Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: Internet Update
Posted On: Wednesday - December 13th 2023 7:46PM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites China iEspionage
That's what I get for depending on my memory after over 4 months. I'd wanted to do a comparison of website access in China in '23 vs the situation in '17, as covered here.
No, I didn't take notes, and I apologize for that. I'll just note the few things I do remember, which includes one important point. You can see that yahoo has been banned in China for a couple of years now. Yahoo news is nothing but Regime Narrative distribution, but I will say they took a stand when it comes to Chinese heavy-handedness and its Orwellian urge to control information.
Per this article from the time on a Chinese site, no it's not that, it's a...
... move that experts say is driven by its own business failure and has nothing to do with China's business and legal environment.But,
In a statement emailed to the Global Times, the company citied [sic] "the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China" as its reason for exit. Yahoo's exit also prompted criticisms in some foreign media outlets about China's business and legal environment for foreign firms.Then again,
However, such assertions are refuted by Chinese internet and legal experts, who attributed the US company's failure to its poor competitiveness in the Chinese market.Sure, I'll believe a Chinese expert on internet freedom when I get done aptly listening to Anthony Fauci teach me about contagious disease.
Anyway, youtube was still off the air there, with nothing but black frames of whatever size the webmaster made them. I really, really wish I'd tried, or remembered what the deal was with bitchute or rumble.
I was able to read and comment on The Unz Review with no problem other than the same sporadic blockage that I see in America. Peak Stupidity was up too. With all that I write about China, you'd think some cadre over there in Peking would have found us. (Maybe it's because I write "Peking", and that evades their searches.)
Here's the big point: The Chinese can't seem to block anything downloaded on smart phones. Yet that's what many people (not me, because it's exasperating!) use as their primary means of getting on-line, from what I see, most ESPECIALLY in China. As most besides the high-status Government types pretty much missed the whole Alexander Graham Bell landline era, I doubt many Chinamen had much in the way of desktop computers for very long before the time of the Apple iCrap.
The Chinese Government controls The Peoples' iEspionage devices in many ways, the most basic being the registration of the SIM cards. A National ID card - no simple piece of laminated card stock anymore - is needed to get a SIM card, and the number of them one may get is limited. We needed to borrow a phone belonging to a Chinese woman for some apps. I didn't want to get her in trouble looking at this or that, so I can't be sure it could also get any website I could on mine. I could see there possibly being a difference, even though we were, of course, using Chinese networks. Does my carrier have a deal with them in which the data is downloaded outside China on our normal network here, then sent along?
I don't know enough about it, so I'll stop here. Is there some fundamental computer-technological reason the Chinese Gov't can't block websites on phones?* It'd be cool if there were.
* Yahoo is a different story, as it was yahoo's call to NOT be accessible from China.
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Fall of Minneapolis - Last Responders
Posted On: Monday - December 11th 2023 7:04PM MST
In Topics: Lefty MegaStupidity Race/Genetics Legal Stupidity
(Caution: Reader discretion advised! There are references in this post to pieces of video containing very bad memories of plexiglas and face masks. Rated PG-19.)
I've read questions and discussion about the "First Responders"* and their role in the life and death of National Martyr George Floyd, that otherwise ordinary (for black reprobates) Monday in May of '20. We'll just go old-school here and call them EMS or ambulance drivers and firemen and -women.
That firewoman above is at-the-time 2-year employee of the Minneapolis Fire Department, one Genevieve Hansen. The screenshot above from The Fall of Minneapolis was taken in the courtroom during the criminal trial of cop Derek Chauvin. (The reader should start at the 55:45 mark.) She doesn't look good in it. I don't mean that just her non-girlish figure and the various dumb looks on her face. She comes across as completely for the Narrative of George Floyd the Martyr. Well, I suppose she was a witness for the prosecution (as far as I know), fair enough, but she can be seen as a bullshitter, to say the least.
The cops called a dispatcher for EMS 36 seconds after finally getting this guy pinned down. That's when they were sure he had medical problems, though they must have had a real clue since the time he rolled down the window of his car long before. At some point later, maybe a couple of minutes - no more than 9 - Miss Hansen was at the scene, but not on duty. She made an effort to ask the cops about EMS, and they told her something about it. At that point she became one with the on-looking harrassers, both unprofessional in actions and looks. The documentary shows all this.
Back to the trial, Miss Hansen told the attorney questioning her that she knew there was a Fire Station, #17, just a couple of blocks away. The question put to her was whether the cops were supposed to arrange that or the dispatchers. Of course the dispatchers do, and she had to know that already. I do, and I'm not a first, second, or even third responder (unless it's by accident). (Go to 57:12 in the documentary for this.) My question as the defense attorney x-examining this piece of work would have been "If the fire station is only 2 blocks away, why didn't YOU run down there yourself to alert someone, since the dispatchers were having miscommunications with the firemen?"
That was the deal - there was a delay (over 8 minutes) in the arrival of the ambulance - which came before any firemen, who had arrived, but at the Cup Foods, which was no longer where the cops and George Floyd were. It couldn't have been far, as the guy never ran, and the whole reason this controversial knee on the shoulder/neck move was done was because they never could get him fully into one of the police cars. Was that delay and miscommunications due to AA in the hiring of dispatchers? That's very possible, but I don't know.
The video shows transcription of a few calls related to this delay on the police radio. (@ 58:50.) See what you think.
Peak Stupidity will not analyze the whole Derek Chauvin/George Floyd story. There's the documentary, and our readers likely have found many sources and already formed solid opinions. There's one more small piece of the story I may write about, but it's only tangentially related to the whole thing.
It's time for something different tomorrow. Back to China? Not physically, but yeah...
* Actually he cops are considered to be First Responders too, but they are what this story is all about, their being there the whole time.
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The falls of Minneapolis and South Africa, and Alex Jones "on" Brian Seltzer
Posted On: Saturday - December 9th 2023 7:07PM MST
In Topics: Websites Humor Movies Pundits Race/Genetics Anarcho-tyranny Legal Stupidity
First off, it may seem like Peak Stupidity is nothing but a spin-off, as they used to say in TV land, of The Unz Review. I do take a lot of idea for posts off that site. I wouldn't say that's where all our news comes from, but it leads me pretty well to stories. Also, it's my go-to site for entertainment, especially for the posts from iSteve (Steve Sailer, that is.)
The first 2 of these 3 items today come from that site, so make of that what you will.
Jared Taylor is a race realist and the guy we featured in a short interview clip at the beginning of this week.* He puts together weekly posts on his American Renaissance site that get crossposted here on The Unz Review. I wrote "puts together" rather than "writes", as these are a mixture of short pieces of text, some pictures, and some video clips. I realized that his own video show does the same job of putting the same things together. Mr. Taylor speaks in a soft civil manner, always calm, collected, and reasonable.
This latest one about the fall of not Minneapolis (yet), but South Africa is only 13 minutes, but he does an excellent job in that time. The ruination of that once 1st-World country was the subject of an 8-part series here on Peak Stupidity earlier this year called Cry the DeConstructed Country. (See Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 - - Part 4: Anecdote on Anti-Apartheid - - Part 5: Cold and Hot Wars, and the Commies, of course - - Part 6: Africa Wins - - Part 7: 1st World Memories of Suid Afrikaanse Lugdiens and Part 8: As Falls S. Africa ....) This video goes right along with what we had to say, but his format is perhaps better.
From Jared Taylor's post Mooncalves at Harvard Think They Understand Africa:
What a sorry shame it is, all brought on by do-gooder Whites of the Western world, for the most part. It's just under 3 decades since White rule ended, and South Africa has first gradually, and lately, suddenly, gone to ruin. Please take the time to watch that short video.
Next, for those interested in The Fall of Minneapolis documentary, in addition to that review of ours, you will probably want to check out this review by one Anastasia Katz**. This one is so much more comprehensive than ours that we feel a bit embarrassed. However, I don't usually have time for something like that - yesterday's post was just a quick overview, and the idea was to help spread the video around. The comments under Miss Katz's review are fairly lit.
Finally, via a friend's link to ZeroHedge, I got to the Tucker Carlson interview of Alex Jones. They too, were pretty lit, as apparently, previous to the interview Mr. Jones made a prank phone call to one Brian Seltzer (of CNN) while drinking with Tucker Carlson. I'd never heard of the guy before, but Alex Jones has. This is not typical of the whole 1 hour, 35 minute interview, but, yeah, Alex Jones most definitely had heard of Brian Seltzer.
(Rumble lets one specify a start time, but not an end time, apparently. Give Tucker a chance to come back on and then give him ~20 more seconds.)
Whatever meds he's on, I want the opposite, Doc! OK, look, I like Alex Jones. He speaks a lot of truth. Besides all of the discussion in the whole interview, which I can't get into here, Mr. Jones has been a stalwart Constitutionalist in the past, back when there was still more of a point to it. His voice has improved a bit, part of the time too. However ... he can get a little, errrr, carried away? Nah, I think this is entertainment, and he loves it so. So does Tucker, So do I. I am smiling as I write this.
Is he even using a phase shifter at one point, you know, like Paul McCartney used to?
That was a busy blog week! We'll never run out of material, folks. Thanks for reading and writing in. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
* Additionally, we've written about him here and here.
