A year later - the NTSB on the midair crash of Pat-25 into PSA FLT 5342
Posted On: Thursday - February 12th 2026 9:04PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Political Correctness
Peak Stupidity wrote about this tragic - they generally are - midair crash of a US Army Blackhawk helicopter (call sign PAT-25) and a PSA Airlines CRJ-700 (call sign PSA 5342) a week after it happened. Since this blog concerns itself with, among plenty of other things, the D.I.E./Wokeness, formerly PC stupidity (generally here), we posted Did D.I.E. cause 67 people to die? and The pilots of Pat-25 at that time.
It’s been a year + 2 weeks since that crash. The NTSB has its full report out and that includes the full CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) transcripts, so I figured I’d be able to answer my question from the latter.
First, though, for any readers who are seriously interested, the following 11 minute video does a good job of describing what happened that night a half mile east of the Ronald Reagan National (DCA) airport. The narrator talks slower than I’d like, but this may be worth your time.
I’ll leave this NTSB report for you all to check out. I wrote “this”, as the page lists the investigation status as “ongoing”, and there are reports such that there may not be a “THE” report. However, this is a pretty comprehensive summary, written after a board meeting (with 8 presentations that you can check out yourself from links included - I have not yet) on Jan. 27th of this year. It has 74 “Findings”, most of them criticisms, 5 “contributing factors” and 50 recommendations, the latter directed at the FAA (Air Traffic Control), the US Army and Dept. of War, and the FAA. I note that there is NOT ONE recommendation for PSA Airlines - the crew was not just in no way at fault, but I’m not sure there was much they could have done to prevent the accident that killed the 60 passengers and 4 crewmembers.
Because this crash was not due to some mysterious mechanical problem or loss-of-control for unknown reasons, with the help of ATC-Live website radio recordings, what happened was pretty clear to me last year. However, the transcripts of the conversation within the helicopter was what I was looking for. It’s in this report. The format has three columns of transcribed voices and sounds. The left is from the helicopter, the center from the DCA control tower, and the right is from the PSA jetliner. You’ll see repeats across all or 2 columns when there are radio calls made, in the case of 3, when the transmission is from the tower. (He talked on 2 different frequencies at the same time, a special one the choppers generally use on those low, numbered routes though this area, and the normal VHF frequency for “the tower”, sometimes dubbed the “local” controller.) Even when it’s the same transmission, the 3 columns don’t always match, as the radio calls may occasionally be “stepped on” - it’s a busy place - so not heard completely or at all.
OK, then, if you’re interested, there’s plenty of info to peruse while you wait for the post we’ll have by end-o-week trying to answer the question, “Was D.I.E. involved?”. I’ll tell you now that there’s not much of a change from what I wrote last year, but I have confirmation of what exactly was going on onboard Pat-25.
PS: That NTSB report linked-to above has 3 additional videos in it too. You’ll need a few hours for all of this.
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[UPDATED 02/19:] As explained in this Wednesday’s post, the page I linked to for the full NTSB report changed. Thanks again, Adam Smith, for getting us to a web archived version. The link should again to to the right report.
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Quarter for my thoughts?
Posted On: Wednesday - February 11th 2026 7:44PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Trump Economics US Feral Government Race/Genetics
Oh, they're still free, believe me! This post is about the new quarters, and by "new", I mean of this most recent century only. I've had to rely on my coin-collecting kid to read dates due to my farsightedness, the technical term for lack of nearsightedness.
I found this in the car's ashtray. What the hell...?
That ain't no Martha Washington. Even George on the front - the obverse, as the coin collectors call it, looked more like some shady "TECH" Billionaire than the General and Founding Father on last century's quarters. It turns out that this lady on the reverse could be one of either Bessie Coleman, Jovita Idar, Edith Kanakaʻole (daughter of Kumon Iwanalea, I guess...), Eleanor Roosevelt, or Maria Tallchief. That's per wiki, but she don't look like no Eleanor Roosevelt to me- I knew Eleanor Roosevelt, I fought for the Women's trade union and the United Nations with Eleanor Roosevelt, and this ugly broad still ain't no Eleanor Roosevelt.
No, my friend looked up on his phone, and my kid later confirmed that this is the 2nd of the 5 for '25, one Jovita Idar, so give yourself a golf clap if you knew her. I didn't. It turns out I wouldn't have wanted to. All of these "American" women, along with a large majority of the other Quarter Women on quarters minted from the rest of '22 through '25 do not represent any decent ideals of America.
Who is this Jovita Idar? She's "an American journalist, teacher, political activist, and civil rights worker who championed the cause of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants.", that's who. Who let this happen?! Trump signed off on the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 in early '21 (had to be in January, of course). However, as even wiki admits, Dark Brandon used this act to push a progressive agenda. Almost all of the women are non-White, and if they're White, they're anti-White and/or anti-American. Well.... there was Sally Ride, the 1980s astronaut, on one of the '22 reverses, but then, I just found out she was one of the letters of BLT-G++. Who knew? (Seriously, they would not have told us she was a lesbo back when she rode on the Space Shuttle in '83. That would not have sat well 43 years ago.)
It turns out there is writing on the clothing of this Jovita Idar, but I surely wasn't going to catch that myself on the real quarter from 4" away. It says there she was a "Journalista". I kid you not, there's now Spanish writing on an American coin. Man, Brandon, Mayorkas, and I don't know who else, really, really wanted to push us!
Unsurprisingly, President Trump-47, for the Semiquincentennial special numismatic coinage, wants the dollar coin to have an image of him on both the front and the back:
On October 3, 2025, the Treasury Department issued design concepts for possible use on the Semiquincentennial $1 coin. These featured President Donald Trump in profile on the obverse, and on the reverse Trump standing with raised fist and the U.S. flag in the background, with the words Fight! Fight! Fight!, evoking his words and actions during the July 2024 assassination attempt on him. The authenticity of the designs was confirmed by U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach.That's our modest leader, always pushing back against the progressives because, yes, they WILL go ape-shit. Haha, that's OK, because, ego aside, he does indeed fight against the anti-White agenda. It's the CFA (Commision of Fine Arts) and the CCAC (Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee) who review designs for coinage. President Trump has fired, errr "dismissed" all members of the CFA. If it makes anyone feel any better (or worse), Brandon had done the same for this Commission when he took office.
Under the authorizing legislation, head-and-bust images of any person, living or dead, were not to be used on the obverse of the coins. A living person could not appear on the reverse.
That explains the quarter above. Peak Stupidity has been very angered by this agenda in the coinage and paper currency due to more than just the face value. We wrote 3 posts on the hideous Tubwoman design that HAD BEEN planned for the $20 bill. The title of the first of Tubmania and a cashless economy - - More on the Tubwoman Twenty, and Final Tubman-thumping post (yes, of course the "Danny Boy" song is embedded!) may clue the reader in already. If we are so disgusted with the currency, normal White Americans will probably shun the bills, and that would bring us to that Revelation 13-style cashless economy more quickly.
As for the quarters, I can barely read them, a big blessing I'd say, so I just now found out about all this*, after the last year of the 4 of this series. I look forward to the Trump dollar. That's not so much out of admiration, but it'll be a blast spending 'em at, say, the coffee shop!
PS: From the 2nd of those 2 old posts on the $20 bill, which we will hopefully never see, since this still cracks me up, then here you go:
Oh, Lordy, pick stack a day!"
We get knocked down, but we get up again, they're never gonna keep us down!
PPS: I'm amazed. I read that quarters have been of the same composition, 91 2/3% copper and 8 1/3% nickel, since the end of silver coinage in 1964.
* My son had told me, but I hadn't paid attention to exactly who the women would be.
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Roofing and Illegal Alien Labor: Arithmetic and Polemics
Posted On: Tuesday - February 10th 2026 9:09PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Economics
We got both kinds of writing here!
No, this is not the Peak Roofing Cost blog. You’re quite right. For those not willing to put up with boring roofing cost estimates, you could skip to the polemics of the latter part of this post. (Sorry, I don’t know how long it’s going to be… I’m writing in real time here.)
The point here is to demonstrate that the long-running themes about “work Americans just won’t do”, and “Americans CAN’T do this stuff”, the latter out of people under 50, I guess, are a load of rubbish. Peak Stupidity has already done some quick math regarding Trump’s (even!) “We need the illegals” claim about the Agriculture industry, with produce as an example, and Hospitality industry, with hotel housekeeping as an example. The differential labor cost between cash-paid illegal alien labor and tax-paying Americans is maybe 10% to 15% of your retail costs of the product and service, respectively. We try to be conservative with our estimates too.
Estimation, yes, that’s something I’ve found I’m pretty good at. That includes the tough ones, as I got into it with The Unz Review’s Ron Unz on estimates of the number of illegal Indian and Chinese people in America. Numbers for this are very hard to come by via conventional means, of course. However, I’ve got a whole lot more of an idea than someone that trusts the search sites or AI.* Yeah, there will be a couple of posts…
Roofing estimates are easy enough though. We’ve got most of the numbers very accurately with only a few - illegal labor pay rates, for example, guessed here (again conservatively). I’ll bring up 3 examples, my own roof a decade back, roofs in the local area, and the big roof in my friend’s story, discussed in Breaking Roofing News.
It’s very hard for me to bring up roofing shingles without bemoaning high inflation, first, so, with your forbearance… This post about it is 7 1/2 years old, so I had to go get a new price for architectural shingles. If you’re not going with metal (not a bad idea) or clay, these “architectural” ones are what almost everyone specifies, making the standard shingles ugly in comparison (used for that apples-to-apples inflation calculation, though). Holy cow, they’re $40 - $45 a bundle now, up from ~$22 when I wrote that inflation post. We gotta do this - from $6.66 in the mid-1990s to $40 today (again conservative estimates), I invoked the MoneyChimp site for help with the compounding and got an average of, again, 7% inflation.
Anyway, 3 of these bundles cover what’s called a “square” by roofing people, 100 ft2. A decade ago I made an estimate for my roof that was only 2/3 of what the 3 White guys I made a special effort to hire had figured. This ain’t rocket surgery. It was a simple roof, so you get your house footprint area, add the overhang, divide by the cosines of the slopes, and add extra for ridges and valleys. I was right in MY estimate, and these guys were either wrong or trying to scam me for extra material. All of it, the shingles, tar paper, and the nails were way over-estimated.
I paid them $5,100 in cash. Here we go: I remember the materials ($22/bundle plus the rest) were about $1,600** and that these guys worked for about a day and a half. I’m estimating 15 hours max, so 45 labor hours. In other businesses, with tree-cutting as an example, there can be pretty big fixed costs, upkeep of expensive bucket trucks, chippers, etc. What did these guys have besides a couple of ladders and a small trailer for materials? I doubt they even had insurance, so their fixed costs were negligible. They made $75 per hour! It’s the times when I do these calculations when I think I should have gotten a better price. Then again, I’m glad for guys like these to make some good money, $1,100 for a day and a half’s hard work… AND, the tax man was, that is the welfare-eating mooches were, getting ZILCH.
I’ll go in the other direction with this next example. I’ll watch the Mexican crews of 4 or 5 do a $2,000 ft2 house in the neighborhood in one long day.*** (Removing the old roofing is part of this, of course.) I don’t know how much they make exactly, but I don’t think $30/hr is anything but conservative even in this day and age. Let’s use $35 though. In a 12 hour day, with 5 guys, that’s $2,100 in labor, but let’s call it $2,500. A 2,000 ft2 house with a more complicated and steeper roof could require 35 squares, which is ~100 bundles of shingles. With tar paper, nails, some parts like ridge vents, flashing or drip edges and the like, it could add up to $6,000 in material. Let’s just note here the proportion in labor costs to total so far, only 30%
But, you’re probably not going to get that roof done for $8,500 or $9,500, not in the year ‘26 you won’t! $12,000 is probably a good deal now. Next time I know the owner somewhat, I’ll ask. For these more “professional” jobs than mine, there are dumpsters and a few more fixed costs. The contractors make some good money - that’s the main thing. That’s what I’ll get at with the final example.
