The Nurture Assumption - Book Review
Posted On: Friday - August 24th 2018 9:30PM MST
In Topics: Science Books Educational Stupidity
Peak Stupidity was supposed to have movie and book reviews as separate from our regular posting in my original envisionment, with links on the left. Our movie reviews don't usually resemble anything by Siskel & Ebert or the "trade papers" of Hollywood anyway, but we could get organized at some point on this. This post will be as close to a book review as I've written, just because I've been wanting to write about this book, and a bit about the subject for quite a while (there is also one more that really relates to this site - coming, uhhh, sometime).
The book is called The Nurture Assumption*, **, by Judith Rich Harris, and the plan was to write this a bit earlier, to follow-up from the 3-week ago post It's that time of year - THE STATE is coming for your kids.. Yeah, well, it IS and they DID.
The first thing I should state is that it's about 3 years since I read this book, and I don't have it on me. Can one write a review like this? Sure. I can't name page numbers, but since the book was interesting, I can remember the gist of what I want to write about it. For instance, to get in review-mode here, this 20 year-old book is well written and not can't-put-down interesting, but a good read. Mrs. Harris wrote the book after being a psychology doctoral student and a textbook author. I recall she mentioned that, besides being dismissed from the graduate program (a bit more on this in a bit), she took time off of the career stuff to raise her two daughters, and had major health problems. She was able to work out some psychological theories on other subjects while she was bedridden for a long time. Mrs. Harris had live examples of the nurturing of he daughters to observe in addition to citing studies of many sorts.
The very first portion of the book, the intro. or first chapter, relates to Mrs. Harris' time in graduate school doing research, and unexpectedly made me smile. It was surprising that, even though she is in the field, Mrs. Harris had lots of choice words disparaging the work of the departments of psychology in general. It's a bit up my alley, as I don't have too much respect for the researchers and research in the soft "sciences" either. (I feel a post coming about the whole business of sharing the authoring of papers and such.) That was an unexpected but very honest way to start off a book that references loads of studies in psychology to support her "Nurture Assumption" point.
Before getting to her point though, I'll explain the possibly-very-obvious business of the balance between nature and nurture causing traits and personalities in humans. It's just not something I write about much - go directly to Steve Sailer's site (look especially for the older posts) for way more. A figure of 50% of traits caused by nature's and, of course, the same for nurture's effects, is cited a lot by laymen and people in the field of psychology. That's very obviously just a number used to say "there's significant effects from both, and that's all we know". No, I'm not saying that nothing has been learned, but human traits are so various and numerous, and I don't know how you'd ever begin to categorize them all. Lots of methods have been tried to find the N vs. N cause of important human traits, and most likely the best of those are the studies of identical twins (who have the same genes) that were separated early in life, and therefore grew up in different human environments (nurturing).
The author does not dispute the 50/50 (or any other number) split. Her point involves only the nurture "half". Since the nature (genetic) side of things can't be changed after conception, psychologists, interested people, and most of all parents, want to learn everything they can to understand the best way to nurture children to end up "right". Most of us assume that means the time a child learns in the home, especially early-on when he picks up ideas like a sponge. Mrs. Harris' contention, however, is that the parents' effect is minimal and (if I remember the number correctly) 95% of the nurture effect on traits/personality comes from the child's peers. Now, you may understand why I referred back to the post about schools. The author maintains that the childhood friends and fellow students are of much more importance in forming the personality of your child than what happens at home.
Judith Harris' theory should obviously be a big blow to parents, and I'm not arguing against it just yet. Were it true, though, that means all that upbringing work by parents requires no thinking and planning, as the kid will turn out a certain way predominantly due to which type of peers he hangs out with growing up. Because this is 3 years after my reading, I can't bring up specific examples, but the author cites and explains many psychological studies throughout most of the book to back her contention. It's all very interesting and believable, but then parents with mostly-grown up children may have common-sense that tells them otherwise. I'd believe my common sense over the work of psychologists any day of the week. Parents, or maybe I should just say women, who don't have enough confidence in themselves are the ones who do lots of reading of parenting and more trashy magazines for which psychology departments have a big "in". It's probably the thing that gets these graduate students and professors up in the morning, the idea that one day their research paper, right or wrong, will be cited in Cosmopolitan as an advice article on how to raise kids better and be read all over.
The only problem with Mrs. Harris's theory (for her I mean) is that nobody's gonna publish the gist of it as advice, as the message would be "it doesn't matter what you do - don't bother reading any more of our parenting articles. What's the point?". That's not a good look for Cosmo or People!
Even if I do accept the important conclusion here, it turns out that parents will still have a major influence anyway. Why? It's because parents who do a good job with their kids are ones who help pick or at least guide who their children's peers are to begin with. This brings me to even another factor. Though one would think it's not important (per Judith Harris' theory, that is) how much time children spend at home, it still does matter because trust is built at home. That's not a personality trait, so it the book's theory doesn't cover it, right? However, the more trust in his parents built up, the more likely the kid will listen to them when he is told which kids he should hang out with, why he should get into the smart (but also, better behaved) kids' class, etc. He will also listen to the parents over his peers up to a later age. It's kind of recursive thinking here, but the author's conclusion that nurture effects on personality come from peers still results in very important input from time with the parents.
It's still a thought-provoking book, but possibly the conclusion of The Nurture Assumption, even if totally correct, is not anything that should result in parents doing anything differently after all.
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PS: This is not worthy of as stand-alone post. It just didn't fit in up top, but since this IS a book review, I want to make this small criticism of a detail:
Somewhere among the studies discussed in The Nurture Assumption, I remember one (neither the title nor authors, unfortunately) about a typical type of observational study in which Mrs. Harris agreed with a conclusion that I think is simply wrong. This is one of those experiments involving "ringers", people who are not subjects themselves, but seem to be to the real subjects. It was simple. The real subjects, who were adults, BTW, were asked a bunch of knowledge questions in a verbal manner, along with the ringers. At some point, some questions would be asked that the ringers would all answer wrongly, and the test was to see how that peer pressure would influence the subject, who should have known the correct answer. Most of the time, after a while, the subject would answer wrongly too.
The erroneous conclusion of the study, which Mrs. Harris agreed with. was that this was the result of peer pressure alone. There's a plenty good alternate explanation though. At some point, if you see smart people around you answering differently, depending on exactly how well you think you know the answer, you may just feel you are having a brain fart. You're not afraid to answer in opposition, but you just don't want to be derided as senile or under the influence, is all. OK, that was neither here nor there, except it was part of the book, and a part that I thought was not well thought through.
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* Subtitled: "Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do"
** I am linking here to a cheaper paperback version (if you're going to buy it) updated version for the reason that there are reviews on the amazon page for this one, but not for the original, that I read.
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The Death of Historical Accuracy, by Boyd D. Cathey
Posted On: Friday - August 24th 2018 11:10AM MST
In Topics: Music History Pundits Southern rock
Here comes another highly recommended article by the North Carolina historian Boyd Cathey. We have linked to another great article before, late last year, called Black & White in Culturally Marxist America.
The Peak Stupidity blog gives 2 thumbs up to his latest article, also featured on unz.com, The Death of Historical Accuracy. In it, Mr. Cathey sets the historical record straight in this review and discussion of the recent Dinesh D'Souza documentary movie, Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time? Here is the introduction:
In case you haven’t heard, there is a new “conservative” film out; it is titled “Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?” Its director and screenwriter is Dinesh D’Souza, the word-measuring figure who occasionally shows up on Fox to talk in pious tones about “conservatism.” He is the movie producer who, by his own admission, has done as much as anyone to shape (in an almost ahistorical manner) perceptions about American history and the Founding Principles that have supposedly guided this country. And, in his latest cinematic adventure he stunningly compares the “triumph of America and its values” under that “great president and martyr” Abraham Lincoln to the crisis facing President Donald Trump. Like Lincoln, Trump is saving America “for a second time.”I was originally planning on excerpting nothing, as I would urge you all to read the whole thing, but additionally, if you have 1 - 3 hours to spare (depending on your reading speed), the 270-odd entry comment thread is just as informative as the article. There are only 10-20% of the trolling or just plain ignorant comments on the subject, but that is well compensated for by some great discussion. A guy with the handle "rebelwriter", from the upstate of South Carolina made some great comments on this history of the "War of Northern Aggression", that are worth commenting on right here.
Mr. rebelwriter (rightfully) considers himself a "historian of the history" of this great war and its causes. He discussed the fact that, after the terrible times of the Reconstruction, not a lot of history of the war was written. Northerners and Southerners, he states, got back together as a people only after the beginning of the Spanish American War, as old Confederate generals, and sons of Confederate soldiers fought along with Northerners in the US Army. That's when the Daughters of the Confederacy and other groups were formed, and monuments were put up all over, North and South. There's lots more from rebelwriter on this, and it's great stuff that I've never studied. Sure, I've read many books (although quite some time ago) on the battles and such, but Mr. Cathey and the commenters cover territory I have not read about. I will say, in my favor, that at least my history class in middle school covered a whole chapter on the damage done to the South after the war, called "Scaliways and Carpetbaggers". I believe I only remember that due to those very humorous terms. I'm pretty sure that book is unfortunately not used today.
Just to sum up Mr. Cathey's opinion of Mr. D'Souza and his views of what is conservatism: Mr. D'Souza makes big use of the completely erroneous meme of "hey, look, see the Democrats were the bad guys then too. We R's were always the good guys" with no real thought into all the politics that resulted in the war. The parties were very much opposite in terms of conservatism and progressivism compared to nowadays.