** I had to guess on Miss vs. Mrs, as I couldn't find out much about her. She is wisely pretty anonymous. What I did find out is that, lo and behold, he writes for American Renaissance too here. In fact, I realize I'd read her previous article.
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Another Year, another dud
Posted On: Friday - December 8th 2023 5:23PM MST
In Topics: Movies Socialism/Communism
Since it's turning into movie week here at Peak Stupidity, we continue with a review of an actual fiction movie. This review of the '11 Cannes Film Festival-featured* Another Year will be fairly brief. "If you can't think of anything nice to say, ..." hasn't stopped us in the past, but this will be closer to taking that advice.
There was really no excuse for my having sat through this entire motion picture. True, it was free. However, after the first minute of the movie, I realized that this was one I'd borrowed from the library before. The first scene, which didn't really have squat-all to do with the movie plot, if you could call it that, showed a black lady doctor at the British National Health Service, or so I assume. (The characters spoke British English, and there being this doctor and the one very depressing insomniac patient, it must have been the NHS. That was depressing due to the Socialism alone.) Due to this politically correct scene at the very beginning, I had almost nothing invested, so I ejected this sucker last time.
Why did I venture further this time? I don't know. Even though the movie was free to watch for me (thanks property taxpayers!), my 2 hours and 9 minutes was worth something. Didn't the producers of Another Year realize that?
Here's the plot, such as it is: There's this older happily married couple. They do some gardening at a plot a drive away from their house, they have a son that visited later on in the movie, and their 35-40 y/o friend Mary from the lady of the house's workplace - that health service office - comes over a lot to share her troubles. There are four seasons of this in the movie.
Let me just say that Another Year may be a "slice of life" and very artsy and true-to-life. Sure, but, I really thought that, in those 2 hours and 9 minutes, something was gonna freaking happen! Nope.
The reader who has seen this picture may differ greatly in opinion. If you haven't seen it, you may want to read the synopsis and the high-rating reviews there on the IMDB page linked-to above. I went the other way for my after-viewing perusal of reviews. A guy named Gerry wrote:
2 hours and 5 minutes of an utter suicidal, depressive, boring image of life in the UK. I know its bad here in the UK but if this were a true example of life in the UK, then, I think there would be a huge outcry to legalise assisted suicide in this country.From a few more not-so-impressed reviewers:
No plot, no story development, no character development, characters come and go without warning and without any conclusion. How this can be nominated for an Oscar is beyond me. Yes we all know that award ceremonies these days are politically motivated, but what is the motivation behind this? 'Don't complain about life, it could be like this'.
It is like having a webcam on a series of uncomfortable gatherings that you can only be thankful you are not attending, except that you are paying to witness them instead. Two hours of my life that I will never get back and I would like a refund!You paid money, as in real British sterling? Sucker!
Having had 2 friends fall asleep whilst I watched it with them (one of which has never before fallen asleep in a film) proves my point at how excruciating this film is to watch.Welcome to the .... zzzzz... party(?), pal! I only fell asleep 2 or 3 times, but that's not unusual.
This film certainly aged me. 2 hours of plodding wooden drama with minimal interplay between the principals and almost no story development at all.Not every IMDB user thought these reviews helpful. Believe you me, they're helpful.
A great sense of relief came over me when the fade to screen indicated that it was over after a penultimate excruciatingly slow morose scene between 2 near mute characters.
My idea of hell would be dinner with the director of this leaden effort.
A totally joyless experience all round, in keeping with most of his body of work.
Thankfully it was half price day at the cinema so we only felt 1/2 cheated of our hard earned cash.
PS: I almost forgot - the movie was filmed in Derby and Derbyshire, England. Good job, John, getting out!
* Note to self: This year, spend more time at the gun range instead.
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The Fall of Minneapolis
Posted On: Thursday - December 7th 2023 9:33PM MST
In Topics: Movies Media Stupidity Race/Genetics ctrl-left Legal Stupidity
The astute, on-the-ball Peak Stupidity readers will have probably all heard of this documentary and many likely already watched it. I'll just refer to The Fall of Minneapolis as a movie here, and this will be a review, for those not sure if they want to spend the 1 hour and 42 minutes watching. The video appears below, but the link here goes to the movie on rumble in case you have any problems here (such as not being able to view full-screen, etc.)
There's no reason for me to go over the whole case here, of the death of fentanyl-overdosing, violent, reprobate George Floyd, the excuse for a summer or more of violence, looting, burning, and destruction, then the racially-motivated show trial. I'd learned a lot within a few days of what real story was more likely than that this poor innocent George Floyd was the victim of murder.
What really miffs me when I read arguments on-line today (with the news of Derek Chauvin having been stabbed 22 times in the Federal prison in Tucson) is that it’s taken 3 years for people to get the story! Maybe it’s because I DIDN’T watch TV news on the story that I DID know what really happened – not all details, mind you, but the gist of it – within a couple of weeks.
I’m not a cop, forensic expert, lawyer, any of that. I just read things and pulled up video at the time. Some of it has indeed been censored. Maybe the public will SOMEDAY, EVENTUALLY learn that they will be more informed if they don’t watch the standard Lyin’ Press Narrative Infotainment. It shouldn’t take this long, to where the man got railroaded in a coerced Stalinist show trial after pressure from months of Black Looter Mayhem and antifa Commie destruction and threats.
OK, about The Fall of Minneapolis now: The title doesn't really fit well, first of all. This movie is not so much about the decline of the city of Minneapolis due to the the death of St. Floyd and the resulting mayhem. It's about the actions that took place that May 25th of '20, the initial portion of the rioting and destruction with an emphasis on the 3rd Precinct police station, the railroading of Derek Chauvin in his trial, and interviews with many people involved, including Mr. Chauvin himself (only audio, from prison).
I would apportion the duration of discussion in the movie as such:
20 minutes: The arrest and attempted booking of George Floyd, with bodycam and other footage. This footage was tedious just watching, much worse for the cops trying to put this dumb, drugged-up reprobate into the cop car. He wouldn’t let them put him in the back, and he is a big guy. It was that, or I guess, as Steve Sailer says, you don’t arrest Black! people if they don’t want to be arrested, and too bad about the counterfeit twenties being passed around… and the woman threatened by Floyd with a gun to her pregnant belly.
The cops called the EMS early on, but the firemen went to the wrong location (quite likely due to incompetent AA dispatchers that can’t communicate well) and the ambulance took forever.
20 minutes: The first few days of destruction - protesting, looting, and burning. This included a pretty long segment about the abandonment then of the 3rd precinct (police station). I gotta say, though that evacuation under pressure from a violent mob must have been stressful, I really didn't appreciate seeing the police officials involved breaking into tears in the interviews. That'd be the women for the most part. Come on. I'm sorry, but I can think of things to cry about later, but that wasn't it. Perhaps these women shouldn't be involved next time. Its' one thing for the Mayor of Minneapolis Jake Frey to make big fake sobs at St. Floyd's funeral - he's a politician - but those big men doing that fake tear-wiping thing... please stop.
10 minutes: The movie focused on the Lyin' Press infotainment that stirred up the mob, politicians such as that evil Mayor Frey and Bai Dien himself, and then the Black! Reverend grifters and that crowd.
5 minutes: The question of exactly how George Floyd died is important, and the first autopsy that showed he didn't die by
20-25 minutes: Derek Chauvin's trial was a big part of the movie. I'll write about a few aspects of this in another post.
15- 20 minutes: There were interviews with cops involved with the trial and the Moms of both Derek Chauvin and Alex Keung, one of the other 3 cops present - he was sentenced to 3 years behind bars, I believe. Then, there were short phone interviews with both Mr. Chauvin and Mr. Keung from prison.
As I noted in the beginning, the whole event of this convenient excuse for BLM/antifa to run amok about the city of Minneapolis (first) was not the story here. The movie was mostly centered on the happening on the street that one day, and the things that the Minneapolis cops, especially the one guy, experienced in the aftermath. It is a movie made from the viewpoint of the cops.
That doesn't mean it's not worth watching for anyone else. The 01:42 was not a waste of my time, even though I'd known a lot of it. I'd not followed the court case though, so that part was somewhat new to me.
One would like to think that those who have pushed the black awokening business to near the brink since the Summer of '20 would have something to gain by watching this movie. I know better. They don't want to learn something, for lots of them, something that they already know. They are not interested in the truth, just power. They gained a lot of power by taking advantage of the death of that stupid worthless reprobate George Floyd. Lots of Americans are complicit in giving them this power by acquiescing to the following years of bullshit.
Here's the movie:
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Spies Like Us, starring Manuel Rocha
Posted On: Wednesday - December 6th 2023 7:50PM MST
In Topics: Commies Immigration Stupidity US Feral Government
I don't know if anyone cares anymore, people under 40 knowing pretty much nothing of the Cold War, or any history not on twitter, but the infiltration of Communists into the US Feral Gov't was a Big Thing. I'd heard of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) of the House of Reps from its heyday in the 1950's. (This resulted bitching Hollywood stars who were on blacklists, because ... they were Communists.) I'd heard of the Venona Transcripts, important evidence of espionage in telegraph form, a small percentage of which was released in the early '90s.