In that Breaking Roofing News linked-to above, we discussed a re-roofing job required on a 7,000 ft2 mansion. The insurance company was going to pay out $90,000 for it!! Even half that is good money, as I’ll estimate. There are 2-story parts of the house, but let me estimate most of it as 1-story, so 5,000 ft with a reasonable slope and perhaps many complicated parts. Materials could be as much as $15,000 very conservatively. For labor, one can extrapolate from my roof or the ones nearby, but how about a big crew of 10 guys taking 3 10-hour days? That’s ~$10,000 in labor. Where is that $65,000 going?! Even were it a $50,000 roof,**** as would seem more reasonable, after the odds and ends, the contractor will get a lot of money for his work - sales, management, driving all over in the big-ass pickup for a week. Could Mr. Contractor in his big-ass pickup spare just a chunk of that huge profit - unless I’m making some big mistake, in the tens of thousands pre-tax, to pay Americans somewhat more to do this work?
I imagine the reader at this point might be - if not off to sleep - wondering if Peak Stupidity has turned Communist? Shouldn’t these guys be able to make this good money, if the market allows? Economics aside, after all, they are decent White men for the most part, not your Bezoses and Gateses out-of-touch Billionaires.
Well, sure, if they weren’t CHEATING. The cheating is in that these contractors are reaping benefits of cheaper (not so cheap) labor while the external costs, schooling, healthcare, etc. that these illegals are not supporting as Americans do. Above all this, Economics aside again, the cost to other Americans is the cultural transformation of their society. Where is that noblesse oblige we keep hearing about? The Epstein Island crowd doesn’t have much of it, so why should these roofing contractors? (Because, otherwise we’ll deport their cheap labor and lock them up for violating laws against employment of illegals, is one answer…)
We’re into the polemics now, in case you hadn’t noticed. If everyone’s doing it, why shouldn’t I hire illegals? That’s a decent point, as you don’t want to be at a disadvantage when you quote the job. However, the main point here is, to go back to the simple math for a second, is that the extra labor cost to hire Americans, for any of these guys, will not bankrupt these contractors. They’d still be making good money. $50/hr would get most young guys not already holding some lucrative job up on a roof. The $15, but let’s call it $20, hourly differential means a 60% increase in labor costs. That sounds terrible. It would mean that the labor cost for the houses near me would be an additional $1,200 for those roofs nearby and $6,000 on that mansion roof.
That would cut into profits by 1/4 to 1/3 in the first case, while for that mansion, I don’t even know WTH is going on with all that money. So you set up 2 jobs in a week and, instead of making $7,000 that week, you might make only $4,000. That IS a big hit, so I can see why noblesse oblige for working Americans is not a thing with these guys. OTOH, $4,000 a week is still GOOD MONEY!
The fact that Americans making $50/hr doing roofing WOULD be paying taxes and insurance and therefore not mooching off the system would negate the alleged benefit of illegal alien roofers … framers, plumbers, etc. for society.
PS: I didn’t even bring up the contractor discount, 10% at least, that brings material costs down.
* Ron Unz says “I haven’t seen anything on the whole web even claiming…” Yeah, has anyone given it a try as I have? I’ve got facts from being out and about and talking to people, and then there are known unknowns, such as my knowing there are plenty of illegals in the Chinatowns but not how many.
** That’s after I returned most of the excess, keeping a few bundles and a roll of tar paper for repairs. Good thing I paid for the materials myself and WAS THERE.
*** The point of using big crews for a smaller duration in this job can be summed up in one word: Rain.
**** As I wrote in that post, this crazy estimate of the insurance company has us both wondering. Is something shady going on?
Comments (6)
The Superbowl Circus
Posted On: Monday - February 9th 2026 8:13PM MST
In Topics: Media Stupidity Bread and Circuses
I mean the whole thing too, not just the nutty half-time culture war business that I read about. It's been a while. The last time I watched a Superbowl game was probably when I still did my taxes during half-time at the bar. Doing taxes takes at least a minute amount of concentration, so I must have been busy during those half-time "extravaganzas".
I did hear that the Seattle Seahawks won the game yesterday, but, rather than rant about Sportsball, let me show this graph of the culture war divide. It appeared in a Zerohedge article - Bad Bunny Halftime Show Versus Turning Point USA Alternative Highlights A Divided Nation . First of all, I know about the assassinated Charlie Kirk and his still-extant Turing Point - USA, but Bad Bunny? WTH??
Some people like him, apparently.
Generally Democrats are "very or somewhat satisfied" with the lewd-behaviored Puerto Rican who sings about our politics in Spanish. Republicans are generally "very or somewhat dissatisfied". 8 - 12% of everyone is "not sure". The Independents lean nearly majority "don't give a rat's ass."
I gotta say, I feel one with these not sure* and don't care people, no matter what party they're in. The regular reader can probably see what's coming ... It's Bread & Circuses, people! The game is too, but especially this huge hype about the halftime show is the distracting Circus, and the bags of chips and salsa are the new bread.
I don't want to hear any more about ANY of this half-time this or that! Put me in the middle of the yellow.
* Wait, they're not sure if they don't care?
Comments (2)
Fun with AI
Posted On: Saturday - February 7th 2026 6:46PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Humor Trump Media Stupidity Artificial Stupidity The Future Anti-Social Media
Peak Stupidity, for one, is glad that Bing's "Copilot" AI search software has been promoting this site with blurbs and images. Many times, I can tell that the blurbs were spit out directly from a software perusal of our "About" page, as it were.*
Here's one blurb I came upon - it seems device-dependent. This is some GREAT advertising! Girls sell. Girls' rear-ends sell. It's just too bad that when anyone who is not privileged to be on the Peak Stupidity staff clicks on it, he will never see those college girls without lucking out and getting somehow to our post Peak Stupidity University Sociological Observations versus Theory.
You'll end up here though... so there's that...
... and if you haven't yet seen the Lion Sleeps Tonight AI animation feature, well, you have been missing out. Our President Trump even enjoyed it... before he took it off his Truth Social account, cause, racism?
I'm hoping Adam Smith can come through as he always does and find a video I can embed - I tried youtube and rumble but I only got loads of different people TALKING about the video… and Adam has come through. Here's the
Well, yeah, I can see why some people think this or that, but have they watched the whole thing? Many different enemies of Trump, hence, America are shown as various jungle (and Savannah, don't forget Savannah!) creatures. Tough call on the racism.
Something about Trump's having at least passed this one on makes me wonder how much the Øb☭mas are still our enemies. They say that the Dark Brandon administration was just Øb☭ma's 3rd term. He doesn't seem like he has the energy or cares enough, but they say... Then, there's the one we like to call Big Mike. OK, she's just big-boned, but she sure IS an enemy of the White man.
Nah, let's not all gang up on the President for what's just a fun video. President Trump is just the King of Forwards, of AI videos rather than joke emails.
The song here, one Americans might know as The Lion Sleeps Tonight, was originally named Mbube, written by one Solomon Linda, a black (Zulu) S. African. Back in the 1930s, it became a big hit there. Everyone liked it, black, White, or coloured, striped or spotted. Then, the American folk singer and Communist Pete Singer transcribed the song from Zulu to English and his The Weavers released the song as the Wimoweh song. Next, the American
The song has been featured elsewhere, but the mid-1990s Disney Lion King movie was its biggest exposure to people - lots of kids - most who’d likely not have heard it, 3-4 decades after its release. There was a Lion King remake in ‘19, but remakes generally suck, so… This video above could be the first time people under 30 y/o have heard the song.
I only bothered writing all that about the song because, well, we got a real problem here! The Wimoweh song has such a catchy tune that I found myself whistling it after watching the video. Now people are are going to assume that anyone whistling or singing the song has recently watched “that racist video”. So, readers, watch what you whistle, or whom you whistle around. I foresee shootings.
Lastly, I read something today regarding more of the extreme Orwellian AND Anarcho-Tyrannic (Orwanicho-Tyranny?) going on in the UK. That's a subject for more posts to come, but the character named Amelia came up. She's a Playing Character vs a Non-Playing Character, whatever that means, I don't care.** Purple-haired Amelia was the bad guy in a UK Government created video game, Pathways (ahhh, geeze!) designed to get British people to quit trying to think for themselves and quit opposing the Government that is replacing them.
The gamer folks or some youtubers have now made many AI videos featuring a different, MUCH hotter purple-haired, revealing-pink-dress-wearing Amelia who, just as she was in the Government video, LOVES the UK and the British people. The Amelia videos are probably multiplying faster than youtube can suggest them.
This one is called I Will Always Leave You:
Oh, what can I say! I'm in love with an AI chick. Here's another, Sun All Year Round:
No, I mean, I just love her for her politics, that's... like ... all.
This world is getting Science Fictioney a whole lot faster than I'd ever thought it would or could. This above is all computer graphics. However, when these geeks and engineers get the right materials, sensor arrays and combine it with all the computing power that's already around, I can imagine an AI sex robot like Amelia that will be an introduction to pretty much the end of humanity. Will the AI robots have sex with each other? Will they like it?
Thanks for reading this week, Peakers, oh, and watching. We'll get into that year-ago DCA airport crash for sure and there'll be more on that Magic Dirt/Tragic Dirt stupidity along with the religious aspect of that wrt Mike DeWine and the Haitians. (Unfortunately NOT just a Rock & Roll band.)
PS: I titled this post Fun with AI well before I noticed that was the title of the video.
* Commenters E.H. Hail and Adam Smith have done some interesting experimenting with requests for AI summaries of our site in general or of recent posts.. See the comments here.
** I was pretty hip to the whole video games scene until sometime after Asteroids.
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[UPDATED 02/07 late:] Substituted the Lion Sleeps video in for the still picture. Thank you, Adam Smith. Added 2 paragraphs about the song, and one as a warning. Added the short PS.
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[UPDATED 02/07 late:] Added more about Pathways, the game, not video, and a link to an old post about video games. Oh, and it’s PURPLE hair, but she wears pink. (I guess that was an obvious mistake.)
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Comments (21)
Airbnb and the New, New, Sharing Economy
Posted On: Friday - February 6th 2026 1:52PM MST
In Topics: Humor China Big-Biz Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
My family has no gamblers in it. That goes for life as well as getting rich quick, so we don’t have much a reason to spend time in Lost Wages. In addition to that, we are generally slow adopters, so, believe it or not, we’ve never stayed at an Airbnb yet. I don’t know how this story would apply to us, but for Peak Stupidity readers in general, Caveat Emptor, Bitchez!
I mean, there could be a fairly hefty discount for Airbnb locations co-located with Chinese Bioweapons labs, but is it really worth it? The hookers you bring over from the casinos may already have a number of 3-letter WHO-certified infections - further combinations could be deadly.
Should we thank President Trump’s tariffs for this, making bioweapons research services too expensive to still do on the cheap in Wuhan and elsewhere in China? Bring it back home! Is the idea of hiring the imported Chinese scientists to do the research in Airbnbs instead of BSL-4 high-containment buildings part of the DOGE cost-cutting efforts? If so, I’m all for it, but we’re just gonna … maybe switch out and … we’ll just go see the National Parks in Utah instead …
From the pictures in the Hot Air site article, Chinese Biolab in Vegas Was Attached to Airbnb, Multiple Renters Sickened , the one place in question has a nice deck, pool AND foosball tables, and a gas fireplace… I think to substitute for the ugly the normally-required yellow steel trash cans.
BUCKLE UP! New info in Las Vegas biolab case. According to docs reviewed by @8NewsNow @davidcharnsAs long as the cockroaches are OK, it can’t be THAT bad.
⚫️"Several" people were sickened, w/2 becoming "deathly ill" after being at the home.
⚫️ The home was being used as an Airbnb (pics attached)
⚫️ Tipsters said garage smelled "like a hospital – not like a clean hospital but more of a foul, stale, stagnant air smell.”
⚫️ House contained "many dead crickets"
⚫️ House cleaner told authorities about lab equipment, refrigerators in garage
⚫️ David He/Jia Bei Zhu, the CCP-linked homeowner, contacted prop mgr Ori Solomon 467 times since his arrest in Oct 2023, directing him to send $ from property rental
⚫️ He/Zhu has contacted his wife/accomplice, Zhaoyan Wang, who's in China, 3,524 times from jail
⚫️ Authorities believe Wang has access to cameras monitoring the Vegas property
Of course, this brings up even more questions. With all of that contact from jail, how did this go on so long?