D'Souza reveres Abraham Lincoln and compares President Trump's job to that of the former. I don't see how any Libertarian with any respect for himself could possibly think of President Abraham Lincoln's policies as anything but tyrannical, no matter what you currently understand the cause of that "late unpleasantness" was. Mr. Lincoln's disregard for the right of States to withdraw from the agreement they made in 1789, discussed well in the article and more-so in the comments, was the first drastic move to change America from a true Constitutional Republic toward the USSA Police State we now live in.
Well, it's nothing about that war, Hank Jr. here says the South is just a better place to be than the North. He wrote this > 25 years ago though...
It's Hank Williams, Jr., with Dixie on my Mind. OK, it's just up here because the rebel flag is the video, I admit it. Somehow this is offensive nowadays, and, if nothing else constructive, Peak Stupidity aims to offend.
(Yeah, I put the topic key, "Southern Rock" on this post, not due this song being truly part of that "genre" or style, but it's pro-South in lyrics and it does resemble rock to a degree. This was the point when the electric guitars starting changing the sound of country music. However, what made country music go down the drain from about that time on was more the fact that it became nothing but guitar rock with Southern accents, and stories about pick-up trucks and barbecues and "the flag".)
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Grasping at Straws - Part 2
Posted On: Thursday - August 23rd 2018 4:57PM MST
In Topics: Treehuggers Environmental Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity
(continued from the previous post)
The use by Americans of so many plastic straws is said to be a problem. As Part 1 ended, we had calculated that no, plastic straws are no kind of serious problem for the environment. That was just a strawman. Are there people who want these useful enviro-idiots to do this campaigning and propagandizing against the poor straws? I only think of this now, because that's been the modus operandi for the ctrl-left and globalists behind lots of other supposed environmental crises in the past, with exhibit A (with a bullet) being the use of the Global Climate Stupidity to push for global control of energy use.
It was the efficient refrigerant Freon, or R-12, that was the big one during the 1980's. It supposedly was going to destroy a part of the atmosphere. We were apparently very lucky to have it phased-out through Feral Gov't coercion just in the nick of time for a new DuPont refrigerant, right after the patents for Freon expired. Wheeew, that was close. Lots of older car's air conditioning systems and home A/C units to this day cannot be repaired or charged up without a big-money conversion, making them now disposal, forcing the purchase of new units and cars. Great for the economy, it is - I mean, the Big-Biz economy, not your personal finances - nobody cares about that. Peak Stupidity has a post coming soon about CARB, the California Air Resources Board, which is responsible for lots of misery in American life - some of that is due to Big-Biz behind forced changes to products to force otherwise-unwanted purchases by the lowly consumer.
What's the deal behind this straw thing? I don't see some big ulterior motive, but I do believe that restaurants and fast-food joints will be glad to be FORCED into not having straws now. Sure, most of the local business owners do think it's stupid, and feel for customers who don't appreciate the stupidity. However, the corporate MBAs on Honchos will be glad to save the bucks on purchases and logistics. McDonalds and the like will have one less task for the overworked, undersmart folks behind the counter, and that will help the bottom line. (4 seconds cut off of every order! Bonuses all around, folks!) See, they can pretend they're sorry for the inconvenience, but "folks, IT'S! THE! LAW!". In addition, they can, at the same time, perhaps, advertise how damn green they are by not putting that 1/4 cubic yard of plastic in the huge local landfill daily. "We are so sorry! It's the law! We are green as all hell!" That's the ticket.
Could there not be a simple solution for restaurant services, in which, they may charge a few cents for straws? OK, that could be annoying. How about have some really solid ones that are not disposal, but kept with the silverware and washed and re-used? How about a lot of ideas without the treehuggers and governments getting in our faces? Why is there no outcry about plastic drinking cups, BTW? I've seen lots of those out there. Like I wrote in the last post, I like waste a whole lot less than the next guy. It's not by business though, if the free market is left to take care of it. For example, the whole bottled water thing irks me to no end. It's not the plastic, but the energy, my energy, involved in hauling this stuff around, when the Romans invented piping 2 Millennia ago, that chaps my hide.
I think this straw silliness is a great example of the Peak Stupidity blog's contention that it's all about the money, discussed in our post Green is the new Cheap-Ass.
Lastly, I promised to mention milkshakes. I've noticed that the straw that comes with a milkshake these days is one of the biggest in diameter and thickness. Those are the ones that are really bad, mmmkaaay? Why do they need to use those big-ass straws? Well, I'll tell ya', cause PEOPLE! DON'T! KNOW! HOW! TO! MAKE! GOOD! MILKSHAKES! anymore ... well, OK, in a lot of places. They are so damn thick that even those Grade-A industrial straws collapse, or the drinker collapses, whichever comes first. You've got to mix lots of air into the shake. That's what makes it great. You should be able to tap the side of the nice tall steel cup, or the glass, and here a nice thudding sound. If you don't, that is not a milkshake but a travesty. So make better milkshakes, people, and save YOUR planet!
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[UPDATED 08/29 Afternoon:] Changed title to comply with rules of punditry.
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Grasping at Straws - Part 1
Posted On: Thursday - August 23rd 2018 10:07AM MST
In Topics: Treehuggers Economics Environmental Stupidity
(It's like one of those New Yorker cartoons. You don't think it's funny, but you pretend it is.)
It's been a big brew-haha for a few weeks now, I guess, so this is a post I'd almost forgotten I was supposed to write. Plastic soda straws are bad, mmmkaaay... after ~ 30 - 40 years of use (my memory here) people have just realized that, "hey, these things are killing the planet!" We apparently don't have any other problems more serious than straws right now. Anyway, I came upon a Takimag article by one Joe Bob Briggs, called 500 Million Lazy Environmentalists on this topic. The guy lays out the stupidity reasonably well, but doesn't seem to know a lot of the background of this kind of Environmental Stupidity, so this post and it's 2nd part will attempt to explain the real causes.
Let me first say one thing about one number, as I'll use it later on. No engineering type himself, at the end of the article, Mr. Briggs explains the source of the number of 500,000,000 drinking straws used per day thusly:
Besides, the numbers are overwhelming—the operative statistic is 500 million a day!OK, now I don't mind rectally extracted numbers for some purposes, and this is one instance. (And, no, it's not a "statistic", per Briggs, just a number.) Let me explain. Just plain Does It Make Sense?, in-my-head, analysis makes me think it could be too high, but it's not an order-of-magnitude off. Sure, people eating at home don't use straw one most days, but people eat lots of fast food meals that come with straws for all. Sit down restaurants provide them, oftentimes when one doesn't need one, so that seems to be what started this brew- ... err, slurp-haha. I will go with this number with the realization that it could easily be 100% high. I want to look at some basic numbers to see the problem. For that, a 1/2 order-of-magnitude is good enough. Were this a calcuation for engineers or managers in the waste/recycling business, no, that would not be good enough.
The problem with this statistic—the statistic that has driven this movement since 2010—is that it’s based on a single study conducted in 2009. When National Public Radio went looking for the author of that study, they found him in Shelburne, Vermont. It’s a guy named Milo Cress, who noticed that straws were being handed out in restaurants regardless of whether the customer asked for one, was bothered by that, and went on to found a movement called Be Straw Free. But he couldn’t find any official statistics on straw use, so he called manufacturers, wrote down what they told him, and made an educated guess that the number was 500 million per day. It must have been a good guess, because he was rewarded for it. [Note: author's italics became my bold.]
That number aside for a while, sudden plastic straw panic is another narrative with the usual sources, useful idiots, and devious greedy evil people behind the scenes. In other words, it's business as usual in the Peak Stupidity of America.
Let's think about the source here first. Somebody has thought what plenty of others have, while sitting down at a restaurant or rummaging through his McDonalds take-out bag. "Hey, what a waste. I don't need these straws. They always put them in the bag." or "They give you one with your fork, knife and spoon, and I don't need one." Fine, I don't like waste, period. It bugs me, and, for the latter case, I will try to catch the waitress in time and tell her we only need ones for the kids. For the former case, I try not to eat the junk food, and am not too lazy/busy to walk into the place if I do have the craving. I'm not a straw guy, but the people at the drive-thru don't want to make a mess on themselves, so they want them. Lastly, good luck at the drive-thru trying to get the straw-count correct. You're just lucky if you've don't have the onions and mayo on the burger, even after you've told the lady 3 times on the microphone, in each of English, Spanish AND Ebonics that "yes, I don't need no steeenking onions, senorita!" You don't sweat the straws at this point.
Now, a few who've naturally wondered about the waste involved in the food service business have taken it upon themselves to get outraged, in particular the drinking straw industry. No, no thoughts about cups, napkins, 1/2 eaten food, oh, and, like 100 million extra people in the country right now! Nope, they are fixated on the straws. It's an easy thing to pass laws about. Ban the straws! It's "doing the right thing", and that impresses some chicks, which is what it's all about for the guys, while for the chicks it's all about being silly and stupid and not knowing much about the world around them. The reason I call these people the "useful idiots" in these matters is that there is usually someone behind the scenes with a vested interest. I'll get to that in the next post.
Is the worry about filing up the landfills? As explained in the Peak Stupidity post Toward Sustainable Stupidity (yes, one of our favorite titles!), there's not actually any problem about running out of space for landfills. It's really a matter of placing landfills further out of the city, due to rightful NIMBY concerns, costing the city more in refuse transfer costs. When recycling pays off in this respect, well, the free market (were there one) would say "do it.". If it cost more to get the stuff recycled than trucking it out to the landfill, then the free market (were there one) would say "don't do it." I'm all for the material being re-used in many products, as Mr. Briggs (in the Takimag article) says, IF IT PAYS. Let's say it doesn't. How much material are those straws we are throwing out every day?
