Football talk in the morning
Posted On: Thursday - June 15th 2017 5:42AM MST
In Topics: Music Media Stupidity Liberty/Libertarianism Bread and Circuses
As promised in the last post I'd just like to state that I don't care about football - college or pro. Oh, and basketball and hockey (nobody does where I'm from), and whatever. I am referring to spectator sports, but hey, an occasional baseball game at the park can be a good time.
Now, I don't have a beef against people who do, except for the ones that somehow think this is more important than what's going on in the world. It's been said before, and here too (I can't find it. Embarrassing, tweet-tweet) that "you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you." In other words, none of this matters to you now, but what you don't care about WILL catch up to you and/or your family to the point when you do care. I know "I can't do a thing about it, so why bother worrying." That's understandable, but it's one of those things in which if the majority think this way, what comes is inevitable. If they do care and act, it's not inevitable.
[Big digression moved to the bottom.*]
Man, that's way off of football. OK, there are fans who are in it for the stats, fascination with the strategy, whatever, and do pay attention to other stuff. Fine.
This is another out-of-my-control-vehicle-radio post, like deja vu of yesterday morning's post. It was about a month ago, and this time was sports talk, neither as infuriating nor soothing as National Public Radio. This guy was going on about what I'm pretty sure was football, in particular, about one McCafferty. He apparently is pretty good, possibly controversial, but very important. This announcer was, and I'm going to use the term for the first time on Peak Stupidity, "cucked out". Let me explain.
Here's where I've got a beef with your average football fan - you're following this bunch of thugs with a few white quarterbacks, like they have anything to do with you. You don't play and they don't care what you think about their passing, rushing, and strategy, only that you keep your cable subscription This stuff's not important, when at the same time, Globalists/elites of our country are doing their very best to replace the white male and white families in general. When will you start paying attention? You are encouraging them with your satisfaction with, and distraction by, this circus aspect of the whole "bread and circuses" deal you are being allowed to have as consolation.
Back to the announcer: It's really funny that I was thinking while listening "hey, this guy sounds like he wants to marry this McCafferty, as he's going on and on about this guy and the team like he's in love." Seconds after I thought that, the guy indeed said something just like that - "Yeah, I have a man-crush..." and another phrase to that effect. The announcer came across as positively ebullient, that's the word. Yeah, the "cucked" for "cuckolded" term really did fit there. It's really time to leave this stuff behind, people.
I'll tell ya, or ask you, why can't people just get a good sound system, just 9" woofers would be acceptable, like back in the 1970's, and blast out Rush in the morning?
Begin the day
with a friendly voice,
a companion, unobtrusive
Plays that song that's so elusive,
and the magic music makes your morning mood.
Off on your way,
hit the open road.
There is magic at your fingers.
For the spirit ever lingers,
undemanding contact
in your happy solitude.
Don't even play it without the woofers. You need to feel Geddy Lee's bass deep in your chest cavity.
Rush, with "The Spirit of Radio" from Permanent Waves
* [Big Digression here, I just noticed!:] I also may have wrote this with respect to the old small-government USA (you've to to reach way, way back now), but I will again, in case: We were such a free country and people when you go back 50 years or more, that it really was a place where one didn't generally have to care about the Feral Government. Whatever happened in Washington, FS did not have a bearing on most people's lives on a daily basis like it does in the present. Back in the day, the only time it mattered what happened over in the swamp was during war time or when the progressives went on a big rampage, cough, Wilson, FDR, cough, cough. Now, one Feral Agency can make a
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A ray of hope from the football fans
Posted On: Wednesday - June 14th 2017 6:49PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Trump Americans The Neocons
(Sure, but hey, the country's falling apart right now, perhaps later.)
A reader of this blog talked to me for a bit about the football forums that he reads and occasionally writes on. This is college ball, which is pretty big in most rural areas of the country. Most readers of this blog would know from other posts under the TV, aka Gov't Media topic key ( good examples of which are here and here), that I am not the biggest fan of the "boob tube". Not at all, in fact. Also, I'm not a sports follower at all anymore, so I could not relate much to my friend's talk on football.
I will write more about my opinion on the following of pro sports a bit probably tomorrow, but it was interesting what my reader had to say regarding some of the discussion on this particular football forum. I will say now, that, perhaps obviously, most serious college football fans, the ones that get on forums and take it seriously, would lean conservative and but not necessarily libertarian. They'd very likely be pro- US military adventurism, GO USA! GO TEAM!, etc. That is a great generalization, but just think of the people you know. I think they'd be very likely decent people, but exactly the type that think they don't need to pay attention to politics, even in this day and age.
Now, time to admit that this is another non-timely post, but again, we're just catching up, and it doesn't negate the point. At this particular juncture (love that word), President Trump had just decided to neocon out and order missiles fired at Syria (whoa, 2 months back, in fact). Would many college football fans peruse this map, for example, unless they were particularly involved in the US military, or care much about it? GO USA!
Well, we were discussing this event and disappointment in Trump's failure to keep his promise, and the reader related something about the forum. All types of forums do deviate far off the topic (In this case: What was the problem with the defense? Who's hurt for next game? Whatever.) sometimes. He had been reading a thread that related to the new warmongering in Syria, and surprisingly the football fans were mostly against it! To me that shows that things can slowly change in the mood of the population. It was really good to hear that. People who don't usually care have had enough of the bull. Some say that nothing will change in people's attitudes until a financial crash or big event and people are distressed and hungry. It'd be nice if change in attitudes would occur before it comes to that, and this football forum was a good sign to me.
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"All Things Considered", it's been a long road to Peak Stupidity
Posted On: Wednesday - June 14th 2017 8:41AM MST
In Topics: Humor Media Stupidity US Feral Government
Some folks were discussing the Lyin' Press and good old NPR, National Public Radio, came up. This reminded me of just a week or so back, when I had no control of the vehicle radio (yeah, some still use those.) It was just a situation in which it would have been pretty rude to ask the driver to change the station or turn it off or down. After a minute, I realized that this was NPR, and that they were still in business. Easy, because the announcers are just so soooothinggg. It is very relaxing stuff to listen to, as none of them talk loud or are obnoxious in any way, until ...