More to come at
@RedState
It’s called the Sharing Economy in case you, like my family, have been under a rock for the last 15 years. We can share everything including brand new germs.
Oh, and the Chinese Nationals running these labs are here LEEGULLY, by definition. So there!!
Comments (4)
The Epstein Files with the REDACTED stories of Fantasy Island
Posted On: Thursday - February 5th 2026 10:42AM MST
In Topics: Music Globalists Bread and Circuses World Political Stupidity
No, no, not THOSE files. You're gonna need more than two hundred dollars a day... plus expenses. You gotta be a playa.
Peak Stupidity wrote about this story last summer, in Jeff Epstein's Fantasy Island: clients, personnel, and the point. This will be the second, and likely last, post on the subject. (This is always subject to change.)
Perhaps some of us think of the Epstein Files as a stack of manilla folders or a drawer of those forest green hanging folders with plastic tabs - "Andrew", "Bill" "Hildabeast special requests", "Lolita Express hot section overhaul expenses", "Lolita, lingerie expenses", etc. Is there any paper left from the day, when we still used it?
I do remember that there was a safe full of videotapes, named after important people along with the label "young" [the girls] - yes VHS tapes - are they still around? Jeffrey Epstein must have had files on his various computers, with back-ups who knows where, the latter which would have been really important. We all kinda know what was going on. These "files" must have been entries in the databases of different servers, say in those of whatever email "provider" he used. I'm guessing there are many people just now learning that emails, text messages, etc. are not just gone when you delete them.
6 million pages, they say! Granted, it sounds like an interesting venture for say, our Mr. Hail here, to do a whole lot of ctrl-f searching for this or that. Steve Sailer is rightfully very proud that he made the Epstein Files!.*
You all have fun, but I'm likely not gonna bother. (It'd be different if Epstein had written US ... back, at least with some receipts for our taxes, and I want my Betamax tapes back!)
Here's the thing. This guy and his whole obviously blackmail operation - it's NOT about the girls** - have been known about and discussed by the public for what, a decade, two decades? Mr. Epstein did get hauled in and eventually arrested in Palm Beach for underaged girls just under 20 years ago. He could have kept records, such as the videos, in safe places for blackmail and his own safety. Sure, but then he "committed suicide" 6 1/2 years ago.
Even if Mr. Epstein had been successful in holding onto masses of incriminating blackmailable evidence and his elite friends all that time, would not those worried about being implicated in more than enjoying a nice vacation on Fantasy Island have virtually torn up each of their own records since the time of his death? I mean, was there some trustworthy US Government agency or Swiss bank guarding all "the Epstein Files"? Where exactly did these files that were sitting on Pam Blondie's desk last summer come from? Did non-corruptible agents of the FBI, scrounge through all the servers with all the info that Epstein had accumulated?
There's been so much time for these elite visitors to Fantasy Island to have gotten their own personal stuff deleted from these official(?) files. As powerful as Epstein's clients are said to be, couldn't they get whole server farms wiped or sent to the dumpster? I can imagine both sides of our and the World's political divide working out deals with each other to expunge all the serious stuff on all of them. They seem to all be in the same big club, as the man said.
I'm reading that the blackmail or the mass of correspondence was all to/from Russia and Putin. That sounds familiar. Did someone in the Mossad do a quick ctrl-R (search/replace) of "Putin" for "Netanyahu" and "Russia" for "Israel"? I don't know - all the serious stuff in the Epstein Files has probably been REDACTED, if not over the last 6 years, over the last 6 months, so finally... "OK, yeah, you passed a law, and the law's the law, so, sigh, fine, here you go...."
If nothing else though, no important names, no important instructions or threats, it sounds like the public is at least getting a taste of how the elite types such as these Epstein clients talk and think. It's not pretty.
From what I have been reading, these elites are just like we'd be, had we a whole lot more money. I kid to some, OK, a great degree... Here's Billy Joel:
You say you went out late last evenin',
did a lot of drinkin', come home stinkin',
and you went and fell asleep on the floor.
And then your lady comes and finds you a-sleepin',
starts into weepin' 'bout the hours you been keepin',
and you better get your ass out the door!
It ain't no crime.
Yeah, it's good to get it on to get a load off your mind.
It ain't no crime,
Well, everybody gets that way sometime.
It ain't no crime.
[Billy Joel signature "Oh, oh, ooohhhh..."]
* To be precise his name is NOT in any emails, from what he wrote, but there's an email from Epstein to one Dr. Henry Jarecki suggesting he might want to read this VDare article, on Jews, IQ, and genetic diseases, that was written by iSteve. Close enough!
** This seems to be becoming more and more obvious, as it's said that the youngest of the girls, well that have not been REDACTED were 17 y/o. That's not... even anything. Shame on their parents, but that's not a news story unless you're a Feminist.
Comments (10)
IRS Pie Charts for Fiscal Year '24
Posted On: Tuesday - February 3rd 2026 7:28PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Economics US Feral Government Taxes
We were pretty excited last year, the Year of the Pig (no offense intended toward any specific IRS employees when the new pie charts came out!. Income tax calculation date for me is the night of April 14th, as I usually owe money, and sometimes a few days later if I've got important posts to write.
However, the IRS on-line booklets* come out much earlier in the year. I've had the following graphic saved for a couple of weeks already. It's the usual, and you may be bored, as usual. It's just the normal noises around here.
Note, that the .pdf from the IRS is for the '25 tax year, but each time, they include these basic numbers from the most recent fiscal year. I think that's the deal. This time, I'll put last year's (see link above) pie charts right here for comparison:
Now, the whole fiscal situation is worrisome, but the most worrisome sector, as in piece of pie on the expenditures pie (on the right) is the net interest on the national debt. It went from and 11% piece to a 13% piece... only 2% higher... BUZZZ! No, that's 2 percentage points higher, but 18% higher... roughly, as we only have a precision of 1 percentage point.
What's the big deal? Well, absolute-numbers-wise, that 13 % of those $6.75 Trillion in Federal Outlays (as it says below) = ~ $880 Billion in interest. What net rate has this interest been paid at. Let's see - let me take an average between end-of-fiscal-year (end of September) '23 and eofy '24. That's an average of $33.1 Trillion and $35.5 Trillion, so let's use $34.3 Trillion. $0.88 Trillion out of that $34.3 Trillion is about 2 1/2 %. That's a pretty nice rate! It's good to be
What's the point here? Same as every year, until things get bad enough so we don't have time to post these boring ones amid from our bunker in Scottsdale while still cooking our 10 y/o beans on the sterno stove. That'd be that, look, that $0.88 Trillion is 18% (coincidental value there) of the $4.92 Trillion of Federal Income collected (the left pie). Could Trump appoint a Paul Volcker (see "1980s") 2.0 to let interest rates to a high level to tame inflation**?
Well, President Trump would be the last to do that - he's got his own new FED Chairman in there now specifially to hold the rates down, and he even, in that real Caudillo-style, has his own BLS head to DO THE DAMN NUMBERS BETTER!*** No matter, were an effort made to let rates rise, even to nowhere-near-Volcker-level rates, but say, a normal 7% price-of-money rate, then (7%/2.5% x 18%) right at 50% of all monies collected would need to go straight to paying off Treasury Bonds.
If you read the previous posts with the pie charts - going back in time - here - - here - - here and here - you'll see that the situation is getting worse.
OK, done, and done. We'll get to a few posts on Governor Mike DeWine and the Haitians of Ohio and also, before or after that, a couple of posts with discussion of the NTSB final report on the just-over-year-ago air crash at Washington Reagan Aiport (DCA). Good night. Give 'em hell... errr, Ron Unz that would be... but nicely. There's another post or two.
* I'll have to ask the library and the post office if they have actual paper ones still, just to know.
** Trump got you convinced there IS none? Go shopping, for food and a car...
*** Actually, Trump does have good evidence (we all do) that the Brandon-appointed previous BLS head fudged the job numbers recently to make Trump look bad. The numbers were WAY off. However, on inflation, well, good luck to the new guy, Kevin Warsh- it takes a clear mind to ... fake it.
Comments (19)
If ICE saves just ONE child...
Posted On: Monday - February 2nd 2026 8:00PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Globalists Media Stupidity US Feral Government ctrl-left
Peak Stupidity leans realist. We can't save all the children from harm, the US Gov't can't, America can't, and even ICE can't. The usual BS out of the ctrl-left about the children in the cause of continuing the Population Replacement Programme has been "You're splitting up families! The poor children!"
Well, you can try to explain that "Yeah, I mean, if I get pulled over and thrown into jail for DUI for a night, the cops won't let me bring my son with me either." That would probably be for the best! Anytime a criminal is put away, he doesn't get to stay with his children. Put away may include put a long way away, across a border or an ocean sometimes. It's very humane of Americans to even consider that the children could stay here, but these families are always free to consider NOT splitting up and going home together.
This post comes out of my spending ENTIRELY too much time today commenting on and arguing about the latest Ron Unz article on his site, Say Goodbye to the Second Amendment---and Most of the Others as Well! . Mr. Unz's hyperbole here has been unmatched by anything I've read from him previously. He has really exposed himself lately as a pro-Immigration-Invasion Trump hater.
Ron Unz sees nothing wrong with the PRP because, as he admits, East Palo Alto, California, just east of his Palo Alto, has a much lower crime rate since Hispanics replaced the black residents. I don't doubt it, but then those black people didn't just die. They went somewhere else, and all kinds of foreigners have been let to pour into everywhere, but that doesn't matter to Mr. Unz because his Palo Alto is going to be A-OK in all this. The rest of us can go screw, I guess... is his position.
As I finally weaned myself off of The Unz Review this evening, I took a look at some ZeroHedge articles. This one struck me: Border Czar Homan Says More Than 145,000 Illegal Immigrant Children Located. I've discussed the human trafficking before, with Dark Brandon and that treasonous Ally-Hondro Mayorkas being the Traffickers-in-Chief*, back in early '22. Then, we did go see The Sound of Freedom, a movie/documentary about human trafficking by Hispanics - see a review by UR commenter Mike Tre here.
I'll finally get to the point. (I'm kind of bad about this, I realize.) The ZH article notes that, per "Border Czar" Tom Homan, it wasn't just ICE, but also the FBI and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (I generally DON'T like the latter org, I must say!) who were involved in locating these 145,000 children in the interior of the USA. They are said to be searching for 300,000 more!
Peak Stupidity cares about the PRP mostly because we care about America, no so much about foreign children. However, they are children still, and it's amazing that the emotional news journalists that deign to care about... things ... haven't been all over this story, while if one kid fell in a well somewhere ... It's amazing how evil the Globalists and ctrl-left have been in that these children are just collateral damage of their effort to destroy America.
Because of the confusing timeline in the story, I'm not sure about my subtraction, but regarding these children, these 3 government orgs continue to locate:
more than 300,000 unaccompanied alien children” whom he said had been “turned over to unvetted sponsors, lost track of, and weren’t looking forward” under the Biden administration.They were lost track of. We've got to check in with the office to get a kid out of school, there are these Amber Alerts for one missing kid (likely often taken by the Family Court-screwed Dad), but, hey, three hundred thousand children were just "lost track of".
Of those [323,000 this time], more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not been served court notices by ICE as of May 2024, while another 32,000 were served notices to appear in court but failed to do so, according to the report.Yeah, they're kids. They don't go traveling to immigration court. Oh, and they probably can't read English... and can you serve a notice to a little kid anyway?
“Many of the children who came across the border unaccompanied were allowed to be placed with sponsors who were smugglers and sex traffickers,” McLaughlin said in a November 2025 statement. [Bolding by ZeroHadge.]The Epstein Files have been back in the news. Sure, to me the blackmail aspect is the ONLY important story there, but if you want to talk about abused children, maybe this story could get a little equal time.
Two or three useful idiot Commies have FAFO'd lately, causing a big fuss. ICE is seen by Ron Unz and millions of others, being big suckers for Commie propaganda, as the Gestapo 2.0. Yet, that's 2 or 3 worthless adults killed but 145,000 children found. Thank you, ICE! I do hope these children find their families again or good homes, in their home countries preferably, but somewhere.