Let's crunch the numbers in our heads, shall we? Now, I have an advantage in doing this, as I seem to have a calibrated eyeball/memory combination. I would have guessed 3/16" diameter (sorry, no SI here, buddy!) for the small straws and 3/8", almost to 1/2" diameter for the big milkshake ones. I'd have put length at 8". Indeed I see that Web Restaurant Store's straw page gives diameters from 1/8" for the kid's school straws to near 1/2" for the massive milkshake intake pipes. Lengths go from 5 1/2" to 8". I was pretty close. I need thickness now.
Without my calipers and a straw (I don't use 'em, see, I'm greener than fresh horseshit!) I would have guessed thickness from 10 to 25 thousandths of an inch. That restaurant supply site has the other dimensions, and talks about thickness, but gives no thicknesses. What a crock - give me numbers, people. Wikipedia - let me down, the innumerate bastards. Ahh, finally, I got to an industrial site and got a dimension of 5-8 thousandths (that's 0.005" - 0.008"), but this has to vary widely from the school straws to the near 1/2" thick ones. One could easily, starting with max. expected suction pressure (I suppose one should start this research at the whorehouse...), calculate thickness required to avoid straw collapse based on diameter. This would not use the normal thin-walled pressure vessel equation, as this is a buckling problem. I'm quite out of time for that, so let's just pick an average thickness of 15 thousandths to account for many of the bigger straws and to be conservative, and use 1/4" as an average diameter. That's .25" x π x 0.015" x 8" = 0.10 in3 of plastic per straw - didn't even need a calculator. 500 million x 0.10 in3 = 50,000,000 in3. Sounds baaaaad? Nah, divide by 1728 to get a number near 29,000 ft3. Sounds baaad? That much could fill up the space of a decent sized house (oops "home", sorry), with 10' ceilings. That does sound like a lot of plastic to throw out per day, but that's the whole country (and based on a probably-high initial count and conservative estimates on material volume). If you live in a medium-sized city, with say, 100,000 people, which would have an infrastructure to support a landfill etc., that is 0.03% of the population, hence, straw
That may have been pretty boring there, but, hey, if you're going to be numerate about it, and understand the problem, than, yeah, some quick calculations are needed. The next post will get more into the stupidity aspect of this environmental crisis, or are they just bringing up another strawman here?
(I had to get that joke in somewhere, right? Yeah, I'll get into the behind-the-scenes shenanigans involved in many of these environmental schemes along with more on milkshakes.)
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[Updated, late 8/23:] OMG! I forgot to get the material cross-section of the plastic straws via π x the diameter x thickness (left out π completely). I updated all the numbers. That was stupid.
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[UPDATED 08/29 Afternoon:] Changed title to comply with rules of punditry.
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[Updated, 05/18/20!:] I'm looking at this post almost 2 years later. What I get for estimating in my head is that I had used 1440 in3 in a ft 2 instead of 1728. OK, updated one number - of course, the numbers are in the same ballpark, but still...
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The Rain Song - Led Zeppelin
Posted On: Wednesday - August 22nd 2018 9:23PM MST
In Topics: Music
Between working and commenting elsewhere, Peak Stupidity has kind of dropped the ball the last few days and today. I used to just put up some great music without much commentary once in a while, so that will be the case this evening. There are about 10 posts in waiting in the wings, but the mood for writing has got to be there.
Tonight we'll feature The Rain Song from the album Houses of the Holy. The confusion with this album is that the "title track" of it is NOT ON THIS ALBUM, but on a susequent one called Physical Graffiti, and was featured long ago here.
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On robberies gone horribly right
Posted On: Tuesday - August 21st 2018 8:50PM MST
In Topics: Humor Liberty/Libertarianism
The title of the last post here, Social DIstortion - just a stage dive gone horribly wrong? may or may not ring a bell for those of us who've otten heard this phrasing in relation to various crimes. The "gone horribly wrong" part is the Lyin' Press's way of trying to explain to us that, no this criminal wasn't a bad guy really. He just intended to commit robbery.... you know, ransack your place and take some of your most valuable, possbily sentimental belongings. He in no way planned for the crime to involve rape or murder or anything. Things just went wrong ... horribly wrong. It didn't have to be like this ....
Peak Stupidity should really have a topic key just called "guns", but we hesitate about adding them willy-nilly, as then we've to to re-categorize a bit. We have featured one article specifically about defensive shooting by a Washington State man in Hey man, nice shot!. That story was more about a guy that stopped a rampage, but armed defense of the home happens every day. Just once we'd like to hear it straight from the Lyin Press, with this same phrasing, about, say, a burglary gone right!
Here's part of our imagined transcript of the 911 call:
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"Hello, 9-1-1, marko numero uno por Engleeesh ....
... how may we better serve you today?"
"Uhhh, yeah, I just want to report a burglary and ..."
"SIr, don't panic! Breath normally. Are you Mr. XXXX at YYY Elm St?"
"Hey, HTF did you know that?! Anyway, two guys came in through the kitchen window and I got out my Sig ..."
"Sir, breath normally. We'll have an officer out there in the next 5 ... 10 minutes... 15 tops. Shelter in place. Do you have any large pieces of furniture to hide in ..."
"Hey, what? They busted up the big cabinet looking for stuff. That's when I heard them and got my pistol and 2 extra loaded magazines."
"DO! NOT! TRY! TO! HANDLE! THIS! SIR! These burglaries can sometimes go horribly wrong. You need police officers for protection. GIve me that addresss one more time, for verification purposes. The officers will be there soon. Are you hurt? Do you need an ambulance?"
"Uhh, yeah, I guess, but they're not moving. I guess it wouldn't hurt any to send out an ambulance, but uhhh, I'm not payin' for it!"
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See, now that's a burglary gone horrible right.
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Social Distortion - just a stage dive gone horribly wrong?
Posted On: Saturday - August 18th 2018 7:02PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Music Humor Trump
A guy named Mike Ness generated a bit of Social Distortion out in Sacramento, California a month back, as the lead singer of said band came off stage to beat up on a
One concert-goer, a Mr. Tim Hildebrand, somewhat-cooly from the town of Galt, CA (just S. of Sacramento, and currently 32% hispanic), had had enough with the lead singer Mike Ness' making a political diatribe during the show. Said diatribe included some badmouthing of President Trump. Mr. Hildebrand, note again from a now-32% hispanic town, is a Trump supporter and didn't particularly appreciate the last part. He "allegedly" held up his middle finger toward the singer and band, haha, for 2 FULL SONGS (emphasis, because doing that for 6-10 minutes would be extremely tiring). That's when the lead singer got tired of having anyone question his political righteousness, and came down off the high ground.
The incident in question is nothing if not a learning experience on both sides. As for the band, Peak Stupidity has been on about entertainers mouthing off about stuff that they are not particularly more knowledgeable about than their fans before in Bono, you'd be serving up fries chips if it weren't for The Edge and Of course the Russians love their children, you dumb bass player!. (In the latter, I'll have to give Sting a break, as it wasn't mouthing off so much as just silly lyrics - that ain't no crime.) "Shut up and play!" should be the mantra - imagine if bands just played and played like the All-American Grateful Dead, leaving the politics alone as a matter of understanding one's limitations.
The concert-going plaintiff, with 2 black eyes, a busted lip, and a concussion, should learn a few things:
1) Maybe he didn't know that the punk band Social Distortion injected politics into their shows. Maybe, but would you really expect a punk band to be conservative though, anyway? If he did know their views, why support the guys by attending the show?
2) If you blow off the politics because you just love the music, and attend anyway, I can see a few heckles or boos at the singer, but once this fight got started, whose side would you expect the fans to be on? It was a very unfair fight, as the fans held Mr. Hildabrand back, as the 56-year old Mike Ness inflicted the injuries. The ctrl-left doesn't like to fight fair ... then they lose.
3) It could have been a lot worse. Besides having the high ground of the stage, the weapons in the band's possession include heavy microphones, drum sticks, and still-heavier guitars (hell, they used to smash them even when they weren't mad at ANYBODY!)
4) Here's how you do it next time: Aren't these punk guys into stage diving and such? They have their fans catch them as the jump from 8 feet up, sometimes on their backs. Mr. Hildabrand, my suggestion, in lieu of some lawsuit or what-have-you goes thusly: Bring 20 friends next time and enjoy the show. Encourage a stage dive from the lead singer Mr. 56-y/o (bones are not getting any spongier) Mike Ness. When he gets to peak altitude just spread yourselves and everyone else away from a 10' diameter crash zone on the concrete floor. Put on MAGA hats, and run like hell for the emergency exits. No, wait, first run like hell for the exits. Call 911 to be sportsmanlike.
Speaking of being sportsmanlike, though I don't like the guy's politics, I'm gonna cut this band some slack. I just read that Mike Ness has played with Social Distortion since their beginning 40 years AGO!. The first song I looked up on youtube was Ball and Chain, and yes, it's good stuff. Though I respect Mr. Hildebrand's possible courage (mixed with some small amount of foolhardiness) in the incident, maybe I'll chalk this one up to Mike Ness' youthfulness and punk spirit. There was no felonious intent - he was just a poor yute, caught up in a stage dive gone horribly wrong.
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Evil of Inflation/interest-rate stupidity Summary-2
Posted On: Friday - August 17th 2018 7:36PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Economics US Feral Government Inflation
(continued directly from previous post.)
The amount of additional money poured into the economy via FED creation is what leads to inflation. The increase in prices is the symptom, but economists' definition of "inflation" is inflation of the supply of money. Making pieces of green paper (or more like pressing some keys and putting more zeros on the ends of some numbers stored on a secure server) does not create wealth. Whatever wealth is being created will be the same that day, no matter what the FED "prints". The very simple supply/demand laws says that if there's more money, but the same goods/services out there, then it'll take more money to obtain those goods/services. Sure, sometimes it takes a while for the increase to filter through, and guess what, the US government gets the money first, at it's earlier, higher value.