It wasn't until I read M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted by History a year and a half ago that I got a bigger picture. Much of the espionage and Communist influence was happening within the US State Department, a natural thing to have done if you want to have changed the policy of the most powerful nation in the world.
Well, it STILL IS! It's not one of their normal reporting subjects, but since the guy, one Manuel Rocha, was an immigrant, VDare's A.W. Morgan posted yesterday: Immigrant Former U.S. Ambassador Spied For Cuba Since 1981. That's 42 years of a naturalized citizen working against his adoptive nation!. Surely he was vetted ...
Spy Manuel Rocha started in the State Dept. He ended as head of the military Southern Command, one of 11 unified Combatant Commands (COCOMs) in the Department of Defense. He headed up the portions of the military operating in Central and South America and the islands of the Caribbean. No conflict of interest there, I assure you.... A.W. Morgan included a long biography within the US Gov't that anyone "serving" his country may consider a distinguished career. That's not the case, though. It's been learned finally that this was a career that only Mr. Rocha's Mother, the old Commies Senator McCarthy was after, and Fidel Castro would have been proud of.
Again, doing the jobs that (most) Americans just won't do ...
PS: Rocha stared his career just a year or two after Castro's Cast-outs, the Mareil boatlift. One may wonder if he was one of those 125,000 mostly criminal Cubans who came to Florida to help America, or something. OTOH, most of them would have hated Castro.
PPS: Peak Stupidity has posted info on Chinese spies, here, here, and here, also using information reported on VDare. From my personal knowledge and other reading, they don't seem to concentrate on the State Dept. It'd be more like industrial spying from both private industry and university and National high-tech labs and such.
* Ha, history.com says here that this was going on "... during the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s." Oh, Communism was real enough, Ministry-of-Truth Channel.com!
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ThreeCranes on a not-so-glorious future
Posted On: Wednesday - December 6th 2023 1:51PM MST
In Topics: Commies Globalists The Future Bible/Religion
Unz Review commenter ThreeCranes, a technical guy, as I recall, wrote a long gloomy comment about Wokeness and the future that was pretty interesting to me and worth sharing.
Here it is in its entirety:
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The current establishment throws stones at “the Far Right” secure in the knowledge that their police and military will protect them from reprisal. They truly ARE privileged in that they exist in a feedback free world.
But one day, the soldier or policeman wakes up, sees clearly and decides not to open fire upon others like himself who are not privileged with immunity and instead turns around and confronts those behind him who had been goosing him on.
The entire propaganda effort of all the establishment news sources is dedicated to putting off that momentous turnabout. Will they succeed? Can reality be denied forever? Can the grain of the Universe be perpetually plowed against?
Taoism tells us, “No.” But is Taoism correct?
The Communists thought, “Yes. If we control all sources of information available in a society, we can dictate the thoughts in the HiveMind so thoroughly that none can wander off the plantation.”
This is the reason Wokeness must be constantly upheld, the battle joined against the unwoke every moment of every day, the incessant pressure inside the minds of the Woke that drives them half nuts to the point that they need to medicate themselves with anti-depressants washed down with a twenty eight dollar bottle of red.
Their need for conformity is so great that they will gladly kill us just to relieve the tension throbbing in their brains that is caused by their religious yearning for Absolute Peace and Silence for God’s sake “What is wrong with you people?” as they listen to NPR telling them that if you get the shot you will not, repeat NOT, catch Covid.
And then the whole stinkin’ lot of them, the Royal Families, the Biden Crime Family etc. come down with the disease so there’s no one left to blame but they push the shot anyway as though no one could grasp, understand that the damn thing was a hoax and useless and, amazingly enough, the same gullible Fools lined up for yet another booster even after the curtain had been pulled aside.
What is wrong with the people who ask “What is wrong with these people?” is that they are asking the wrong people about the wrong people. They side with their jailer. They are Kapos who act as though their privileges were dependent upon the degree to which they keep their charges, the irredeemable basket of Deplorables, in line.
But the day will come when a liberating army appears on the horizon and the Officers and camp guards will flee, the Kapos will be left to take the blame and they will be strung up by their heels in the public square and for just one moment the Sun will stand still in the sky at high noon and the world will enjoy a moment’s respite from the free for all catch as catch can that is our daily run of affairs and all will take one deep breath.
Well, one can dream.
I believe our current system is the perpetuation of the prison camp system which came into widespread usage before, during and after WW2. Virtually all combatants took part in this phenomenon, became adept at it and carried it forward into what we live in today, the present era.
We live in a work camp, where labor is herded around by the needs of the Machine as it is administered by lab-coated technicians, their efficiency now augmented with computerization of practically everything, supplemented by vast data collection capabilities which can see into every nook and cranny of an individual’s life. “Individual” is the wrong word here since there are none. The system relentlessly hammers down the oddball nail that sticks up.
There are still pockets of freedom where one can live free from the prying eye of the all powerful great Eye in the Sky, but they must be sought out. Most inmates have no interest in doing so, voluntarily wearing their prisoner ID bracelet i.e. carrying their cell phones, with them at all times, voluntarily beaming information up to their Father God, please forgive us for we have sinned, just our mere existence is sin, we were born into it through no fault of our own yet we are still responsible for it and not You, oh Great One who has made us in your image but not quite because thou art perfect and we stand in need of Your benevolent redemption so watch over us and the group of Shylocks who invented this steaming bucket of crap laugh as they defraud these poor lost souls, deprive them of their dignity and feed them media swill and insect slops and whip the poor buggers to death as in Dostoevsky’s novel the poor horse till it drops to its knees and the enraged Master whips it all the harder to get it to stand back up in the traces.
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The last paragraph, starting at "up to their Father God..." is not something that I particularly agree with. It may have a different meaning, depending on whether the writer meant to put a comma, where I have one [in bold] here:
"... and we stand in need of Your benevolent redemption so watch over us [,] and the group of Shylocks who invented this steaming bucket of crap laugh as they defraud these poor lost souls, deprive them of their dignity and feed them media swill and insect slops and whip the poor buggers to death...I like the part about Communism, of course. As for this last part, I don't see our getting out of this mess easily without some strong beliefs in forces greater than ours.
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Nimarata, the Koch brother, the AFP, the Donald, and some dude on my lawn
Posted On: Tuesday - December 5th 2023 6:54PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Trump Globalists
(Image copied from VDare.)
VDare's Washington Watcher II put together an article connecting 4 of those 5 entities. The last one is from me. WWII explains that Kochtopus Endorsement Of Haley Shows Its True Open Borders Colors—And Hers. We explained the Nimarata moniker before, and the regular Peak Stupidity should know that we are not at all fans of this Globalist traitor to South Carolina and wannabe traitor to America.
VDare cares nearly only, and above all, about the immigration invasion, and this lady is all for it. (Yeah, she decried the importation of Moslems on account of the current excitement level of people her ilk have imported. She doesn't mind inviting in all the rest of the world and even those types again when the heat is off.)
One of the pro-open-borders Koch brothers has died a while back. ("Koch" rhymes with coke, the soft drink or the drug.) We can't say Koch Brothers now, and since I don't know the one guy left's name - don't wanna know - we can, per the article, at least be aware of his organization. That would be the AFP (Americans For Prosperity - a dumb name if I ever heard one - hey, Koch, who the hell ISN'T for prosperity?)
The AFP has never made an endorsement for a Presidential candidate before, they say, but, because, per this announcement of theirs a week back, "Donald Trump and Joe Biden will only further perpetuate the country’s downward spiral in politics.", they endorse Nimarata Randhawa Halley of Dillon,
Anyway, the same day that this article came out I saw someone on the walkway headed away from the house. It turned out he'd hung a flyer on our doorknob that advised us to vote for Nimarata. By the time I saw it, I had already walked out to see what the young guy wanted. There was no point in being rude, so I just asked him if he wanted the flyer back. This guy's golf-style shirt had the letters AFP. Whaddya' know, I'd just read the VDare article that day. These people are fast!
The young man admitted that he knew not much about Mrs. Haley, but this AFP organization had just put a lot of money into her campaign, so that's good, right? Well, I had to fill him in, as he told me straight up that he didn't know who he would vote for, and, this is just a job, because the campaign has all that money now. I explained things. After giving the guy a bottle of water and offering him a banana (he's paid by the hour), I went through just a little bit of politics with him. I explained what was completely wrong with Nimarata Haley, and gave a him short run-down on the pros of Ron DeSantis and the pros and cons of Donald Trump.
From Washington Watcher II's article again, I will demonstrate one of the cons of the latter guy to the Peak Stupidity readers. This is his reply to the news about the AFP and Haley.
Hey, it starts out good. Nah, I don't like "DeSanctimoneous", not because it's any kind of insult, but more like because it's NOT. It's just lame, because it means nothing, as that's not a DeSantis trait at all. Stick with the simple stuff like "Birdbrain". I like that one, as it fits, and not enough people use "birdbrain" anymore.**
Yes, "Americans for China [sic] Prosperity" and Making America, not the outside, World Great Again!", I like that. Hit 'em hard with the truth. After "birdbrain", it goes wrong. She said a lot of shit, and your dumb ass appointed this NeoCon Globalist as head of the UN, remember? Don't take it personally. "She better start running FAST!" It's not a horse race, man. Bragging about your "standings" is not helpful. Brag about not starting wars. Brag about slowing immigration way down and being ready to shut it down and start deporting. FOCUS, Trump, FOCUS!