If it, in this case, ICE "saves just one child..." Isn't that what the worried journalists always say? Then why come we don't hear no praise of the ICE men for... THAT -----> [145,000] many?
* See also This Human Trafficking is HUGE. We're gonna need a bigger
Comments (47)
Peter Brimelow on Tucker Carlson
Posted On: Saturday - January 31st 2026 2:06PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Websites History Pundits
Thanks to the Unz Review iSteve Community commenter who pointed out this video a couple of weeks back.
Peak Stupidity was excited when Mrs. Lydia Brimelow, not just Peter's wife, but the now-former business manager of the VDare Foundation, was interviewed by Tucker back in February of '24. That was before the Lawfare done by NY Attorney General Fatass Leticia had finished the job and finally shut them down based on finances. That was in late July of the same year.
I'd been pretty excited then, because, in my mind at least, Tucker was a more widely-viewed pundit at that time. I'd thought Lydia would get more chances to talk about the Immigration Invasion itself, but Tucker kept the conversation focused on the lawfare, with a sympathetic view.
In this interview, Peter Brimelow tells Mr. Carlson about a lot of things, but more about his time in the political (and way back, financial) world, the lawfare again, other more famous media figures, etc. Were VDare still up, this big plug for his site would have been a great thing. THIS past year and going forward would have been the best years of VDare's existence!
Alas, this interview is mostly about history, though the formerly taboo subject of the elimination of the White race is discussed. The youtube page has a nice outline:
*********************************************
0:00 It's Time to Rethink Immigration
4:11 How William Buckley Jr. Stabbed Brimelow in the Back
13:44 Why Did Ben Shapiro Attack Brimelow?
14:05 Why Brimelow Was Pushed Out of National Review
21:27 Is Israel an ethnostate?
27:23 The Effort to Make America Less White
31:31 Why Letitia James Is Trying to Destroy Brimelow
46:08 Why Is the White Population Around the World Being Eliminated?
48:52 Brimelow's Experience With the Murdoch Family
56:55 The Ridiculous Lawsuit to Silence Brimelow
1:02:56 How Was Trump Able to Win Over the White Working Class?
1:06:33 What Does America's Future Look Like?
1:11:10 Will the Department of Justice Help Brimelow?
1:14:07 Is Brimelow Hopeful for the Future?
*********************************************
441,000 views is not bad at all. Pay close attention, if nothing else so that you can keep up with Mr. Brimelow's Yorkshire(?) accent. He's an immigrant, you know... He explains that part...
If you have time, there are almost 4,700 comments under the video. I already know the story, and I don't have that much time.
Comments (6)
MOAR Thematic Maps!
Posted On: Saturday - January 31st 2026 1:38PM MST
In Topics: Websites Kung Flu Stupidity
Not interested... we just had this thing, and it was, again, just the flu, bro.
It's been about 2 weeks, as one can see from the date. This was an ad, I supposed to sell some medicine, face masks, or floor stickers. Nah, but the Gateway Pundit site is thick with ads. Jim Hoft or his web builders are especially bad about inserting ads showing gross nasty bodily misfunctions interspersed among their posts on politics.
I think I'd rather see the ads with the gross nasty bodily malfunctions. This thematic map brings back some BAD memories!
Comments (2)
Remembering Justine Diamond, murdered by a Somalian Minneapolis Cop
Posted On: Friday - January 30th 2026 9:08PM MST
In Topics: Commies Immigration Stupidity US Police State Race/Genetics
This is not an anniversary remembrance - the murder we bring up here happened 8 1/2 years ago minus half a month, on July 15th of '17. It's just that, with all the argument and hype over the 2 killings of Commie anti-ICE protesters by ICE and the Border Patrol in Minneapolis, perhaps this killing should be remembered right now. It happened in the same city. The story also has an immigration component to it.
40 y/o Justine Damond (maiden name Ruszczyk*) was a dual-citizen from Australia, having become engaged to American Don Damon a couple of years before. She had heard some kind of strange noise in her apartment building, she called the police a couple of times, and then she knocked on the police vehicle (the "unit", which was a Ford Explorer) that she saw outside to report it (we have to suppose).
32 y/o Mohammad Noor, formerly based out of** Qoryoley, Somalia, had joined the Minneapolis Police Department as a D.I.E. hire 21 months prior. He already had had 3 formal complaints standing against him, one about sexual harassment (I know, everybody claims that, but then he was a Somalian.) Also, per wiki, "... two psychiatrists and other training officers had raised concerns about Noor's fitness for police duty. Two months before the shooting, Noor allegedly pointed a gun at the head of a driver he had pulled over for a minor traffic violation." Now, that's not quite your Minnesota nice demeanor that you'd get out of your Marge Gundersons and the like up in nearby Fargo.
Noor and his cop partner, one Matthew Harrity (25 y/o), were startled, so they both drew their guns. Officer Harrity pointed his downward, while Officer Noor aimed his at the unarmed woman outside the whole vehicle and shot her through the window in the abdomen. Miss Damond died soon afterwards. This was closer to flat-out murder - not a legal term, I'll admit - than even the killing of Ashli Babbitt by Capitol Cop Michael Leroy Byrd on THE January 6th. In the latter case, there was a bunch of commotion and confusion, but the cop shot an unarmed 100 lb woman who was very gingerly stepping through a broken-out window. She was no threat.
Mohammad Noor was startled, see? Yet he was inside a Ford Explorer with no evidence around him that anyone was a threat. I don't know if it was due to it being Minneapolis or that the defendant was a Somalian or that he was a Somalian in Minneapolis, but, from the various charges, after various appeals and early release, Noor only spent 38 months in prison for this. (Of course, Michael Leroy Byrd spent ZERO TIME in prison, as he was never even arrested.)
Now, back to last week's Minneapolis, Peak Stupidity is not quite on-board with only us vs them with no regard for rule-of-law, for the two shootings, though we do understand the reason for that mentality. Some may claim they were Pretti Goode shootings too, but I don't agree that either of the shootings was.
Not to get into this too deeply, let me just say that it's easier to get out of the way of a car than draw a gun AND get out of the way. As much as Renee Goode was causing trouble and obstructing justice, she was not some raghead aiming to run over a crowd. For the 2nd case, all I'll say is that Alex Pretti had every right to carry a gun, Minnesota carry law not really withstanding... when you have a specific line in the Constitution.
However, I will agree, with all the road blockages, yelling in ICE agent's faces, whistles, and the rest, things like this were bound to happen. Additionally, though specifically the shootings weren't so legal (just the opinion of someone who's never been a "LEO"), the crowd also deserved this sort of thing. I doubt anyone on either side really cares about Renee Goode and Alex Petti. The ctrl-left LOVES that martyrdom for the leverage, and we on the right detest destructive Commie agitators like these two.
It's a big deal though. How much of a big deal was the murder of Jasmine Damond by Officer Mohammad Noor in comparison? I wish I could remember more. Firstly, this happened at around midnight, and the cops' body cameras were off at the time. There's no video out there for shock value. The wiki page describes protests, but the big crowds mostly held a vigil. This was the 2nd of 2 incidents in close succession, so there was some anti-police-brutality language, and the Police Chief, one Janee Harteau, was "resigned" by Mayor Betsy Hodges.
Perhaps some of the protesters we've seen in Minneapolis, the locals, may have been the type to have protested the police murder of Miss Damond 8 1/2 years back I imagine it was all tempered by the thoughts that nobody wanted to be seen being against the wonderful Somalian Community, a Black! cop, and the D.I.E. hiring program. The Commies who are there now to both prevent the President for continuing his work against the PRP and maybe purely to foment revolution directly, well, they wouldn't have cared. It wasn't a good killing, because it didn't provide a very good anti-White and anti-America cause.
Then there was poor Black! George Floyd. Even months of burning and looting didn't get them far enough with the revolution. Now, it's the ICE Nazis. OTOH, they fight back. Goode!!
PS: The top of the wiki page notes "Not to be confused with Minnesota politician Mohamud Noor." Why? Why should we have so many Moslems and/or Somalians in America named Mohammad [sic?] Noor that wikipedia has to distinguish between two of them?
Here's another line from wiki: "The Somali-American Police Association issued a statement after the verdict claiming that racial bias contributed to Noor's conviction." No city in America should have nearly enough Somalians to have a Somali-American Police Association large enough to need more than a hut to meet in.
* She'd taken her fiance's last name already. That's a little different. Maybe it was about pronunciation problems.
** H/t, Steve Sailer for this "based" thing. Modern cosmopolitan people don't LIVE in places - they are just BASED there. Black Americans STAY in places. Mr. Sailer doesn't deal so much with the latter.
Comments (8)
Tampon production: 3 things you need to know
Posted On: Wednesday - January 28th 2026 7:15PM MST
In Topics: Science Female Stupidity
Note: This post is NOT about the Governor of Minnesota. Sorry.
We may all be impressed by Elon Musk’s rocket ships, the advances in solar power, quadcopter drones, etc. This type of engineering of what were previously things only imagined in Science Fiction books require maxing out the use of the laws of nature, often taking advantage of the newest materials and highest speed digital electronics, without which they simply couldn’t work, per the engineers of the past.
Then there are Xerox copy machines. Or, not Xerox or not even copy machines. There are a lot of parts there. The exploded view above contains many sub-assemblies, each of which may have dozens or hundreds of parts of its own. They all have to move the right ways and not break. I get just as impressed with this kind of machine design than with the rocket ships. All these moving parts are designed to work together to move the paper along, one piece, not 3, at a time, to the right places for this, that, and the other thing.
Designing these machines took even more engineering brain power before the age of high-speed electronics. Rather than sensors outputting their signals, and the chip deciding to activate these solenoids here and those motors there, there were motors for timing, cams for the “logic”, and so forth. However, to make up for the new digital logic, we have plastic parts now.
This is that future. I am amazed that these machines work at all now, and how do none of these small plastic parts break when the user slams his fist on the machine due to an imagined paper jam?
Well, enough about copiers. Let’s talk tampon production. I had a long talk with a gentlemen who worked for a company that supplies and maintains BIG HONKING machines that make tampons for Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati. These machines go on for many yards, as all processes that are part of making a working tampon are done on a line within them, every step. He talked about the price of the machines, though I don’t recall it now, and he also told me that one machine may produce tampons at a rate on the order of 1,000 pieces per minute. That’s 18 per second. They are flying out of this machine faster than you can watch them. (Contrary to popular belief, feminine products are not a niche market.)
“What happens when the machine gets jammed?”, I asked when I heard that. Someone better get on that E-stop button fast! During one of those, errrr, periods, probably thousands of tampons in their various stages of production were ruined - it’s not the material, but the loss of time of the machine that’s costly. You’ve got to clean up the bloody mess quickly and get piece parts set up for re-start. The whole conversation was very interesting.
Recently I thought about the current state of this Matriarchy of a society we live in. It’s somehow become a non-stupid thing to believe that non-Whites and women could run the civilization the White man has built just as well. I’m not sure they’ve thought that hard about it, in their women’s studies department offices up there. It’s not only that they couldn’t build what we have, but they could not maintain a modern society either. Things would, and maybe WILL, go back to cave-man level in due time.
They really would be living in caves, at best, were there no men to build. These big tampon machines take many engineers working upon the shoulders of other engineers, doing detailed work. Sleep is lost and hair is pulled out while trying to make these parts that fit, aren’t too heavy but are of just the right stiffness, won’t break after a few million cycles, can be manufactured cheaply… oh, and can be put into the assembly, never mind repair. Design reviews are held, prototypes are made that don’t work quite right, and more sleep is lost …
Yet, these particular machines are built and maintained only for the production of feminine products, made for feminine people, those not doing all that detailed thinking and sweating to make them actually work. I’d think the customers would be more grateful. However, I guess upon time and point of use, the average tampon consumer is not grateful for anything!
That’s what Proverbs 21:9 was all about. And, we built the roofs too!
PS: Speaking of Tampon Timmah! Walz though, and his and others genderbender stupidity involving the school bathrooms, I’d guess Proctor & Gamble execs would have to be all for it. It’s not like the boys have to USE the tampons - they could make something to throw, I imagine, out of them, and sales are sales. Doubling the teenage sales - it takes a marketing genius… and one retard.
PPS: In other Feminine Products news, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-SO) has been given a vinegar douche. Unfortunately, it didn’t take.