Just look at that graph. For the 1st 125 years of our country, from the first US dollar until the mid-19-teens, inflation was virtually ZERO. Remember the y-axis is just an index representing price level in 1790 as a "1" or some such method. Besides during wartime, the graph is a horizontal line. What changed 100 years ago? Yeah, I know, we just told ya'.. Notice, also, that between the wars in the 19th century prices actually went down. Why would they not, as productivity improved? Most of American history has been a time of great innovation, but the late 1800's were one of the best of these times. If the same amount of money is in use (the money supply), and things take less time and resources to make, then of course prices should go down. What was the deal then, during the 1990-2000's internet ages, when white-collar work got much more productive? I didn't see prices go down. (There was a lull from the mid-90's to mid-00's due to the big shift to China, but that'll discussed in part of another post.)
Prices did not recover the pre-WWII levels after the war, but notice that prices did not go nuts until the mid-1970's. Hmmm, wonder what happened then? There was a coupla' year lag, but since President and Dick Nixon took the country off of the gold standard in 1971 or so, meaning money could no longer be redeemed for it's supposed value in gold*, prices have shot up better than any moon rocket we don't have the money for anymore ever did!
Let's put the two financial evils of inflation and doctored-up interest rates together again. Peak Stupidity has a decent post about this (so please refer to that, if interested (no pun intended)), from 1 1/2 years back, but I'll just try to say this slightly differently. As explained also here interest rates ARE NOT compensation for inflation. If the interest paid on your money in the bank equals the inflation rate, you are going nowhere. You've let that bank have your money to lend out at will, and believe me, they aren't charging basement-level rates. Compensation to you at the rate of inflation is like paying you ZERO for the use of your money! Now, if the FED were not around, and private banks would compete for the use of your money, you could make a decent amount for your services (yes, lending them the money is indeed a service rendered), and I mean a decent rate ABOVE and beyond what inflation is. After all, they are giving you back the money at a lower value, so you should be compensated for that too.
With or without inflation, were interest rates allowed to exist in a free market, then, one could still put some steady savings away and through the "miracle" of compound interest, really make a nest egg. The local bank can do fine giving out 5 % on savings accounts and charging 7% on mortgage loans. However, let's say inflation is running at 4% (quite likely!), and the time value of money is worth 5% annually. The 9% that you SHOULD SEE from the bank is still only really 5% in real value. You're still coming out ahead just the same, as is the bank, but just not as much as it looks. At the same time, you've still got the problem that your wages or income must continually go up, or you won't have the extra to put that same amount of money away yearly. Now, imagine the money supply was left the hell alone, or our currency was backed by something that made it impossible for the money supply to increase (if it did, people would just turn in paper or bits for the real stuff, and turn that currency into trash). Without inflation, such as was the case through still more than 1/2 of the history of America, one could earn, spend, and save without the misery of getting screwed six ways from Sunday in all aspects of one's financial matters.
OK, who's doing the screwing? Yeah, the big bankers have been around for centuries, and all over - I've just been concentrating on America, "cause we live here!" The kind of business that takes even a 1 %, but maybe often a 4-5% cut of EVERY SINGLE FINANCIAL TRANSACTION ON THE BOOKS is a BIG MONEY BUSINESS. That's big banking, taking those seemingly small cuts on a large economy. The people behind the big banks are extremely wealthy, powerful men, the kind with legends behind them - the Rothschilds, the House of Morgan, what have you. They have the power, via the money, to influence people in high levels of government to make sure they KEEP that money flowing in.
This brings up one last point I want to make. At this point in reading, a reader may well ask, "shouldn't you not be a libertarian then? Quit that silliness - we NEED Big Gov to rein in these banksters!". No, see, this gets into the chicken-or-the-egg question - who came first, the big banks or big gov? It's not exactly like the chicken/egg question though, as the answer is: The big banksters had, and could have again, NOTHING TO INFLUENCE, were the Federal government as small as the Founders envisioned, and as it went for ~ 150 years. If there is not much that government is involved in, especially financially, then what power do the banksters have? Once the government is let to get big, by an uncaring voting population, then the banksters have the power via Big Gov to make Big Gov bow to their wishes. "♪♫♬ Mister, we could use a man like Andrew Jackson again ... ♪♫♬
Oh, yeah, to finish the chicken-or-the-egg analogy, I think the voters are the chickens right now, and if they'd only wise up and listen to Peak Stupidity and Ron Paul, they could break a few bankster eggs ... you know... to make a free market omelet.
* This was done due to the wish of the French government to redeem dollars, as they recovered from their expensive foray into Vietnam, and America was in the middle of its one. We obviously didn't have the gold to back up the dollars.
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Evil of Inflation/interest-rate stupidity Summary-1
Posted On: Friday - August 17th 2018 7:16PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Economics US Feral Government Inflation
(This post is a wrap-up, and continued from the recent Peak Stupidity discussion of interest-rates and inflation as twin evils of the American financial system.)
I have Ron Paul's photo at the top of this post, just due to his being the only Federal-level politician who, not just understands, but tried to explain to Americans the source of our increasing economic woes. He was also a Constitutionalist with integrity, hence the moniker "Dr. No", as he voted against legislation way more than your average representative. Why? It was because almost all of it's been unconstitutional over the years per Amendment X.
Back to the economics, Dr. Paul made big efforts to bring the evils of central banking, unsound money, inflation, and artificial interest rates into the public light. It wasn't awful successful due to Americans either not understanding how deep the roots of the problems go, or thinking that everything is still hunky-dory, what with the DOW in the middle 20 thousands lately.
The interest-rate post brought up the Federal Reserve Bank, the FED, created in secret by a cabal of Big-Biz guys just before Christmas Eve on Jekyll Island, Georgia 105 years back. I've read The Creature from Jekyll Island a few years back, so though I can't give out details, the general idea of what happened is in my head. These guys came from around the East mostly, NYC in particular, along with the one Senator or Congressman that they pressed into service for their cause, by train to ostensibly "do some hunting" on this Georgia barrier island. They got a law passed while most Americans, including in Washington, FS were distracted by Christmas festivities, and created the now century-old Central Bank that American politicians in the 19th century had done their damndest to prevent. President Andrew Jackson, who is very ironically on the front of the 20 dollar "Federal Reserve Note" (get it?) upon his dying day felt that keeping a Central Bank from being created was his biggest accomplishment. "I killed the bank!", he said. That was the early/middle of the 19th century. We've suffered through 87% of the 20th, and now 18% of the 21st, with this Central Bank.
This bank is in private hands, no matter what the name says. It has the ability to create money, loan it out in various ways at various rates to try to "control the economy". The distortion in the markets for money, as discussed in the previous posts, are the results of having "The FED", rather than the US Treasury minting only silver/gold money, per US Constitution. OK, I know, you can't carry all that money around, blah, blah. Sure, there were paper notes long ago, but these could be created by independent private banks whose customers understood that they could redeem them for real money, aka gold and sliver. With the FED in charge of all big-money matters, private banks can only work with the system created by it. When the FED loans out money at 1.5%, and the local bank can lend it back out at 4.5% for a mortgage, you'd better believe they're gonna work with the FED.
(to be continued very shortly in a 2nd post - the entire thing was just a bit too long - stand by...)
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Doctor Talk
Posted On: Thursday - August 16th 2018 8:21PM MST
In Topics: Humor Healthcare Stupidity
To (possibly) wrap-up the posts on Doctors, generated unexpectedly by the post about the strangely-murdered Houston Cardiologist, something from somewhere on the internet reminded me of some of the weird doctor terminology. I guess the nurses probably are part of this too - they'll jump on the bandwagon, if it gets them in tight with the Docs.
This is not about Latin, but, come to think of it: These guys learn lots of Latin terminology in Medical School (in fact, taking Latin beforehand can be a real help). That's fine, you've got to stick to the existing terminology, unless you're Chinese, and you call "arteries" "blood pipes". That's one thing, contrary to my other opinions about the Chinese language, that I do like. The Chinese DON'T make up new words when they can use perfectly useful normal words to make up the necessary words. (This may because the DON'T have Latin and Greek to reach back to.) The literal translation of a phone, at least a mobile one, is "electric talk".
Doctors have Latin terms, though, even for simple business stuff. The generic drug names are all still in Latin, it seems. Doctors say "locum tenens" for temporary assignments, when they could say "contract job" like the rest of us. I guess it makes them sound real edumacated, haha! I'm surprised they don't come up with a Latin term for Stat, or maybe they did. Nurse, fetch my patient, stat, statorum, statiamus, .... and HURRY UP doin' it!
It's the perfectly normal English words they use in just weird ways that is kind of humorous, though. The word that came up somewhere recently was "present" in a form that doesn't use an object (it normal does). "This disease presents as a bunch of big warts around the genital area." is an example (luckily not a personal example!) How do they get off talking and writing like this? You can't just make up your own usage of an already well-known verb like this. Who do these doctors think they are? I think their insanity presents as crazy talk.
The funniest ones are the use of "admit" and "deny" to denote a patient's yes or no to questions about his symptoms. "The patient denies having chest pains." "No, absolutely not, Doc. I swear on my Mudda's grave! I don't care what you write down on the chart, and what you hear on that stethoscope, I don't have chest pains." "Patient admits to joint pain in the knees." "OK, OK, you got me, Doc. My knees hurt! There, I said it - are you happy now?! Now, get the nurse to stop banging on them with the ball-peen hammer, and get your finger outta my ass! My knees hurt!" "OK, that wasn't so hard - I'm gonna write you up some knee medication and schedule in for another struggle session once we check your insurance. Oh, and I don't know how you came to get those Betty Davis knees, but worst of all, young man, you've got Industrial Disease."
