Drea de Metteo v Big Tone
Posted On: Wednesday - September 20th 2023 6:40PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Humor Kung Flu Stupidity
"In this corner, wearing the tight white trousers and low cut sweater,
"In this corner, wearing spectacles and the shame of the whole world stands the Eyetalian Faucist ... ist ... Big Tony ... eee... yeah, dis fuckin' guy!"
Peak Stupidity reports to you tonight from Hollywood, California. Is that not a first? Don't mistake us here, we hate the place and all it stands for. We do have an appreciation, though for the old Sopranos TV show and particularly right now the actress Drea de Metteo. I had never heard the actress' name before reading something a few days back, but I remember her as Adriana La Cerva (didn't ever know her show last name even), the girlfriend of Tony Soprano's nephew and loyal "associate" Chris.
Yes, I could find better pictures, but the one above reminds me of what I like about Italian life, the great food - I could tell Carmela's cooking was excellent even through the TV! - and those Italian restaurants* with the checkered tablecloths... yeah, it's all fun and games until someone pokes
Alright, the article from, yes, Hollywood in Toto**, says Drea de Matteo Unloads on Fauci: ‘The Real F***ing Mafioso’ . I really just like the headline, but there's quite a bit about this actress' turn from being the usual lefty to something of a Libertarian. The Kung Flu PanicFest done done it.
The actress said watching her country, and especially her fellow Hollywood liberals, give up their freedoms during the pandemic alarmed her.Is "Front Man" the Hollywood word for miserable fucking Totalitarian? I'm not an insider.
She saved special ire for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s pandemic front man and someone who pretends he didn’t demand the country lock down during the outbreak.
But he did.
“They wanna f***ing do it all over again,” de Matteo said about virus protocols, including mask dictates that ignore the growing body of evidence that masks do little, if anything, to help prevent exposure.Ha, she sounds the same as on the TV! It's very catchy, this Italian talk, with the f-words and such ...
She hissed at Dr. Fauci without uttering his name.Pauli, you and Big Pussy, take care of this... wait, I forgot, we whacked Big Pussy. OK, you and Chris, whack this Totalitarian fuck and bring him down to the pine barrens, South Jersey. North Jersey and New York are too crowded already with whacked fuckin' psychos, live and dead!"
“Public enemy number one, that other Italian. The real f***ing Mafioso …the little tiny Italian…. If there’s ever been a f***ing thug,” she said of Fauci, her voice trailing off in anger.
In addition to Big Tony Fauci, Adriana had hit Neil Young hard too.
“I cannot tell you how f***ing fast I stopped listening to Neil Young … at that time [Rogan] was gathering more information,” she said of efforts led by Young to deplatform the comedian.I'm in LUV!!! Well, I already was.
“Who the f*** do you think you are, old man? Old man, take a look at your mother f***ing life now,” she added, quoting one of his classic hits.
“And he’s Canadian, and these truckers have a convoy lined up and you’re not fighting for the average man right now?” she added, alluding to a push to protest draconian government measures to fight the virus.
Adriana appears in this scene from The Sopranos. It's possibly my favorite scene from that series:
"A bottle of reds, a bottle of whites ..."
* See our very first post for the song that is now in your head.
** No, we're not actually there, but we are reading the magazines, online.
*** uck. Don't all Italians talk like Tony Soprano? What's with the asterisks, you miserable fucks?
Comments (2)
Resistance to the Thacker Pass Lithium mine
Posted On: Tuesday - September 19th 2023 7:21PM MST
In Topics: Economics US Feral Government Environmental Stupidity Geography Peak Stupidity Roadshow
I've driven all over the State of Nevada, almost always on the way to somewhere else, at 80 - 100 mph. Much of it is the "Basin & Range Country". The two-lane highway goes up a couple of thousand feet over 5 10, or 20 miles and then goes back down. Except near the crests of the ranges, one can see the glint off a cop car windshield - yes, I'm paranoid - for 5 miles. That's nicely out of radar range.
Wide open spaces are great. This is just one of the reasons Americans should work to defeat those who want a Billion Americans. However, if you're going to do mining with as little disturbance of the way of life and the views as possible, Nevada (and parts of a handful of other States) is the place to do it.
As I read a little about the Thacker Lithium mine mentioned yesterday on both the wiki page and in the Extreme Tech article I linked to yesterday, I noted the lamentations of the environmentalists and the resistance of the Indians to the project being well covered. For the latter, this was specially the case on wiki, on which every page on some piece of American geography seems to have a paragraph on who the "Indigenous Peoples" were, who used to live there, apparently forever before.
Bill H. wrote about the environmental problems with these big mines in the comments yesterday. Those enviros who are on the
Now, Chinese 1/4 ownership or not, I like to see productive work, creating wealth and requiring decent jobs, be done in America. Therefore, I am square on the side of the Moar EVs! crowd on this one, not at all due to any of their stupid ideas, of course. The battle between them and the more knowledgable enviros that can see the bigger picture here is, well, just an impetus to stock up on Orville Redenbacher's finest. (OK, that's just a meme - it'd be Breyer's Mint Chocolate Chip!)
What struck me as kind of humorous about other effort of resistance to the Lithium mining projects was the claims by the Indians. As I wrote, these places are wide-open pieces of NOWHERE. Yet, the small Indian tribes that say they were first to the land. Wiki includes this quote from the Reno Sparks Indian colony - that's a couple of hundred miles away:
"Just because regional tribes have been isolated and forced onto reservations relatively far away from Thacker Pass does not mean these regional tribes do not possess cultural connections to the Pass."Sure, and I've got cultural connections to the Little Saint Bernard Pass* where I shoveled elephant shit as Hannibal crossed the Alps (in a previous life). Seriously, I've got cultural connections to the Molas Pass, where my too-rich-running muscle car could barely climb up from Durango to Silverton, Colorado, and I pulled off there to take a piss and nap in the car.** Yet, I don't deign to interfere with development of the region.
The Paiute tribe is upset because 31 of their number were massacred by US Gov't soldiers in 1865 at Thacker Pass, but evidence has some put the location outside of the mining area. Either way, it's not like the Indians marked their people's graves, so how much do they care, really? Are they worried about poltergeists rising up through the mine tailings? I don't think they'd last an hour among that sulfuric acid.
The Extreme Tech article reports:
“The Caldera holds many first foods, medicines, and hunting grounds for tribal people both past and present,” the People of Red Mountain, a committee representing all three tribes and others, wrote in a statement.First foods?? First, you need enough of ANY food. This isn't the place. The comedy routine of one Sam Kinison comes to mind...
“The global search for lithium has become a form of ‘green’ colonialism. The people most connected to the land suffer while those severed from it benefit.”Connected, hell. It's unfortunate, but they are connected more closely to the US Feral Gov't than are most of the White men. At some point, you've got to make some money yourself. And there's that "colonialism" slur that's supposed to block any progress. I'm worried about economic colonization.
... threats to sage grouse habitat, old growth sagebrush, golden eagle nests, endemic springsnails, and Endangered Species Act–listed Lahontan cutthroat trout, bighorn sheep, and pygmy rabbits.Yeah, but see, most of that fauna is Endangered. The White man tries to save it, but it's always OK for the Red Man to take it.
You've got your knowledgable enviros that care about ACTUAL pollution against the Climate Alarmists that, if you grant them their stupidity, still miss the big picture. Then, there are other splits in the Coalition of the Fringes (TM-Steve Sailer), such as:
The next day, an article describing the acrimonious split, stated that the People of Red Mountain fired Falk because Falk and Wilbert, co-founders of 'Protect Thacker Pass', are also members of Deep Green Resistance (DGR), and there were concerns over DGR's beliefs about transgenderism. Further articles followed on the rift.While I enjoy the wide open spaces for driving and plinking, I don't see how these big mining projects aren't one of the best uses one can think of for the land. The West has solved REAL pollution problems partially by outsourcing the nastiest industries to China, where they don't care about it nearly as much yet. That word "industry" is important though. Without that, you can't keep your own country. Remember, he who hath the gold, maketh the rules. Hathing 40 million metric shit-tonnes of Lithium helps too.
Oh yeah, if they could just pull out a few tons annually, if nothing else, that amount of this element would be enough to make a big dent in the mental state of the most psychopathic head cases that "run" our country. The benefits of a saner, albeit institutionalized, group of leaders would more than pay for the biggest Lithium project in the World, environmental degradation accounted for.
PS: Much of this is BLM - no, not THAT BLM, but the Feral Bureau of Land Management - land. I have no respect for the BLM as any kind of Constitutional agency and have always rooted for those Westerners who were against the US Gov't "owning" big chunks of land in their States. Nevada has by far the highest proportion of land owned by the Feral Gov't - 80%. (Utah, Alaska and Idaho come next with somewhat over 60% each. Connecticut and Iowa are tied for lowest at 0.3%)
* Historians and archaeologists are not certain that it's not one of 4 other passes that Hannibal crossed, but this was a previous life, so... and I was too busy shoveling elephant shit off the road to read the sign.