... you hear what they are talking about. I should have known that, since they feed off the public teet*, they are still the same left-wing fogeys that they used to be. I realized the guy was talking about some President Trump impeachment ideas, and that sort of thing ... always so very logical and play-by-the-rules sounding ... never the other side of the story though, one notices, and never the big picture ... just keep on the establishment ... soothing ... narrative .... wonder what Nina Totenberg is like in real life ... very soothing, no confrontation ... just the only side of the story there is ... she sounds like one of those sexy librarians.. maybe a spinster....
Nina Totenberg comes in to this post because, though I have no idea is she is alive and
Sometimes I wish there was no internet, so I could still think that the woman on the left was who Nina Totenberg was:
* Yes, they will tell you a lot that National Public Radio is supported by listeners like you. Yes me and you, Kemasabe, whether we have the radio on or not. I am a listener to Rush (the band, mostly, but the guy from Rio Lindo once in a while), but still at the same time supporting NPR. They still get US Feral Gov't money, meaning mine and yours, all to spout out the same old left-wing garbage that ... wait, I don't feel soothed anymore, dammit.
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More on this "Al Stewart / History" week
Posted On: Monday - June 12th 2017 7:27PM MST
In Topics: Music History
This guy's music was just amazing. I wrote about his writing of lyrics about history in presenting his 1st song on this blog, "Roads to Moscow". Yesterday featured "Nostradamus", and today, here is "On the Border" from the album "Year of the Cat".
This is a live version that features
Late last night the rain was knocking at my window.
I moved across the darkened room and in the lamp glow,
I thought I saw down in the street
the spirit of the century
telling us that we're all standing on the border.
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[UPDATED 01/24:] Rats. The version I had originally is gone. This too is a live version, but it doesn't have any more than the small bits of Spanish guitar from Peter White.
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Self-Rebuttal to our post on centuries-long conspiracy theories?
Posted On: Monday - June 12th 2017 6:45PM MST
In Topics: History The Future
Toward the end of my writing Stupid vs. Evil and long-term conspiracy theories, I had some thoughts about whether a rebuttal to my thesis that there aren't these century-long conspiracies out there wouldn't be "Hey, what about the Frankfurt School?" I think that's an interesting argument to ponder.
If you're not familiar, the Frankfurt School was not a particular set of school buildings on a piece of land (though they had various ones before they got kicked out of Germany and had other ones), but a bunch of people with the same ideas that met and discussed them and made plans. So, by "school" we mean it in the same way as you may hear about the "Austrian school" in economics (the smart guys) or the "Keynesian school" (the borderline retards). There are millions of pages of information on this Frankfurt School on-line, so:
a) I won't go into it in too much detail, as you can duckduckgo* it anytime and spend a whole day on it.
b) Here is a fairly long article from the "Schiller Institute" (hmmm, are they a real institute like the "Ponds Institute for hand creams? Who knows?). Yeah, it's a random hit, but it looked very interesting, and I'll read it later.
c) Here is a shorter article from "ReturnOfKings" that just relates the Frankfurt School to modern higher education.
To summarize from knowledge of the Frankfurt School from past reading, they were Marxists, and they had big plans to change society. They really had no power back when they started meeting in 1923 when they were associated with one actual university in Germany. They left Germany in 1933 due to the Nazi's hating on Communism (hey, who doesn't?) and ended up in New York City - that can't explain everything about the place, but it all fits.
To relate this finally to the conspiracy-theory post, this group had very much influence on American society and culture, completely to our detriment. Feminism, socialism, hatred of the white man, you name it: If it sucks, they are all for it! Now they've been pushing their cultural rot for a long time; it's been damn near a century since these
No, these people just had the same overall ideas, however erroneous, about how future society should be. They had adherents that could take over the meeting, writing, and infiltration of the institutions, but was that a big plan? Was it just a bunch of people thinking the same way over many years? Is that really a conspiracy? I think not - all that would have stopped their plans would have been millions of (more) Americans (than did) not putting up with the socialist PC crap at universities and social institutions, in governments, and in the consumption of media. People let this happen, and it was not per-ordained via an evil plan.
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Addendum - pretty much off the subject, but not worth another post: About the song "Nostradamus" by Al Stewart featured in relation to this heavy thinking on historical patterns lately, here is an interesting thing about the song and the man. Though having tried some years back, I couldn't seem to really make much sense of the Nostradamus poetic prophecies from 1/2-millenium-ago France (the first of it was published in 1555). I think the songwriter, Mr. Stewart took lots of liberties about just what Mr. Nostradamus had said, and maybe made up pretty much all the verses (called "quatrains", at least wrt Mr. Nostradamus' original writings).
OK, fine, it's an amazing song no matter how accurate the lyrics. However, here's the one amazing thing - Mr. Stewart wrote "Nostradamus" in, or before, the year 1973, when "Past, Present, Future" came out. Here's one line - "A great wall that divides a city at this time is cast aside". Note, this was 16 years before the Berlin Wall came down, and Al Stewart was writing as if Nostradamus predicted this - even if he didn't and was just making it up, then Al Stewart predicted this. Is that weird, or just the odds?
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* Yes, duckduckgo.com for my searches now. Bing tried to connect up yahoo mail with what I was searching for so, as far as I'm concerned, Bing is dead to me.
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Counter-protesters claim to be anti(anti)(Sharia). Do the Math.
Posted On: Monday - June 12th 2017 7:15AM MST
In Topics: Music alt-right/MAGA ctrl-left
Yes, no Calculus, Differential Equations or Number Theory is necessary here. It's just the arithmetical axiom that a negative x a negative = a positive. ZeroHedge informs us Clashes Erupt As Leftists Crash Nationwide "March Against Sharia". This story seemed kind of buried to me, but then I would not hear about it on TV, since it's in a state of OFF. However, something kinda weird on this is that, even though the link above works (as of 6/12/17), I could not find this article listed on ZeroHedge a few pages into the site at the time stated (Jan 10 9:22PM, no time zone). That's strange, as I've not run into that before on ZH.
Back to these clashes. I like that word. It's not quite a battle, but it's not a friendly debate either. Don't be alarmed, it's just A CLASH. I wish it were THE CLASH - saw them at a 3,000-seat auditorium in the early 1980's - great show!
It takes this much writing for me to get the thoughts together to get back to the point... There are people out there, say New York City, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and other places who actually came out to give a hard time to those who are having a pre-emptive protest against Sharia Law, the set of Islamic law, which is in great conflict with they type of stuff written up by James Madison, Thomas Jefferson et. al. So, you've got your Americans protesting against continued creeping Islamification (yeah, it always starts off small, but we know the people behind this don't ever let up.) Then, "counter-protesters" came out against these patriotic Americans peacefully promoting awareness about Sharia. Let's get this on the record. These "counter-protesters" are against people being against Sharia, so they are pro-Sharia then. No way around that, it's just math, bitchez!