Comments (15)
Globalization has Failed
Posted On: Tuesday - January 27th 2026 8:44PM MST
In Topics: Global Climate Stupidity Trump Globalists Economics
Well, that depends on whether you’re a “worker”, that is, anybody but one of the Globalist elites, or you ARE one and are the type that attends the WEF conferences at Davos, Switzerland regularly. (James O’Keefe in drag excepted.) Globalism has failed the PEOPLE of America and the West in general, explains President Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The Mr. Lutnick’s rant, one may rightly call it, is in the first 3 1/4 minutes of this 10 minute clip of some shindig at the WEF. He works for Trump, so you gotta figure this is Trump’s view too. Mr. Lutnick tied in this criticism of Globalization, as he put it, to the Global Climate Stupidity, something that should offer a nice take-away, or action item, if you like your corporate-speak, for the Germans especially.
You’d never have heard a representative sent by the Bushes, Clintons, Øb☭mas, or Brandon’s speak like this. It’s very refreshing.
I could have given a similar talk to this one AHEAD OF TIME, say about 30 years ago, but it’s been a real oversight that no one on the Peak Stupidity staff has ever been invited to Davos … other than our receiving those standard employment offers from the “hospitality” industry… addressed to our kids…
Comments (9)
Too Kold for your average Kommie
Posted On: Monday - January 26th 2026 9:31AM MST
In Topics: Commies Lefty MegaStupidity Global Climate Stupidity Trump ctrl-left Bible/Religion
These wack-jobs, some of them allegedly men-'o-God, women-'o-God even, were out there blocking traffic in front of the Lindbergh Terminal* (Terminal 1, if you're in a hurry) of Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. I get that you want to have your say, to redress some grievances, but people going to the airport, MOST OF THEM, are in a hurry, and this is surely no way to Win Friends and Influence People.
The online National Catholic Reporter reported online that one Reverend Mariah Furness Tollgaard came from St. Paul to the protest. This clergywoman of the Hamline Church said, per the NCR:
... police ordered them to leave but she and others decided to stay and be arrested to show support for migrants, including members of her congregation who are afraid to leave their homes. She planned to go back to her church after her brief detention to hold a prayer vigil.Harboring
"We cannot abide living under this federal occupation of Minnesota," Tollgaard said.Well, no, I wouldn't feel comfortable with that either were I aiding, abetting, and harboring illegal alien criminals.**
The Rev. Elizabeth Barish Browne traveled from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to participate in the rally in downtown Minneapolis, where the high temperature was minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 degrees Celsius) despite a bright sun.Unitarian! There ya' go! I'd thought we were talking about real clergypersons here. She does puns though, so there's that...
"What's happening here is clearly immoral," the Unitarian Universalist minister said. "It's definitely chilly, but the kind of ice that's dangerous to us is not the weather."
Note the temperature cited. Yeah, the sun was shining that day, but the wind has been blowing too. I have been in the northern regions lately, and I don't like it. It's not so bad when the wind stops. Going from a location with an outside air temperature of -13F to one at 13F felt like setting foot in Florida... well, OK, not south Florida, but how about Destin or Panama City?
I know, people are used to this. Peak Stupidity may even have some readers from places as cold as Minneapolis, Minnesota. WTH is wrong with you?! Anyway, but I do assume all our readers are not Communist agitators. People, we are not just experiencing a fast moving frontal system, per that old White man weathersplainin'! No, this is a NAMED winter storm, called Fern. The Climate Calamity is in full progress, and Fern is one nasty part of it.
Winter month Highs average in the mid-20's F, but it's been a lot colder. Who in his right mind picks Minnesota in January for the date(s) of a protest anyway, or were they counting on Global Boiling? I don't think these Commies are in their right minds. OTOH, they may not all know better, having come from all over the country, supported with money from all over the the world. Was that the case - this external monetary support - with the Communists in Russia 108-109 years back or those in Germany a century ago? (This seems a good question to be answered by Ron Unz in an American Pravda, no make that Russian Pravda article. He likes delving into that kind of history.)
AI tells me it was a normal harsh Russian winter in 1917-'18. The recent average highs for the 3 (Three??) Winter months, all I really got, are very close to Minneapolis highs, though I imagine there's more cloudiness in Moscow, which would explain why the average lows for the 3 months are higher in Moscow. You don't need to protest at night, as ICE and the Czars, respectively, would be resting.
However, the main location of the Russian Revolution was in Petrograd, which we call St. Petersburg.
Finally, I left it out until now for effect, but that Russian Revolution is called the October Revolution. Check out the Highs for October in these locales. It's not a picnic, but October is a much better month during which to hold a revolution in your strongholds, such as St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, or Minneapolis.
In that weather up there, I really doubt people come out to protest based on ideology alone. These people are getting paid. They've likely been told, "No agitation, no renumeration!" ("No, DON'T put that on the signs, people!") The only other explanation is that they are plain retards, like this well-known Minnesoootaaan:
Now, ZeroHedge posted another article today on these protests.
As we go to print here in the midst of Winter Storm Fern, that doesn't sound like a half bad idea, for all of us. Pre-heat to 110F and put in a big fat turkey in there with me, and I'm good.
From the guy with the pink hat:
“I’m not saying they’re Dachau. I’m not saying they’re putting people in ovens — yet — but these are concentration camps. I don’t need to argue with you about that.”History sure does rhyme, if you make it so. These Commies may be stupid or they may be lying. They may or may not understand that last time around, a century ago, the biggest reason the Nazis came to power was that they were the only people doing a good job taking on the Communists. Do we want to let it go that far?
* The other, smaller terminal, where Southwest, Sun Country, and others parked, is named the Humphrey terminal after old Hubert, former Vice President, Senator of Minnesota and Mayor of Minneapolis. I wonder what that guy would think of these people were he alive today...
** Yes, redundancy alert there. It does worry me when Trump & Co. say "illegal alien criminals". All illegal aliens are criminal by definition. Many legalized immigrants are criminals too... take the Somalian Community, please!
*** Since there is no "Normal" climate, a 30 years back to current year average is often used by NOAA.
Comments (16)
500 million guns are loaded…
Posted On: Saturday - January 24th 2026 8:22PM MST
In Topics: Internets Music History Americans Race/Genetics Guns
Back before Christmas, I posted a CCR - Creedence Clearwater Revival - song, one of many great ones but my very favorite, Up Around the Bend. That got me looking at wiki pages for the 7 great albums the band made (under that name) all within the 4 years spanning June of 1968 through April of 1972. Then I looked at wiki pages for some of the songs…. this is what the www does to us, even without TikTok Instagram, X, and MySpace. (Wait, what?)
Because the song has been in movies, video games, what-have-you, within American culture, it’s pretty natural that most Americans would figure the song Run Through the Jungle, from the Cosmo’s Factory album, was about the Vietnam War. Just over 6,000 American men were killed in Vietnam that year. CCR’s span of existence under the name* nearly overlapped the most intense time in the war for Americans. Per this page that I’ve viewed before, from the Military Factory site, with the deaths of American men (almost all men, besides the 8 women) categorized in various ways, roughly 30,000 of these casualties out of the 58,193 total occurred during the career of CCR.**
The one lyric line goes Two hundred million guns are loaded. Satan cried “Take aim”. I remember when I first heard the song thinking that the 200 million had to do with the number of Americans at the time. The www says that, yes, the US population had just topped 200 million, at 203.3 million from that year’s decennial census. So, yeah, that part was about America, not Vietnam.
The wiki page for the song (linked to above) has the following quote of John Fogerty (lead singer, lead guitarist, primary songwriter) from 2016:
The thing I wanted to talk about was gun control and the proliferation of guns... I remember reading around that time that there was one gun for every man, woman, and child in America, which I found staggering. So somewhere in the song, I think I said, '200 million guns are loaded.' Not that anyone else has the answer, but I did not have the answer to the question; I just had the question. I just thought it was disturbing that it was such a jungle for our citizens just to walk around in our own country at least having to be aware that there are so many private guns owned by some responsible and maybe many irresponsible people.Well, I can give him an answer to his question, or what I assume it is, albeit 10 years later and 56 years since he wrote that song. If the question is why is America such a “jungle” for its citizens “just to walk around in our own country”, I’ve got the answer in one word: Blacks. No charge, John Fogerty.
Could John Fogerty have not understood this in 1970, but even in 2016? He was from El Cerrito in the Bay Area of California, and there is a place there called Oakland, just south of Berkeley, south of Albany, just south of his El Cerrito. I could give him a break for those thoughts in 1970, as the big gun control push - starting with the 1968 Act - was on, and perhaps the media narrative had a lot of that “those rednecks shooting each other”, and without Steve Sailer and his stats, whaddya’, whaddya’?? Plus he was young and naive then. But by 2016 when he said the words above, come the hell on, Fogerty, you know who the irresponsible people are. You know very well where and why you can’t walk around in our country and where is that jungle in your song.
It just so happens that soon after I thought of this post during my wiki binge last month, one statistic came out. Per the National Shooting Sports Foundation, Armed American Citizens Own Over 500 Million Guns! Half a billion guns is now about 1.5 per
I’ll confess here that some of us have more than our 1.5 gun share. I have friends out in Lost Wages right now, and I believe they went in part to attend the SHOT show. There’s no turning back on this.
I write that thankfully. What’s been going on in Minneapolis, something the Communists behind it plan for New York City and other locales soon enough, has us all wondering if the most basic purpose for the ownership of these 500 million not-all-yet-loaded guns per the US Constitution will be understood by all soon. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
BTW, whaddaheck are these AWFUL “Minnesotans” doing outside in -9F weather?! Is keeping murder, rape, and thievery by illegal aliens in their cities THAT important to them?
Well, Run Through the Jungle is still associated with the Vietnam war just due to the time and other songs CCR wrote (Fortunate Son), so I don’t think it matters much what John Fogerty was thinking and what he thinks now. This is a great song musically, which is what matters, after all.
Best voice in Rock music EVER. The video could have used a little more
Have a happy Sunday, Peakers. Thanks for reading and writing in!
* I’ve been adding this as a caveat, as they played for 4 years prior as The Goliwogs and 4-5 years prior to that as The Blue Velvets.
** By calendar year, 1968 was the worst, with 16,592 men having been killed. Being maimed for life is another story…
Comments (4)
Something to brag about
Posted On: Friday - January 23rd 2026 4:28PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Trump Economics Environmental Stupidity Healthcare Stupidity
This first portion of the post may seem like a weasely disclaimer, something to get me out of hot water if a Kier Starmer or Gavin Newscum were ever to take over the country. Nah, it’s not that. If one of the were to, I’d most assuredly have to post from a prison library after all the raw non-woke truth that’s appeared on Peak Stupidity over the years. However, the following is true too.
I’ve been good friends with quite a few immigrants. This includes long-ago Vietnamese refugees, some Chinese folks of the Chinese persuasion, and, way back, 2 guys I studied with who were from 2 other different continents - no, NOT Africa, not Antarctica, and not even Greenland…
Our worries here about Immigration Stupidity and our general elation about the President’s recent work on Job #1 have to do with MASS immigration. It’s not the individuals I don’t like, it’s the mass groups of individuals that have been brought inadvertently and advertently to destroy the nature of American society. (I do detest a number of individuals too, but that’s another matter.)
I had these thoughts as I was remembering something Peter Brimelow had written on the now-defunct VDare website. The greatness of VDare was that it covered every aspect of the mass immigration disaster. There were plenty of writers who wrote about the politics, but there was Brenda Walker (I hope she is OK - she quit writing long before fat-ass Leticia lawfared the site to death) who wrote about the damage to California and nature in general. There was Alan Wall who’d lived in Mexico a decade and wrote with an understanding of the Mexican viewpoint - this included heavy Mexican involvement in American politics. There was Joe Guzzardi (gone even longer than Mrs. Walker) who wrote of social aspects, IIRC. There was a monthly report (forgot this guy’s name) on the job growth for immigrants vs. native Americans. It was very one-sided.
Rather than the VDare writers, let me mention the many ills other than “just” the replacement of the White population, of mass immigration that were covered on the site: Availability and affordability of housing and land, a better job market, destruction of the environment, extreme stress on the healthcare system, huge burdens on public schools, diseases brought into the country that had been eradicated half a century ago, and more. It’s hard to look things up there now.