** This was on the way to Grand Junction, Colorado and points northwest, so not on one of the routes I've taken across Nevada.
Comments (10)
Big Lithium and the Golden Rule - a tailing of 2 elements
Posted On: Monday - September 18th 2023 7:18PM MST
In Topics: China Economics Geography Science
Just a couple of decades ago, the idea of a realistic electric vehicle was not very easy to imagine, because the energy storage ability was just not there. Running practical EV's is all about the ability to store energy in batteries. The physicists, electrical engineers, chemists, chemical engineers and materials scientists have made some great headway as of late. Of the new materials that are used, Lithium is a component of the biggest, newest battery technology*. The lithium ion batteries that are used in electric vehicles are also in all the iCrap now, a 2nd big market (with many more instances of use, but at a couple of orders of magnitude lower energy storage).
The lithium ion batteries store a LOT of energy, an amount unimaginable last century. That these batteries can cause serious and difficult-to-extinguish fires and ought not to be let ride in the un-reachable cargo compartments of passenger aircraft give us an idea. These are not your Grandaddy's Dry Cells. They are not your energizer bunny power supplies, unless you like to see your bunny running energetically down the bunny trail with its fluffy tail on fire.
To be fair now to "fossil fuels", let me say that, as of right now, these batteries are said to have an energy density of ~ 1 MJ/kg tops, while the chemical potential energy in gasoline is 45 times that much, 45 MJ/kg. Batteries, you got a long way to go, baby!
It's not as blessed as America is with many resources, but when it comes to the newly-in-demand Rare Earth metals (for motors) and Lithium, China has been indeed blessed. (It helps that nobody is let to get in the way of the big projects too, but that's a subject for another China post.) However, Nevada, "The Silver State", has been blessed with material resources too. Whatever else would you do out there but ranching, playing blackjack, operating the oldest profession, burying your silver stash, and digging some more to get stuff OUT of the ground.
The biggest news there is the finds of massive amounts of Lithium in what's called the McDermitt Caldera in northwestern Nevada. A large mine has been started up at Thacker Pass. The latest find, after this, has resulted in back-o-the-envelope calculations of 20 to 40 million tons of Lithium there, off that dirty Winnemucca Road, near the Oregon border in an area of ~600 mi2. If you've ever driven through the State, as I have on probably 6 different full routes across, you may understand that this is a small chunk of land in Nevada.
It's a YUGE find. This is some good news. Granted, mineral extraction is not manufacturing - it, along with farming and lumbering, are known as "primary industries". Manufacturing, to me, is somehow more important, just one of the reasons for which I'll explain shortly. Still, this mining of Lithium is wealth creation, in America, something to see, baby... Less reliance on the Chinese economy is a good thing for us.
While reading about the Thacker Pass mine on the wiki page, I ran into something concerning. The company that's operating it is 1/4 owned by the Chinese! Great, so we're trying to be less reliant on that economy, but with a 1/4 share, I'm pretty sure the Chinese investors will have a bias as to where much of this Lithium will go. Sure, one may say, this mineral is a commodity, and it'll go to the highest bidder, but then the Chinese are one people, a tribe, if you will. That free market stuff is used for their purposes, when it helps, but they do not play fair when it's not good for China.
Will America, like Australia pretty much is right now, become an economic colony of China? Right now, lumber is cut down here and in Canada, shipped across the Pacific freaking Ocean, made into furniture in China, and shipped back across the Pacific freaking Ocean... bulk one way, and bulky stuff in containers the other way. We are a colony when it comes to this furniture industry (albeit, not completely). That's what an economic colony is about, as with the sugar and coffee plantations in Latin America. Extract raw goods and ship 'em home, manufacture finished goods out of them, and sell some of that back to the colonies.
"Well", one may say, "just make some laws about the ownership of companies - and real estate while we're at it - by foreigners". I ask the reader at this point, if he's still interested, to read the 2 3/4 y/o Peak Stupidity series Will America be looted by China?:
Part 1: Intro.
Part 2: Housing
Part 3: Big Biz
Part 4: The Fruited Plain
Part 5: The Wilderness
Part 6: Conclusion - The Golden Rule
That title of Part 6 does not refer to the Christian Golden Rule about "Doing unto others..." The much more widely adhered-to International version goes "He who hath the gold, maketh the rules." America is figuratively and literally giving the gold to China on a yearly basis to the tune of about half a Trillion dollars.
Yeah, so who's in charge of our economy again and these big Lithium mines?
PS: That one article I linked to and the wiki page on that Thatcher Pass mine have a lot of info on objections to this industry by various usual suspects. We'll have at least one more post on that subject.
* See, we're talking actual technology that doesn't mean a software package, though software is involved in getting these things charged and discharged efficiently, I'm sure.
** Don't take the quote marks for my not believing at all in the theory of these fuels originating from fossilized life. I'm no geologist, biologist, whatever - I don't know, but one wonders ... Quote marks are there just to delineate the term.
Comments (17)
Do! Not! Read! Scab post!
Posted On: Saturday - September 16th 2023 8:03PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Humor
I would have never thought that Bill Maher and I would ever have anything in common. However, like the ctrl-left punditard Maher, I too am in defiance of the writer strike. Must ... keep.... writing .... I have no control of the post titling and the editing during this contentious period, however. [Damn straight - go strait [sic] to hell, you f**ing scab! - Ed.].
I got away with mostly pictures yesterday, so we'll see how far this one goes. With the China reports and the gun story (more on that coming will be good news) taking up half the blog-week and my fatigue from the beat-downs at the picket line, I didn't get to the rest of the verbal destruction of High-Holy Communist Leon Trotsky, nor more on the Depopulocalypse. Then, there's plenty more on the front burner... wait...
OK, I'm back. I finally clicked on that yahoo link. I'd only seen about 3 headlines on this writer's strike over the last month or so, without clicking of them, and it turns out that blog writers, not being members of any union, are not part of this strike after all.
Good! It's about TV writers or something. Why the heck should I care about the people that write the stuff that's said on TV? I've not been hooked up since early 1999. I hope that you don't care either. This strike could go on for the rest of our lives, and Peak Stupidity readers might never notice.
Now, if it were really all writers, would we miss them? So long as Lionel Shriver is a scab too, I'd be fine with that. Moby Dick must have been finished by now, right? (Don't know for sure - even the Cliff Notes for it were too long for me!)
Have a happy and restful Sunday, readers, commenters and The Editor! [Thank you. I hope we're good... just have to tell you that Peak Stupidity corporate is not responsible for damages to employees' property... say car doors that have been keyed and such ... no, just sayin'... - Ed]
Comments (2)
Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: Planes, **Trains-III**, and Automobiles
Posted On: Friday - September 15th 2023 12:20PM MST
In Topics: China Peak Stupidity Roadshow
(Continued from **Planes**, **Planes-II**, **Trains**, and **Trains-II** of our Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles series.)
I wrote that I'd put up some pictures of the high-speed rail journeys in China. (We made 2 HS rail trips.) To really get the idea of it all, you'd need video. I took lots, but as Adam Smith noted, this takes up lots of memory on the server. I am thinking of starting a youtube channel for things like this.
In some later posts on general life in China, I'll embed more pics taken from the trains too. The top picture here is from out in the sticks.
This is the big station where we started off our 12 hour trip. We were ahead in line, so these are the first few people trickling onto our train. Seats are reserved. There may have been 20 different tracks, and they turn around the trains fairly quickly - I'd guess less than 1/2 an hour.
That was an intermediate stop. No, see, that's not graffiti. Those are Chinese characters that say I don't know what, but our American minds expect graffiti at the stations, on the cars, everywhere. I HATE it.
I've written that Chinese words are usually small, one or two syllables long. This town is one of the exceptions. For the big cities, Chengdu, Chongching, Peking, etc. there'll be a "bei", "nan", "gong", or "xie" on the end, for north, south, east, or west, as these cities have more than one big HS (and other) rail stations.
Comments (8)
The Camp of the Saints - Happening right now
Posted On: Thursday - September 14th 2023 8:17AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity The Future Books
Peak Stupidity posted The Camp of the Saints 6 years ago yesterday. It was a review of a review of the prophetic book on immigration invasion by French author Jean Raspail. It was published right at 50 years ago.
I read the book. The ways and means, and the type people, of the immigration invasions into almost all Western White countries have been different from the book. It's the idea of the massive numbers let in due to guilt and stupidity of the residents (not to mention malevolence of "their" governments) that has made "Camp of the Saints" a good metaphor.
Now, as VDare's A.W. Morgan reports, a Camp of the Saints scenario is literally going on right now on the Italian island of Lampedusa: Great Replacement Update / Lampedusa: Literal Camp-of-the-Saints Illegal-Alien Invasion Swamps Italian Isle . This island, only 60 miles off of the closest point on Africa, on the east coast of Tunisia, has had many of these "refugees" land there before, on their way to continental Europe via Italy.