I wish I had more time to talk to the young guy passing out flyers who didn't know much about politics, but he had a 1" stack of them still to hand out. I gave him mine back to save the planet.
* h/t to Steve Sailer
** "Jackass" too. Not enough people use "jackass". I hope that will come back in vogue some time soon.
Comments (12)
Chedderflation
Posted On: Tuesday - December 5th 2023 9:58AM MST
In Topics: Humor Inflation
Yes, these inflation posts (and titles) are getting pretty cheesy.
One last inflation by deflation observation before we get off this kick for a while. Geeze, Louise, have you looked at the prices of cheese? Yeah, well, this name brand cheese from the fancier grocery store is what I'd been getting semi-regularly a while back. Besides the many delicious varieties, there were variations in what you get in a package.
My 12 y/o noted that the number of slices varied, but I explained we'd best compare them by weight. "Those 12 slices here might still be less cheese than the 10 slices there." He got it. The packages were either 8 oz (1/2 lb) or 1 lb. The lb. packages were usually a slightly better deal, and sales would often be only on certain types of cheese. Anyway, beside prices having gone up 25%, I'd guess, selection was easy, cheesy.
Not anymore, it isn't. You may have to perform gay gestures with your fingers or mash ctrl+ on a real computer to zoom in, but you'll see that now the package weights vary... always lower, of course. There is an 8 oz package, a 7 oz package and a 6 oz package. Note that the number of slices isn't linear with weight, just as it wasn't before.
OK, how are they going to do this? Does a computer program work out the best way to fool people or at least get them on-board. I could see a pretty sophisticated program, written by John Derbyshire with his higher math background, being used. With the input of massive amounts of sales data for the various sizes, sharpnesses of the cheddars, elasticity of the Swiss*, different store chains where people are known to be dumber or smarter, 1st derivatives - changes in sales per rate of decrease in mass, 2nd derivatives... it might take 25,000 lines of optimization code written by the best geeks Bombay has to offer.
Great work, marketing gurus, but now shopping for cheese is NOT easy. Cheeze whiz, I hope, still comes in similar weight cans as it did in my day, after subtracting propellant:
* Economists say that demand for Swiss cheese is inelastic, but I say that theory is full of holes.
Comments (6)
Jaredai Taylorsan on the rights of the Huwhiteodomo
Posted On: Monday - December 4th 2023 4:06PM MST
In Topics: Pundits Race/Genetics
OK, so don't nobody wanna talk about 2 by 2's and Moments of Inertia. Fine! (I don't blame ya'.) Though I have one more inflation by deflation post coming - nothing to do with lumber and there will be no math - now for something completely different.
The following 7-odd minute video is part (it can't be all, I'm sure) of an interview of Racial Realist Jared Taylor some members of the Japanese press. Mr. Taylor is founder of "AmRen" or the American Renaissance organization. It is strongly and unabashedly pro White people. Mr. Taylor is a tough bird, I gotta say, not just to say certain obvious things publicly - when they let him, but to always stay so calm under pressure.
In the comment thread of the Unz Review link above, I found a tweet with this pretty cool video. The way I am with searches - I try the obvious first - doesn't freaking work - I feel lucky to have gotten this one on bitchute.
As soon as you get started, you may be shocked to see that everyone is speaking Japanese. Usually, everyone around the world caters to English speakers, but Jared Taylor speaks fluent Japanese. I know he lived in Japan for quite a few years (don't know at what ages), but this is still impressive. And, yes, the two Japanese women are pretty cute - does that explain Jared Taylor's having lived in Japan for quite a few years?
I can also say that is really nice to see these three journalists hear Jared Taylor out. OTOH, boy do they come into this with a plethora of ignorance*, well, it must be blissful.
* @ 01:20: "But man's equality is written under the Declaration of Independence." Dude, please! First of all, "under" it? I know Olde English is not your first language, but that says "John Hancock' under there. Secondly, the Declaration was a statement - it's not the law. Finally, I guess plenty of Americans don't understand that Jefferson's point was about equal treatment under the law and endowment of natural rights either so what can we expect?
Comments (6)
Inflation by Deflation - building materials Part 2 x 2: Tables
Posted On: Monday - December 4th 2023 8:53AM MST
In Topics: Science Inflation
(Continued from here.)
Yes, this stuff will end, I promise. After all, this site is called Peak Stupidity, not Peak Solid Mechanics. I just want to finish what I started. The "table" in our title today has 2 meanings:
1) 2 x 2's are not thought of as structural lumber, but they can be used as such, and my use of 1 x 2's and 2 x 2'sfor a table I made* is an example.
2) I wanted to put my numbers from Saturday in a couple of nice tables.
2 points should be mentioned. One is that my rounding is off (1% pt) from my previous post.
Secondly, note the last row. If one doesn't care about any of this structural stuff, that is just the decrease in material in mass and volume. Because that's just based on cross-sectional area (they surely won't change length off of the Nominal, will they?), the numbers are the same as for Axial Loading "strength", also based on cross-sectional area. The point is just "how much wood am I getting for my money?"
Just as in the last post, let me tabulate the decreases from a mythical piece of wood with a 2 inch by 2 inch cross-section
OK, fine, last week was inflation week, carrying over into this week, so what about all this? Wood is still not so dear (British terminology) that we don't build nice solid outdoor furniture, for example, that is surely not going to fail, just based on common sense. I.e., it's not something we need to do this engineering on, probably.
That's if you don't build thousands of some item like this as a business. At that point, one may calculate that he needs to use more wood in his structure. That would be this inflation by deflation in action. If nothing else, for our general readership, at least we can look at that last row - how much wood for our money, and think of it just as with containers of Dannon coffee-flavored yogurt. They're making it smaller, so if it's a regular purchase, we're going to have to buy more of it to keep up.
But wait, there's LESS! Adam Smith brought up a good point, using the image below. (A description is in the original. Look at the difference:
Let's talk solid mechanics for just a little longer. Yes, pulling a nail out may demonstrate the difference it inherent strengths of the new vs old wood. I used no quotes this time, because that's just it: inherent "ultimate strength" and other values are obtained by testing material samples in the simplest loading - Axial. A tension test is done using a big machine to pull the sample apart very slowly while taking both load and deformation (stretching) readings.
The breaking strength, a property of say, yellow pine or oak, but also, per Mr. Smith's point, lumber from older vs newer trees, can be compared to the stresses determined by the type of work seen in Saturday's post. It gets a lot more complicated than this, but to put it simply, when stress = strength, it breaks.
Let me digress to that "deformation" measurement. It's important for other reasons, but note that there is that E (Modulus of Elasticity) in the buckling formulae. Also, stress (to compare to strength) does NOT appear. As I said, buckling, being a phenomena of instability, is an odd duck. The critical buckling load is not a function of the inherent strength of the material, but it IS a function of that Modulus, a property that represents elasticity, that is the inverse of stiffness.
We get values of E from tensile tests. Interestingly, E does not very much at all for a same type of material. For example, an alloy of steel can have 3 x the ultimate strength of another alloy of steel, but their E's will not be significantly different. For wood loaded in the grain direction, as both the new and old would be, I also wouldn't expect much of a difference in E, so the buckling "strength" for columns made out of each would be close to the same.
That's not the same for their ultimate strengths, so as to Inflation, the nominal(?) point here, the older stuff gives more for one's money if used structurally and not just for its decorative value at the lodge. I will say that those older 2 x 2's I bought and used in the '90s were probably similar to the current ones in this respect, but who knows? That's just another form of inflation (decrease in value).
I will leave that strength reduction out here and even all the reductions in loading, and get back to the basics. Even here, I will unfortunately have to guess a price for a '90s 2 x 2, but I'll try my best and be conservative. I know that 8 ft. 2 x 4's were in the range of a buck and a quarter or so. (Chime in PLEASE if you have some hard memory on this - I'll change this post.) 8 ft. 2 x 2's couldn't have been more that 75 ¢. Those were not pressure-treated, so I'll compare apples to apples. Let's use that and the current 1.3215" square vs the '90s 1.5" square - a reduction in material to 78% - and the $3.35 (yikes!!) I saw on the Lowes website.
That's 4.7 x the price for a piece of wood, but with the material reduction, 5.7 x the price per volume of wood.*** Over to the MoneyChimp site calculator for the compounding bit: After plugging in 30 years (1993 to 2023) the Chimp says: 6.0% average inflation rate compounded.
Yep. Much of it was recent. You really did that, Zhou! "Awww, shucks ... I had lots of help, from the FED and the PanicFest."
* There were 4 at one point, but some went missing.
** The reason for the quotes was explained previously, but it should be more clear from material later in this post.
*** I was about the write "weight", but, as discussed above, the wood just may be less dense than the '90s stuff.
Comments (4)
Inflation by Deflation - building materials Part 2 x 2.2
Posted On: Saturday - December 2nd 2023 9:23AM MST
In Topics: Science Inflation
This post is a follow-up to both Thursday's Inflation by Deflation - building materials Part 2 x 2 and our 5 y/o post Inflation by Deflation - building materials version. Why is it "2.2" in the title? We're still talking wooden 2 x 2's [sic] here, but, (call it) the 2nd, "2" is now on its 3rd iteration from my adult recollection of dimensions, 1.5" to 1.4" to, now 1.3125" (1 5/16"). (You too may be wondering about the 1.4", which is not a round English unit value. Perhaps it's off by a slight amount, but it wouldn't be much.)