I bring this up to ask, is it not the case that, if we reverse the immigration invasion, we will reverse all of these many ills brought on by it? I don’t see why not.
Is the correlation in the table just coincidental? No, the law of Supply & Demand works. There’ve been about 2.5 million formerly illegally-residing people deported (about 1/4 of them) or that have self-deported (3/4) over the last year. In the meantime, still people entered legally though. DuckDuckGo’s Artificial Stupidity say the NET OUT-migration has been from 10,000 to 295,000. Well, that’s a hell of a range - do you see why I dub this software so? Even 300,000 is maybe 0.6% of the population. Can this really matter? It does when compared to a normal IN-migration of 1%. The trend is your friend. There are investor types and businessmen who are not as stupid (JMO) as my local university bubble housing developers*. I’d like to see the housing prices go down and availability go up mostly for the young people - more on this**. (It’s pretty much a wash for me.)
Besides the (screen-shotted) tweet above, I also read a ZeroHedge article Are Deportations Making Affordability A Winning Issue For The GOP?
America no longer has the frontier, but that land has been plentiful still and a guy can buy his own “spread” is a valuable thing. Would it not be beneficial for family formation and growth that a man can still buy 5, 10, 50 acres somewhere and make something out of it. That’s not a thing for all of us, but that it’s a possibility is important.
The job market in building and “the trades”, often crowded out by illegal aliens should improve too. (When it comes to white-collar work, it’s the legal immigration that’s the problem.) Now wait a minute, wouldn’t fewer illegal roofers and builders mean higher roof and house prices? Labor is not as big a part of it - same with Agriculture and Hospitality, as people make it out to be.** I think we’ll come out much better off… there was a time in the last century…
How about the disastrous financial state of American Emergency Rooms and hospitals as illegal aliens use them for “free” healthcare? (Free for them, yes, with the costs spread to Americans) I’m pretty sure I’ve told the story before in which I told the bill collector directly that “I can pay our share, but I can’t pay for the 5 illegal aliens that were in there with us.” Imagine ERs without all the scamming illegals. Maybe fewer hospitals would close down.
How about the wilderness? We are so blessed to have the beautiful land we have, but had it not been for a number of caring White guys 150-100 years ago, we likely couldn’t experience most of it. The National Parks might still exist after America is filled with the Globalists’ wet dream of ONE BILLION people, maybe not, but I’m not sure I’d care to visit one anyway. The idea is to have a place where one can find solitude with nature. It’s hard enough now to do that, but imagine 3 times as many people, almost all who don’t respect nature the way you do. You wanted to hike, but you ended up being a trash collector.**
Could we eradicate bedbugs and Tuberculosis … AGAIN? I read the VDare articles explaining how these formerly eradicated ills have come back with the illegal entries across the southern border.. People under 20 may thing these ills have always been with us, but older Americans know that America eradicated them in the past.
I’ve not nearly covered all the ills of mass immigration, hence the BENEFITS of a reversal of it. I tell you who should. The ZeroHedge writer suggested the GOP ought to, but the UniParty has been dormant when it comes to Job #1. They get no credit for anything. President Trump and his people - I give Steven Miller a whole lot of credit - have made this reversal in policy, and Trump is the one who ought to be bragging about the good developments that result. We can be pretty sure that bragging isn’t something that Donald Trump shies away from.
"In one year, I have provided more young people a place to live than that Levittown guy!"
"The Emergency Rooms will be empty. If you want your White doctor, you can keep your White doctor."
"You will have so much wilderness, more wilderness than this country has ever seen!" Actually, as a NYC real estate and casino tycoon, I’m not sure Trump really appreciates the wilderness. Yet, he can brag anyway. I won’t mind.
"There will be fewer bedbugs than when they were called Buffalo Hide bugs!"
Come on, Miller, Homan, and the ICE men: Let’s give him something to brag about!
OK, but sure, the numbers are small as of yet. Let this be an incentive to the bragging Orange Man. Want to have something to brag about, I mean without even bullshitting? Get MOAR done - a much higher rate of deportations (forced- and self-), total elimination of the H1B/etc. visa program, improved exit tracking**, cut down student visas (screw the greedy U’s!), and MOAR. Then, we’ll ALL see some major changes for the good you, President Trump, would deservedly be able to honestly brag about!
PS: I’d meant to mention that Commenter SafeNow brought up this same thought with respect to healthcare, that some political strategist like Carl Rove, but NOT Carl Rove, ought to get Trump to emphasize benefits that could come in that realm (no maybe way too late for California, SafeNow’s home.) Under the recent post about Trump’s success on Job #1, he wrote:
Stress access to competent, timely health care. There exist 40 million people who don’t belong here, and they are absorbing not only ER visits. It is an ongoing, frustrating, stressful, humiliating, health-compromising, losing battle to get timely office visits. And, fully one quarter of visits are now handled by - - new-word warning - - “providers” - - that is, PAs and NPs. It didn’t used to be like this, back in the day.Could it get better? At least note how much worse it’s been getting with illegal aliens swamping the system. Do young people never get sick or in car/scooter wrecks to they don’t care? They may want to care, just sayin’.
* Someone’s gonna lose his ass on that. The last time I told a builder that, after the fact, he insisted 2 times during our argument that “That’s just your opinion, man”, but then admitted, “Yeah, I lost my ass on this.”. ;-}
** That’s another post. Tell you what, I’ve go so many in mind that I’ll just list them respectively: “I paid for all my college by washing dishes in the summer..” “Yeah, OK, Boomer” - a post in sympathy with the economic/family difficulties of America young people - - Trump’s fee increases on foreign visitors to National Parks/Monuments/etc. is a good thing, if just for symbolic reasons alone. - - Back to that post on the cost of roofing with that particularly egregious example with the mansion - - We’ve written a bit on it, but we’ll have more on doing deportations with great publicity vs. quite under-the-radar work - - I hate the Orwellian photo-AI entry deal, but I think they are using this for exit of the country too, so the fix might be in.
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[UPDATED 01/24:] Fixed “advertently” and added PS.
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P.J. O'Rourke on the Somalians - worst people in the world?
Posted On: Thursday - January 22nd 2026 9:57AM MST
In Topics: Pundits Race/Genetics Books World Political Stupidity
How do you get like these people, genetics, culture, inbreeding, environment, or a big mix of these?
Hey, I've only dealt with Somalians in Minnesota a few times, so don't ask me. Ask P.J. O'Rourke. Well, he's passed on, unfortunately, but I did read this great author's book All the Trouble in the World a few years after he wrote it, and I have been reminded that he wrote a long description of Somalia and the Somalians from being there as an actual reporter.
Mr. Steve Sailer included a big long excerpt from Mr. O'Rourke's chapter in a blog post (maybe the whole chapter), and if he's not worried about getting sued, neither are we. I will say, after being reminded how much I loved P.J. O'Rourke's writing, that Steve Sailer has a bit of P.J. O'Rourke in him.
Maybe the following will explain a little of what we see in Minnesota, Maine, Ohio, and (hopefully not) a State near you. I doubt a hundred Somalians, definitely not a thousand, lived in America when Mr. O'Rourke wrote this.
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FAMINE
All Guns, No Butter
I went there in December 1992, shortly after U.S. troops had landed in Mogadishu.
,,, And in Somalia the good intentions that professional worriers forever profess were being combined with—how rare this mixture is—good deeds. Food was being shipped to the country and international peacekeepers were being sent to deliver the food.
“Feed the hungry” is one of the first principles of morality. Here it was in operation. So where were the starving children of Mogadishu? …
What I met with instead were guns. Arrayed around the landing strip were U.S. guns, UN guns, guns from around the world. Trucks full of Somalis with guns came to get the luggage. These were my guns, hired to protect me from the other Somalis with guns, and they all had them. And I thought I might get a gun of my own besides, since none of these gunmen—local, foreign, or supranational—looked like they’d mind shooting me.
Everything that guns can accomplish had been achieved in Mogadishu. For two years the residents had been joining, dividing, subdividing, and rejoining in a pixilation of clan feuds and alliances. Previously Somalia had been held together by the loathsome but stable twenty-two-year reign of dictator Siad Barre. But Barre gained loathsomeness and lost stability, and when he took a walkout powder in January 1991, all and sundry began fighting each other with rifles, machine guns, mortars, cannons, and—to judge by the look of the town—wads of filth.
No building was untouched, and plenty were demolished. It was a rare wall that wasn’t stippled with bullet holes and a peculiar acre that lacked shell damage. Hardly a pane of glass was left in the city. There was no potable water and no electricity. At night the only illumination was from tracer bullets. Mogadishu’s modern downtown was gone, the steel and concrete architecture bombarded into collapse. …
It’s easier to advertise our compassion for innocents in misery than it is to face up to what happened in a place like Somalia. What happened was not just famine but the complete breakdown of everything decent and worthwhile. I spent two weeks in Somalia and never saw a starving child, not because they didn’t exist but because they were off somewhere dying, pushed into marginal spaces and territories by people with guns. Going to Somalia was like visiting the scene of a crime and finding that the murderer was still there but the body had fled.
… Nonetheless, for someone who has been to Somalia, Mr. Cohen’s views sail precariously close to Romantic primitivism. Mogadishu is no place to argue in favor of Rousseau’s ideas about “natural man.” Attribute superior virtues to simple natives, if you will, but the Somalis are about as untainted by civilization as they could be, and no one who’s met the Somalis is calling them noble savages.
III
In order to go to Somalia, I took a job as a radio reporter for ABC news. It wasn’t someplace I could go by myself. News organizations had to create fortresses for themselves in Mogadishu and man those forts with armies.
ABC sent in its most experienced fixers, men known in the news business (and not without respect) as “combat accountants.” The accountants hired forty gunmen and found a large walled house that used to belong to an Arab ambassador. The house was almost intact and close to the ruins of the American embassy, which—the accountants hoped—would soon be occupied by U.S. Marines.
Satellite dishes, telephone uplinks, editing equipment, half a dozen generators, fuel, food, water, beer, toilet paper, soap, sheets, towels, and mattresses all had to be flown in on charter planes from Nairobi. For some reason we wound up with five hundred boxes of a Kenyan chocolate chip cookie that tasted like bunion pads. Cooks, cleaning people, and laundry men were employed, as well as translators—dazed-looking academic types from the long-destroyed Somali National University.
Some thirty of us—journalists, camera crews, editors, producers, money men, and technicians—were housed in this compound, bedded down in shifts on the floor of the old audience hall while our mercenaries camped in the courtyard.
It was impossible to go outside our walls without “security” (“security” being what the Somali gunmen—gunboys, really—liked to be called). Even with the gunmen along, there were always people mobbing up to importune or gape. Hands tugging at wallet pockets. Fingers nipping at wristwatch bands. No foreigner could make a move without setting off a bee’s nest of attention—demanding, grasping, pushing crowds of cursing, whining, sneering people with more and worse Somalis skulking on the fringes of the pack.
One of the first things I saw, besides guns, when I arrived in Mogadishu was a pack of thieves creeping through the wreckage of the airport, sizing up our charter cargo. And the last thing I saw as I left was the self-appointed Somali “ground crew” running beside our taxiing plane, jamming their hands through the window hatch, trying to grab money from the pilot.
A trip from our compound to Mogadishu’s main market required two kids with AK-47s plus a driver and a translator who were usually armed as well. The market was walking distance but you wanted a car or truck to show your status. That there was a market at all in Mogadishu was testimony to something in the human spirit, though not necessarily something nice, since what was for sale was mostly food that had been donated to Somalia’s famine victims, CONTRIBUÉ PAR LES ENFANTS DE FRANCE said the stenciled letters on all the rice sacks. (Every French school child had been urged to bring to class a kilo of rice for Somalia.)
Meat was also available, though not immediately recognizable as such. A side of beef looked like fifty pounds of flies on a hook. And milk, being carried around in wooden jugs in the hundred-degree heat, had a smell that was worse than the look of the meat. But all of life’s staples, in some more or less awful form, were there in the market. If you had the money to get them. That is, if you had a gun to get the money. And a whole section of the market was devoted to retailing guns.
