless graphs, I can get the opposite end of this, that about 35% of loans have terms of > 6 years (bottom of the dark red).
Look at the black line in the top graph, though. There's your black pill. Though these loan "markets" are not of the same size, the $1.6 Trillion student loan market is a big worry. The economic stupidity and the politics, as in forgiveness, will be discussed in the upcoming post, hopefully by end-o-bidness-week.
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Bread and Circuses - Part 5 - Conclusion
Posted On: Tuesday - October 15th 2019 5:50PM MST
In Topics: Bread and Circuses
This is the concluding post on the definition of "Bread and Circuses" or, from last time around with this world empire thing, "Pan et Circenses". (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, , and Part 4.)
Perhaps this is a boring series, as it's so far just been a description of the copious amount of bread and the various types of circuses available to us in modern America. Let's get to the point of all this.
As happened during the Roman Empire for a few hundred years, the American empire is in decline. Whether it's the invade-the-world/invite-the-world program or the debasement of the money, also practiced by the Romans during their later era, (both discussed nicely in that American Thinker article that I mentioned in the 1st post on this, this is more of the rhyming of history. This deal seems to be on a 2,000 year cycle, but with 2 orders-of-magnitude faster transportation and close-to-infinite higher speed in communication, perhaps this decline will be quicker too. I'd say we are already 5 decades into it, though some would argue a century or so.
The amount of "bread" and the amount of "circuses" also must be a couple of orders of magnitude higher, that's both in actual quantity and in choices. Perhaps that makes sense as we need greater distractions for a quicker decline.
Peak Stupidity has stated numerous times that we don't believe in really long-term conspiracy theories on the scale of centuries or even half of that. Who really has the time and inclination for that sort of thing? Nope, it's usually just the same culprits in power and/or of the elite, who just don't give a damn about the rest of the population, sometimes truly detesting them. They think alike. If Americans will watch 5 hours of football, and another 5 hours of guys talking about football and being in LUV with the players each week, have those Applebees/Chile's/TGI-Fridays/Ruby Tuesdays* available for $12 meals with unlimited breadsticks and olive oil, will they really get up in arms about some of the egregious stuff happening? They bet on "NO".
Big-Biz keeps this stuff running, with employees who need the bread to spend themselves on the same stuff. You don't make that much in either the restaurant business or the sportsball business without being an owner or player, one. It's a distracting, monotonous cycle: Work long hours roviding bread or circuses, make some bread, and spend it on the same.
For the folks that do care about the changes being forced upon them, well, they can tune into the idiot plate for the political version of the circus. How does one get out of this mode - read Peak Stupidity daily? Well, that's a start!**
* Is it the very same corporate naming company coming up with these?
** See, they didn't have Peak Stupidity in the old Roman Empire, so there's that ... Really, the internet, with its offerings of information contrary to the official narrative, IS something that can possibly offset the much large dose of Bread and Circuses that we are offered vs. the Romans. And, guess what? With the new screens most of us carry around we can learn of another way WHILE we are eating our unlimited breadsticks (yes, and soup and salad).
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Bowflex for the win
Posted On: Tuesday - October 15th 2019 5:24PM MST
In Topics: Artificial Stupidity Science
Exercise machines have been somewhat of a sub-fixation within Peak Stupidity's topic key called Artificial Stupidity. Though we did mention the mechanical quality (or lack thereof) of one of the machines, in relation to the subject of Cheap China-made Crap, our problem has been with the much easier to fix (or do right the first time) matter of the displays.
We discussed some more force-feeding of TV (without some extra effort!) on one of the bike machines recently, mostly our beef has been with the lack of accurate and/or meaningful calculations of the data presented. In fact, in that post on the Sears one with the quality problem, titled "The
The sometimes simple (on the bike machines) and often more complicated physical calculations required to give accurate displays of exercise being accomplished were discussed here in "Peak Torque, Wattage, and Exercise Machine electronic stupidity". There can be a lot to it, but, as I've written before, in an open sentence* to these exercise machine manufacturers, for cryin' out loud, just hire a 2nd-year physics or mechanical engineering student of a few hours to give you the formulae for your geeks to program in! WTF is so hard or expensive about that, spread out over a few or tens of thousands of units?
That all said as a long-winded intro, or summary, however you take it, the reason this post DOESN'T HAVE the curmudgeonry tag is that I used a treadmill that did seem to be programmed to display work done correctly. This was a Bowflex machine, the company more known for the workout tools using flexing members. Well, they done good here. There's a cool speedometer-type gauge that reads in calories/min (burned). It read close to linear with speed. Keep in mind, or peruse that post on Peak Torque ... etc, that no, that's not all there is to it. This value does depend on the user's weight, but also, muscle type and other things that can't be known, much less calculated in. (Other machines do let you input your weight - this may or may not - I didn't notice.)