I put "refugees" in those quotes. Yes, they are refugees of sorts, but being a refugee from a shithole country simply because it is, after all, a shithole country, well, that's pretty much the premise of The Camp of the Saints and of Steve Sailer's World's Most Important Graph.
Per Mr. Morgan, 100 boats brought 8,000 to 10,000 Africans to this island with a normal population of 6,000 Italianos, in half an hour! Regular readers would know that I am no fan of TPFKAT*, but the multiple videos shown within the X's in the post show how very much like the dystopic novel this situation is.
The tweets, X's, whatever have writing that calls from those being attached for war and violence. That'd have been better accomplished long ago, and in fact made not even necessary if proper steps had been made. Right now, the best move would be to bring in 1,000 Italian troops ready to herd these people into camps or directly onto boats for the return voyage. Word will get out, but it would take a while. In the meantime, all other boats on the way should be escorted toward Tunisia and sunk if not in compliance. It's getting all too real now, this Camp of the Saints.
Here's some video, but not necessarily the same as is in the VDare post.
Looking at the invaders, I'd say they are mostly sub-Saharan, as in black Africans rather than Middle-Easterners. So, this is not the 1st country they could have taken "refuge". OTOH, Tunisia is not an insane country, so, why would the Tunisians let them invade. Trespassing the country on their way across, that's OK. As for Italy, like most of the Western ones, it IS an insane country. I don't know which type of invaders it'd be worse off with, along with the rest of Europe, where many will eventually be headed... if this true "Camp of the Saints" invasion isn't headed off NOW. Yes, violence will be necessary, the longer they wait, the more of it...
Oh, why don't we have a look at that simple Steve Sailer graph:
PS: I do have this problem with TPFKAT (X, Twitter) videos. Where I am now I cannot use speakers, but I have CC on. Holy crap, the stupidity of some of the narrative is something else! I was just reading closed captioning from one Natasha Ghoneim of Al Jazeera about all the logistics and money paid by these poor... INVADERS! Then, the former Mayor of Lampedusa now "Activist", comes on there bitching that "we aren't treating these people in a humane way". It's kind of hard to do so, you insane broad, when it's a small island fit for 1/2 this many Italian people. Of course it's a dirty mess. They didn't have to come, and they weren't invited, except by dumb broads like you!
Then, one Giovanna de Benedetto, with the Cher Moonstruck look, comes on about saving the 300 miners [cc sic] with their psychological trauma and getting them painting their homes (yeah, their homes!) and the boats, drownings, and sharks. Perhaps the parents should be put in prison for a few years for child abuse before the ride back.
* The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter.
Comments (13)
Hurricane Lee staying out at Sea
Posted On: Thursday - September 14th 2023 6:56AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Global Climate Stupidity US Feral Government
In the comments under this recent post, Adam Smith and The Alarmist - no, not a rock band, just 2 guys who like Peak Stupidity - discussed Hurricane Lee for a bit.
Would this one make landfall somewhere on the mid-Atlantic area of the US, say, Washington, FS, maybe NYC? That was the speculation and the hope. I looked a couple of days later, was even more hopeful, but just now deleted that image and grabbed the one above from the very nice National Hurricane Center site. (Please, NHS, don't change the page! It's good, and I'm used to it! Nah, that won't' stop 'em.)
Here's the page for Hurricane Lee. This isn't good. We need
This post sounds pretty malevolent - thank you, Jordan Peterson (and Jordan Peterson imitators) for getting this term stuck in my head. Well, yeah ... The Regime in Washington, with large branch offices in New York, HATES me and HATES you, the average PS reader. When it comes to the illegal alien invasion, they enjoy the benefits** without the pain. When it comes to devastating storms, Regime figures and media have openly hoped for Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Hurricane Central, to look bad for not helping people enough. There's a memory of George Bush and Hurricane Katrina involved. DeSantis does a great job there, so no joy for these folks.
It'd be nice to see the Regime Capital inhabitants feel the pain personally, as they are, finally, with the illegal alien invasion.
So, yeah, I'd like to see a Category 5 storm hit one of these places. If nothing else, it would shut them up and down for a good while. That's really all we want. General Lee came close to defeating these people 160 years ago this summer. We'd like to see Hurricane Lee give it a good shot.
PS: The New York Post's Eric Spitznagel sounded pretty hopeful last year with his article/book review How a Category 5 hurricane could wipe out New York City for good.
* Sandy in '12 was not even a hurricane but just a Tropical Storm, but it dropped a lot of rain. The biggest was what they just called "The New England Hurricane" 85 years ago, which was from a Category 3 to 5. Edna in 1954 was a doozy.
** Votes for one squad, cheap labor for donors to both, and the overarching wish for the demise of the White Middle Class.
Comments (4)
History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes.
Posted On: Wednesday - September 13th 2023 2:36PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders Humor Dead/Ex- Presidents
Yes, Peak Stupidity does memes now. #MSPaintForTheWin!
I just watched some of a Tucker Carlson interview with the man, one Larry Sinclair, who says he had gay, cocaine-fueled (what's that like?) sex with Barack Øb☭ma in 1999. The latter man was a lowly Illinois State Representative back then. The Establishment media didn't think it appropriate at that juncture to let that news come out to be discussed, as Øb☭ma was slated to be their rising star already.
That time was only about a year after we saw - for me, live - Bill Clinton wag his finger at Americans for their accusations that he was a liar, and go ahead and lie there on live TV about his not-so-hot lady-in-waiting Monica Lewinski. (Bill, ya coulda' done MUCH better!) 10 years later Øb☭ma was the D-nominee for President. At least he never lied to us about having sex with any interns... girl interns, that is.
Maybe it's that, rather than repeating or rhyming, history spirals ... out of control sometimes.
Comments (7)
New Mexico Commie Governor declares guns health emergency
Posted On: Tuesday - September 12th 2023 7:07PM MST
In Topics: Liberty/Libertarianism ctrl-left Guns
I could have told you this in Spring of '20, when the LOCKDOWNs and curfews started. Give them an "in", and the Totalitarians/Commies will find a way to use it for their purposes. You can do anything during a health emergency, right? We saw that during the Kung Flu PanicFest.
The anti-gun political forcers have tried to use the healthcare industry to do their work. For a long time now, the anti-Amendment II radicals have pushed for doctors to inquire about guns in homes* during patient exams.
New Mexico's lefty Commie Governor is in on this now. The NRA gives us the scoop: Governor Lujan Grisham Attempting Unconstitutional Gun Ban in Bernalillo County! . That's the county where the State's largest city, Albuquerque sits. New Mexico isn't all Constitutional about it, as half the State are at this point (yes, thank the IRA), but it's a "Shall Issue" State and open carrying is permitted. There are exceptions involving Indians, hard liquor, and Indians and hard liquor. (Uhhh, well, that'd be the First Nations and the Spirits Communities.)
However, if it's a health emergency that's going on, well, that's different! Why didn't you say so? Yeah, sure, anything goes!
Late Friday, anti-gun Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that she will attempt to institute and enforce an unconstitutional 30-day ban on open and concealed carry of firearms in public places in Bernalillo County. She apparently intends to accomplish this by administrative fiat under the guise of a public health emergency, which she declared in response to her and her political sidekick, Mayor Tim Keller's inability to control the violent crime situation in Albuquerque that is a direct result of their failed "soft on crime" policies. She also stated that State Police officers will be sent to the affected area to enforce this so-called "civil order," a violation of which would amount to misdemeanor.It's the State police, a bad idea to being with, that are to enforce this. Even the anti-gun lefty Sheriff of Bernalillo Country thinks this is unConstitutional.
I hope the good folks of Albuquerque and Bernalillo Country resist this step in turning individual violence into a "health scare" that demands gun control. We can't give these people an "in" or an inch.
Update from Instapundit's go-to gun blogger The Truth about Guns, regarding the Governor's dependence on New Mexican police enforcement: New Mexico AG to Governor on Defending Her Second Amendment Suspension: Drop Dead. That'd be Attorney General Raul Torrez. No arrests have been made so far. This is heartening news. As left as many parts of the country have turned, Amendment II is still respected by most of the people, more and more so as uncertainty and violence increase.
* I am in a location where I don't think this would fly at all. I've never been asked.
Comments (8)
Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: Planes, **Trains-II**, and Automobiles
Posted On: Monday - September 11th 2023 8:21PM MST
In Topics: China Peak Stupidity Roadshow
(Continued from **Planes**, **Planes-II**, and **Trains** of our Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles series.)
This was a slow time. The stations could get pretty packed.
This Trains-II post is about the Chinese subway systems. I've ridden the subways in 4 Chinese cities now, but the pictures and map shown here are from Peking, so I'll give information on this impressive infrastructure (with a little bit about the one in Shanghai). It's a pretty impressive deal. Things are clean, people are polite (with that one exceptionalism), and things work.