These cntrl-left idiots have gotten pawned/owned, or whatever this is called now, in my opinion (I think "bitch-slapped" was the old expression way back in ought-5.) By making their demonstrations just about "Sharia", not Moslem infestation in general (which they are rightfully against), the patriotic Americans have pulled a good one. You've got your cntrl-left now on record as being pro-Sharia.
Wait... what? The whole cntrl-left is composed of a motley assortment of complete societal-fuck-ups, your feminists, liberal-arts-up-the-yingyang-in-debt man-bunned baristas, your gender-confused, generally, your huddled masses of stupidity, in an unholy alliance against the remaining legacy real Americans who are the last link to what was the freest nation to have seen the light of day in World history. Why would they want to be anywhere around under a Moslem-run system which would have them stoned dead before the first goat-humping Imam retired to his tent for the evening? Do they really not know that Sharia is the most conservative system around, to an extreme? There is no place for feminism, the 31 flavors of gender, and all that crap.
We in America had a nice happy medium here, back in the day, where the laws of nature were observed, yet the rule of law, based on natural law (such as self-defense), and not the rule of men, was also observed.
The cntrl-left extreme nutcases who actually come out on the streets to interrupt free speech and assembly (still expecting no pushback, for now) call themselves "antifa" for anti-fascist, but act just as fascist as the Nazis did on a bad day. However, if you go with their terminology that they are against a right-wing (conservative - in THEIR twisted terminology) then, let's see: anti-fascist & pro-Sharia ==> anti-hard-core-conservatism & pro-hard-core-conservatism. That's a contradiction that looks like the end of a mathematical proof. It IS the end of a proof, by contradiction, with the original statement having just been contradicted being: "These people are sane."
I never did like proofs, but that one was both easy. I still say, though, that 3-D Calculus is the most useful math ever invented - thanks, Issac!
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OK, yeah, they weren't a LOT brighter than the antifa clashers, but they could play guitars, dammit.
(This song was originally written by Sonny Curtis for Buddy Holly's band The Crickets, but was covered by anyone who wanted to act like he was a rebel, over the next 6 decades.)
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Nostradamus - Past, Present, Future
Posted On: Friday - June 9th 2017 7:27PM MST
In Topics: Music History
I suppose as a rebuttal to the theory of no long-term conspiracies you could have had one of these evil-plotting conspiratorial bastards in cahoots with Nostradamus. Now, that'd have been an evil pair.
A musical artist named Al Stewart featured here before due not only his great tunes but his lyrics about history wrote this epic "Nostradamus" for this Past, Present, Future album. This seems appropriate what with these serious posts about the centuries past these last 2 days.
BTW, some historians say that this Nostradamus was completely wrong in all his poetic prophesies, and had actually been known in his time in the late middle ages by the moniker Nostra-dumbass.
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Stupid vs. Evil and long-term conspiracy theories
Posted On: Friday - June 9th 2017 7:04PM MST
In Topics: Commies General Stupidity Globalists ctrl-left
This post may be kind of boring - that's just the way it's going to be, but I have promised to just explain this a number of times in other posts. This can follow nicely from the previous one on 100-year old history, as we left off with a video about the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank, created in secret by a small cabal. One may call that a conspiracy, I suppose, as the way the Fed Reserve was founded and it's real purpose has been kept fairly secret over a long period.
Here's the point I will expound on: I don't think there are any long-term conspiracies, that could be used by some to explain the evil in this world, or just the reason America is what it is today. By long-term, here, I mean > 50 year, and more like century(s)-long plans. This is as opposed to shorter-term odious behind-the-scenes deals made by globalist elites and high-level bureaucrats, the quasi-military organizations, CIA, NSA, people within US and other gov't agencies and various other evil types. There would be no way to list all the even very credible ones here.
The people behind the short- or medium-term conspiracies are not even all blatantly evil. It could be about just wanting to hurt people or groups, but more often there is a lot of money or power to gain as the motive. As to the arguably (that's what the comment section is for ;-}. ) most important issue going on today, the importation of peoples to replace Americans and Western Europeans with the 3rd world, for example, there are multiple different credible theories on why the evil behind-the-scenes people would want to do this. Even this type of evil happening is not done SPECIFICALLY to hurt people ALONE. That is not necessarily how evil works. There are people however, who don't care at all how many 100's of millions of people get hurt by having their lives changed for the worse. Many times the gains are not even JUST the money and increase in power, but this evil is done by people who feel they are doing good. They want to feel good about themselves.
Let me reiterate this and explain it more. There are many wise men who have been quoted to this effect, but perhaps it was put the most simply by T.S. Eliot, with "Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.". This may include the "useful idiots" who, by definition, are not smart enough to be out to purposeful hurt anyone by what they think is the right thing to do, in addition to the fairly-smart, leaders who also think they are doing the right thing, but unfortunately have the power to get it done. See, this is the problem, people with power who think they are omniscient, though they are not. They are smart, but not smart enough to know that they may not be right about everything. It's OK to have people like that, but not in positions of great power of the population.
This is how you get your Chairman Mao's, your Lenin's, your Pol Pot's and your Hitler's. All of them probably had a good head on their shoulders and "knew" what must be done to help their countrymen. People helped them gain positions of great, almost absolute power. It didn't work out very well, did it? YOU! DO! NOT! LET! ANYONE! HAVE! GREAT! POWER! OVER! YOU! The founders of the American Republic were the best in history in knowing this, and their grand experiment worked out pretty well for 150 years or more, until the people got slack.
Back to the evil ones and the conspiracies. The guys like Soros making plans to encourage destruction of the western nations, the guys in the CIA fomenting revolution in foreign lands, the guys behind assassinations, the groups creating legislation in back rooms to help their cronies, all of them - they make some pretty elaborate schemes sometimes and then some fairly stupid ones that backfire. Are they smart enough to make plans that don't come to fruition for 50 years, 100 years, or multiple centuries later though? Again, they are NOT omniscient; they just think they are. Back to the Federal Reserve creators again, as an example. They wanted to control the money supply. They probably didn't care about free money concepts and how the average American would be worse off, but I doubt they were smart enough to know, or be planning for, the transition of the small Federal Gov't to the huge beast it has become. There was no way to know the effects of their short- and even medium-term evil a century hence.