OK, if I'm going to get into structures a bit, I have to put down a number of caveats here. These slides I found have "formulae" for 3 types of loading. Please realize that there is indeed a lot more to it. A non-Engineer who figures "I can design an experimental airplane because I have a copy of this Finite Element Analysis software" is not necessarily the guy to ride along with on the first test flight. There is much more too it, and blindly following analysis software or formulae without knowing more of the theory usually gives bad numbers.
Firstly, no, 1 x 2's and 2 x 2's are not considered residential structural lumber, as was argued to me in comments on The Unz Review. I get that, but that doesn't mean I haven't used it as such. The table top I mentioned had both types in it, and the idea was to support things. That's structural. Many other uses may be structural. Mostly, sure, these are "furring" strips, used for spacing and attachment* of siding or whatever - even that spacing difference screws things up for us though. For the 2 x 2's, since 2 of them don't match up to a 2 x 4, their use around window framing or whatever may be precluded.
Secondly, regarding the engineering calculations, when it comes to using wood (or anything) structurally, usually we're talking about a more complicated arrangement. 2 x 4's are spaced inside sheetrock as a wall, and columns are made of multiple pieces and all that. Still the basic strength differences, new v old, hold when we go from the simple case to the complicated, i.e. real, application.
Thirdly, I've been writing "strength", but it's not the theoretically precise way to discuss structures, just as, well, good luck getting a mechanic to say "36 psi" is your tire pressure rather than the colloquial "36 pounds". What follows is the same as the footnote in that old 1 x 2 post. This is in regard to discussion of bending, but it applies generally:
Technically, the highest stress in the wood in bending occurs at the outside, it's this stress that goes up inversely with the square of thickness (linear with the other dimension, BTW). We should think of the strength of the material as a property of the stuff, whether, in this case, say yellow pine or poplar. We end up with higher stress in the same strength material which means colloquially "lower strength".Finally, these calculation are based on homogeneous, isotropic materials. The first means material with even properties throughout, and the second (this IS different) means that these properties are equal along all three directions. Well, guess what, wood is neither. As far as homogeneity, on the scale we're using it, it's just a matter of knots and such that make it non-homogeneous. That's part of what safety factors are for. Wood is most certainly NON-isotropic, but these kinds of loading will have the grain direction as the important one. Therefore, we can get a fairly decent number for strength of yellow pine, poplar, whatever it is and a somewhat decent number for that "E" (Modulus of Elasticity, the inherent stiffness of the material) used in the buckling formula.
I'm sorry that ALL THAT had to be said before I get started. Were I knot to (typo intended), it would be fair for someone to give me grief about that. Also, in the calculations below, keep in mind that I'm not taking material strength of the wood itself - see Adam Smith's link under the recent post, as that has gone down too. Let's hold that all equal as the same quick-growth lumber, which IS probably the case from the 1990s on. When I write "strength" here, I really mean the ability to hold a certain loading with a certain geometry vs using the older and bigger material.
Now, for the fun part:
Axial loading, whether compression (with a caveat to check for buckling) or tension is very simple. Stresses are the same throughout the cross-section. The simple "normal" (away from or into the surface) are F/A.
Simple, so let's do this. That X-sectional area of these 2 x 2's has gone from 2.25 in2 in the '90s (call them size "A") to 1.96 in2 at least 5 years back (B) to 1.72 in2 recently (C). Therefore, in axial loading, buckling (of long pieces in compression) excluded for now, B pieces are 87% of the strength of A's, while C pieces are only 77% as strong. Now, if we compare to that mythical(?) ACTUAL 2" x 2" cross-section, we get a reduction to 56% axial loading strength A's, to 49% for B's, and to 43% for the newest, the C's.
There is quite a bit to analysis of bending, not least the loading itself, which comes in in that "M", the bending Moment. Some may prefer to think of a torque, but torque is usually thought of about an (almost always) round axis. Moment is more general. That "moment" is not to be confused with the name for the capital "I' terms. That is Moment of Inertia, which is a geometric property of the cross-section. There's a nice little piece of Calculus behind it, but for a rectangle, I is 1/12 bh3. Wait, which side is "b", the base, you ask, and which is "h", the height"? "b" is the side parallel to the axis about which the beam is being bent. For most uses of 2 x 4's in bending, for obvious reasons, b is the short side, the 1.5". (Note which "b" v "h" gives the higher I.) I wrote that for the general rectangular case, but then we have a square here. I = 1/12 x actual dimension4.
That "c" is the distance to the outer "fiber" (they call it), where the highest normal stress is produced. (It's 0 at the centerline.) For this simple rectangular cross-section, c = h/2.
All other things equal besides our having gotten cheated out of material year by year, the bending stress, hence the reduction in strength, goes inversely with the base (b), and inversely with the square of the height (h), of the cross-section. (Note that I goes as the cube of h, but then c, hence h, appears again in the numerator of the formula.) For a square, then, strength of the structure very simply goes down inversely with b3.
Let's do the calculation for bending normal stress for the 3 square cross-sections. B's have 81% of the bending strength of A's, and C's have 67% of that of A's. Starting from that old mythical wood straight outta Sherwood Forest, we get reductions to 42%, to 34%, and to 28% for A's, B's, and C's, respectively.
As a type of loading, buckling is really an odd duck. If you note the formulae, stress in the material, to be compared with its inherent strength, is not in there. That's because buckling is a phenomenon of instability not strength. At a certain critical loading of a column, any slight offset of the load from the centroidal axis** results in bending, but generally columns don't "do" bending. The more the bending deformation (deflection), the higher the offset becomes, increasing the bending moment more, an unstable situation that's really not good for anybody. (Ha, but, there's a lot more to this also. The end "conditions" - how the column is attached to the other structure - are important, as we see in our nice graphic.)
There's that Moment of Inertia for the cross-section again. That's where the changed dimensions come in. Same thing, I = 1/12 bh3 = 1/12 b4 for this square cross-section.
For other things equal, the end conditions, that material property, E for the type of wood, etc, we'll do this buckling load comparison. In this case, I really shouldn't use the word "strength" at all. I'll just refer to how much that critical buckling load - the max limit - is reduced.
Critical load for buckling for B's is 76% of that for A, and for C's it is down to 57%. As compared to the 2 x 2's used in that old mead lodge, we're talking 31%, 24%, and 19% for A's, B's, and C's, respectively.
That's a lot of numbers, so I may make a nice table elsewhere, take a screenshot, and put that in another post. Suffice it to say that, not only are we getting screwed by obvious huge price increases in lumber, but this cross-sectional-dimension version of inflation by deflation is bringing the strength of our wood down, meaning we need more to do the same job.
... and this was to be a short post. Ya' see what I mean?!
* Attaching siding or whatever to a narrower piece can reduce strength of the project too, depending on the application.
** This involves another Calculus-adjacent property of areas (the cross-section again, in this case), the Centroid. It's all cool stuff, IMO.
*******************************
[UPDATE 12/02 Eve:] Oops, I = 1/12 bh3. Had left out the 1/12, very important, of course to get the actual number, but it washes out in the comparisons anyway. [NOBODY CARES! - Ed.]
*******************************
Comments (4)
Peter Brimelow speaks
Posted On: Friday - December 1st 2023 7:42PM MST
In Topics: Commies Immigration Stupidity Pundits Anarcho-tyranny Legal Stupidity
Of the 2 videos embedded here, only the 1st one is really about Peter Brimelow (along with VDare, the castle, etc.) It is an interview OF him, while the second one is a video BY him. I meant to post something about the first one when I first saw it, about some specific point important to me. (... which I'll add when I watch it again and remember what it was!)
What does link these 2 videos is that both of them talk about Communists, using the term liberally, well Classical Liberally, how about?
I can't say I'm responsible for many more VDare writers calling the ctrl-left of today what I call them, but I was ahead of them on this anyway.
A little over 2 weeks back, James Fulford posted Full Video Of Peter Brimelow On Infowars Discussing Letitia James’ Attack On VDARE.com. InfoWars' Harrison Smith is the interviewer for this 20 minute segment.
Then, yesterday, Pat Cleburne posted Wondering Why U.S. Immigration Policy Is Run By Communists? LISTEN To Diana West And Peter Brimelow!. Though it's more of a conversation too, Peter Brimelow asks lots of question of Diana West here. I had never heard of her before (or don't remember hearing...), but I sure like her opinions! The two talk about the connection between the Communism of old and that of today. Mrs. West doesn't see much difference at all between the left of today and that of yesteryear. I beg to differ: Hair dye, tattooes, large-sized yoga pants... The Bolsheviks didn't have any of that stuff.
Here's the first video in which the Lawfare by the Commie Letitia James of NYC against VDare is discussed, along with other Anarcho-Tryanny:
Here's the second video in which Diana West and Peter Brimelow converse about her work and then about the history of leftist infiltration into American Gov't and then all the Institutions.