The Chinese are late to this game. The London Underground - not the band, but The Tube, started up in 1863. That's a stretch though, as the barely-underground lines used wooden carriages pulled by coal-burning steam engines. (Talk about your carbon footprint! I imagine there were more than footprints, probably carbon arms, legs, faces and whole bodies disembarking in Paddington Station.) A serious deep-level line with electric trains opened up in London the same year as the New York City system did, in 1904.
Americans, after less than a century of the industrial revolution and only a couple of centuries of civilization, built this amazing transportation infrastructure 67 years before China, with its 3,500 y/o civilization! That's a stretch in favor of China anyway, as the Peking subway consisted of but one measly line from 1971 through '84, and even then, only 2 lines until 20 years back. (Here is a graphic showing the slow growth and then big expansion.) The Soviet Union helped the Chinese design the first part of it, but then they got the hang of it themselves after Communism was long gone and things could get done properly. It was really almost a century after New York's subway opened that Peking could claim a serious subway, but now, in 2023, it's something else.
It's not the case in all stations, but these lines are set up with glass walls in the stations with doors that open only when the train is there and lines up. Are there many Chinese people who'd push people onto the tracks? Well, no, it's not New York, but then it's still a good safety feature. It's just that Americans didn't think of it first... because the nation in 1904 and a long time afterwards was one with a high-trust population. The riders in China were pretty polite while on board, even when it was really packed. Still, when the doors opened, people would push their way on, before letting those who wanted off, get off. I'm telling you, I don't get this!
It's all shiny and new. One thing Peak Stupidity has written about before is that, once things become really old - take the New York City subway (don't mind the maggots!), please - repair mode becomes costlier than build-from-scratch mode. Also, as commenters discussed under these posts before, that shine could change quickly, especially in a place like China. "The commons" are not taken care of well compared to private property in a low-trust society. However, in their favor, they don't have the MTA full of nepotist-AA hires. China is a country of competent people, though the labor force is quickly getting older, a subject for another post.
Just as with the high speed trains in China, it's not the individual shiny trains that I saw and rode on that I'm impressed with the most. It's the big networks that have been built over just a few decades, not just the one in Peking. Most of the big cities have subways now. Based on yearly ridership*, Peking is the 4th biggest subway system in the world, after Shanghai, Tokyo**, and Canton (Guangzhou). It had 2.29 billion riders - they could be the same people, of course, just fare-payers - even in '20. The routes total to 488 miles.
Here's a clearer map. The one above was one taken at one of the stations.
9 of the top 10 subways based on "system length" (meaning the total length of all the routes, without regard to how many sets of tracks lie within each) are in Chinese cities: Shanghai, Peking, Canton, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, and Wuhan. (Moscow is number 9 in the top 10 based on this metric.)
The New York City system is still #1 in number of stations with 424. The Peking system has 370 stations. However, I'm guessing when it comes to amount of urine accumulated within stations, New York is WAY WAY ahead. We saw no bums in the Peking or Shanghai subway stations, just lots of busy reasonably well-dressed Chinese people.
The question of whether these subways are paying for themselves came up in my mind when I paid the very low ticket prices, a buck to a buck and a half. (They are based on distance, something many systems have now due to the abilities of electronics. This makes it much harder to figure out WTF to do at the ticket machines the first time around, no matter what the language!) As with the HS rail, I don't have enough info to figure out whether this mode of transport is subsidized. I will say that you don't need so many employees with the self-serve electronics, etc. Oh, and the Chinese save on DIEversity departments and the like.
PS: In general the signage is pretty good, with pin yin along with the real Chinese language written for stops. On the trains, there are schematics - straight lines - for the route one is on, with LEDs to show the current stop. On the map above, the reader can see 2 full loops, the inner dark blue one and the outer light blue one. Let me tell you from a previous trip, if you lose your sense of direction going deep down into the station due to turns, then the question of which direction on the loop, CW or CCW, the train one is about to board is going is not an easy one to answer! I got lucky...
* ... using this wiki page. Unfortunately, the numbers are not all for the same year. Interestingly, Shanghai numbers are show for '20, and it's still #1.
** Tokyo, as a CITY, would be well ahead as number 1. However, this page lists subway "systems", of which Tokyo has 2, the Tokyo Subway and the Toei Subway. Together, they had 3.93 Billion riders in '19. (Again, comparing different years around the PanicFest time is prone to problems.)
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3 more for the Parrotheads
Posted On: Saturday - September 9th 2023 7:08PM MST
In Topics: Music
These are 3 more of the many favorite Jimmy Buffett songs of mine. I'm out of time to post any writing tonight.
Mañana is from the album Son of a Son of a Sailor. Many of the lyric lines are really dates, so the song is like an inside joke from mid-late 1970s America. A stand-out on that score is the bit about Steve Martin. Anyone know what "getting small" is?* Let's reggae, Reefers!! That'd be the Coral Reefer Band.
Speaking of the 70's, the somewhatt obscure movie FM (1978) was great for those into music and broadcasting. It had concert appearances from a number of great musicians of the era - one I remember the most was Linda Ronstadt with her version of the Rolling Stones' Tumbling Dice. Here's Jimmy Buffett in the movie doing Livingston Saturday Night, also from Son of a Son of a Sailor. He seems pretty wired here and nothing like laid back sailor of the islands. Different drugs? (Well, it was the '70's.)
Finally, from his prior and probably best album Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, Jimmy Buffett sings In the Shelter. It's more mellow.
Peak Stupidity has got posts backed up like mad around here. We'll have more info from the China trip - not all is bright and shiny - a continuation of that fisking of the words of the idiotic Lenin (the Russian one), more on the problems, or lack thereof, of the "fertility crisis". and then back to the stupidity of the here and now in America. Thanks for reading, writing, and listening too! Happy Sunday, all.
* I do but just asking.
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Peak Stupidity is FOR the alleged Depopulocalypse - Part 1: Substack essay
Posted On: Friday - September 8th 2023 8:43AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Pundits The Future
Heh! I just realized how humorous that cute coinage is after trying to pronounce it. It's 6 syllables long, if that helps you. A Depopulocalypse, a large decline in fertility and therefore medium-future populations of the world's nations, is what seems to be a big worry for many. That includes one substack (named Postcards From Barsoom) pundit named John Carter, whose 3rd post* in a series got me motivated to write this post.**
Upon going back to his Part 1, I almost gave up very early on, upon reading:
The collective carbon footprint of that eight hundred million US tons of human biomass is giving the planet a fever, destroying ecosystems, depleting resources, stripping the topsoil, poisoning the air, killing the oceans, filling the fields with trash, and causing traffic jams. A less crowded Terra would be in everyone’s best interests, right?This is his intro., after which he explains why, "no, not right." It was just that "carbon footprint" and "giving the planet a fever" thing I didn't like, and with way too much material on the internet for me to peruse every morning, I do tend to quickly dismiss and quit reading anything that starts off way on the wrong foot. However, it turns out, from my perusing more of this series and then a few other substack posts, this guy is a Conservative, sometimes even Libertarian, albeit with a R.C. Christian-style penchant (at least, on Part 3 of this series) for then suggesting WE need to do this or that a little to heavy on the "WE" rather than leave people alone and let it get figured out. Finally, as this post was not supposed to be a criticism of this John Carter or his essays, I do note that in his criticism of D.I.E., he included the following:
The rot is everywhere, touching everything, a miasma of mandatory make-believe that has choked off the oxygen of rational inquiry. Whether the subject is race, or sex, or "gender", or climate, or COVID, or most recently Ukraine, there is a "narrative" from which deviation is not to be tolerated. Naturally the narrative is always false; it is precisely because it is false that it forbids even the discussion of alternatives, a taboo that expresses itself in the deplatforming or cancellation of deviants who dare "deny" the sacred narrative, or even to raise the most timid of questions about some minor aspect of it.So, was that one line from the intro. sarcasm? The rest wasn't. The guy almost lost me with that one sentence! A good warning to myself and others is that an unrecognizable piece of sarcasm can turn people on a dime.***
[My bolding.]
OK, well, seeing as I'll never get to my point in this post, and I want to read Mr. Carter's 3 essays more thoroughly first, let me just link you to them now and note here that he is not so against this Depopulocalypse as I'd first thought (after reading nothing but some excerpt and a title). Read them if you are interested. This may help me better pare down and elucidate the point I wanted to get to, and you all may have some comments on his series. The subtitle of the series is Suggestions for solving the fertility crisis. See, I don't think the fertility crisis need solving. It would solve itself, barring some big problems that I see, and I think Mr. Carter does too, from first glance. His essays are:
Depopulocalypse
Depopulocalypse II – Solutions That Don’t or Won’t Work
Depopulocalypse III – From SINK to FLOAT
It might be a little confusing, but the pundit has 3 Roman-numeraled "installments". Those are the 3 links above. He mentions "chapters", but there are more than one of those per installment.
Next time, I'll get to it: Fertility is going down nearly everywhere, with that "nearly" a very important and terrible factor. That factor aside for some of this thought process, why is declining fertility a bad thing?