Yes, there were the Rothchilds and other rich families who had big money, hence, power over multiple centuries, sinister people in the Catholic Church, the Masons, etc. People say they had big conspiracies to cause what we are dealing with a few centuries later. Did they really make plans, the effects of which would be known on their great-grandchildren? How could you even know which countries would be around? Would you know what to invest in for that long a period. My conclusion is that there is just nobody that smart - if he was, he would most likely not make plans that would end up causing pain and trouble for so many, as He would be God.
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Man, another century's gone by - felt like only a coupla 3 decades!
Posted On: Thursday - June 8th 2017 9:55AM MST
In Topics: History Global Financial Stupidity US Feral Government
The older you are, the more time and history seems shorter - we all know that - except when we're young. It's pretty obvious why, as the few short years a kid's been alive are everything there ever was to him. After a while 2 years ago is not that awful long ago anymore, when you're, say 30 years old. After a while, you're like, what, gotta start writing dates with 4 digits now!? Or, what, we don't need to keep writing 4-digit years anymore, as people didn't do that in 1917? They just wrote '17 and talked about, "well, let me tell ya' sonny, back in ought-5 we didn't have fancy ... whatever-the-hells".
History behaves the same way in our minds as we the number of years behind us, in our memories, changes. As a kid, most "old people", as we called them, had memories of World War I times, "the Great War". Now, you would find nobody with personal knowledge about it to talk to. The 1960's turmoil and Beatles music is as long ago to the kids now, as prohibition and ragtime music was to me as a kid. The Vietnam war is as long ago for kids now as WWI was to people who were kids when I was a baby. Ronald Reagan as president is as historical to kids now as Harry Truman as president was to us, and I even have a memory of some guy wearing the hats people used to always wear reading a newspaper with a big-font headline "TRUMAN DIES". Who cares, I thought, and still do.
Think though, about how Ronald Reagan, VietNam, and the 1960's are NOT, however, ancient history to us. Go back to 100 years of history now, and it does NOT seem like you are reading about a totally different kind of people that didn't know anything, and just acted in ways that were so foreign to us, and that nothing at all that happened back then has ANYTHING at all to do with what goes on in the world now. As a kid, however, this would be like being told it that the panic of 1873 and the status of the new colonies in Africa, and the goings-on in the court of Queen Victoria were important in relation to our present kid's lives of hula hoops and Beatles 45's. Now, it's 2017 and I can look back at the people in American history a century ago, and see what they did to us.
It so happens that the years about an entire century ago +/-5 years were years when people and events began changes to America's future all for the worse. 2 of the worst of it were the Constitutional Amendments, the 16th, allowing (Note that word, allowing, overriding Amendment 10) a Federal Income tax, ratified in early February of 1913, and the 17th, specifying direct elections of US Senators, ratified only 2 months later. Though the latter SEEMS like just an adminstrative "housekeeping" change, it is most definitely not, and it was as if the people had said "America's Federal government is not broke, but let's fix it!". How much damage was done in just 2 months in 1913.
However, that's not all, folks. Before the professor Woodrow Wilson got the US into the Great War right at a century ago, after being elected on a platform-plank in 1916 of "he kept us out of war" (does this sound familiar, as, again 1964 is not long ago for, cough, cough, some of us?) there was the founding, via legislation a day before Christmas Eve of the Federal Reserve. The last may have really been the key instigation of the eventual ruin of America.
I came across The Corbett Report from some videos being shown by a commenter named Agent76 on unz.com. This James Corbett speaks some real truth in his videos, and here is a 1 1/2 hour one about the Federal Reserve. As he says in the beginning, economics sounds boring, but this stuff will have you enthralled (with possibly rage later on) with these 1-century-ago elites who created this beast that controls the money, hence the economy, causing the coming terrible financial crash. Not many wanted to hear Ron Paul talk about it, but give this a try. It gets more interesting about 15-20 minutes in.
These elites causing havoc for an entire nation seems somehow familiar to me, like Deja Vu all over again.
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What IS the Deep State?
Posted On: Wednesday - June 7th 2017 7:25PM MST
In Topics: US Feral Government Deep State
We (we bloggers, I guess) need to get something straight. This phrase, "the Deep State", has been trending, as the idiots at google, yahoo, and assorted other idiots like to say these days. The phrase is being used a lot, though it is nothing new, yet I've been reading it as having 2 different meanings. This Peter Brimelow blog post on VDare is an example.
The original meaning of "the Deep State" is the one that has been used for 50 years or more, at least in reference to goings-on with or really, behind, the US Feral Government. It refers to a "shadow government" and/or powerful elite non-government people who work behind the scenes to make the real decisions as the politicians play their role as puppets. The idea is that these nefarious types do not want to be public figures and they don't want the public to know there even is any Deep State. By "Deep" here, writers mean "deep secret", so we don't guess these people blog about their activities or have a Deep State facebook group and stuff like that.
Conspiracy theories can be made about much of the goings-on in government, and not all turn out to be wrong. As has long been promised, Peak Stupidity will have a post about long-term, as in centuries-long conspiracy theories, and why we doubt their possibility. That will make this post (again!) too long, so, anyway, most conspiracy theories and facts involve people behind the scenes that, in any large conspiracy could be thought of as the deep state. Any conspiracy that takes even a modicum of planning and intelligence could not involve just the faces we hear from, the politicians and Gov't agency heads - there MUST be some smart people behind them.
There are plenty of just plain facts out now about the CIA, NSA, and groups without published names that carry our all kinds of evil and sick behavior on behalf of "the common defense of the United States of America". Peak Stupidity thinks of these people, these agencies, and some elite super-rich globalist scum-bags that care nothing for America, nor any other country, really, working with them, for them, and over them, as this Deep State. That is the deep state that could have easily compromised President Trump, as we just theorized here in paragraphs 4 and 5.
Now, the other definition I've been reading lately is more like just the deeply set-in-place US Feral Government bureaucracy. That is what some articles have been referring to as the Deep State in reference to the inability of President Trump to follow through on his promises to the patriotic American voters.