*To get this, one must have seen the old 1976 flick, Marathon Man.
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Even Down-Under, you can't say anything.
Posted On: Thursday - August 16th 2018 11:05AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Political Correctness ctrl-left
You can't say anything* anymore, apparently, as Michael Scott explains:
(That one is too hilarious to just put in the few seconds illustrating the slight problem with the English language on this fine point. I had to include up through the "that's what she said" part. Yes, it's my favorite TV show of all time.)
It has been brought to the attention of the Peak Stupidity blog, that you will get excoriated by just about all the damn politicians in your country for saying a simple term that is not particularly mean, crude or derogatory, oh, I mean if you live in a Western country. This was in Australia, way, way to the West, just south of the Orient (caution - bikini picture in link - not safe for surfing during a date!), in fact. A Senator Fraser Anning from Queensland, of the Australian Party* made a speech using the term "final solution". Hmmmm, let me write right away here (because the Lyin' Press won't even get me the simple quote easily) that Mr. Anning said, to paraphrase - the final solution to the immigration issue in Australian should be a vote by the people, a referendum, that is. THATS! ALL! THE! MAN! SAID! He got fired, even though his party head, a Mr. Bob Katter, was the only guy standing up for him against the PC hordes. But that was yesterday (or tomorrow in Australia, or whatever...) and Peak Stupidity had pulled out a 3 or 4 year-old New Years' resolution to start to Keep the Hell Up!
Now, quickly, before you condemn this blogger for the massive lyin' stupidity in the link to follow, let me tell you: I searched for 2 minutes, which is all I had time for, for a non-"mainstream" source, so I WOULDN'T get the lies. I clicked to this CompuServe** article thinking "hey, computer guys, and the story is in the entertainment section at that - it can't be too bad". Oh yeah, it is - read this to both raise your blood pressure, as some Peak Stupidity readers are known to have hypotension, and to see how the narrative is just pushed everywhere now. I can't even excerpt this one for facts, and had to paraphrase the damn quote from Mr. Anning! It's pretty ridiculous, the amount of lying that goes on.
Let me go back here... way on back... to 1940's Nazi Germany. Yes, there WERE millions of Jews murdered by people working for Adolf Hitler. He used the term "final solution" to refer to his program of extermination. It was too late for any better solution to be implemented, as Herr Hitler had absolute power over all the 3rd Reich at that time. This is why, no matter how it starts out, YOU! DON'T! LET! ANYONE! GET! ABSOLUTE! POWER! - SIMPLE! It was a terrible thing. However, one Pol Pot, only known about by probably 10% of Americans, and that's only do to the 1984 movie The Killing Fields, killed ONE THIRD of his countrymen in Cambodia, aka Kampuchea, aka Cambodia again. Pol Pot had absolute power. The Commies in Red China under Mao Zedong killed 30-40 million. Oh, true, most of that was from starvation due to programs to get farmers to quit farming and make steel at home (yeah, just like the internet advertises still today). Chairman Mao had absolute power. Unfortunately, those people are dead just the same. Then you had the Bolsheviks in Russia, aka USSR - that went on for multiple decades at various levels of murderous stupidity. OK, I know, the astute reader here gets it - I'll quit this rant and get back to the stupidity down-under.
"Final Solution", the term, may have left a very bad memory in 90 y/o people who had family and friends killed in Nazi Germany. However, they have not trademarked*** the otherwise perfectly-useful phrase. If I'm a math professor, and I have just finished a proof or an engineer who has finished a lot of work on a complicated analytical problem, can I not call my completed work my "final solution"? Senator Anning had no malice in the use of the term, as it makes perfect sense to call a referendum by the people the "final solution", kind of like BREXIT, uhhh, was supposed to be. This PC stupidity has gone so far, that almost all the politicians in the man's country have hounded him out of his office in about one Peak Stupidity news cycle - seriously, it was a day or so.
OK, nothing greasy in your stomach? I will excerpt something after all from the guys that used to sell us 4096 lighting-speed dial-up internet:
In one of the most divisive speeches seen in parliament since 1996 when far-right politician Pauline Hanson declared incorrectly that Australia was being swamped by Asians, Senator Fraser Anning on Tuesday called for a national vote on whether to ban Muslim migration.[My bold]The lying is so blatant. Who says Miss Hanson's statement of 22 years back was incorrect? It turned out to be right, unless you get really technical - true, most of the Asian (all kinds) immigrants didn't move into the swamp, if that's what CompuServe means - these people are not stupid.
One more thing - whether the ex-Senator was lying in order to back-pedal (not necessarily the case) or not, he and his party boss stated that Mr. Anning didn't even know that horrific use of the term. It shouldn't freakin' matter though. We don't just prohibit use of perfectly fine English language because it freaks other people out! Fraser Anning must know that the ctrl-left would like to shut him and his party up on the immigration-invasion issue. From 2 days ago being a member-in-good-standing to this - he should have known "you can't say anything".
I wish one of these guys would stand up, well, for more than one day!
*Would it not be cool if America had an "American Party", you know, one party that is pro-Americans? Man, those people down-under are way ahead of us! Yeah, we tried with the Mr. Perot-inspired Reform Party, then the Tea Party (which didn't actually have anyone running for office under the name), but for now it's still the two squads of The Party up here, where the toilets flush CCW....
** Yeah, anyone remember CompuServe? I'd first worried a bit that the article would be in monochrome, green on black. It'd rather read truth in monochrome than lies in 256-bit color any day though.
*** I hope the reader understands that Peak Stupidity claims a trademark on "Global Climate Disruption(TM) only as a running joke. We don't have the money for that kind of thing, and we would really like the term to spread.
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Great comment on Trump from a guy named Jack D.
Posted On: Wednesday - August 15th 2018 9:02PM MST
In Topics: Music Trump Pundits
Once in a while Peak Stupidity will just save some effort by posting an entire great comment from, well it's been so far, guys writing on the unz.com site. So far there have been 2 posts, written as comments by a guy named Mark Green, one about Trump and the Neocons, and another also about America's foreign policy.
There is a commenter that goes by the handle Jack D. who writes prolifically under the Steve Sailer posts. He's a good writer, being always coherent and to the point. Though I don't agree with the guy always, say, 90-95% of the time (85% on a bad day), I wanted to put up this one, maybe not completely related to the post it was under an iSteve post called
"Swedish PM Asks Arsonists 'What the Heck Are You Doing?". That title has Mr. Sailer's great humor in it, as it makes fun of the unflappable, always nice, semi-stupidity of the Scandanavians.
The comment here is response to another commenter's embedded tweet about the President's calling one of his disloyal, traitorous staffers a dog, and the problem for the ctrl-left that none of us give a crap about the name calling. Jack D:
At least he didn’t call her a monkey or else they would have to cancel his show.Well put, Jack D. I couldn't find it in a post just now, but Peak Stupidity liked Donald Trump from the get-go for the main reason that he doesn't seem to be a guy easily bullied or blackmailed. We knew he was a playboy. We're beyond caring about whether that is a "problem", as this guy could actually do some good for Americans. I did find a fun post from Inauguration Day in which Peak Stupidity declared President Trump a Righteous Dude.
Oh, wait, they can’t cancel his show – he was elected by the people of the United States to serve for 4 years. This is what really drives the left nuts because they are so used to being able to instantly unperson anyone who has slipped up. One word and you are out. But Trump says one word and then another and another and nothing ever happens to him.
Imagine the shock when the Hillary people unleashed Pussygate and it didn’t work. The expression on their face must have been like the bad guys when they would shoot Superman point blank and he would just stand there with his chest out. And then he would grab their guns and twist the barrel into a pretzel.
Or maybe it was Machado. Machado was going to cause Trump to “self destruct” – he called a woman fat. This is unpardonable – not one single woman in America could ever vote for such a monster. Trump would melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. He would self-destruct. Except he didn’t.
[Jack D.'s Vanity Fair link]
But every day they try again and again even though the election is over – hope is evergreen.
Yes, we've been up and down on this guy. We've had hopes and disappointments, yes and no feeling on whether this guy has been already neoconned, or deeped state(?), but damn, we still need to wake up each morning thankful that the sick wicked Hildabeast is safely ensconsed in some liquor-and-drug-induced state in some state from away from here, anyway. Could Peak Stupidity do the job better? Of course.
"If I was the President (was the president)
the minute the congress called my name (was the president),
I'd say now who (whooo?) do you think you're foolin'? (who do you think you're foolin'?)
I've got the Presidential Seal, I'm up on the Presidential podium.
My Mama loves me, she loves me, she loves me like a rock."
Loves Me Like a Rock is from Paul Simon's excellent album One Man's Ceiling is Another Man's Floor from way back in 1973, only a couple of years after he broke up from the great duet act with Art Garfunkle. Peak Stupidity featured Paul Simon before, in a serious manner with American Tune , then with a fun song named At the Zoo, and lastly with the more obscure song Only Livin' Boy in New York. Those great backing vocals on Loves me Like a Rock and others on the same album were the singing of the black gospel group The Dixie Hummingbirds.
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Docs on Bikes, Addendum
Posted On: Wednesday - August 15th 2018 11:01AM MST
In Topics: Humor Healthcare Stupidity
Nurse, strong coffee, 4 sugars, STAT!
Probably just best to get those 2 in the middle...
Since there's been some writing here about doctors lately, and bicycles, and doctors on bicycles, kind of a rare combination, it leads to a few humorous anecdotes.