Now, the linearity of displayed work done with speed is probably the case for other treadmills, for the most part. The bigger deal with this Bowflex is that as I moved the incline up and down to experiment, calories/min varied linearly with incline too. That is important. After all, just based on pure rigid-body physics, the power being exerted should be ZERO at the horizontal setting**. The vertical speed, a pretty linear function of incline at the settings of these treadmills(no more than 15% for most of them), should have a linear relationship with the rate of calorie burn. Most of the other machines I've seen DO NOT calculate it this way. Their displays of calories are totally bogus for that reason, if one uses the incline feature.
The display on the Bowflex was otherwise kind of boring, with no track or Go-Pro camera footage, but that's OK. The numbers are right, or if not right, they vary as they should with your speed and incline. This means that you can be rewarded with the right numbers for the extra effort you put in. I even tested the thing at a high speed that I could not possibly keep up with, and the needle pegged. Even better, the read-out told me "you've pegged out!" Well, I wasn't actually on the machine, but I like that old-timey terminology.
Nice job, Bowflex. If I'm gonna review this machine, I may as well state that it is not as massive as many of the other brand treadmills, the Precors and such. Whether it would last as long is something I can't say. For home use, hopefully, it would do OK, and being lighter, at least one could possibly move it into the house. As far as the display and accurate calculations go it's Bowflex for the win!
* Can you do that, write just an "open sentence" instead of a long-ass "open letter" to people? Do they read it?
** WHAT?! See, that's why there's more to it. One most certainly is exercising like hell at 10 mph even with the belt level. Using the definition of mechanical work as Force -dot- distance (power = Force -dot- speed) well, the power is the weight force (g x mass, or your weight) times your vertical speed component, the latter easily calculated by belt speed x sin(incline ANGLE, not SLOPE).
So, what does this mean? It means that the work done by your muscles moving your mass around, up and down, and sideways, is exertion of energy. The amount is not easy to calculate, but a linear relationship with speed is quite reasonable.
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Bread and Circuses - Part 4 - The Media Circus
Posted On: Monday - October 14th 2019 9:40AM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Media Stupidity Bread and Circuses
In the previous post of this series, we discussed how many and varied are the types of "circenses" during this decline of the America empire vs. during the decline (and fall, mind you) of the Roman empire. There is more to it now, though, of course: the media circus.
We don't get demographics on you all, as with Chinese internet, so I don't know how many Peak Stupidity readers are old enough to remember when the TV wasn't on nearly all the time, at home, at the store, at the airport, etc., mainly, because it COULDN'T BE. They cost a lot, they were too much like a piece of furniture to hand everywhere, the stations (remember stations?) just signed the hell off with the Star-Spangled Banner at 11 P or midnight, and everyone went to sleep. When it came to news, it was 1/2 hour a day national, and 1/2 hour local news, not enough time for babbling idiots (other a few of the anchormen). It likely took a while for the creators of the shows to understand how they could write scripts with agendas inserted, likely not till the 1970s.
CNN was the first network, as I recall, to make news broadcasting a full-time job. I think the original idea was to have the news available for people to watch a bit of at any time, rather than just at 6:30 P Eastern time. There was a lot of mission creep, needed to keep interest and fill in all that 24/7 airtime. They could have broadcast re-runs of Hogan's Heroes, and One Day at a Time, but since they are the "Cable News Network, they stuck to that, rather than keeping the name and going completely off the mission, such as with the History Channel showing continuous Pawn Stars instead of history.
CNN could have just found more stories from around the country to fill the time - to me that would have been a better use of their capital. No, they just take the few "big" stories and go with them over and over. That may seem like what I stated was the original mission in the last paragraph, but no, the deal is that now, all the big stories must be discussed endlessly by and with "experts". It's not broadcasting of even what they say is news, it's broadcasting of endless blabbering about the same news.
Now, as I wrote, Americans have the various and sundry big-time sports as their modern "circuses". However, even the many that DO CARE enough about their country to try to keep up with happenings, in addition to their sports, are just distracted by another type of circus. This crap is on endlessly and everywhere. Americans rooting for the Red Squad can watch FOX and hear the one side of the stories a little more. Those that root for the Blue Squad can watch CNN and MSNBC to catch the other side of the stories. The problem is: what are these stories? Major things happening in the world and in America that don't fit the narrative of The Party are just not story material, while lots of the stupidity in American politics is broadcast as the stories, over and over.
The nonstop TV media doesn't get to fundamental questions about the existence of, and decline of, America, such as the big picture on immigration (the numbers), the drastic changes to our economy for the worse, and the fact that America has been running as an empire to begin with. So long as it's not anything that intentionally causes Americans to think about the fundamental problems, all this Red-Squad/Blue-Squad squabbling is fine entertainment, like the Superbowl or NCAA final 4. In the meantime, not many understand the agenda that CNN and all the networks work under to keep the narrative going in the same direction - toward Globalism.
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Greta is Betta!
Posted On: Saturday - October 12th 2019 3:45PM MST
In Topics: Humor Global Climate Stupidity
(Does that title ring a bell? It's from an old water-filtering machine commercial, probably before your time, and not everyone can keep up with all the water-filtering machine commercials.)