This is quite a different story. There are indeed millions of entrenched usually not-easily-fire-able employees in government. These people are almost all very much in favor of Big Government, because, (yeah, no shit) they work there and want to keep their cushy jobs with decent pay and a really nice pension
The 2nd-definition deep state is something that can be dealt with, at least more easily than the 1st-defintion version. In a war against stupid vs. a war against evil, I'll take bets only on the war against stupid. In fact, come to think of it, this very website is a squadron-level unit in the battle against stupid. Back to Trump and all the Feral Gov't entrenched bureaucrats at all the different agencies, let's get one Constitutional thing straight - the President is the head of the executive branch. That is where all of these cabinet-level and sub-cabinet-level agencies reside - the executive branch. Donald Trump has every right to get rid of whom he wants and hire whom he wants.
Sure, that is a lot of people to fire, we're talking millions, but we've got just the guy in there to do it! What other president in our lifetimes has ever had his own TV show where the whole theme was "You're Fired!"? But, but, we're going to have hollowed-out, ineffective Federal agencies!!! Hey, that's a feature, not a bug, here, people. It's called, (wait for it) freedom. In fact, why not just keep the jobs unfilled, excepting the border patrol?
YA FIYAD!
Just as another version of the conclusion here, Peak Stupidity agrees with the 1st definition as the meaning of Deep State. It has been around longer, and makes more sense. The 2nd definition should rightfully have a different term, say the "Deadbeat State".
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Reader Comment - US military as world's policeman
Posted On: Tuesday - June 6th 2017 2:44AM MST
In Topics: Americans Liberty/Libertarianism US Feral Government The Neocons
Commenter Buck Turgidson had a good comment re this post on the US military. I had called the things going on these days ...
"...a sick social experiment...." That is well stated. Our military has gone way, way beyond its original mandate and what is should be reasonably doing today. Our military is extremely overextended and this global military empire is tremendously expensive and a big reason we are $20T in debt. The net result, other than the debt, is heartache, failed expectations, and a huge friggin mess.
Unfortunately, the military seems led by people who cannot learn a damned thing from this experience and, unfortunately, receive way too damned much money from our US Congress. I know several military officers. Good guys and friends, all that. At the same time, they have an entitlement mentality regarding the US Treasury and my tax dollars, and do not think there is any place on Earth that they should be stationed and keeping an eye on things. They believe that they are entitled to a bottomless pit of money to play global geopolitical engineers and strategists, and blow up things, kill people, take out leaders, and so on, as they see fit. No doubts.
The opinion of a taxpayer such as myself, who foots the bill for this insanity? Not worth considering, as it's coming from an outsider who does not really know how the world works, like they do. I am from a military family, but our military needs to be reigned in, and we need to start living within our means. We also need to keep our nose out of other nations' business. We can't fix every damned problem in the world. We also should not be saddling our future generations with a mountain of debt b/c we have neocons who think they are in charge of policing the world. Sorry kind of a rant, we have bad leadership in this country and the military sees bad guys around every corner. and we're broke.
The paragraph breaks were from Peak Stupidity, but we could not have said this better. Thanks, Buck.
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Berkeley Prof. states 5 Laws of Stupidity
Posted On: Monday - June 5th 2017 6:11PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity
Commenter Heidi something-or-other brought up this article on a website called "Quartz", about a month back. We wish we had thought first about coming up with some laws, but these 5, from a Berkeley Professor of Economics back in 1976 seem pretty reasonable. Since this was back > 40 years, I shudder to think of what new laws will be discovered very soon, as we reach the peak.
Intro from the Quartz article:
In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.
Here are Professor Cipolla's 5 laws without comment, but the article has elucidations on each:
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Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. (PS: One must read the article about his 3 types of people in order to understand "dangerous type" here.)
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Heh!
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At the Beach
Posted On: Monday - June 5th 2017 8:54AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity
It was early morning at a very nice beach; the tide was coming in and surf was up just a bit. That's a nice place to hang out at that time before anyone else is around ...
... except some guy taking video, up and down the beach, he kept on going, more video. Can some people not just enjoy being somewhere? The sound of the surf is soothing indeed, and a big part of the reason people rent or buy beach houses. The view is first, I would guess.
I worked it out one time, how much good coastline we have in this country, and you'd be surprised how few people could live on the beach in a detached beach-house, even with only 100 ft.-wide beachfront lots, with no gaps for anything else. This is a "fractal geometry" problem in a way, as in some places the length of the coastline changes quite a bit depending on your scale. By counting parts of the Great Lakes, one could easily get to a round 10,000 miles. That's 500,000 lots on the shoreline, and for families averaging 4 even, that's just a coupla million, so just above 1/2 a percent of the population. Well, you can build condos everywhere to bring this up by a factor of 10. That's why "it's all time-shares nowadays".
Anyway that whole paragraph was to say, hey, we can't all live at the beach so, let me enjoy it in peace while I'm there. Get your camera out of my view, dude.
This was not some young kid even, who wants his whole life on camera (well, here's a case in which I should probably use "she" for the unknown-gender 3rd-person pronoun.) They would rather watch themselves walking on the beach later on, as they're crossing the street or driving down the interstate. That's how they roll, these young people.
He was not Oriental either, as it is no erroneous stereotype that the Japanese, in particular, have got to take those pictures, everywhere. (I had thought back in the day, that maybe they were all Fuji Film employees with deep employee discounts and a determination to put Kodak out of business). However, the Chinese are giving the Japanese a run for their money. They are not above taking their share of photos, what with it being absolutely free now. The girls have got to get themselves in front of some landmark they know squat-all about with the peace signs that mean absolutely nothing. Let me tell you Chinawomen about the peace signs - it came from hippies imitating the V for "Victory" from WWII days while changing it's meaning. Fair enough, but while that was going on, China was in the kind of turmoil, in the midst of Mao's "Cultural Revolution" that we are only beginning to see a taste of now in our country. What's that peace sign supposed to mean, girls? Let me just sit here and see what I came to see.
What is the purpose of all this continual picture-taking? If this video guy was trying to get something on youtube to teach/demonstrate something, I guess I could see that. I always appreciate the fix-it guys that put up auto repair, etc. on-line. Some, I'm sure, do it to get a following to eventually help out their businesses or just make a few bucks on it, but others do it just to help.
It's the continual selfies or posed photos everywhere in front of every damn thing that makes me think "do you not think people will believe you, if you said you've been here? Are you taking the pictures to prove it? If not, don't you think you can download a better picture of this place without idiots posing in the way? If you want your whole life on video, with you in it, get some kind of end-of-nose-cam that records any and all of your doings. However, not everyone's going to want to view this world of peak stupidity - they've been through in "meat space."