* ... from which I took the image above. He must have coined Depopulocalpyse too. Mr. Carter seems to like sci-fi fantasy, with allusions to material therefrom that I am not too familiar with.
** There was also an excerpt in a recent Steve Sailer post, which I'll mention at some point. It got me re-motivated.
*** People write in tags for fun or to be informative (/s), but maybe it could go farther than that. There could be a true HTML tag that changes the font to silly fonts or something. Underlining, italics, and bold are getting old.
Comments (10)
Bai Dien v the Dry Tortuga: Who's gone further?
Posted On: Thursday - September 7th 2023 4:57PM MST
In Topics: China US Feral Government Dead/Ex- Presidents Muh Generation
Perhaps that title is more understandable with the words rearranged: "Who's further gone?"
I saw this Yahoo headline and graphic today:
I had to shrink this, but the initial article text reads:
Mitch McConnell's recent freezing spells and other health concerns have created a campaign conundrum for Republicans...
"Probably a double standard."
Errr, yeah, I suppose it is, if you're nothing but a "rah-rah, Red Team" GOPer. Does the yahoo writer really believe that all those who are against the traitorous Bai Dien necessarily support Mitch McConnell, (T-KY)? "T" is for Tortoise this time, and neither for for Texas nor Tennessee. OK, Turtle, Tortuga, Tortoise - I can't tell the difference!
Note that the graphic is not exactly a fair comparison. Perhaps Mitch McConnell rides a bike too. Well no, but why not show one of Zhou Bai Dien's senior moments, many of which are available on youtube or places on the internet the Regime has not yet reached.
This type of article is very good at reinforcing the narrative that there's a big divide between the ctrl-left Blue Squad and the Establishment Red Squad there in Washington, FS. It's not like that.
As for poor Mitch, I sure hope there's a good Kentucky Conservative that the Commonwealth could send to Washington to work with the great Rand Paul. Mr. McConnell could relax and try to recuperate at home. However, I'm guessing Mitch will stay until he freezes into rigor mortis, as the Chinese have not gotten all they're due yet for supporting he and his wife Mrs. Chao in their business dealings. I'll tell you what - the Chinese sure like to hedge their bets. That's no conundrum, strickly bidness!
This video is wicked shocking:
I'd have to say that Senator McConnell has the lead in the 1st round of this Dementia Face-off, sponsored by Geritol, if either of these guys can remember where to pick up the prize and what it is exactly.
From hard-working commenter Adam Smith:
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Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: Planes, **Trains**, and Automobiles
Posted On: Thursday - September 7th 2023 8:54AM MST
In Topics: China Peak Stupidity Roadshow
(Continued from **Planes** and **Planes-II** of our Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles series.)
Due to my having a window seat on both of our Chinese high-speed rail (I'll just use HSR from here on) trips, I didn't get up much. That means that I don't think I would have missed any speed higher than that shown on the display at the front of the rail car. Generally, we went at and no more than 300 km/hr = 185 mph, at least on one of the runs, and I believe that was the limit for that line.
Besides Maglev trains (more on them, actually "it" below), this is at the top of the speed range that HS trains in Japan, France or elsewhere get to. It's not AMAZING in today's day and age - one can go faster on a maglev train. However, the construction of these lines calls for lots of elevated track and tunnels (to avoid steep slopes and high derivatives of slope, sharp curves), no grade crossings, seamless track, and I'm sure other higher quality railroad features than one needs for 80 mph freight trains. What's amazing is that within a decade or so, China has built this complete network of HSR lines, that they are highly used, that they likely can pay for themselves, and just that the whole thing WORKS.
That's a shorter time period than it took for Americans to build the bulk of the Interstate Highway system, very advanced for its time, with cruder technology (I'm thinking of the many long tunnels in China here, requiring lots of impressive machines). It's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but still, I am greatly impressed by the sheer amount of concrete in the millions of high columns and track support beam alone. Then, there are those tunnels - with mountainous terrain almost covering the Middle Kingdom. This is no white elephant.
To explain that, let me note that on the shorter run, 4 hours from Peking to Shanghai**, I attempted to estimate how many opposite direction trains we passed. A few times, I got 8 minute intervals, but some were closer to 4 or 5 minutes. If we take 8 per hour we get 32 trains, meaning they are separated by ~ 25 miles. (This made me wonder if there is a "siding" of some sort within that interval, or some way to get a broken train out of the way, if need be.*** Push it over and into the ravine below and bury it? Hmmmm...)
I might be slightly off on my basic numbers - cars in the train, and seats per car (2 abreast) - but believe it was 10 cars with 80 seats per, so there's an 800 passenger capacity. Therefore with 8 per hour on the line, they can move, let's say 100,000 to 150,000 people in a 24 period if they needed to. (If they needed to, they'd probably tighten up the spacing too.) That's pretty amazing. Airlines don't and CAN'T carry nearly as many.
Since I'm comparing these trains to airline service, let me state that the rides were extremely smooth and quiet, with none of that clickety clack and almost imperceptible accelerations other than during the approach and exit to/from the stations. The trains were roughly 80-90% full. In fact, for one of the trips, we were lucky to get tickets at all due to capacity. The seats were like coach airline seats with another foot of pitch - a big deal, of course! One could get up to go to the snack bar, bathroom, or walk the length of the train.
That is the station in the big city where we left for Peking. (I think. If not, this was Peking south.) It was packed. The security set-up has close to the airport level of annoyance. National ID cards, passports for foreigners, facial recognition, all that are part of it. One lines up, best Chinese people can give it a go, by the track number, and the boarding is done in 10-15 minutes. They need to, as each track waiting line, well it must be for a pair of 2 tracks, has a list of trains going out very frequently.
The ticket prices were cheap. We paid in the neighborhood of $60 for the Peking-Shanghai run and something like double that for the much longer run. Can these trains make money? I don't know if they are right now or not, but there's plenty of room to bump up ticket prices, IMO, as they are nowhere near airline prices. These trains really do compete pretty well with the airlines, at least on a run like the 4 hour one. Something from our old post Trains in the Orient vs. America comes in here. These huge train stations are not necessarily right downtown. Many can't be, I suppose - no way to get that much track and land in now. However, one can take subways to and from, so it's not like driving to the big hub airport with that parking and hassle.
That leads right into the part about the one MagLev train. This one goes from the big Shanghai train station - which is IN the city of Shanghai, the Pudong District (not what you're thinking!), but not what you might call downtown - to the airport. I rode this myself a couple of times years ago. What I remembered right is "8". Well, 8 is the lucky number, but was that the price or the duration of the ride? It was both. 50 RMB is ~ 8 bucks right now, and the ride took 8 minutes. We did only the same speed the other trains did 300 km/hr. I thought I'd remembered wrong, but, upon looking this up just now, on some of the runs, it gets up to 431 km/hr = 265 mph. With the low ridership we saw this time and others, and from the numbers I looked up, this one IS a white elephant. It's a fun white elephant though!
Back to the subject of the regular HSR in China, what I need to do is put up more pictures. (I've got plenty of video too.) I think I'll make another post with some. It'll not be so much about the trains, but about what one can see of China.
Your Peak Stupidity blogger may sound like pundit Fred Reed or some 10 y/o kid here. I am not impressed so much with the speed, the comfort, and the efficiency. What I'm impressed with is what you can see below. This is not some one-off. This is life there now:
I had to blow up that legend for readability after shrinking the image. I am sorry the city names are hard to see. Here is a bigger, clearer version of this map.
* Yes, I know, 213.75 mph, but Peak Stupidity has a thing for round numbers.
** The straight line distance is 665 miles, but, for terrain and possibly land-use reasons, the web says it's an 820 mile trip. With a time enroute of 4:20 or so, that works out to 305 km/hr, AVERAGE!
This was an express train, so we may have stopped only once or twice, if at all. (This whole trip is blurring together. We rode another train on a different route, which did have a couple of dozen stops.)
*** That brings up merging and forking on these HS tracks. How much of that do they have? It's got to be a bit more sophisticated than that on ordinary track.
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The Defects of Dunkirk
Posted On: Wednesday - September 6th 2023 7:10PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity History Movies
It seems like I just read about this movie a year or two ago, but it is 6 years old. Time does fly. The event itself was going on 83 1/4 years ago, which IS a long time.
Dunkirk is a WWII history movie. This town on the coast of France was the site of an amazing evacuation of 338,000 mostly British and some French soldiers who'd retreated there from the big German advance at the start of the real war (after the Sitzkrieg, or "Phoney War") in Europe. When I was a boy, I read a captivating semi-fictional book about this event, as narrated by a boy who sailed on one of the many hundreds of small vessels as requested* by the British Navy to cross the channel and help in the massive evacuation.
As a defensive battle against the Wehrmacht (German Army) was being fought in the towns of Dunkirk and Lille, men on the beaches and at the harbor were evacuated over a 9 day period, the 27th of May through the 4th of June of 1940. The movie in question here focused, so to speak, on the beaches, but the numbers evacuated were over 98,000 off the beaches and over 239,000 from the harbor. The biggest numbers were on the last 3 days of May and June 1st.