As I wrote in the previous posts on the subject, doctors in general have to be fairly bright to get into and through medical school. Med school involves lots of rote memorization, but just to develop techniques to get through it all takes smarts. That does not mean doctors don't do stupid things. Having more money means more chances for some of these endeavors. The doctor in this post probably drank more during the time in question than most doctors, or at least most people. However, he could drive like nobody's business, better, in fact, when fairly drunk than most people with a blood alcohol level of 0 (and this was well before all the artificial stupidity, that is, the cell phones, was around). I could tell this because one night I thought he wasn't doing it right, and I grabbed the wheel and put the pickup truck and us into the ditch on the side of the dirt road. We couldn't drive it out ot fhere. Yeah, well, speaking of bikes, I had my bicycle in the back of the truck, so rode 2 or 3 miles, which sobered me up, to get a large automobile and a rope.
Now, this guy told me stories later on, when he'd already gotten the big-paying doctor job and the fancy sports car, about getting drunk enough to see double on the road. "I just couldn't tell which white lines to follow on the Interstate. I was seeing double, cause there can't be that many lanes. I tried to keep between the ones near the middle...." Again, the guy was not a hazard compared to the average driver anyway. However, even after being conscientious and sleeping it off in the car when possible (a sports car, remember), what was bound to happen finally did, and it took an expensive lawyer - no problem! - to get the violation changed to something like "reckless operation" or what-have-you. That was fine, but somehow due to bureaucratic screwage, my doctor friend ended up with no license for a few months. I realized during the middle of this that he was riding, what we call a motor-pecan, back and forth the short trip to the hospital. It's not even a scooter; it has pedals on it, and not enough power to require a driver's license, of course.
"No, no, you're not doing this right", I admonished him. "You pull up into the emergency room parking lot on this tiny $200 used motorpecan instead of your usual fancy sports car, yet you don't want the hospital to know anything?" "Why not ride a bicycle? There's a good excuse - yeah, 'after seeing all these sick people, that eat poorly and get no exercise, I remembered that whole 'Heal thyself!' bit, from the 1st day of med school'" "Yeah, that's the, errr, ticket ... no, I didn't mean ticket... uhhh..." Naah, he still putted along until a new fresh driver's license came in the mail. Exercise, psshaww, we've got pills for everything now!
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Additional Commentary on Alex Jones vs. The F.A.G.S.
Posted On: Tuesday - August 14th 2018 3:05PM MST
In Topics: Pundits ctrl-left Orwellian Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity
CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Google, and Spotify, non-respectfully.
The Peak Stupidity blog chimed in on the un-personning of Alex Jones last week. Mr. Jones gets into lots of conspiracy theories, some in error and some not, but this deal is not a conspiracy just due to the lack of secrecy. It was just plain straight-up COLLUSION among the "tech" elites. (I'd be surprised if Alex Jones could even retain his Amazon Prime membership to get free shipping, but then we here at PS don't want Bezos involved just due to: [That's the acronym, and we're sticking to it! - Ed])
Just as an update, Mr. Paul Kersey, the writer of the "stuff black people don't like" blog, has written Immigration Patriotism, Not Conspiracy Theories, Triggered Tech Totalitarians’ Purge of INFOWARS’ Alex Jones. First of all that term "Tech Totalitarians" is a damn good one and may become a topic key here. Now, I'll excerpt a bit of the interesting and well written article. (Kersey took the time to put loads of links in, but I will not here - please read his whole thing.):
Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud, daughter of Indian immigrants, is the latest corporate Cultural Marxist to deny InfoWars’ Alex Jones the traditional Anglo-Saxon freedom of speech [Alex Jones flees to Vimeo, is immediately banned there as well, by Zack Ford, Think Progress, August 13, 2018). But it’s vital to note that this latest example of tech totalitarianism has nothing to do with Jones’ conspiracy theories—and everything to do with Jones’ belated emphasis to immigration patriotism. Bottom line: our Ruling Class is simply desperate to repress awareness of their Election of A New People until it’s too late.It IS the case that many of the
The war on Alex Jones has been incredible to watch, with CNN dedicating multiple months to attack a humble Texan who started out doing a public access TV show in Austin in the late 1990s and ended up playing a major role in the 2016 election, hosting a 30-minute interview with then-candidate Donald Trump before the primaries began. [Donald Trump just did a big interview with a famous conspiracy theorist and was asked about impeaching Obama, by Colin Campbell, Business Insider, December 2, 2015]
Peak Stupidity's take on the matter is that this effort to silence the always-controversial voice of Alex Jones has been something the tech totalitarians have been thinking of doing for a while. I don't believe it's just Mr. Jones' coming to see the light on the existential immigration issue. Jones' beliefs in, and constant fighting the battle for, Constitutionalism is something that is HATE HATE HATED by globalist elites of all sectors of the economy, one of them being Big-Gov itself along with it's Big Media sackhangers. However, their noticing of Alex Jone's million-viewer youtube channels enlightening Americans on the imminent immigration catastrophe may have been the thing that set these four F.A.G.S. off. After all, they shouldn't have to put up with a guy exhorting people to stand up for their own existence. Take him off the air!
PS: Every single time in the Kersey article, and other writings about this, when the details are given, the writers use expressions like "removed from" "banned from", etc. Some of those apply, but when you can't reach a site via Linkedin, or what have you, type the freakin' URL in in the address bar, dammit. As I wrote in previous post, if people were less lazy about their usage of software, it'd be harder for Alex Jones and others (coming) to really be un-personned. CLICK HERE FOR ALEX JONES
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The America motel - they can check in, but ...
Posted On: Tuesday - August 14th 2018 10:31AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity
This and the next post will be written in the old point-and-sputter mode. Some of the stuff I've been reading does deserve a quick shout-out*, so Peak Stupidity will get back to semi-original material shortly. A VDare post written by the indefatigable Californian Brenda Walker, gives some numbers to illustrate the major problem of visa overstayers to add to all the rest of the immigration stupidity.
Peak Stupidity remarked on this issue way back during President Trump's State-of-the-Union speech in January. I wrote "remarked" there to admit that my knowledge is anecdotal. Mrs. Walker's post excerpts a Washington Time article that has NUMBERS. We like numbers:
More than 400,000 people came to the U.S. on legal visitor visas in 2017 but were still here six months after their time was up, the government said in a new report Tuesday detailing the less-talked about side of illegal immigration.(My bold, because, HOLY MOLEY!) That's not just a significant amount but a big part of the influx.
They are a small fraction of the total travelers — slightly more than 1 percent of the nearly 53 million visitors who entered the country last year — but that still amounts to big numbers. Homeland Security said 701,900 people blew past their departure dates in fiscal year 2017.(My bolding again.) My anecdotal evidence is mostly about the Chinese contingent. Since this lack of accountability, there's no easy way to undo the damage already done by years of this neglect of the basic idea of a nation. As I wrote in "(let me tell ya') It's More Fun, Bein' An Illegal Alien.":
Of those, more than 600,000 were still in the country at the end of the fiscal year and more than 421,000 were still here seven months later.
The numbers likely will continue to drop as the months tick by, but Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said he figures at least 200,000 each year stay for the long term. That’s at least equal to the 200,000 new immigrants he says come to stay each year by jumping the border.
“Half the problem of illegal immigration, at least, is related to overstays,” he told The Washington Times.
The number of illegal Chinese residents may be much more of a surprise to Americans. If you don't live in a medium or large size city (IN the city that is, not the 'burbs") you may not know, as Chinese people LUV the city, as described here. You won't find out easily without being with someone who knows the language, but much of the help at the myriad of Chinese restaurants in medium and even smaller towns are illegal Chinese people. Add in the massive amounts of people in the Chinatowns of NYC and the west coast cities, and just simple estimates can get one over 2,000,000. I will admit that is just a 1/2 order-of-magnitude guess - let's say 1 - 3 million. No, most do not cross over from Mexico, Canada, or ride in shipping containers. Most come via some type of visa, but overstay forever. The US does not have any good system being used to track exits, as THEY DON'T WANT TO DO IT, or the elites DON'T WANT THEM TO!Even though they'd be hard to pick out to send home (not just due to actual difficulties, but the spinelessness and stupidity of those who should be responsible), I'd like to see the numbers, say some graphs of nationality/ethnicity of these overstayers.
In the meantime, the relative levels of overstaying on the various NON-IMMIGRANT VISAS are in this graph, from the Washington Times article excerpted by Mrs. Walker of VDare:
I've written before that Brenda Walker has an odd habit (for a pundit anyway) of not getting the last word in after excerpting other's writings. That's fine in this case, as it was very factual, non-opinionated writing that she inserted. However, Peak Stupidity sure as hell will get in some words here.
REAL COUNTRIES don't let invasions happen. With the by-far biggest military in the world, and out isolation via the oceans from the big powers over 2 centuries, we've got this part down. Invasions don't always involve marine landing craft, paratroopers, and blitzkriegs, however. Let's not fight the last war, as they say. Having no checks on what visitors to your country do, after they get through the airports, is allowing an invasion, right now. Just read the numbers again - 2016 and '17 were not some fluke, crazy years. This craziness has been going on for decades.
In China, one gets checked upon exiting the country. It's really simple: People-In - People-Out = Accumulation-of-Foreigners. If you have not left within the visa stay period, it's easy enough for a computer to crunch through the numbers in seconds for every visitor, and some Chinese cops WILL come looking for you. It's not like they have to come looking for EVERYONE who's overstayed, for 2 reasons:
1) They don't allow nearly as many immigrants, legally or illegally, so a foreigner STANDS OUT, contrary to in America.
2) Because the Chinese government takes this stuff seriously, being a REAL COUNTRY and all, visitors know this and respect the law out of fear.
The ones that overstay get searched for, and an anecdote from ~ 10 years back that I have is about some Africans in a part of Guangzhou who made some sort of riot there - it was due to one of their cohorts having jumped out of a 2nd-story window to avoid the cops coming to nail him and send him home, with no ability to return. (Yeah, he either died or was hurt bad - not the smoothest move there.) Yeah, the riot didn't go over too well either.