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What's the Frequency, Kenneth?!
Posted On: Saturday - June 3rd 2017 9:56PM MST
In Topics: Music TV, aka Gov't Media Humor
This post is necessary to lighten things up after the gloomy previous one about the US Police State apparatus and the curmudgeonly one before that. If you haven't heard this true story, you'll enjoy it. Even it you have, this is to refresh your memory and put on a good rock "piece" to end the day.
Dan Rather is a former member of the Lyin' Press as anchorman of CBS news for 25 long years, having taken over from Walter Cronkite (that's how long ago). This guy is most known reasonably recently from such doctored documents as a supposed memo about President George W. Bush's Air Guard service record in 2004 (hey, we have ZERO admiration for the Bushes, but the truth will suffice). Here's probably more than you'd want to know about that.
Anyhoo, while walking around Manhattan, NYC on or about (sounds professional, right?) Oct. 4th of 1986, Mr. Rather was assaulted by a crazyman who, while punching him nicely about the head and body, kept shouting "Kenneth, what's the frequency!" Besides the funny part about the well-deserved beating up of this Lyin' Press piece-of-work, that line cracks me up. Nobody knew who the guy was till a decade later when a guy named William Tager was jailed for murder of a stagehand of the Today Show on a different network, NBC. Rather identified the guy as his assailant from a decade past.
What's the Frequency, Kenneth!? Hahaa, it never gets old. Mr. Rather would end his 1/2 hour TV broadcast with "Courage" for a short period just after the time of his beat-down. It sounded pretty damn nutty, but I guess it WAS kind of courageous of him to not give out the frequency.
What DID this Mr. Tager mean about the frequency? Apparently he was under the impression that he was having signals beamed directly into his head. He needed to know the frequency to jam it, I suppose, and I guess he mistook Dan Rather for this "Kenneth", an honest mistake. Though I appreciate the unsuccessful effort by Mr. Tager in trying to put the kibosh on the Lyin Press early in the game, I could have saved him some effort: Yes, you ARE getting signals beamed into your brain, and this particular frequency is Channel 10, least where I live. You know what to do about it. Anything else, guys, just click at the bottom to comments for your questions.
REM sings "What's the Frequency Kenneth" from their 1994 album Monster, and again, the songs (especially REM!) are good no matter what the steeenkin' lyrics:
Here's the part where Peak Stupidity explains in detail how this REM song relates to the What's the frequency, Kenneth incident. We'd be glad to, could we understand a damn thing Michael Stipe was singing there!
Suggested follow-up work for readers: With the many readers of Peak Stupidity all around this world, we request a small favor. Could anyone living in close proximity to the perp Mr. Tager - I'm sure he's out on good behavior by now (possibly the 1/2-way house or even a 90% house by now) - slip him a note from Peak Stupidity? He needs to know that one Ms. Rachel Maddow of New York City has all of the frequencies he's been looking for. Yes Rachel emm ... ay .. double-dee, yeah you got it, ... yes, New York City.
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UPDATE [6/5/17]: Added reader suggestion.
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TSA - Lady excited about pat-down process
Posted On: Saturday - June 3rd 2017 9:09PM MST
In Topics: US Police State Liberty/Libertarianism
No, it's NOT a "The Onion" headline, that's the problem! While getting into the airport terminal recently, a lady wanted to get this stupid, undignified, and completely unconstitutional pat-down over with to get to the flight. Yeah, I know, "Whatdya gonna do? Those 19 bad people ruined it for the rest of us." That's basically the most common thing I hear from people when I mention how sick and pathetic this whole TSA stuff is. What are we, a freakin' kindergarten, is that was America has become?
This lady wanted to get this over with, I understand that, and it's hard to fight this stuff as an individual - you end up missing your trip. However, while waiting for a "Female Assist!", she said to the guy, "I don't mind if you do it." No joking, she didn't care who feels her up, and no, she was no Phoebe Cates in "Fast Times as Ridgemont High", believe you me.
What was I saying, nobody much fights this stuff, which is why the sheeple are indeed getting used to Police State USA.
Mike Krieger's Liberty Blitzkrieg Blog puts it very correctly as Recent TSA Molestation Video Proves Americans Have Become Authority Worshipping Slaves. This is also not a particularly timely article (2 months back but newer than Phoebe Cates up there), and it's stuff most air travelers have already seen, but it's definitely worth reading the whole article, not just:
TSA treating law-abiding American citizens like livestock for the privilege of boarding a plane has been a festering problem for over a decade. Such demeaning “security” practices represent just one of many unacceptable privacy invasions we’ve allowed to happen to us as a people since being overwhelmed by irrational fears of terrorism following the attacks of 9/11. Such fears are never allowed to dissipate since they’re constantly reinforced and encouraged by corporate media, hack politicians and the military-industrial-intelligence complex looking to make money from imprisoning Americans in an all-encompassing surveillance grid panopticon where we cheer on our own enslavement.He's got a video of a boy being patted down. C'mon, just think back to attitudes of only 25 years ago. Would anybody then think this wasn't something to start American Revolution II about? Even in the middle of Nazi Germany, this would have been shocking!
Yeah, it’s disgusting, inappropriate and anathema to a free people, but that’s the point. We aren’t a free people. We’ve become a bunch of authority-worshiping subjects toiling on a plantation dominated by multi-national companies who write our laws and manipulate our thoughts through corporate media. The worst part is we don’t do anything about it. We elect Trump and then puff our chests out yelling stupid slogans like MAGA, as molestations from the TSA get worse. Well done everyone.Before you tell me that all this Police State fun has prevented a damn thing from happening, I could tell you how many guns get seen at the TSA checkpoint every day. Plenty go on through. Here's the thing - none of this worries me one bit. The good people are many, the bad guys will always have weapons, and were Americans not being disarmed at the airport back on that day in 2001, we would not even be thinking of that September 11th as a day of infamy, Instead, it would be a day we could have been proud to be Americans, having handled the situations in those airliners as lessons in self-defense. Our founders would have been looking down at us in approval, instead of in disgust at this current sick Police State we have become.
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Plug-and-play, got a few hours?
Posted On: Saturday - June 3rd 2017 4:54AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity
Peak Stupidity has upgraded (not the website, but that's coming)! Wow, the bluetooth keyboard has been made fully operational, which should speed things up while our writers are on the road. OK, what you say, it's plug-and-play? Yeah, let me tell you about plug-and-play, buddy; there is always some stupidity hanging around anything called "tech" nowadays ("tech" being an ignorant shorthand for computer technology, as there are plenty of other lots-more-technical things around in this world compared to ic-chips and software).