It was the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) that was the biggest threat to these men trying to get back to England. The movie showed the dive bombing and strafing. It also showed correctly that men were angry at the lack of visible support from the RAF (until the end, an example of which I'll mention), but much of the action in the air was out of sight of the men at Dunkirk. The RAF lost 145 planes, and the Luftwaffe lost 156. Over 200 British/Allied ships were destroyed, 9 of them (6 British and 3 French) being destroyers.
From my reading - the movie didn't have time for all this - there were 3 sea routes that the British Navy worked out, each with it's own perils. The shortest one was 39 nm. It had the peril of ~ half the route - westbound near the coast of France - being in range of German shore batteries. The 55 nm route went though an area with a big number of mines. For that reason, it could not be used at night. The 3rd one was 87 nm, taking double the time of the shortest. It took on the most danger of attacks by German ships, subs, and planes.
The biggest part of the story of Dunkirk, in popular lore anyway, was the participation of the over 300 British small craft. (That's out of the nearly 700 British and mid-800s total Allied boats that took part.) Some of the small craft made the journey back and forth, while other spent time by the beaches ferrying men from the shallow water to the bigger boats. Dunkirk the movie does a decent job of telling the story, except for a bad depiction of the numbers.
Quick summary of the history completed, this posts was not to be a review so much, as if any Peak Stupidity posts are movie reviews in the classic sense, but I'll write a few things and then get to my alleged defects. First off, I'd go see this one, if you like history and/or war movies. I don't recall much Wokeness in the movie at all - that's the most important thing to this viewer and re-viewer. There was a lot of action, of course. Lighting, casting, directing, yeah, it was fine. Even the Key Grip did a nice job, I gotta assume... seeing as I never wanted to even know what that's all about ...
However, when you make a movie about history, especially recent, well-recorded history, you want accuracy too, well, as a viewer you do, at least. In this case, I don't mean accuracy on the facts history so much as on details that otherwise cause disbelief. I noticed a couple more than the 3 (one pretty minor) that I write about here.
1) The most minor involved aviation. I enjoyed the detailed aviation scenes, in the cockpit of the Spitfire, as the flyer figures out fuel margins in his head and writes bingo fuel or time on the panel with chalk. There was this dramatic scene at the end in which this same pilot has shot down one or two German planes that were out there strafing boats and soldiers, knowing he was long out of "go-home" fuel. He glided the plane to a beach landing, after which the German army took him prisoner.
The thing is, he cranked down his landing gear by hand (we must assume that his hydraulic pump is engine driven) only seconds before touching down. MAKES! NO! SENSE! Though a good beach landing was no sure thing - can't be too wet and can't be too dry - he had this long, long stretch of beach to land on. That was waaaay too long of a glide for a plane like that, but that was to make allow the scene to include the proper musical score, I'm no director. However, that's not my beef here. Why not crank the gear down earlier? You'll have more drag and steepen your glide. So what? You're not going for a particular spot here - he was flying parallel to the beach. Just sayin'...
2) More critical was the neglect of the water temperature. There are lots of scenes of men getting pulled out of the water and others of them going in or out one way or another. I saw a few blankets, and I understand that these were men, not crybabies. Still, the water off Dunkirk, per interpolation on a table from this travel climate site, would have been somewhere between the low-mid 50s F and the low 60s. That's COLD! It's not 1/2 hour hypothermia cold, but with the wind and waves, you'd have seen much more shivering, teeth chattering, and worse. The cold water just didn't seem to be much of a factor in the movie story.
3) The number of boats shown to be involved is misleading. There were the large ships, but I don't think the view showed more than 25 small boats out there when the feel-good music came on. Maybe the average one could take on 20 soldiers - total guesswork here, so that's 500, and they could make 3-5 trips tops. (Remember the deal with the 3 routes.) At best this looked like a fleet that could take a couple thousand men in a day. Between the beaches and the harbor, there were over 25,000 men taken across on 7 of the days, and 47-68 thousand on 4 of the days. I don't belittle the civilian participants in the Dunkirk evacuation here one bit - it was heroic, and one man taken across was a guy who may have been captured or killed. Was this only a small part of the whole operation though? I can't get the numbers transported by ship type.
Out of the 311 (recorded**) small boats only a small number were shown together in the movie. This was a 9-day operation though, so perhaps this is not so out-of-whack. It just didn't make for good perspective***, as one could not fathom these boats taking but a small percentage of the 338,000 men evacuated from Dunkirk across the English Channel in late-May/early-June of 1940.
You can call the men and boys involved heroes, as the danger was large. 140 of the 311 recorded small craft were sunk.
* It was not necessarily voluntary on the part of the ships.
** Per Churchill, per Wiki.
*** I think what didn't help for me is that I don't recall anywhere in the movie anything or anyone saying this was more than a day or two operation. I hadn't known until reading more just now.
Comments (5)
Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: **Planes-II**, Trains, and Automobiles
Posted On: Tuesday - September 5th 2023 6:01PM MST
In Topics: China Peak Stupidity Roadshow
There'll be a whole lot of the "Dispatches" posts, but I'll go ahead and link to previous - only 1 right now - posts on traveling in China. (Continued from Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: **Planes**, Trains, and Automobiles.)
In the last post, Peak Stupidity mentioned we'd write more about the international part of our travel to and from China. I won't get into the details of the flight itself - except to note that we deviated from the Great Circle route enough to miss what would have been many hundreds of miles in Russian airspace. Now that COULD have been due to the ride, some weather, or operational concerns*, but somehow I think it was more than that.
This was an American-based** airline, so the service is what I've been used to: OK or good, depending on where you are sitting. "Native speakers" (2, I believe) can be younger, but the F/A's have lots of seniority and what goes along with that.
The big change I saw as compared to trips 10-15 years back is how Chinese the passengers are. Sure, many may be American citizens, but I'm talking ethnically Chinese here.*** 15 years ago, I'd say the passenger population was 60-75% American - at least White people. Now, it's no more than 25%, and I don't see why this flight wouldn't be representative - There was no big Chinese holiday in progress, moon cakes, or whatever, speaking of which, they eat moon pies in China now too, but not American ones - unfair trade practices are ubiquitous. "They" doesn't just mean our party. ;-}
Yes, China is rising rapidly economically, and America is descending. Whether the passengers were 1/2 American citizens or not, it's China running the show now, or calling the shots, it seems. (This post on a very minor issue, with our only Peak Stupidity prequel post as of date, gets that point across.)
It being China, everyone had to GTFOTP, now, dammit! I understand this to some degree, as there can be lines for customs/immigration. Yeah, but they have machines now. One of these is what's shown in the image above. It didn't work. The guy next to me's machine didn't work. None of them worked, so we just had some guy look at the passports and visas. The reason this was not so intense as it'd been a long time ago - see Chinese Immigration NON-Stupidity - is that finger-printing and more so, facial recognition, are ubiquitous in China now. That's one of the things I have been thinking about and part of the reason I wanted to see for myself how Orwellian the place is getting. Cameras and the software/databases/AI behind them are how China keeps track of people now, most especially foreigners coming in (and going out, but that'll be another post).
Maybe it was our being foreigners, but things were not as clear-cut as they are entering the US - this is customs, where Snoopy checks for bananas and they may be interested in any REAL money, and this is immigration control, where we mostly look like foreigners ourselves and generally give the real Americans the most shit. Nah, I couldn't really tell what was going on at some check-points there in Shanghai airport. There were multiple layers, as there were on the way out. This may have been do to my making a connection rather than leaving to the streets of Shanghai.
Then came the funny part. The Chinese version of the TSA was full of hard-working mostly young people. They were mostly slim, including the young lady who had me spin around quickly as she looked for... I don't know in my pockets. They worked much harder than the American TSA (not that I agree with the idea in the first place), but I don't think they worked smarter. I've had some of the same stuff in this one case for years - the guy kept running it back through the machine. "Oh, those are keys!" Run the keys through, along with the bag againg. "Oh, that's a phone charger? Run the charger through, along with the bag.. "Oh, lots and lots of coins!" (That gets the Americans once in a while too.) It didn't help that we couldn't communicate other than with hand gestures. I believe the Americans kind of figure "hey, those are keys, those are coins, and that's a charger."
The last time I tried to communicate with the young man who was working so hard to see what the cool stuff was in my bag was when I wondered myself "Where'd I put the key fob?" See, the other keys are all on one keychain, while this one is too big, hence goes separately. I asked the guy using hand gestures to run the bag one last time, lucky number 8, so I could see where that key fob was in the x-ray picture. He didn't get the concept of my using the security machinery to, you know, like, help me with something.
With the surplus of time I had to make that connection, the bag search was just amusing. However, I'd say the whole China international travel experience is worse on the China end than it is here. Getting on trains had some of this same security mess involved, but then it was all Chinese domestic travel. Finally, don't get fooled by the initial bag screener machine near the outside of the airport. You throw the bags in, someone sort of watches, and they come out the other end in a few seconds. I think they are designed for masses of metal the size of small hotel safes. That's just the beginning though ...