I wanted to buy a basket or something, just to see how the ordinary aspects of life worked in Somalia in the midst of total anarchy and also, frankly, to see if having my own gunmen was any help in price haggling. I was thinking I could get used to a pair of guys with AKs, one clearing a path for me and one covering my back. I’d be less worried about crime in the States, not to mention asking for a raise. And, if I happened to decide to go to a shrink, I’ll bet it would be remarkable how fast my emotions would mature, how quickly my insights would grow, how soon I’d be declared absolutely cured with two glowering Somali teens and their automatic weapons beside me on the couch.
They were, however, useless at bargaining for baskets. Nobody gets the best of a Somali market woman. Not only did the basket weaver soak me, but fifteen minutes after the deal had been concluded she chased me halfway across the marketplace screaming that she’d changed her mind. My bodyguards cringed and I gave up another three dollars—a sort of Third World adjustable basket mortgage.
She was a frightening lady. Ugly, too, though this was an exception. Somali women are mainly beautiful: tall, fine-featured, and thin even in fatter times than these. They are not overbothered with Muslim prudery. Their bright-colored scarves are used only for shade and not to cover elaborate cornrows and amazing smiles. Loud cotton print sarongs are worn with one shoulder bare and wrapped with purposeful imperfection of concealment. There is an Iman doppelgänger carrying every milk jug.
You could do terrific business with modeling agencies hiring these girls by the pound in Somalia and renting them by the yard in New York.
The men, perhaps because I am one, are another matter. They’re cleaver-faced and jumpy and given to mirthless grins decorated with the dribble from endless chewing of qat leaves. Some wear the traditional tobe kilt. Others dress in Mork and Mindy–era American leisure wear. The old clothes that you give to charity are sold in bulk to dealers and wind up mostly in Africa. If you want to do something for the dignity of the people in sub–Saharan countries, you can quit donating bell-bottom pants to Goodwill.
When we emerged from the market our driver was standing next to the car with a look on his face like you or I might have if we’d gotten a parking ticket just seconds before we made it to the meter with the dime. Shards of glass were all over the front seat. The driver had been sitting behind the wheel when a spent bullet had come out of somewhere and shattered the window beside his head.
Mogadishu is almost on the equator. The sun sets at six, prompt. After that, unless we wanted to mount a reconnaissance in force, we were stuck inside our walls. We ate well. We had our canned goods from Kenya, and the Somalis baked us fresh bread (made from famine-relief flour, no doubt) and served us a hot meal every night—fresh vegetables, stuffed peppers, pasta, lobsters caught in the Mogadishu harbor and local beef. I tried not to think about the beef. Only a few of us got sick. We had a little bit of whiskey, lots of cigarettes, and the pain pills from the medical kits. We sat out on the flat tile roof of the big stucco house and listened to the intermittent artillery and small-arms fire.
Down in the courtyard our gunmen and drivers were chewing qat. The plant looks like watercress and tastes like a handful of something pulled at random from the flower garden. You have to chew a lot of it, a bundle the size of a whisk broom, and you have to chew it for a long time. It made my mouth numb and gave me a little bit of a stomachache, that’s all. Maybe qat is very subtle. I remember thinking cocaine was subtle, too, until I noticed I’d been awake for three weeks and didn’t know any of the naked people passed out around me. The Somalis seemed to get off. They start chewing before lunch but the high didn’t kick in until about three in the afternoon. Suddenly our drivers would start to drive straight into potholes at full speed. Straight into pedestrians and livestock, too. We called it “the qat hour.” The gunmen would all begin talking at once, and the chatter would increase in speed, volume, and intensity until, by dusk, frantic arguments and violent gesticulations had broken out all over the compound. That was when one of the combat accountants would have to go outside and give everybody his daily pay in big stacks of dirty Somali shilling notes worth four thousand to the dollar. Then the yelling really started.
Qat is grown in Kenya. “The Somalis can chew twenty planes a day!” said a woman who worked in the Nairobi airport. According to the Kenyan charter pilots some twenty loads of qat are indeed flown into Mogadishu each morning. Payloads are normally about a ton per flight. Qat is sold by the bunch, called a maduf, which retails for $3.75 and weighs about half a pound. Thus $300,000 worth of qat arrives in Somalia every day. But it takes U.S. Marines to deliver a sack of wheat. …
… Where did this strange nation come from? The Somalis have a joke: God was bored. So He created the universe. But that was boring, too. So God created Adam and Eve. But He was still bored. So God created the rest of the human race. And even then He was bored. So God created the Somalis. He hasn’t stopped laughing since.
As with all nomads, Somalis come basically from nowhere. Roving, quarreling, pillaging bands of Somalis show up in the Horn of Africa—the biblical land of Punt—about the same time that roving, quarreling, pillaging bands of Normans show up for the Battle of Hastings. The Somalis are, and seemingly always have been, divided into clan families. There are six of these: Dir, Isaaq, Hawiye, Darod, Digil, and Rahanweyn. They hate each other. Not that those are their only hatreds. The two worst Somali warlords extant at the time of my visit, Mohammed Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi Muhammad, were both Hawiye. Each clan family is divided into numerous subclans. They hate each other, too. And each subclan is likewise split and irked. The first Europeans, visiting Mogadishu in the sixteenth century, found the then-tiny city already riven into warring clan sectors.
Back when one culture could say what it thought of another without risking a massive Donna Shalala explosion, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (the only reference work I really trust) opined, “The Somali are a fighting race and all go armed. … They are great talkers, keenly sensitive to ridicule, and quick tempered … love display … are inordinately vain and avaricious. …” And, said Britannica, “The Somali have very little political or social cohesion.” In fact, the basic unit of Somali society is something called the “diyapaying group,” diya being the Arabic word for blood money.
Besides the members of the six clan families, there are other nonclan Somalis known as sab, or “low.” These are hunters, barbers, leather-workers, metalsmiths, and other productive citizens much looked down upon by nomads. Noble camel thieves think sab vocations are degrading. The six clans themselves are divided in prestige according to degree of idleness. The Dir, Isaaq, Hawiye, and Darod call themselves “Samale,” from whence comes the name of the country. The Samale clans consider themselves to be strictly nomads—fighters and herdsmen. They call the Digil and the Rahanweyn “Sab clans,” and Rahanweyn, in Somali, means merely “large crowd.” The Sab are farmers, and nomads regard farms with the same violent distaste I have for law offices.
The gunmen who are currently destroying Somalia, who are wrecking the livelihoods of innocent Somalis and robbing them of their sustenance, are largely Samale. And many of the people who are starving are Sab. It is one of Somalia’s plentiful supply of grim ironies that the victims of its famine are the people who grow its food.
Of course the nomad clansmen doing the wrecking and robbing aren’t traditional nomads any more than a Toyota pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in its bed is a traditional element of a caravan. But the Samale don’t need to go on any Robert Bly wildman weekends to get in touch with their inner warrior. Somali became a written language only in 1972. Just a few miles from the main towns you see itinerant families of Darod and Dir who could pass for Mary and Joseph on their flight into Egypt. Here all the men are dressed in tobe kilts, with sword-length daggers in the waistbands, and the women are wrapped in homespun instead of Kenyan chintz. The camel bridles, donkey blankets, pannier baskets, and milk jugs have been made by hand. The nomad life is possessed of almost as much honest, natural, rough-hewn folksiness as a New England crafts fair. Only the occasional flash of a bright yellow plastic wash bucket tells you what millennium you’re in.
I have a friend, Carlos Mavroleon, who works as a freelance TV reporter for ABC and who has spent a lot of time among nomads in the Muslim world. Carlos found a very good translator and went off with a minimum of security and baggage to the far parts of the Somali desert to talk to the real Samale. They were shy of strangers—given current events in Somalia, they’d be crazy if they weren’t—and it took Carlos several days of lolling around making gifts of tea and tobacco before the nomads would chat. Finally they invited him into their camp, and, when a suitable length of pleasantries had been exchanged, Carlos asked the nomads, “How has this war affected you?”
“Oh, the war is terrible!” they replied. And they told Carlos that just last week some goats had been stolen and a month before a valuable camel was lost. It was a very horrible war indeed. More goats might be lost at any time and only a couple of years ago a wife had been carried away.
Carlos said he didn’t realize for a while that the war the nomads were talking about was the war they had been conducting, time out of mind, with the next subclan down the wadi. “No, no, no,” said Carlos, “I mean the big war in Mogadishu.”
“Oh, that war,” said the nomads, and there were shrugs all around.
Carlos liked the Somalis. “Men in skirts killing each other over matters of clan,” he said. “People call it barbaric savagery. Add bagpipes and a golf course, and they call it Scotland.”
And, like good Scots Presbyterians, the Somalis can be religious fanatics when they feel like it. Sayyid Muhammad ’Abdille Hassan, known as the “Mad Mullah,” fought the British Empire to a standstill in northern Somalia
in the Dervish Wars of 1900 to 1920. The British were forced to withdraw to coastal garrisons, causing famine among the Somali clans who were not allied with the Mullah. An estimated one-third of the population of British Somaliland died during the Dervish Wars, a period that Somalis call “The Time of Eating Filth.”
The British never intended to rule Somalia but found themselves continually forced to intervene in Somali affairs to ensure the supply line to their strategic outpost at Aden. In the words of I. M. Lewis in his A History of Modern Somalia, “The problem of the future status of these areas was complicated; no one friendly or fully acceptable … seemed to want them.” And they still don’t. Various internationalist schemes were attempted, which is where Italian Somaliland came from. The Mad Mullah was unimpressed. During World War I he wrote a letter to the British Commissioner at Berbera:
You … have joined with all the peoples of the world, with wastrels, and with slaves, because you are so weak. But if you were strong you would have stood by yourself as we do, independent and free. It is a sign of your weakness, this alliance of yours with Somali, menials, and Arabs, and Sudanese, and Kaffirs, and Perverts, and Yemenis, and Nubians, and Indians, and Russians, and Americans, and Italians, and Serbians, and Portuguese, and Japanese, and Greeks, and cannibals, and Sikhs, and Banyans, and Moors, and Afgans, and Egyptians … it is because of your weakness that you have to solicit as does a prostitute.
Seventy-five years before the fact, Sayyid Muhammad was able to accurately predict the composition, effectiveness, and moral stature of today’s UN.
The Mullah is still revered in Somalia. And the day I arrived in Mogadishu a flyer was being distributed in the local mosques showing a servile Somali rolling out a carpet for a pair of armed men mounted tandem on a horse. One man was marked with a cross and the other with a Star of David. Two fighting men on one horse was the seal of the Knights Templars, a Christian military order formed in the twelfth century to fight Muslims in the crusades. Sense may be short in these parts, but memories are long.
VI
So here we were on another crusade, this time one of compassion (though Richard the Lionhearted thought his cause was compassionate too). Enormous stores of food aid were arriving in Mogadishu, food donated by international governments and by private charities. Armed convoys were being formed to deliver that food. It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). …
Much uglier jokes were available. About food, for instance. It was all over the place. In fourteen hours of travel the previous day, we’d never been out of sight of the stuff. The American sergeant yelling at the Somalis for trying to grocery-shop in a famine was wrong. Just as I’d been wrong about parched sands when I’d seen our bivouac area. The Shebeli river valley is wet and fecund and contains the richest farmland in Somalia. The road from Mogadishu traversed miles of corn and sorghum, the fields marked out with animal skulls set on stakes. (Scarecrows, maybe, or scarepeoples. I saw a human skeleton beside the pavement.) Even in the drier areas, away from the river, there were herds of cows and goats. We’d been carrying thousands of pounds of food relief through thousands of acres of food. …
VII
On New Year’s Eve I went with another convoy west a hundred miles to Baidoa, this time with U.S. Marines in the lead. …
We began to drink and think big thoughts. What the hell were we doing here? We thought that, for instance. And we thought, well, at least some little bit of good is being done in Somalia. The director of the Baidoa orphanage had told us only one child died in December. Before the marines came, the children were dying like … “Dying like flies” is not a simile you’d use in Somalia. The flies wax prosperous and lead full lives. Before the marines came, the children were dying like children. Would this last? No, we thought. Everything will slip back into chaos as soon as the marines are gone. But to do some good briefly is better than doing no good ever. Or is it always? Somalia was being flooded with food aid. The only way to overcome the problem of theft was to make food too cheap to be worth stealing. Rice was selling for ten cents a pound in Somalia, the cheapest rice in the world. But what, we thought, did that mean to the people with the fields of corn and sorghum and the herds of goats and cattle? Are those now worth nothing, too? Had we come to a Somalia where some people sometimes starved only to leave a Somalia where everybody always would?