Greta is BIG. I mean, on youtube, she is big. You can type in "Greta" and "ABC", where ABC is any regular expression, and you'll get some video with this little pigtailed pipsqueak. You know who she reminds me of - that Pippi Longstocking. I can't even remember what Pippi did in her stories, but I just wasn't sexually attracted due to the pig-tails. (Also, I was 7.)
This first video is a meme, one might say, just 10 seconds long with a basic point.
The point is: Isn't it weird being scolded by a 16 year-old? It's fine if you're 10, and she's your babysitter.
The next one took much more effort and was nicely done. The sound IS in English, except at the very end. Just so you know, "gestrande" means "stranded", as in, for this case, stranded at the airport for cancelled flights due to not wanting to KILL THE PLANET!
We never even got to the school loan discussion and have not finished this "Bread & Circuses" thing. That'll leave plenty for next week. Enjoy the game!
PS: Yeah, it's a pony-tail in the 2nd video. I've seen her in pig-tails though.
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Bread and Circuses - Part 3 - The Greatest (number of) Shows on Earth
Posted On: Saturday - October 12th 2019 3:22PM MST
In Topics: Bread and Circuses
This and the previous post most likely come under "stuff I already know" or "no duh!" for the reader, so I apologize if it's boring. I just want to be complete on this topic, with a discussion of it all on the last post.
Yeah, I know, that was Monty Python (The Life of Brian).
The "circenses" half of "Pan et Circenses" refers to entertainment of the masses of regular josephem, not just by shows of animals and feats of daring. It meant entertainment of any kind to keep life from being too dull and full of drudgery and to give them enough to think and talk about, in order to avoid any deeper thoughts and resulting action by the people.
The Romans had circuses all right, in a big way. As Peak Stupidity reported from our tour of the eternal city (here and here), before we snubbed the so-called Pope and his Vatican City, we had seen the big Roman Colisseum. It is pretty damn impressive, rivaling a medium-sized college football stadium today in seating, but without the built-in beer-cup holders. The events that went on there may seem barbaric today, but it's probably just because they are against the law. Once can watch pro boxing, MMA, cockfighting, etc., and see something of the same. Interestingly, a Ringling Brothers and/or Barnum & Bailey circus would have been pretty mild in Roman times, had they pulled it all off, but now, we are too civilized apparently to have old-fashioned circuses anymore (or it it that the modern announcers are all afraid of clowns?)
The football arena is the best we've got today. Guys smash into each other, but only occasionally get hurt badly in front of us (the serious damage is long-term). Since things seem harder and harder to look up on the search engines, I was just trying to estimate how many people are in attendance on a college game day. For an average of 5 big teams per state, with 1/2 playing at home, let's give it a minimum of 100 games at these big stadiums holding, say 80,000 apiece. I would say 5 to 10 million people are AT the games. (Adding NFL would give you another 16 x 80,000 = 1.2 million, so let's keep it in that wide range.)
Then, there are college and pro basketball and baseball, less-attended sports, monster truck rallies, drag races, NASCAR, ... it goes on and on. There is no shortage of this type of entertainment. The Roman Emperors could only have dreamt of having the varied and greatly-attended circenses that America has to keep Americans entertained and distracted.
I didn't yet mention the order-of-magnitude more amount of entertainment from these same "circuses" brought to the viewers over the TV. Of course, the Romans couldn't have imagined this, and more so the 24/7 ESPN-n (where n is a channel number ranging from 1 through 3?) discussion of what exactly happened well and what went wrong during last weekend's circuses, what will likely happen next game, and the man-crushes or lamentations of the announcers.
Let me continue with the media aspect of our modern "circuses" portion of the "Bread and Circuses" next post. I want to put something funny up in a bit.
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HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY!
Posted On: Saturday - October 12th 2019 6:50AM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness History Holiday from Stupidity
It was 527 years ago today, when Christopher Columbus and crew arrived in the New World after 6 weeks of sailing the ocean blue.
It's still early. Greet your friends with this, greet any left-kook you meet. Whatever BS he has to say back, it doesn't compare to this amazing voyage of discovery by the Italian navigator. We can date civilization on the American continents from October 12th, 1492 onward ... till ... pretty recently.
Peak Stupidity celebrated this holiday belatedly last year and in '17, and amazingly, before I just looked at last year's post, I picked an image for this one (2nd picture there). They are amazingly similar! Same minds think alike, or something.
Anyway, it's not too late to take the day off on Monday. If you are a Fed - and I don't expect many readers from that "sector" after things published on Peak Stupidity, but please remember folks, we are an Equal Opportunity Offender, complying with all statutes, rulings, and penumbrae required by the UN and PS legal dept.- if you haven't been offended yet, you haven't been reading enough - where was I, yeah, this holiday IS a Federal Holiday and you should not go to "work". If you are in a State or local government, hell, even a First Responder, they have sick days for a reason. Just let the PC boss and colleagues know, "I'm gonna take a sick day, I'm so sick of you people!"
Don't let the ctrl-left have the megaphone.
PS: The six week voyage was from the last islands off the Euro/African continent until first landfall.
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