I haven't finished this one - I will later on. It's very enjoyable hearing people you like discuss the truth.
PS: I felt lucky to get either of these, much less both, to embed here. The first is on rumble, and the second is on bitchute.
Comments (12)
Inflation by Deflation - building materials Part 2 x 2
Posted On: Thursday - November 30th 2023 10:10PM MST
In Topics: Economics Inflation
After that long treatise(?) about the Great German Hyperinflation of one century ago, I figured this would be Inflation Week, here at Peak Stupidity. In other words, for the same donations, you'll get fewer posts. No, that's not ...
Time really flies! It's been 5 years since I wrote this post about the shrinkage of 1 x 2's, and that came out of my having purchased some pieces of 1 x 2 [sic] for the top surface of an outdoor table. It seems like I did that work recently! You can read that post, but I'll just say here the change was marked and very obvious, even before I broke out the calipers.
Anyway, I started a way O/T discussion on an iSteve thread about the shrinkage of bigger lumber, such as some 2 x 8's, being under the mistaken impression that they had shrunk in width (the "8" inch dimension) recently. I was about to write a post here, but, as much as he won't stop arguing, I'm glad Jack D (along with commenter Res, but he with less certainty) corrected me. I had been wrong for years in thinking that all the "Two by" lumber had actual dimensions of 1 1/2" x [nominal - 1/2"] That is true for 2 x 4's and 2 x 6's, but the wider stuff is 1 1/2" x [nominal - 3/4"]. OK, fine, but I have another example that IS true and is pretty damned egregious.
That would be the cough, cough, 2 x 2's, spit. Maybe a reader here would have a more recent and/or precise date, but I do know that through the fairly late 1990s, I would use these on projects, and they would be 1 1/2" x 1 1/2". Because I'd used a few pieces for that same table 5 years back, I can say that the size of this wood has been reduced significantly before that time. I just don't know how long beforehand. Yes, it's significant when they used to look a bit like lumber, and now they look more like walking sticks.
To get data on the old stuff, I went out to the garage with my nice dial calipers I "obtained"* long ago. After scraping the edges and some dirt off, I got just a couple of thousandths under 1.5" for the one dimension and 20 thousandths over for the other. (You could tell these things were ripped, as in sawn the long way, so that explains the difference. I'm not sure if other 2 x 2's of the day were milled on all surfaces, but ones on my old porch are ripped too.)
Then, I found I had a perfect example of the modern 2 x 2 vs the older ones, side by side:
They are both 2 x 2's. The reason the front one looks like it has a rectangular x-section is because I have a 45 deg. cut there for looks.
That's that very same small table. This holds some firewood. It used to be inside, but the wife demanded it go out, so I replaced the maple top, luckily just screwed on, with those spit, 1 x 2's. I had the old 2 x 2's as part of the structure way before, but 5 years ago put 2 little sections for support (with diagonal cuts for looks), screwed right on. The old and the new are happily both flush with another surface at their tops. So I got to use the depth gauge feature of my nice calipers. They showed 0.098 on the dial. Yep, down from 1.5" square to 1.4" square, old to new.
But, WAIT, as they say, there's MORE! MORE inflation, that is, meaning even less material. I went to the Lowes website:
I enlarged it this time. Wow! They're down to 1 5/16" square now.
Wait, at least one more exclaimation point is needed. Five oh freaking eight?!! (Yeah, 2 will do.) That piece would have been 45¢ or something 30 years ago, and with much more material to boot! (One more.)
I'm too pooped tonight, but I'll do some axial loading, bending, and buckling calculations tomorrow. I'll also figure out an inflation rate based on both price and mass of material. Can't they just up the price but leave the dimensions alone?! This is exasperating.
PS: Sorry to the readers who can only deal in SI units. Being a curmudgeon and an American both, I am happy to stay in English units for most things. Also, though, this wood is all dimensioned both nominally and actually in round numbers in English units.
* There is a story behind that which might be worth a post here. It's about bureaucracy and patience.
Comments (8)
Let the candy floss your head, on Sugar Mountain
Posted On: Wednesday - November 29th 2023 6:00PM MST
In Topics: Music China
Not Sugar Mountain, far as I know. This is in China, where they're not big fans of sugar. They sure do have some hairy terrain though. From one direction this wall looked over vertical.
We'll do that song-out-of-the-blue thing again today, as in the old days of the blog. When he wrote this great folk song in 1964, Neil Young was referring to his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but this makes me think of North Carolina. There is a Sugar Mountain there.
This song never made it to an album until long after, with Mr. Young's big (3 vinyl record) Decade compilation. From wiki regarding this song:
On the bootleg album Live on Sugar Mountain, released just days after the concert at which it was recorded (on February 1, 1971, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles), Young talks at length about the lyrics. He says that when he first wrote the song, he wrote 126 verses to it." Now, you can imagine that I had a lot of trouble figuring out what four verses to use... I was underneath the stairs at the time... Anyway, this verse that I wrote... It was the worst verse of the 126 that I wrote. So, I decided to put it in the song, just to give everybody a frame of reference as to, you know, what can happen. What I'm trying to say is, by stopping in the middle of the song, and explaining this to you, is that... I think it's one of the lamest verses I ever wrote. And, uhh...it takes a lotta nerve for me to get up here and sing it in front of you people. But, if when I'm finished singing, you sing the chorus 'Sugar Mountain' super loud, I'll just forget about it right away and we can continue."As Peak Stupidity's been telling ya'll for a long time, good lyrics can be nice, but with a great tune, they just don't matter. This is such a case. Without an internet and all earlier, I did not know this one line until today, when I finally looked it up:
It's so noisy at the fair,For the life of me, all I could make out of it was "...and the candy floss your head.", cause well, I get that they were at the fair and all, but... look, why didn't you translate it into American, if you're gonna move here, Neil? It's cotton candy! Ohhhhh... duh!
but all your friends are there,
and the candy floss you had,
and your mother and your dad.
I used to be able to play this on guitar - not too hard. I like the hammer-downs that Neil does on acoustic guitar, but his way of using the guitars for both melody and percussion is something I couldn't do.
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Seven Years of Peak Stupidity
Posted On: Tuesday - November 28th 2023 8:20PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Websites
... the blog that is, as stupidity itself is still ramping up. The peak is nigh!
Yep, that's right. I won't put that Beatles song back into readers heads again, just after y'all shook it off, right? It is, though, 7 years since Peak Stupidity's blog post #1, with the personal self-assessment FIRST POST - Am I a curmudgeon?.
We - long term readers know that means "I" - analyzed this a bit and determined:
The above [complaints about modern music], and other thoughts - let me write about Windows software another time - make me realize that it's not me, it's the world that is the problem.So, that could be taken as a no, but I'd say I am a curmudgeon and wouldn't like things changing even it they weren't bring us toward Peak Stupidity. Speaking of the downward trend in music, to make up for that, we started off the music embedding in that first post, with Billy Joel's Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.
Within a month and a half this site had 100 posts up, with no more worries about running out of material. We hit 200 posts within 3 months. Early on, most of them were fairly short though, 1/4 to 1/2 the size of our average post now.*
By the one year anniversary, we clocked in at 500 posts. (I made a special effort to make that work out.) At the time we noted Peak Stupidity Celebrates 2nd Blogversary!, we were at 866 posts. The 3rd year anniversary coincided with Thanksgiving**, and the post count was 1263. After 4 years, 1704 posts, and the heart of the Kung Flu PanicFest, we announced that The Peak of Stupidity has been postponed... and the updating of our "NACA" graph on engineering paper on our header.***
We didn't even notice the anniversaries in '21 and '22, but the post counts were 2118 and 2451, respectively. This is post #2788. That's a yearly average of just under 400 posts and a weekly average of ~7 1/2 posts.
Quantity is not everything though. The content has shifted slightly. Going by recollection here it's gone from losts of curmudeonry, look-at-what-this-guy-wrote****, wild-and-crazy stuff, music out of nowhere, direct Steve Sailer-discussed stuff out of the NY Times and its ilk toward many series on special or general (ex., inflation) topics, more books, movies, and Rockford Files. Lastly we have gotten closer to current events, as the elementary school teachers would call news. I don't know if that latter is such a good thing. There ARE many stories now that go along with our most important areas of stupidity, and we like to discuss them without delay. That interrupts the flow of the series and precludes the subsequently forgotten odd stuff.
As far as the flavors of stupidity covered, the topic keys, going many-to-one of them with blog posts, are one way to keep track of this. Those topic keys, well, we've added a handful or so in the last few years, but older posts are not all back-filled with them. I looked back and saw that we had tables showing the quantity of subject matter based on those keys in our 1000th post. One can look back there, at the post count 36% of the way to now. I may get the info in that same format later, but I can say the following:
The top 3 topic keys here haven't changed in order of occurrence:
Music is still topic key #1 with 542 posts now, 236 then.
Humor is #2 with 435 posts now, 153 then.
Immigration Stupidity is #3 with 337 posts now, 137 then. That's the highest actual flavor of stupidity, and that one is to be expected. It's EXISTENTIAL.