We had some more to drink and smoked as many cigars and cigarettes as we could to keep the mosquitoes away—mosquitoes which carry yellow fever, dengue, lymphatic filariasis, and four kinds of malaria, one of which is almost instantly fatal. Was this the worst place we’d ever covered? We thought it was. We had, among the four of us, nearly forty years’ experience of journalism in wretched spots. But Somalia … tiresome discomfort, irritating danger, amazing dirt, prolific disease, humdrum scenery (not counting this night sky), ugly food (especially the MREs we were chewing), rum weather, bum natives, and, everywhere you looked, suffering innocents and thriving swine. True, the women were beautiful, but all their fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, and, for that matter, male children over twelve were armed.
Still, we thought, this wasn’t the worst New Year’s Eve we’d ever spent. We had a couple more drinks. We certainly weren’t worried about ecological ruin, shrinking white-collar job market, or fear of intimacy. All that “modern era anomie” disappears with a dose of Somalia. Fear cures anxiety. The genuinely alien banishes alienation. It’s hard for existential despair to flourish where actual existence is being snuffed out at every turn. Real Schmerz trumps Weltschmerz. If you have enough to drink.
But what do you do about Somalia? We had even more to drink and reasoned as hard as we could.
Professor Amartya Sen says, “There has never been a famine in any country that’s been a democracy with a relatively free press. I know of no exception. It applies to very poor countries with democratic systems as well as to rich ones.”
And in the New York Times article featuring that quote from Professor Sen, Sylvia Nasar says, “Modern transportation has made it easy to move relief supplies. But far more important are the incentives governments have to save their own people. It’s no accident that the familiar horror stories … occurred in one-party states, dictatorships or colonies: China, British India, Stalin’s Russia.” She notes that India has had no famine since independence even though the country suffered severe food shortages in 1967, 1973, 1979, and 1987.
Says Professor Sen, “My point really is that if famine is about to develop, democracy can guarantee that it won’t.” And he goes on to say that when there is no free press “it’s amazing how ignorant and immune from pressure the government can be.”
Well, for the moment at least, Somalia certainly had a free press. The four of us were so free nobody even knew where we were. But how do you get Somalia one of those democratic systems Amartya Sen is so fond of? How, indeed, do you get it any system at all? Provisional government by clan elders? Permanent international occupation? UN Trusteeship? Neo-colonialism? Sell the place to Microsoft? Or … Or … Or …
We were deep into the second bottle of scotch now, and boozy frustration was rising in our gorges along with the MRE entrées. It’s all well and good to talk about what can be done to end famine in general. But what can be done about famine specifically? About this famine in particular? About a place as screwed-up as Somalia? What the fucking goddamn hell do you do?
There’s one ugly thought that has occurred to almost everyone who’s been to Somalia. I heard a marine private in the Baidoa convoy put it succinctly. He said, “Somalis—give them better arms and training and seal the borders.”
*************************************************
I guess the nice Minnesotan ladies who've "only wanted to help!" over the last 35 years never picked up any P.J. O'Rourke books. is it too late now? All the trouble OF the world has headed to America.
PS: Yes, this and the previous post have been "phoning it in". I'll be busy all today but should be able to write a decent post tomorrow and probably Saturday.
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AnotherDad on First Woman President(?) Trump
Posted On: Wednesday - January 21st 2026 6:21PM MST
In Topics: Humor Trump Pundits
Note: Peak Stupidity is required by the FBI (Federal Blogging Institute) to follow the Fairness Doctrine, lest we lose our … whatever that piece of paper is that we’re required to post on the wall in
Trump acts like a woman sometimes, nay, really more like a 14 y/o vindictive schoolgirl. Peak Stupidity has stated before that, in some ways, Trump is our first Woman President. (Well, we came awfully close to the First Woman President having been the Hildabeast or that cackling Kameltoe, so it coulda’ been much, much worse!) I won’t repeat our views on Trump’s vindictive schoolgirl-style stupidity regarding Jeff Sessions, MTG, and many such cases.
Under a quick, mostly “What do YOU think?” style post on his substack site, titled The Upcoming Northern White House, pundit Steve Sailer kept the comments visible for non-paying readers.* The commenter AnotherDad had many thousands of good, coherent, cogent comments back on The Unz Review over many years, but he’s since switched over to Mr. Sailer’s substack site.
This one of his on substack is excellent:
A whole lot of politicians are narcissistic. But for a “big man” type Trump has to have one of the most feminine and petty–take everything personally– personalities ever. He can’t just drive his chariot over his enemies, laugh, have a beer and call it good, everyone must kiss his ass and tell him he’s the greatest. And if anyone out there does not, Trump is willing to spend all his cycles and energy in some petty pissing match.LOL!, indeed, and, yep, I’ve been saying something like this… but wait, “I voted for him 4 times”? As a cross-country snowbird, AnotherDad must have voted in two States one of the elections. Hey, if everybody else is doing it…
Trump is like a world straddling, 6’2″ 14 year old mean girl with a penis.
And I’ve voted for him four times!
OK, Equal Time has been given. Good night.
* Just to repeat, it’s NOT the $10/month, and I’d be glad to support him, but I don’t want to get involved in yet another online time-sinking venue.
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Trump-47 Report Card: One year into Job #1
Posted On: Tuesday - January 20th 2026 7:01PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Trump
We've got plenty of other posts in mind here at Peak Stupidity, but I realized what day it was a few hours ago. It's been 1 year into the 2nd Presidential term of Donald Trump as of today. I have neither the time nor inclination to lay out opinions on all of what's gone on in the past year out of that one guy. However, I can write about Job # 1, his work against the Population Replacement Programme, version America.
As opposed to my tepid views about his work on this existential issue at the end of the last term, I am pretty much ecstatic about Trump's work so far, one year in. I would not have imagined that half of the policies he's introduced would have, back on January 20th of '24.
First thing you do, you STOP DIGGING! We've all heard that one. What we don't hear so much about, mainly because it's long been a relatively easy fait accompli, the US southern border is more controlled than it has been since the time of President Eisenhower's Operation Wetback. That was 72 years ago, for anyone counting. The digging down there at least, has been stopped.
That's a feat in and of itself, something they told us - even Trump himself was fooled by them last term - would take a whole lot of money - I mean HALF A DAY of a year of Congressional spending, for crying out loud! They said it was very difficult. Nah. Done... until the next destructive ctrl-left President...
Starting a reversal of the PRP, at least the illegal alien side of it, is something else. People have been deported over the years before of course. We've got to be careful to differentiate, though, between those sent right back across the border when they arrive, and the deportation of illegal aliens residing here. This time, we have ICE nabbing people in the interior. We've all heard of ICE by now, and Minneapolis is surely in the interior. (Well, there's a northern border too, and that is no friendly 49th parallel of the last century.*) As we noted in our post How many times must a man be deported? last summer, all the deportations in the world mean squat if you have un-secure borders.
Last I read, a couple of months ago, 2 1/2 million illegal aliens had left. Granted, only half a million were deported, but that 2 million that "walked before they made me run" are just as appreciated. Will this continue? Will it get ramped up even? Peak Stupidity pulls a number of 10,000 per day via rectal extraction, 3 1/2 million annually, as a sufficient number of forced deportations. If it were done with a real strategy and publicity where warranted, it could result in a total of 15 million, maybe more, leaving yearly, due to self-deportation.
We've written (here and here) about the ongoing violence in Minneapolis. The Communists who want to destroy America require the PRP to move forward - it is Job #1 for them, along with Feminism and other destruction of the nuclear family, Regime Media propaganda, University and other indoctrination, trashing of the culture... well, they've got lots of jobs I guess. This is why they are taking a stand in the Sanctimony States and municipalities. Trump and his Staff (Miller) and Field (Homan) Generals have their work cut out for them. I have no problem with whatever tactics Trump ends up using.
OK, this is all very good news. However the LEGAL side of the PRP is just as big - it's been on the same order as illegal for many years. What has Trump done?
What he hasn't done is listen to Elon Musk on this issue, as we worried about a year ago. (See here - - here, and here.) Trump's administrative move to change the H1B Indentured Servant fee from $2,000 to $100,000, "just a slight administrative change, mind you, part of my job, you know", has been very welcomed. The money matters, if you want cheap labor. It's not all about replacing the White Middle Class. Greed is a part of it too.
Then, whether it just a great excuse, or it's nothing but Trump taking things personally again, either way, the halting of visa issuances to first 49, then 75 countries is also an exciting thing.
Effective January 21, 2026, the Department of State is pausing all visa issuances to immigrant visa applicants who are nationals of the following countries:No, I don’t know who stuck Russia in there. Why Uruguay, though? It’s not a bad place, but Montevideo is not as nice as I’d imagined. (They love their graffiti, more than the thugs of Harlem!)
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic**, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
There're a lot of African countries there, a good start. No India, no China? You’ve got to get serious at some point…
Then, you've got people who come in legally and stay illegally. Non-immigrant visas can be overstayed pretty easily because, unlike China, America doesn't have a good enough Exit Tracking program.
The Trump Administration has recently required $5,000 to $15,000 bonds be posted to secure the exit of entrants to the US on non-immigrant visas. Those are tourist visas, work visas, and many others. Without it, well, I've seen guys like that Indian down at the crossroads***, and I know that those visitors that never get to the Grand Canyon or Disney World, only the convenience store... on a 3 dozen year tour, a 3 dozen year tour... I know what goes on.
We have someone in mind from overseas that really may benefit from visiting with us for a while, but if we have to put down money, that's on us. We'll have to make sure she gets home safely. Personally, I think it should be $50,000. Not enough tourists at Disney? I don't care.
Finally, this last thing is part a serious effort and part symbolic. The serious effort is that Trump has decided that there shall be no, that is ZERO refugees, asylum seekers, or whatever, coming in, besides a few thousand WHITE South Africans. This is an amazing move. I doubt the S. African number will even get near the 5,000 number, but Trump's stating out loud that it's these White people being persecuted and that they are ACTUAL refugees is very welcome symbolic move.
No, wait, that's not the last thing - it's just the last thing I'll mention, as plenty more work is going on as far as Job #1. Things are better than even I've described due to one factor that I've been seeing, even just today when going over articles. I've heard the promises before. We've mentioned before that one thing Trump has not been good at is follow-through, and without that, the promises were broken most times. Upon looking just today, I see that the items described herein seem to be actually happening. That's gotta take some good advisors, knowing Trump.
I chalk up the ideas and successes to 2 factors: Trump has learned a lot since '20, and he has some good people that he's been listening to this time. Peter Brimelow, in a very recent interview by Tucker Carlson (I'll post it soon) said that Steven Miller might be the first Jewish President. NeoConnery and other problems aside, due to his great work on Job # 1, I'd not have a problem with that.
Yeah, Venezuela, I dunno. Greenland, WTH? and I dunno. Bombing Iran, I dunno. However, some other foreign policy out of Trump has been very good, such as the likelihood that he has nearly single-handedly and FINALLY put the kibosh on the whole 4 decade-long Climate Calamity™ stupidity. It's not just about stupid attempts to claim SCIENCE! It's about control of large portions of CoC's (Oh, Countries Other than China's) economies. The ending of this alone makes for a successful year or full term, if you ask me.
All that aside, Trump-47 gets a solid A on the subject of Immigration Stupidity from this Professor.
* My friend remembers crossing somewhere from Montana to Alberta back in the 1970s, when the border was a traffic cone on the centerline of the road. There was nobody around, so he moved the cone, went past, and then put the cone back in place. Good thing too, as he had something sort of duty-free packed in the spare tire...
** Whaaaa? Then again, if the whole damn country even has not been vetted, we don't need any of that.
*** BTW, I had to go buy a car part in that same direction and I'm sure I turned at that same crossroads just over 8 years later. The gas station is now a much newer looking Shell station, but I didn't go inside this time.
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