Here's the small dose of stupidity to relate today. Yes, this keypad that you're hearing from right (on my mark). NOW, should have been easy to set up. I put the table in the correct place, turned on bluetooth connectivity on the table, and got ready to type. No joy. OK, where's the ON button? It was hard to tell whether the problem was in the tablet or this new keyboard. Just "FOLLOW! THE! DIRECTIONS! DAMMIT!", I've always ignored in the past, but that's a good last resort. Hey, there were no written directions, in English or any other language, this time. A 3 x 4 sheet of paper had some line diagrams that were completely unusable. Holy crap, I couldn't tell which little oval is supposed to be the tablet vs. the keypad, and there was no "legend", or a few arrows to the only two controls/indicators on this thing, one tiny button made for the pinky finger of an infant, and one LED. I understand, from observation, that good translators must be too expensive to hire for 1 hour to spread this $200 cost over 10 million units (I guess it didn't pencil out.). How about a guy who can draw well enough for the user to see what's what?
I finally noticed the tablet had recognized this keyboard, and had the keyboard working anyway, noting that the LED had turned blue (blue for "bluetooth", got it!). That was all good until the next time I wanted to use this thing. It was a total no go, after 1/2 hour of messing with it. The tablet could not recognize it, and no blue LED; I guess the blue LED meant it wasn't going to be recognized. OK, I was starting to figure things out, but the impasse was that I was still without any idea of the workings of this thing. (Did it need charging? Who knows - no LED for that, or maybe the one LED would turn Red, but NO DIRECTIONS. How about the tiny button, had I turned it off? I don't know how to know off from on.
I was ready to go back to Best Buy with this, when it worked again. I hadn't touched a thing since the last time, when it didn't work, so there was no learning process, other than DON'T! FUCK! WITH! ANYTHING! NOW! Then, after I tried to turn the tablet off, I figured next time I would rotate it 180 deg within it's mating part on the keypad to make the tablet's off switch easier to get to. Then, it didn't work. AHA! The receiver for bluetooth must need to be very close to this keypad, and the tablet must be only in one orientation. You could have told me that in English you stupid geeks, and saved me a few hours at least. (Or, I could have tried to look this up via DuckDuckGo, but what to type in? "Stupid POS keyboard works some of the time" would probably give a lot of answers.)
"Live and learn", people will tell me, but, listen, mechanical engineers don't make you go through this with something technical, like say an electric solenoid valve. The've got specs and a full description of all wires, fluid connections, and indicators. Plug-and-play, right, I'll believe it when I see a plug and a play button.
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TV force-feeding in the lobby
Posted On: Wednesday - May 31st 2017 7:45PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Media Stupidity
I had to spend some time this afternoon waiting in a used car dealership lobby for a friend to make a transaction. I know, used car dealers*, right, but it turned out they hardly even talked to me. That was the good news, but the bad news was that there was a TV on, there in the lobby, too close and loud to ignore.
But then, more good news: it wasn't set to CNN, it was some sports network with talking sports head on the whole time. Now, I've written of my detestation (new word there) for TV under this topic key way back with a post called Blow up your TV (and eat a lot of peaches). However, the sports show was also bad news, as here's what I now thing of TV sports, or at least as it's presented by the talking sports heads - it's just soap operas for men. Holy moley, enough about this players feelings on this subject, and what are these guys going to do next week, can they work together? The last 2 guys were loudly discussing just some bull that didn't have anything to do with any physical aspect of the sports, football, tennis whatever. These guys could have been talking about who's going to have whose baby, and I wouldn't have known the difference. One hour of that was more than enough for the rest of my life.
This made me think of a time in a small dentist's lobby with my kid. That particular lobby was only about 8 x 12 ft, so there was no getting away from this screen. There was the receptionist sitting on the other side of a big rectangular opening in the wall. Other than that an old man was the only other customer, and he was steadily reading a newspaper. I walked over by the screen, tried to find an off button, and thought it'd be easier to just unplug the contraption. From the voice of the receptionist, you'd think I'd set off a pack of firecrackers in the office. "What are you doing?!" "Hey, nobody's watching that crap.", I told her. She said nothing, and I said to her with a scolding voice of a Mom whose crazy uncle just started watching a porn flick on high volume. "Hey, there's a kid in here!"
This had the tone of the Mad Moms: "If it saves just ONE CHILD from having his brain turned into mush, it's worth it for me to take your cheap flat-screen and smash it on the sidewalk! Bill my insurance." I really feel that feeding a child 15 years of regular TV during his upbringing is more damaging than quite a few psychedelic drugs that people make a big deal about. Maybe TV should be on some kind of DEA "schedule" as some pretty hard drugs, to be doled out only to those patients who have not improved at all during electro-shock therapy.
It's the airports that are the worst, because you can't easily step outside there. They've got CNN, who can claim millions of extra, captive viewers per day, that have no way to get out of it. They are way too high to unplug in most big terminals. You can sit with your back to the screen, but then the sound is nearby. You move 100 ft away, but then you realize they've got speakers spread out to cover the whole terminal. You can't wear a headset all the time, while you might need to listen to gate announcements. Yes, big audience numbers this week, Boss!
* A really funny Kurt Russell movie from 1980 - get it, you won't regret it.
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Gregg Allman - RIP
Posted On: Tuesday - May 30th 2017 8:26PM MST
In Topics: Music Southern rock
From the Allman Brothers album Brothers and Sisters, 1973:
From their album Eat a Peach, 1972:
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[UPDATED 01/15/18: Subsitituted Jelly Jelly from Brothers and Sisters for Dreams due to needing the latter song for a latter post.
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Cash is King - (Part 3)
Posted On: Tuesday - May 30th 2017 12:08PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Globalists Economics Liberty/Libertarianism
We left off here with predictions of various varieties of doom and gloom. This is stuff that I just wanted to add to elaborate just a little bit more (with a part I left out) on why the elimination of cash, or any non-trackable money is such a bad thing, and what resistance to going cashless means.