Some things have changed. The #4 topic key now is Kung Flu Stupidity. Of course, we didn't even have this topic key by post 1000 (March 28th '19). Then, following are #5, US Feral Gov't and #6 Economics. Back at post 1000, # 4 was Pundits, #5 was our beloved Curmudgeonry, and #6 was Trump. Hey, what happened there? (Economics was #7 back then, BTW.) This is not very scientific, as it's all in the labeling to begin with.
As far as business goes - we don't make money here, of course, so I mean the business of reaching readers - things are not bad but have been much more stagnant over the last few years than I'd have like to see. I can produce stats on that another time. It's kind of depressing, but then, I do want to see the difference during the PanicFest time.
Speaking of that, we'd have a few hardy commenters a couple of years in (don't know what happened to BernCar - hope he's A-OK), but commenting really picked up as the PanicFest did. I thank all of you all who write for keeping the comment section going strong for the last few years!
There is no way Peak Stupidity can even keep up with material that I've already thought of, much less run out. Time is another story.
I don't know about another 7 years. I truly think that we'll have enough other things to worry about such that writing posts here would be too trivial a thing to be doing... or we'll all be on twitter, even THIS GUY!
Have a nice evening, Peakers.
PS: Typos and grammar errors have been a long-term problem here. I self-edit, but often, I find things days and months later. I doubt the problem has gotten worse - I just found 2 typos in Post !. FIXED, 7 years later!
* I didn't do any stat on that, though I guess that'd be fairly simple, based on word counts in the dBase.
** Ahaa, I didn't recall, but per a suggestion from long-term reader/commenter Dtbb (Downtown Bobby Brown) I put Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant Massacree in that post, and he just now suggested it. Sorry, I'd forgotten, Dtbb. It does go with Thanksgiving.
*** The old one was out of date to begin with, showing the peak of stupidity being in '14 or so - not even close!! I did note in the 1st post that I'd had the URL for a while and worked on some things, such as that banner, quite a while earlier.
**** Or girl, of course, such as Ann Coulter. There still are lots of excerpts, but we try not to make too many posts anymore just based on one cool bit of writing by somebody.
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Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: Peking Smog
Posted On: Tuesday - November 28th 2023 6:29AM MST
In Topics: China Environmental Stupidity
I left out a couple of points I was going to make in the most recent Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: post called WoKeiProp.
Firstly, yeah, note the smog in the picture above. This is one of a dozen or so I "snapped", as we went touring around Peking. This is not just low visibility in mist. It wasn't particularly humid and/or chilly (this was in August), so this was pollutants rather than water, and it was THICK*. Visibility was 1/2 a mile to two miles generally.
So, there they have their CCTV ads about the windmills and "The wind and the sunshine playing the city melody.", but that looks pretty unhealthy there in Peking still for those susceptible. Additionally, the number of coal burning power plants being built yearly is something else! Industry comes before quality of life there. That's understandable, but cut the TV Ad BS. Are the Chinese people susceptible to that?
Secondly, I had unfortunately left my phone/camera in the hotel room at breakfast the previous day in this same place, so I missed a picture of something interesting. That would be the TV showing massive violence in the Capital City. No, not Peking, this was Washington, FS, of the USA. The violent people were the J6 protesters, running around, throwing shit, and doing all kind of mayhem.
It's the same Narrative they've been playing here for almost 3 years, on Chinese CCTV. Now I see the propaganda value for China in this. "Don't make waves, Chinese people. See these hoodlums in the US that almost overthrew their duly elected Gov't (just like ours is)?! It's anti-Establishment, it's non-conformist, it's egregious, and the nails that stuck up are getting hammered down. Take heed!"
PS: The sound was down. It'd have been nice to get the tone of it and maybe hear some of the English in the footage. Otherwise, I'd sure like to have recorded it for a translation. Dang, opportunity lost! (What kind of slack-ass "journalists" are employed by this outfit anyway?)
* I questioned myself on this due to my not personally being sensitive to smog. In Los Angeles, I was with a lady who could really feel the stuff in her throat and lungs - this was long ago, when it was worse. For me, I was aware of it only when I first saw the wall of rock of the San Gabriel Mountains to the north and thought, "Hey, why haven't I seen them before?!"
Back to Peking, as we went uphill toward the Great Wall on the one day, it did get misty, and I that's why I wondered about it.
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The Great German Hyperinflation of one century ago
Posted On: Monday - November 27th 2023 8:05PM MST
In Topics: History Economics Inflation World Political Stupidity
It was a century ago this week,
when inflation hit the very peak.
Had my Reichmarks in a big old pile.
'bout enough to buy a toenail file.
So let me introduce to you
a monetary tale o'er some beers.
It's Woodie Wilson's reparations plaa-a-a-aan.
The hyperinflation that crushed the economy of Wiemar Republic Germany in the early 1920s is not something you could put an exact date on. However, the reason Peak Stupidity picked this week, its importance for the usual Beatles take-off lyrics notwithstanding, is that it WAS right around this week - the article we'll introduce says "by December '23" - that the Reichmark hit its low of 4.2 TRILLION of them to a US dollar. Well, the regular German people would not have been able to deal in dollars, but that'd have been about the amount of currency it took to buy food for the day*)
We can split the difference between that "by December" and November 16, 1923, when (per per wiki, the new Rentenmark was introduced to replace the worthless paper Reichsmarks. The new Rentenmark was set equal to one 1 Trillion Reichmarks (12 decimal places were lopped off), so Voila!, now you could get a days food for a 4 Marks... I mean for that day, anyway, as that wasn't near the end of it all. However, ~this week in century-ago Germany was Peak Stupidity of the Monetary Policy variety.
I am very glad my recent copy of the John Birch Society's The New American arrived last month with a very good retrospective, Germany’s Hyperinflation of 1923. A helpful commenter on The Unz Review going by MEH 0910 gave me that archive link, as otherwise, it's been paywalled. For those with the extra $99 political account funding available - because one can read current issues of their magazine on-line for free anyway - JBS is a great org to support. They are Conservative with Christian aspects and also Libertarian, Constitutionalist, and anti-Globalist.
The article a nice medium-length history of this terrible period in German history, with lessons for the future, perfect for my kid's first written paper. I don't have much to write that's not in there. However, economics is a big topic key for us here, and inflation is a more special niche interest - in German that's (due to) nichts interest... groan if you must...
Let me at least point to the causes of this calamity. I noted Woodrow Wilson's WWI Versailles Treaty screwage of Germany, but that was for the song meter and only one of the causes. The reparations were onerous, but much debt existed from borrowing during the war. Per the article, Germany expected to win and pay back the debt via reparations on the French! A little bit of old-fashioned Karmflation was coming down.
No matter all the debt accumulated, with Germany having not been on the gold standard, the Wiemar Gov't printed as much money as needed to INCREASE the Welfare State and keep taxes low. In those times, Germany was really close to becoming Communist, so perhaps that was the impetus to (try to) keep Germans satisfied, with the usual wanting to stay in business as a government too. This was actual printing, of course, long before computers ,in the actual "money printer go brrrrr" fashion (more like bang-bang in huge machines back then). The article discusses that the money printing was limited by facilities and even fatigue of the workers in them. (Couldn't they have paid them more? Wait ...)
Well, you can't get away with fake money - tens, thousands, millions of times as much in circulation chasing the same amount of goods - for long without inflation. The more fake money in relative terms, the higher the inflation. Here are some numbers:
The cost of living in 1920 was 12 times what it had been in 1914.So 1923 was the big year. Because standard bills became worthless quickly, larger and larger denominations were being printed. (Here in America, denominations have been going in the other direction, for, IMO, even more nefarious reasons.)
By January 1923, an American dollar (which itself had lost purchasing power as a result of the U.S. government’s own inflationary practices) could buy someone 17,000 marks (the German currency). But it would get worse — much worse. By July, that same dollar would reward the buyer with 353,000 marks, and then, just one month later, in August, it would take 4.6 million marks to obtain one American dollar.
In September, the value of the mark had sunk even lower, and it now took nearly 99 million marks to obtain a dollar. Just a month later, in October, a person would need 25.3 billion marks to equal one dollar, followed by an astounding 2.2 trillion marks in November. Finally, by December of 1923, a person with one American dollar could have purchased 4.2 trillion marks.
One thing the New American article doesn't mention is an important difference between "hyper-" and standard sucky-as-normal inflation. Of course the prefix "hyper" is Greek for "extra high", as in hypertension. However, I've read that a fundamental difference with hyperinflation it happens when the population has lost all faith in the currency. Maybe there is not clear divide there, and there are steady gradations, I dunno.
I'll make a few more points regarding the suffering of the population due to this financial evil. There are the stories everyone has heard about one needing a wheelbarrow full of Marks in whatever denomination that week to buy a loaf of bread. Well, then there were the increased denominations. If the printers could keep up, that solved that problem for a short while at a time. Better have kept that wheelbarrow though, just for the fact that it was a hard asset if nothing else.
Next, the devaluation of the money was so rapid that one had to spend it quickly after being paid, or one would lose significant buying power. This one is really something if true:
The rapid increase in prices led to some stories that were probably apocryphal, such as the story that if one did not eat his meal fast enough at a restaurant, the bill would be higher when he finished the meal than when he ordered it.I have been said to inhale my meals, to this would not be a problem for me. Bring it!