PS: Health forms: This was a joke. Before boarding the plane in the US, one had to do an on-line Chinese health form. The interface was clunky, and I had a real time of it. There were questions about the Chinese destination(s) and contacts there. I finally got to the actual health survey. There's a big [ ] NO on top of a series of symptoms. If you don't click that one, you KNOW you're gonna have a time of things, so everybody does, including me, the guy who entered the country with quite the sore throat. Nobody cares! ... till they do again...
* You don't hear much from the pilots about all this on the long flights as the announcement must be translated, so they take twice as long and a) people want to sleep or b) watch movies or play video games. These announcements interrupt these. Also, people like me are an exception to the rule that "NOBODY CARES!"
** I'll just write "American" from here on, but I wrote it this way once to distinguish from specially American Airlines, the company. (It could only be 3 though now, American, Delta, or United.)
*** Only way to have gotten a good number on this distinction was to have gotten off the plane first and watched the customs lines. I had other things to do, and Peak Stupidity doesn't pay me enough for this kind of thing. $0 goes quickly...
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Living and Dying in 3/4 time.
Posted On: Saturday - September 2nd 2023 8:58PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor
A Lost (Son of a Son of a) Sailor:
Jimmy Buffett is lost to us. I've got the humor tag on this one in addition to "music" because Jimmy Buffett put a lot of humor in his songs. (I'll put some of my favorite lyrics here.) He was an excellent lyricist, a good songwriter in general, and he probably promoted the laid-back island-lifestyle, and sailing, drinking (and flying too) to more music fans than anyone. Oh, and the humor can be seen in the name of his Coral Reefer Band too.
I'm no hard-core Parrothead, but I saw a good show by Jimmy Buffett and his Coral Reefer Band in between a Giants double-header at Candlestick Park. There was one other time at some amusement park. Then too, I've been down to his world in the Conch Republic - the Florida Keys, that is a few times. (Jimmy Buffet was not FROM there - he grew up in lower Mississippi and Alabama - hence the nice ballad Biloxi.)
Nobody said it was all profound and that Jimmy Buffett was the next great crooner. He entertained, and he, wittingly or not, promoted that sailing and island life. That all sounds great, especially after you've gotten a few Margaritas in you, but we can't all be Jimmy Buffetts, living in 3/4 time, or it wouldn't work. That's why the islands are what they are, and America was ... a good place for Jimmy Buffett to write and sing about all this.
My favorite album of his is Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, but I'd put Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, Son of a Son of a Sailer, Volcano, and A1A* next. Here are some great lyrics from songs I know by heart - no, not the album, but songs that I know by heart:
Miss You So Badly from Changes in Latitudes has the same theme as the more popular Come Monday:
We're stayin' in a Holiday Inn full of surgeons.Part of Boat Drinks from Volcano:
I guess they meet there once a year.
They exchange physician stories
and get drunk on Tuborg beer.
Then they're off to catch a stripper
with their eyes glued to her G,
but I don't think that I would ever let 'em cut on me.
Twenty degrees and the hockey game's on.Of course, there's the whole song, but how about this one line from Why Don't We Get Drunk?, off A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean
Nobody cares; they are way too far gone.
Screamin' "Boat drinks," somethin'
To keep them all warm.
This morning, I shot six holes in my freezer.
I think I got cabin fever.
Somebody sound the alarm.
I'd like to go where the pace of life's slow.
Could you beam me somewhere, Mister Scott?
Any old place here on Earth or in space.
You pick the century and I'll pick the spot.
They said you are a snuff queen, but I don't think that's true...**Some of they lyrics are very specific, making them dated now, such as a line about Anita Bryant in his Manana off Son of a Son of a Sailer, and more so the end of the title song of Volcano:
But I don't want to land in the New York City.I don't know what he had against San Diego. Anybody?
I don't want to land in Mexico.
I don't want want to land on no Three Mile Island.
I don't want to see my skin aglow.
I don't want to land in Commanchee sky park
or in Nashville, Tennessee.
I don't want to land in no San Juan airport
or in the Yukon Territory.
I don't want to land in no San Diego.
I don't want to land in no Buzzard's Bay.
I don't want to land on no Ayatolah.
I got nothing more to say!
Best old-country-style song titles of his: Tryin' to Reason with Hurricane Season (not one his best tunes, IMO) and My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don't Love Jesus. Album Titles: Well, yeah, A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean and also Last Mango in Paris.
For you Parrotheads, I am sorry for your loss. My very favorite used to be played by a local musician who is one of the few guys I've known who steadily made a living at it (with 4 kids). His name was Jim too.
Now he lives in the islands,
fishes the pilings,
and drinks his green label each day.
Writing his memoirs,
losin' his hearin',
but he don't care what most people say.
Through
if he likes you he'll smile, and he'll say,
"Achmed, some of it's magic, some of it's tragic,
but I had a good life all of the way."
For a son of a son of a sailor, and others:
Surely, some Steely Dan music should have appeared this evening on Peak Stupidity. However, you can see why we'll have to get to that next music post***. I didn't have time for so much blogging this week, so that's it. Come Tuesday, it'll be alright...
And he went to Paris,
lookin' for answers to the questions ...
that bothered him so...
* That's the highway the runs down the east coast of Florida from Fernandina to Key West. However, the ~Homestead to Key West portion is one and the same as the US-1 - only that one road takes you through there. A1A runs on some barrier islands when it's not concurrent with the #1, while the #1 is on the land side of the intracoastals, and I-95 is generally a little bit further inland.
** Till this day, I thought it was "slut queen". The song was written by one "Marvin Gardens" (that's Monopoly property), but that was actually Jimmy Buffett.
*** There have been at least 5 Jimmy Buffett songs featured before, but there are few more that ought to be. Coming ...
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Barrack Øb☭ma's "I did not inhale" moment
Posted On: Friday - September 1st 2023 6:48PM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Genderbenders Humor
Do you remember the liar Bill Clinton and his story about his having smoked marijuana, technically, but not in the spirit of the thing, as he did not inhale? It was a different time, you understand ... seriously. These days it would take revelations of one being a transexual, I think, to just maybe put a damper on one's campaign.
Back in 1992, as Clinton was still one among 5 or so prominent D-candidates, revealing that one had taken recreational drugs in the past was not good for one's employment prospects. The grifter/shyster Bill Clinton out of Arkansas was gunning for the type of employment that can screw up entire countries.
Think about the time-line. If one had been 25 or older by the mid-60's, there's a good chance he wasn't involved in that "scene". So, anyone in his early 50's or older even could be forgiven for thinking the smoking of pot earlier (or anytime) in one's life was a big deal. Bill Clinton was only 45 y/o during that primary campaign season, so he likely thought nothing of it. It still mattered to the public, and the press still kind of cared what mattered to the public. In interview during the campaign on March 29, 1992, Bill Clinton stated:
"When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two. And I didn’t like it. And I didn’t inhale and never tried it again."See now, I always thought that this answer made Bill Clinton look like a scumbag, well, more than he already was, as the answer could mean 2 things:
1) He is a liar. (Well, yeah, that turned out to be true, of course...)
2) He told the truth but is such a pussy that he had to succumb to peer pressure by smoking with his peers, but not inhaling so he could say in that lawyerly fashion later, "No, I never got high."
How can you experiment and find out whether you like it, if you don't inhale, you dumbass?
Well, the word is out that another former US President and scumbag along the lines of Bill Clinton had similar things to say about a relatively more important lifestyle than toking up. Barrack Øb☭ma was initially campaigning for President on 2008, only 16 years after Bill Clinton first was. In that 16 years a lot had changed in our culture. Being a pot smoker, at least in the past, was simply not a problem. Being a homosexual might have been a deal-breaker still. (Right, now, 15 years after that, it'd be a point in one's favor, and even genderbending freaks may not be ruled out.)
There's been a lot written recently about revelations of Øb☭ma's sexual "orientation" (is that what you do the summer before college?*), likely coming from what was written by David Garrow in his '17 Øb☭ma biography, Rising Star. I just came upon this Independent.UK article . The headline says: "Obama’s love letters from 1982 resurface: ‘I make love to men daily, but in the imagination’". He wrote this to his girlfriend. I am no poet, but I can see right away that this is not the way to wooo a girl. Or was the recipient actually... won't go there...
Was this homosexuality deal all in Barry's imagination, or was this a Bill Clinton-style lawyerly statement he wrote to his girlfriend at his college? I would like to see an interviewer bring this stuff up:
"Did you have sex with that man,
"I experimented with putting a guy's dick in my mouth a time or two. And he didn't like it. And I didn't inhale and never tried it again."
Ookaaayyyy, well, it doesn't matter now - you've already "done enough" for our country. BTW, I read a good comment that noted that investigating Barrack Øb☭ma's homosexuality is still a much easier task than obtaining his college transcripts. That last was not a joke. Stop clapping.