Even without worrying about the larger, more sinister picture of a Government Beast controlling all buying and selling, all governments want money as, to those in government, more money means expansion, new programs (to screw us with), and job security. You won't ever hear that they have enough or more than enough from anyone, down to the public
Governments lose either income tax or sales tax or both, depending on what cash deal is done on an amicable mutually-agreeable basis between consenting individuals. That irks the living shit out of these government people at any level, but the Feds have more power to do something about it. Big Government in America and all around the world, minus the places that are too corrupt for business to flourish at all, are making efforts to stop all the freedom from going on.
So, just by using cash in private deals (we all do, but MORE, MORE, MORE), you are being the resistance to the establishment and the New World Globalist Dream. I cannot find the link to an article on ZeroHedge right now, but it described a gentleman's tipping of waiters and waitresses with cash, but with a note saying this is not pay, but a gift only. OK, listen, don't take any monetary or tax advice from anyone on Peak Stupidity, ZeroHedge or anywhere for that matter. I do always pay the tip in cash, but I'm pretty sure the IRS is wise to any type of written loopholes used to avoid their grasp until you get to the higher monetary levels of the Wall Street white shoe boys, or even the Wall Street chicks with the high heels, and the big business crony-capitalists.
How about this? I just came back from a small store to get a lawnmower repair shop for a new blade, as I left half the post up, and I intended to write more anyway. Good timing. This was not a word-of-mouth sale, but just a small, family-run store. The last blade, on the mower for a decade or so, was mangled, and they liked my joke about a core charge - hey, you don't get that at Home Depot, as the cashiers don't know anything about the stuff they sell. (OK, this should go more into the Curmudeonry topic key.) More to the point, I paid in cash and thought about 2 benefits here of the simple deal at a small business. The minor one is I didn't have to put up with the computer-data-entry hassle: "What's your zip code." "Don't know, put anything." "Oh, the sticker won't scan, register 6 for a price-check, please!". It was: "Here's your change." "See you later".
The 2nd and more important benefit to a free society is that these owners may or may not want to pay sales/income tax on everything, and cash gives them flexibility on this. Hey, it's no Chinatown, where it's all cash all the time and probably corruption at the city level to allow everyone to pay a much smaller amount of tax than officially due*. Let's leave the decisions on taxes up to the small business owners. They'll do what they think is right.
Come to think of it, I'll go ahead and tell you what's right. Any transactions on which taxes are avoided is another win for the patriotic American, that's all there is to it these days. It cuts gov't power, and is an effort to keep many of our lifestyles up toward the middle class where they previously were. Yeah, Rule of Law was great while it lasted. The elites are no Founders, enlightened revolutionaries, and writers of Magna-Carta based Constitutions these days, and the Rule of Law has been ripped-up with pieces waved in our faces every day. So, you know, they can suck it - we're not going to play a rigged game. Keep the money.
Spread it around as you do business with good people. Cash is King! I guess Bartering is Queen then, and just sitting around on welfare on your ass watching Netflix with some Mountain Dew and Cool Ranch Doritos is next step to Baron(?) or, at least Lord of the Manor.
* About Chinatown(s), these people are not avoiding taxes to screw over the Globalists and control freaks. They just do it because it's in their culture to get what they can and society be damned. Hey, I'm not saying it's always been this way with the Chinese, but 30 years of hard-core Communism, with another 30 of soft-core beats the good values out of a lot of people.
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Cash is King - (Part 2)
Posted On: Monday - May 29th 2017 4:53PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Globalists Economics Liberty/Libertarianism
(Continued from here.)
The last post mentioned just one problem in using digital currency with respect to Chipotle Restaurant's payments info. getting hacked. Again, that is a problem, but it's not THE PROBLEM semi-free people are up against here. The globalist elites, governments and big corporations push this "cashless society" idea in order to have complete control of our lives. The start of this is keeping denominations of currency low, so after about 100 X inflation over the last century (making a dollar today worth an early-20th-century penny), you can't hold very much on you compared to how much your credit/debit card can buy. There used to be a $1000 bill, which would be worth $100,000 now! But, just as in China, where the highest denomination is 100 Yuan, or $16 or so, it takes a lot of bills to hold a lot of monetary value on your person.
There are always the usual BS reasons we must stop people from trading pieces of paper, or worse yet, pieces of inherently worthful metal. "We've got to stop the drug dealers from hiding their money." "The terrorists have been using cash." "Tony Soprano has a big stash of cash in his back yard that his wife's been pilfering from, and WE WANT IT!" Once the laws get made, just as with the gun laws, the enforcement always comes down on the law abiding, as the true outlaws don't care how many laws they break. So, now you've got to be scared shitless when driving on a long trip if you have a reason to have a decent amount of cash on you, as the cops can and will legally steal it. You can file some paperwork to get the money back, but it would probably already have been spent for upgrades to the police
The other way going cashless is sold is on the point of convenience for YOU, via ads (I've seen 'em before) showing how quick it is to pay for something compared to the old guy laying down some bills along with the millenial trying to count change. Firstly, even this is part BS. I've had the chip card - it takes longer than cash to process, and one must keep looking down at the screen and get bossed around by the electronics: "Leave the Card in!" "Wait" "Enter PIN" "Don't Remove Card" "OK, Pull the Card, out Now! I've got people in line!" (Oh, the last was the cashier, not the electronics.) It is very impersonal for both you and the cashier to spend the interaction looking down at screens. I guess that may not bother those who stare at their phone screens all day anyway. True, the change counting can be stressful for cashiers these days, but, not my problem.
This convenience in payments and other business arrangements (say Uber) is a selling point for many. Most do not think about how much privacy is lost. The buying and selling part is the real crux though. A big overbearing government Beast can stop you from any resistance to the established order - what you can buy, how much money you can make, who you may do business with, etc; the possibilities for the Beast are endless. It is the sort of thing that would have made the Soviet KGB's, the E. German Stasi's, Chairman Mao's Red Idiot's and all of these tyrannical, freedom-crushing bastards' lives much easier. Just think of what can be done with all the data out there on you, even when we're not cashless yet.
If enough people like their conveniences more than freedom, then this Mark of the Beast deal may likely come down on us. Resistance to that will mean defeat of the Government Beasts or total separation from them. The good news is that Peak Stupidity will probably be reached before the apparatus is really set in place, but it's not really something to look forward to either (as explained in our mission statement, the decrease in Stupidity will be a big relief, but it will be at the expense of the financial havoc to come.) What, too gloomy?? C'mon guys, whaddya need, a refresher course? It's all Gloom and Doom nowadays. Hey, lookey here, one more post on this.
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