Compare this to America, with our searches for illegal bananas and untaxed liquor and cigs in the luggage, yet no process to see when people go back home. This is high-level stupidity folks.
* The only term out of the Commie Øb☭ma's mouth than I liked - in 8 long years.
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Are the Millennials Retarded?
Posted On: Monday - August 13th 2018 12:22PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Curmudgeonry Orwellian Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity Customer Care Muh Generation
Or, do they just not understand the meaning of privacy? I'm sure Peak Stupidity has many "Millennial" readers, so please, people, remember that this site is REQUIRED BY FEDERAL LAW to be an EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OFFENDER. Also, these generations are pretty ill-defined, so you may want to re-define yourself right now, matter of fact.
The thing is, I've got 10 posts built up in my head, some of them even timely and shit, but now after going to the auto parts store, I've got to spit this out first ...no rest for the
The small part for a vehicle that I needed was not at this particular auto parts store, but it's something that was bound to be at a nearby store. I was in no big hurry in this matter of obtaining it either. "OK, what's your telephone number?" Alright, as written about already in BIG DATA can kiss my ass!, and a little more here (2nd part), all the chain stores want as much information about you, to the point of causing wait times 2 - 5 times longer than before all this - Thanks, Computers!
"I'm not in there." (Yeah, I was, but under what phone number, I've got no earthly...) "I'll go ahead and pay cash for them now and pick them up tomorrow or whenever they get in." "I can't look at anything without your phone number?" WTF? We (as in the software, me, and the Millennial-age girl at the counter) weren't even on ME yet, just which stores have got the part, and when will they get here. It really shouldn't work like this, and maybe she didn't know how to use the software properly, but "Just put in anything." The girl froze up. This was highly irregular. Maybe she was highly irregular, but that shouldn't have to be my business. "Yeah, make one up. It's not your business." Just then another customer started giving her number, so I started giving her that one. That freaked out both her and a guy who's been there at least 3 years who came over to help. I was getting pissed now, as it's not so hard to just type in 10 random digits. The computer is not gonna fire you!
Well, all 3 of us were pissed off at this point, a majority at, yeah, you're lookin' at 'em, this blogger. I had to make an effort now to get them to say when the part will be in. "That wasn't so hard.", I stated. "I'll come back later for the parts, thank you." I really had tried to be polite, but this form of stupidity is just anathema to me. How many people of this generation don't understand that we don't all want to give out life stories out on facebook, twitter, to the pizza delivery store, and, today to this Big-Biz auto parts chain? I shouldn't have to explain why, but that'd make a good post for later anyway.
The reason for the post title was simply the look on this cashier's face. No, I don't expect any of the women there to know a damn thing about car parts (I always ask for the one white guy in back, if I really need a guy that knows his stuff). I'm over that. You've just gotta be able to get business done though, without freaking out. I'm sure she's gonna run into other guys who simply want to buy something, and not give Big Data info, to spam them with. Be ready next time, young lady - don't freeze up - this is not the end of the world. I'm only here to maintain my car, and that's what's keeping you employed, Millennial!
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Kardio-Killer Update
Posted On: Saturday - August 11th 2018 8:52PM MST
In Topics: Deep State
Yeah, Peak Stupidity is keeping up with this case. By "keeping up", we mean that now were are under 2 weeks behind the news on it - versus about 3 weeks behind for the first post on this very strange and interesting news story. BTW, I don't mean to make light of the death of this esteemed doctor via the post title, but alliteration is nice too.
We have retroactively learned on August 1st that the murderer of Dr. Mark Hausknecht was identified as a former sheriff's deputy/constable type who apparently held a grudge for 20 years against the doctor. A number of articles on the story either mistakenly or stupidity state that Dr. Hausknecht did surgery on the suspect's, Joseph Pappas's mother 20 years back, and the mother died in surgery. No, cardiologists don't do surgery. Many are qualified to do procedures (that require a hell of a lot of expertise, BTW!), but they don't cut people's chests open and work on their hearts. That would be a cardiac surgeon, and the victim was not one.
To catch up some more, the alleged killer was cornered at on the run somewhere nearby his neighborhood in Houston, wearing his bulletproof vest and allegedly killed himself. Why do I keep writing allegedly so damn much? This is some fishy stuff here. Does it not make you think of a lower-level JFK/Lee Oswald/Jack Ruby scenario? This
Now about this guy's suicide in front of the cops, the NY Post article (last link) says:
The employee called police several times to provide updates on Pappas’ location — allowing an officer to move in on him near the intersection of Bob White Drive and Imogene Street.Hmmm, a cold-blooded killer like this, wouldn't try to shoot his way out? What was the bulletproof vest for? Why would the cornering of the man make him more likely to kill himself only? If he was suicidal, why would he have made such great elaborate plans for this killing, as an assassin would? How many assassins are suicidal? It doesn't seem like a vocation that would appeal to depressed individuals, really.
Pappas refused to show his hands to the officer and killed himself when a second cop arrived.
Acevedo said a shootout would’ve occurred had cops not cornered Pappas.
“Police had indicated that the man had evidently shot himself, that the police evidently were coming up to him and asking him to put his hands up, and he put one arm up and … evidently the man pulled out his gun and shot himself,” said a neighbor who lives in the quiet residential area.
I don't know, I guess untrue conspiracy theories are formed like this - you've got one idea, new evidence is found or new events happen, and you do what you can to prove yourself right. That could be all this is. Interestingly, as related to my previous remarks on the use of the bicycle (from the 1st article):
On Tuesday,police released another video from a home-security camera that showed the suspect riding his bike in a nearby neighborhood minutes after Hausknecht was shot. The suspect was carrying a green backpack that investigators believe concealed the gun.It's hard to get away from Big-Brother video anymore - this sounds like it was a typical exurb type of area. It was pretty astute of a homeowner to look through a whole bunch of his video, though no crime was committed on his property, to find a bicyclist on it... almost too astute, if you ask me. (This was without some before-hand knowledge that this guy rode down his street.)
OK, this guy was in great shape, as the article stated, so he wasn't sick and about to die anyway, the supposed grudge was about a 20-year-ago event, and the killing was done expertly. Was he really an "asset" that had done a poor job, or maybe a good job, and had to be silenced, as possibly planned ahead? It's not like I trust a story out of two cops about their part of the story - there's no video on that for some reason.
On the 3rd hand, I will say that this cardiologist treated ex-president Bush (elder one) 18 years ago, and I'm not sure if anytime since than. Why would someone wait until now to bump him off, if it were about his knowledge of some Deep State stuff?
OK, yeah, this is not the JFK assassination, and I'm not Oliver Stone, but it does make me wonder what the heck goes on sometimes.
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Documents for the Un-Documented
Posted On: Friday - August 10th 2018 10:29AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Lefty MegaStupidity Bible/Religion Anarcho-tyranny
Big-Church has been making bank off of their concern and compassion for people that have entered the country illegally as non-citizens, the technical term being "aliens", making them what ... anyone?... Bueller? illegal ... anyone, anyone .... aliens. Oh, you're wondering about any compassion for parents of American kids who can't get treated at the emergency rooms and can't learn anything in school due to the language confusion and violence from the gangs? No, the Church used up all of their compassion on those illegal aliens - If you are an American, nah they're plum out of compassion.
Yes, and it's the Lutherans up in Minnesota and thereabouts bringing in the supposed "refugees" who will just, like, fit in and all. They are all legally here - that doesn't make it any better for us, of course. The high-level stupidity exhibited by these often well-meaning, but also often greedy, religious organizations doesn't seem to know any bounds, but I'd always thought of all types of stupidity as originating in California. I was therefore surprised that this story, about Catholic Diocesses making ID
Let me put a few pieces of stupidity in here before having a meldown, which I see coming ...
Roman Catholic parishes in Texas are providing church-issued identification cards to illegal immigrants who, because of their status, are not eligible for ID issued by the state. Police in Dallas, as well as nearby Carrollton and Farmers Branch have been officially given discretion to accept the church-issued cards as valid identification.OK, this could be good. When it's time to go back, we've got a good idea of the numbers, and names, so as to be able to dig up enough charter buses and such logistical items. I like the way you're thinking, Roman Catholics, so far ...
“Having this ID can be the difference between paying a traffic ticket or being arrested for not having a form of identification,” said Father Walsh, according to Texas Catholic. “Also if the police officer need to call to verify the ID information, is easier to take the call and say ‘yes, this person is a parishioner here.’” Bishop Burns said, according to the report ...Wait, hold that thought. OK, the thing is, were I to get pulled over when I have no drivers' license (I don't mean ON me, I mean, PERIOD), I go to jail. Does it help to "be a parisioner"? If I knew they gave out "get out of jail for free" cards, I'd probably show up at mass a whole lot more often, believe you me. Is this another example of that Anarcho-Tyranny that you read about on such blogs as Peak Stupidity and the like? I dunno, just sayin'. What happened to all that equal protection under the law stuff from the US Constitution? I believe it was in ... hold on... let me check my phone ... Amendment XIV (14 for those of you reading from Alta Vista). Whaaaa? Isn't that the one with the anchor-baby loophole which a bright young, skinny-but-shapely lawyer tells us is bogus anyway? Come on, Catholic Diocesses of central Texas - which is it? When did you stop believing in the 14th Amendment? Oh, do go on, sir ....
... Bishop Burns said, according to the report, that the Catholic Church will “always be with the members of the immigrant community, because Our Lord Jesus Christ was a member of the immigrant community.”What a load of blasphemic bullshit that is! Joseph and the missus came to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. They were not immigrants at all, much less illegal aliens. Does this Bishop ever get around to reading the Good Book, or is he too busy fucking over our country?!