* Perhaps the weekend at the college didn't turn out like he planned. The things he thinks are sexy, I just don't understand ...
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[UPDATED 09/02:] Fixed the joke, per Alarmist in the comments. Added a couple of sentences at the end.
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Comments (16)
Dispatches from The Middle Kingdom: **Planes**, Trains, and Automobiles
Posted On: Thursday - August 31st 2023 6:22PM MST
In Topics: China Peak Stupidity Roadshow
This board does not indicate flights but airlines - it's an index to the various ticket counters at the Departure Level.
We took all the standard modes of transportation within China. That is, air transport, trains*, and auto (private and taxis), but I could include a bicycle rickshaw ride. We didn't avail ourselves of any motorcycle taxis, though. (I'd taken Chinese-made single-cylinder bikes for rides at about 40 cents for a 2 mile ride about 10 years back. I'm not sure they are even allowed everywhere now - didn't notice any.)
Again, I cannot give big overall economic comparisons between China and America. I will look up whatever numbers I can to put things in perspective. These posts are just descriptions of how things go in the Middle Kingdom (village of a million and the Big Time Peking, both) from personal observation.
I took the picture above in Shanghai Pudong Airport. That's not a listing of flights with their departure gates. It's a listing of the different airline's ticket counters. The place is BIG. That's terminal 2 for international travel, but there are many airlines doing a lot of domestic flying too. They wouldn't necessarily appear by name on that board.
On this Wiki page there's a list of airlines operating withing or out of China. Very much like in the US at this point**, there are 3 big airlines, Air China, China Eastern, and China Southern. These have fleet sizes from the high 400 airplanes to the mid-600s. The American big 3 have fleets in the mid-900s each. Then, there is Southwest, without any overseas international travel, but with a fleet of 800 737s.
In the year '21, last I could find, Chinese airlines flew about 2/3 the number of passengers as American (based/run) airlines, 440 million to 666 million. Revenue-passenger-miles is a good measure, but I had no luck finding a number for China***. In '22 the number for the US was almost a Trillion RPM. That is still only 70-80% of the pre-PanicFest numbers. OTOH, the year '22 used for China is probably not the best, as that was the year of the Covid~Zero stupidity. China had that 660 million number in '19, while America had 1.05 billion passengers carried that year. It was still a ratio of about 2:3.
Well, without analysis to go with them, stats have a tendency to bore the crap out of people, so let me relate the experience of that one domestic flight. This was on a 737, I think -800 variant. We paid on average ~$195 each for one-way tickets on a 2-hour flight time trip. That's very good for the purchase of tickets 3 days ahead and 1 week ahead (on one of them). I remember from other trips that what I like about the pricing is its similarity to the SouthWest Airlines of old. (I remember a website with excellent ease of use and pricing visibility 20 years ago.)
Nah, the flight attendants were no Eva Air or Singapore hotties, but they were slim young women who were nice and professional*****. The pilots? That's what I don't like about the flying in China. They are hiding out in the cockpit, door locked, even before passengers get on the plane. Now, I've had LOTS to say about the TSA, but I do agree with the locking of cockpit doors during flight. (Terrorism aside, some drunkard could fall into the cockpit while looking for the forward lav, and he could lean on one of the yokes and put people into the ceiling!) However, in America, pilots are friendlier, and the door isn't closed until just before pushing back.
The flight seemed packed, with everyone in coach but the one row of 4 1st Class seats. However, when I went to the aft lavatory near the end of the flight, I noticed that about 5 or 6 back rows were empty. I wouldn't think a 737 would have weight/balance problems. That was weird, as people could have spread out more otherwise. There may have been extra cargo loaded aft or a write-up on the plane that required a more forward C.G.
They served a hot meal even, a cross between real Chinese food and Panda Express, I'd call it. With Chinese people still being quite a bit slimmer on average (more on this in another post), I wonder if the airline, the name of which I can't remember, had the seat pitch even shorter than you'd find on SouthWest. (They also would have an extra row of 6 seats due to the lack of 3 of the normal 4 rows in 1st Class. That's 3x2 + 6 extra seats = 12, but then that weight/balance thing...) I believe they were making money.
We arrived at the airport serving this city of 6 million people late at night. 15 years ago when I arrived at the same place I saw a small, simple terminal that had 6-10 gates. It was also late at night, but I could see the airfield looked like ex-military in terms of the landscaping. It was not pretty. Now, there are 3 wide-open brightly-lit terminals! There are flight to overseas including Paris, while that other time you'd be coming from a few big Chinese cities only.
As was the case 15 years ago though, these Chinese people were in a big hurry to get off the plane at 10 at night! There was the usual pushing around. "You're not catching another flight, so what's the freaking hurry!", I remember saying, 15 years ago. This time, there may actually have been a few flights still leaving out of there, as I recall from the "TV"s in the terminal.
I checked a certain American State capital city to compare to this city. It has about 4% of the passenger traffic. Then I remembered. This medium-sized Chinese city is almost as big as New York!
Whatever they do there in China, they do it big and bigger each decade it seems. I'll have more on that thought. As for airline service, America is still a bigger market. I wouldn't be surprised if China has caught up with just a handful of years.
I'll write something about the international airline business to/from China later. Also, I will write a lot more about the situation with the Orwellian controls at airports and the big train stations. (Their version of the TSA in Shanghai was a hoot, both coming and going. They took so much stuff out of one of my bags, that I asked the one guy if he could run it through one more time to make sure I still had my other key fob! Alas, he knew no English.)
* We'll separate out the high speed trains from the subways.
** The consolidation of 6 "Legacy" airlines into 3 from 15 to 10 years back (USAir + American, Northwest + Delta, and United + Continental) was a bad thing for medium-sized city direct service.
*** Yeah, I looked in R-P-Kilometers, of course. China Air (out of Taiwan****, as opposed to Air China in the mainland) has some damn deal with the internet, as no matter how I try to look it up, I get info on China Air.
**** The other biggie out of Taiwan is Eva Air. The only statistic I got for them is that the flight attendants wear tight deep-green curvy uniforms. Again, the internet ... you know...
***** Possibly that was just luck, as on earlier trips, I've gotten guys and very plain women, meaning the hiring may not be all that it could be.
Comments (6)
Jordan Peterson and Free Speech, eh?
Posted On: Tuesday - August 29th 2023 7:59PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Pundits Orwellian Stupidity Totalitarianism
As a whole, your Peak Stupidity staff kind of likes Jordan Peterson. We enjoyed 1 hour 40 minute video of he and Camille Paglia. We've made a little bit of fun of the man due to his idiosyncratic ways and that Canadian accent. (See Fun with Jordan Peterson....)
He's not the cat's meow though. I do realize that the man won't go full out when it comes to truth on racial matters. His campaign against what was Political Correctness and is now the much harder-core Wokeness would need some of that to get to the root of the problem.
I can imagine, however, that he wouldn't have gotten as far as he has in his punditry/youtube/motivational speaking career if he'd started out too strong for what is already a cowardly and unprincipled Canadian political and academic class. I also imagine it'd be same here, if not for our foresighted Founding Fathers having written the right to free speech, assembly and all that into the Law of the Land.*
The obvious truths he has been speaking about are catching up with him anyway. It's not the Government that's after him directly but the College of Psychologists of Ontario. The following (see the link below) is what they don't like:
- Peterson responded to a July 2, 2022, tweet by someone worried about overpopulation that they were “free to leave at any time.”Good stuff, Mr. Peterson. Still, Truth is no excuse for this. It's Canada, so, whatchu' gonna do when they come for you, Jordan?
- Comments made during a January 25, 2022, appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” The document states that Peterson was identified as a clinical psychologist and talked about a “vindictive client” whose complaint he described as a “pack of lies.” On the topic of the correlation between air pollution and childhood deaths, Peterson was accused of saying, “It’s just poor children, and the world has too many people on it anyways.”
- A February 7, 2022, tweet in which he called former Trudeau advisor Gerald Butts “a prik.” (sic)
- A tweet on the 19th of that month regarding Ottawa City Councillor Catherine McKenney. McKenney uses they/them pronouns, and Peterson referred to her as an “appalling self-righteous moralizing thing.”
- In June of 2022, Peterson tweeted, “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”
- In May of that year, Peterson aired his opinion of the Sports Illustrated plus-sized cover model. He commented, “Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”
It's been many years, but I used to follow Instapundit's (Glenn Reynolds') reporting on the Ezra Levant free speech struggle in Canada. Mr. Levant won his battles with the PC Government back then. This Wokeness now has got real Totalitarianism behind it, so Mr. Peterson doesn't seem to stand a chance.
I'm just hoping Jordan Peterson gets off lightly. From what I've read he must undergo reducation. That's better than hanging but Orwellian to the letter of the book. Perhaps The Court will rule that he must first clean his room.
* Yes, I do know that it's only as good as the people who must be vigilant and defend it, who are fewer by the year. We've already let go of about half of Amendment I, and the rest is on thin ice.
Comments (7)