OK, seriously again, the biggest evil of hyperinflation is that saving any of one's money in this currency in the usual conservative fashion, in a bank or home, was, using the adjective in the article, nonsensical. How could anyone who did not already own significant REAL assets get anywhere financially? This is a Middle Class killer. The poor don't make enough to save much, and the rich have those big real assets. I don't see how any of the normal people could stand to live like this - by definition, everyone but the rich was forced to live literally paycheck-to-paycheck.
Wait, maybe they could have borrowed for a house or something. That's the last point here on the effects of currency devaluation (one good definition of inflation). Ben Franklin said "Neither a borrower or lender be." In normal times, sure thing - I like that. Thanks, Ben. In highly inflationary times, it goes like this, though: "Be a borrower, but you're an idiot if you're a lender!" Were an idiot lender to "front you 100,000 Marks for 2 weeks, I promise, man, I'll pay you 20,000 more!", it could have been worth half, one tenth, hell, 1 thousandth of the value when you got it back. Anyone holding debt, as in mortgages, would be in great shape. "Hell, tell you what, Fourth Eighth Bank** of Germany mortgage officer, I feel rich today. Let me bring in my wheelbarrow to the bank and pay off my whole 200,000 Mark home loan. Or, I can come next month and bring it all in my front pocket."
Would any bank lend out mortgages though? I'd say not without equivalently-valued physical collateral. Therefore, only the big entities with lots of debt per their formerly non-conservative business models, came out ahead in the hyperinflation. Soon enough, they had title to everything. This had the effect of pissing off a lot of people, as financially conservative folks had been thoroughly ruined. There was more than that as far as suffering:
Mass starvation was a looming reality by the last months of 1923, and malnutrition was a major cause of an increase in cases of tuberculosis. By the summer of 1923, nearly two-thirds of East Prussian schoolchildren were under observation for the disease.Whaddya know, but it was in this month that Adolph Hitler attempted a coup to create a National Socialist dictatorship, his truly presiding. This Beer Hall Putsch didn't take, Hitler went to prison for a while, he wrote a book, and he was most definitely heard from again.
I highly recommend the New American article written at the century mark from this financial stupidity in the otherwise highly functional country of Germany. It's 2023 now, so that stuff is all over, right? I mean, we can use computers and fancy FED schemes to create "assets" now, right? OK, sure, there's been steady inflation of Peak Stupidity-estimated 4-5% annually for a couple of decades, and lately that 8%, per the government. We can stop printing money at any time. It can't go hyper because the Almighty Dollar is the Reserve Currency. That status lasts forever, right?
I don't know. History may yet rhyme on this score. I have one nice wheelbarrow - with a solid tire (compressed air may become dear) - so if I have to, I can head over to the grocery with the wheelbarrow full of iPhones with barcodes showing. Welcome to Weimar America!
* Per this official US CPI page, lacking Peak Stupidity's caveats that there've been greater increases than official over the last couple of decades, that's $17 in today's currency. Yeah, that could buy food for the day - but did they have Mac & Cheese back then...?
** Well, there's an entity called the Fifth Third Bank with over 1,000 branches. What's up with THAT name?
Comments (11)
No bearing on the matter?
Posted On: Saturday - November 25th 2023 6:20PM MST
In Topics: Cheap China-made Crap Big-Biz Stupidity Customer Care
OK, look, this was my screw-up to begin with. Because the local place was dragging ass on trying to find these certain tapered roller bearings I needed, I went on-line. I'd pay a decent amount more to just be able to go get 'em, but that's the world now, especially with the fallout - STILL - from the economic damage of the Kung Flu PanicFest ("supply chain, supply chain, supply chain" Ahhh, shut it...)
These were to be Timken bearings for quality, and, by mistake, I thought that any bearings with the same 5 digit model number would be made by Timken. No, the number must have become a generic spec, I guess.
I got plenty of search results from "Timken [Bearing #]". Well, lookie here, I was surprising myself by buying bearings from Wal-Mart but hey, there they were on the first page, for the lowest price around with these bearings actually in stock.* I ordered 4 bearings and 4 cups (separate outer races). They came to the house in a week, and let's see.... Whoa, these are not my beautiful tapered roller bearings! Those are not my beautiful bearing cups!
They were made in China. There were Chinese characters on the side walls. Wait, WTH? I checked the Wal-Mart site and nope, it never said these were Timkens. Now, my search was for "Timken", if you recall, but that doesn't mean all results would be. That was my screw up. However, I don't want to take a chance on these. So, I order the ACTUAL Timken bearings of this number. They came a few days back, and well, what to do with $100 in China-made parts? They HAVE to go back.
I gotta admit that the Wal-Mart on-line returns process was great. I'd expected to have to go to the store and hash it out. Now, you take care of most of it on-line, such as filling out the on-line form, you get a barcode, and you go to the store with that. Actually, this lady was very nice and efficient... unexpectedly.
What to put for down for my reason for return? "Made in China", as per the image above. Shouldn't that have some bearing on the matter? Yeah, that's my comment above. We'll see if I ever get the hundred bucks back.
PS: BTW, this was a 3rd-party vendor, not WalMart actually sending (and going to receive) these bearings. They use WalMart's "platform" in Big Biz Geek parlance.
PPS: I forgot until now that Peak Stupidity has written about cheap Chinese bearings before. It wasn't really about the quality, but about the TYPE used, in an exercise bike. The 3rd one was the charm - see The
* To give myself a break here, the prices were in a +/- 50% range at least, so, this seemed legit.
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[UPDATED 11/29:] Added PPS.
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Comments (7)
When Irish Eyes are no longer smiling
Posted On: Friday - November 24th 2023 8:54PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Media Stupidity alt-right/MAGA
I'm trying to be somewhat timely for a change, so please accept my apologies for not writing back to the nice comments under the last post, for now. This is about the rioting going on in Ireland right now, amazingly being perpetrated by THE IRISH. I understand there's soccer (football) hooliganism and that, but it seems most rioting in White countries is done by blacks and/or foreigners these days.* Rioting by White people about anything is a big no-no. (See again.*)
The story started with an act of multiple stabbings, including of children by a man who is said to be a 20-year "National", meaning an immigrant. A "national" is not illegally in a country, though he may have started that way, but is not a citizen either. No matter the details, the guy is said to be some Algerian.
Though not as far gone as Sweden and France as far as the Moslem immigration invasion goes (or any other ethnicity), Ireland has seen its share of this cultural destruction. Peak Stupidity has seen some and blogged about it in Summer '22, including in the post A man's home is his castle. Our concluding paragraph of that post reads:
If the Irish allow large groups of foreigners to immigrate, these newcomers may eventually sound Irish, which is pretty weird when encountered, BTW, but they will not become Irish, even culturally. 10's of thousands of them in big cities will build their cultural fortresses, as those actual fortresses such as the Kilkenny Castle will be let to crumble and fade from history.The "Fighting Irish" is the name of the (American) football team, and stereotypes come from some truth. Perhaps the Irish are a little bit quick to anger. However, as in all of the Western White world, you get in a lot of trouble for showing the least big of anger against these immigration invasions. Everyone's been keeping a lid on it Well, the anger of the Irish may have just simmered over yesterday.
The Daily Mail article I read on this** has as its URL "Get-Furious-Dubliners-drive-police-City-Centre-five-people-including-three-children-stabbed-unverified-rumours-swirl-suspect-foreign-national.html" Talk about your bias here, that "unverified rumours" [sic] business is there to tell the reader that this anger and the rioting is probably bigoted and completely unjustified! First of all, in my best Irish brogue, which is better read than heard, "Unverified, bloody hell! Just look at the foooking mook, mate! That aside, who else DOES that?"
The Irish have a reason to riot against the Globalist authorities there even if these children (and whomever else) HADN'T been stabbed the other day. The fact is, the average Irishman never wanted these extreme foreigners (something like 15,000 Nigerians and a total # that's 12% of the fooking population) in their country.
One Micheal Martin, Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, says of these riots, "This is not who we are. Quite to the contrary, this is EXACTLY who the Fighting Irish are, and this happening is very heartening!
Getting to a critical mass of people who can't be all be carted off and charged with "hate crimes" is not something very easy to plan and not very predictable. It can take the right spark, whether that particular spark is a justifiable reason or not. However, how many Irishmen go around stabbing children? I think this is justifiable, for the record only. I am hopeful this kind of thing spreads throughout the White Western world, until the Globalists stand down.
PS: Steve Sailer has a post up about this with a pretty solid opinion: A Riot Is the Voice of the Unheard, Unless It's Irish Hooligans. The comments there should be very good. It'd be great to see some here too.
That title of his reminds me of a quote from the guy who was assassinated 60 years ago the other day: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." The Globalists would be wise to back off before JFK's adage comes to pass.
* ... with an exception being the very justifiable riot/protest of 1/6/21 over a fraudulent Presidential election. Yes, the term "rioting" is correct (for, what, 1% of the crowd or less?), but "insurrection" is most certainly not.
** I'm not linking to it simply because it's a huge file, taking forever to simmer down. has the following as its URL, the modern practice being that they are very descriptive to remain distinct, I guess...
Comments (13)