Let me just calm down, that wasn't the meltdown (it's coming...) I need to get this straight. These people who broke into America are now called undocumented immigrants, right? Yet, you want to give each one of them some documents, errr, cards, yeah that's the
Hey, I like that video! OK, all better now. That was from an album (probably) called Songs of the Documented.
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[Updated 08/25:] Egregious error there (nobody here caught it?)
WAS: "Jesus and the wife..." Whaat? FIXED TO: "Joseph and the missus"
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The Destructive Power of Inflation
Posted On: Thursday - August 9th 2018 8:52PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Economics Inflation
I really want to knock this one and one more summary post on interest/inflation out, so I hope the reader will feel welcome just skipping this and waiting for the next in our usual articles on the more blatant forms of stupidity. However, this may not be so awful boring, and there's ice cream at the end. My memory for economic as well as political stuff seems to be very good when compared to others who seem to forgive and forget. Do I remember when inflation (of the money supply) and it's visible effect of constantly rising prices was not existent? Nah, I'm not 120 years old, which is about what age one would have to be now to have been 20 and aware before, the FED was created - that's that Creature from Jekyll Isle that you'll hear/read people like yours truly and Ron Paul talk/write about on occasion. One could also just be about 75 years old, and have been aware during the early 1960's that inflation wasn't much of a deal (before the removal of sound money).
For most of us, inflation seems like a natural evil that we can do nothing about, like, say mosquitos. Even when it was very high, in the late 1970's, people really believed that the "wage-price spiral" was just a matter of one-upmanship between employee-consumers and producer-employers, and would just plain stop, if one party could be made to stop the escalation. "The price goes up, so we need more pay, then they need to raise prices to pay us more, then we need more pay... " "All we gotta do is control the prices or wages for a while and the spiral will stop". It sounds reasonable, until you realize that inflation is simply the increase in the supply of money due to the government's extreme need to spend, spend, spend. If there's more money, but the same amount of wealth being created, stuff just plain gonna cost more - easy peasy.
See, it used to be that the Feral Government had to control the budget, due to the fact that anyone could turn in their fiat money, those pieces of green paper, for the appropriate amount in gold or silver. If that green paper was not keeping it's value, the gold/silver would all be taken back by Americans, and the paper would disappear from use, preventing the government from buying anything, what with having no more gold and all...
By diluting the value of the Dollar in this way, with it's effect of continuously rising prices, the US Government is stealing your savings (if any). What this really means (and thanks to some commenter on some site somewhere for making this point) is that the Feral Government is stealing years of your life away. What does that savings, in whatever form, represent? You've worked for that money, and unless you work as a male prostitute, it's usually not something you'd be gladly doing anyway. Those years of labor that represent the time to accumulate the amount that is being lost via dilution are simply being stolen, that's all there is to it. Who's gained those stolen years, BTW? That'd be whoever can make use of this new money being created to live a life of luxury and NOT have to labor at all. (Wait, am I sounding like a Communist, here?- no, not at all. Commies LUV Big-Gov; I hate it, along with the crony-capitalism/government-supported F.I.R.E. "industries".)
All that boring, but important, stuff being said, let's get more personal here. Got that Social Security Scam (see also Part 2) money coming? Sure, they've got it indexed to inflation, so you can't lose. Suuuure, yeah, that's the ticket. Do you believe your promised SS checks will buy in the future what the dollar amount will buy now? Sure, the government also has some land on this one island for cheap ... Bikini Atoll, it's called ... mmmm... bikinis.... It's not just SS, but Federal pensions, and other obligations, that amount to a coupla' hundred TRILLION $ that also vary according to the "official", government calculated inflation rate. That's why the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who come out with the numbers, seem to keep them much lower than a grocery shopper, insurance customer, car mechanic, or homebuilder may notice. Yeah, groceries, car insurance, batteries, lumber etc. are not going up 1-2% yearly. The Shadowstats site, linked-to above, whose graph appears at the top, has much more detailed information on real estimates of inflation, along with other economic numbers.
I'll have to write about hedonics another time, a trick used by the BLS folks to make the numbers look good to, you know, help, and all, but let me just get back to another example of Big-Biz tricks to hide their increases in prices. The old Peak Stupidity yogurt post, Inflation by Deflation described the devious way that Big-Biz downsizes packaging to hide price increases. If you are one who notices these things, you will be familiar with the name-brand (Breyers comes to mind) ice cream package shrinking that started in 2008, if I'm not mistaken.
The containers look the same from the top and are of the same height, but became slightly tapered, then significantly tapered, as the 1/2 Gallon (2 quarts) of ice cream became 1.75 quarts and then 1.5 quarts a few years later. They are pretty sure we were never gonna notice. BTW, I don't believe the company saves that much in cost by putting less ice cream in each container. They can manufacture it cheaply, and lots of the costs is in the shipping, packaging, and fixed costs of advertising, paying the corporate honchos who approved this sleight-of-hand, etc. Their reason to do this is to just increase the purchases of containers of ice cream, as obviously 3 pints takes only 3/4 as long to finish as 4 pints does. I've seen something around a $1 increase in the price of this type of ice cream in that same decade, from about $4.50 to $5.50, when it's not on sale. That is is a total increase in price of decent ice cream of 62% over the decade, over 5% yearly compounded.
OK, says the reader, all I've heard about is stuff from the dairy aisle of the grocery store - that's pretty damn anecdotal. Yes, I'd like to write a post giving quite a few more examples, and kind of giving my experience and remembrances of inflation over the years. Secondly, again, check shadowstats and see how much data they have and where they get it.
The summary on interest and inflation will discuss why both control of interest rates and the destructive power of inflation are good for government.
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Late-breaking story - Ex-Presidential Bicycling Cardio-Doc Shot by Deep-State "fellow" Cyclist?
Posted On: Thursday - August 9th 2018 2:27PM MST
In Topics: Deep State Healthcare Stupidity Dead/Ex- Presidents
Yeah, it's late breaking alright. Here at the Peak Stupidity blog, "late-breaking" simply means we we're late in breaking the story. Actually, we're not breaking anything, just really wondering about this 3-week old story out of Houston, Texas. Now, as stated previously, at least once, Peak Stupidity does not subscribe to the long-term, say centuries-scale conspiracy theories. The shorter term stuff is another story. We just got done writing about the part-time conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones' censorship by Big-Social-Media. (It's not that the censorship was any kind of conspiracy - just perfectly obvious standard tactics of the ctrl-left). Continuing in this topic, let's look at a story that, after reading some of the details, I can't see WOULDN'T BE some type of conspiracy, or just plain Deep State nefariousness.
Dr. HausKnecht, a Houston Cardiologist was shot while riding his bicycle by another cyclist. Now, I bolded that because this very nearly proves that this was not a road-rage hot-blooded act. I know about cycling, and I can tell you that most the road rage involved goes in the bike-on-car direction, with a decent amount of car-on-bike (yeah, drivers can be assholes). The thing is that cyclists are a) vulnerable to injury and death from cars, b) pumped up from working out, and c) damn tired of all the fool drivers concentrating on their artificial stupidity versus looking out the windows of their vehicles, or just being incompetent. People may wonder where those deep scratches
Oh, how about a simple robbery, one may ask. Really, how much money and stuff does a bicyclist usually carry, though? I don't think stopping would be my first reaction were a guy to pull a weapon on me while riding. Anyway, in this case, the man took a couple of shots, which killed the doctor, and rode off. Wait, maybe the killer knew the victim, and this was a cold-blooded murder, a result of some feud perhaps? Sure, it was cold-blooded alright, but it seems planned out almost too well for someone who'd take a disagreement to this level.
Is this case weird because the man was an esteemed cardiologist? No, that's not my point in writing this post. Doctors have accidents, or get sick, and die like everyone else. They may be bright people in general, but they do a lot, (sometimes more, due to having lots of money) stupid things as the rest of us too. Now, this wasn't stupidity in any way, but I just want to emphasize that, sure, stuff happens. Being shot while riding a bike, BY a bicyclist, though, is not something that happens often to anyone, as I recollect.
Dr. HausKnecht (thank you copy/paste!) had been the cardiologist that treated ex-president George H.W. Bush for, (yeah, you guessed it) heart problems. That could have been no factor in this shooting, were it a "normal" type of killing ("he was a good boy, didn't mean to do nuttin"), but this one has no normal motive, what I was getting at in the last couple of paragraphs. In this case, because of that connection to a man who is about as much a representative of the Deep State as anyone there is, you really gotta wonder about it. What did ex-CIA-chief Bush tell this guy while under some anesthesia for a catheter or stent? (No, you don't have to be out, but they give patients some pain relief if requested)? According to the news story linked-to above, Dr. HausKnecht had great bed-side manner, and could easily unintentionally have learned lots from Mr. Deep State.
It really comes down to the bicycle. That is an ideal way to keep from being tracked during a crime. The key is that bicycles don't have plates, registration, and all that Police State jazz that most other vehicles do. Yeah, the plates used to be about auto theft, but it's all about keeping track of people now ... pretty well, I might add. The white ball-cap-donning gentleman(?) that made the, uhh, hit could just come with the bike from somewhere without cameras around do the deed, and take off (as he did) with no tracking. He may have just thrown the bike in a ditch in a field. Cut the tires, and tear up some spokes, and it'll sit there for years until it's rusted to nothing. With an organization behind him, whatever that might have been, this could have been arranged to be very hard to trace. It may be that the Peak Stupidity staff is just more criminal-minded than the average blog, but this is the way I'd go about it, were I a member in good standing of the Deep State assassination bureau. Spooks on bikes, hell of an idea, and it's easy on the black budget, a win/win .. except for honest Americans.
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