Fun Folks in Free Florida
Posted On: Friday - April 14th 2023 8:26PM MST
In Topics: Liberty/Libertarianism Holiday from Stupidity President DeSantis
It's not like it's divided into Vichy Florida and Free Florida, though it would be interesting to speculate on where a divide might be. There's only one Florida, and I'm lovin' it as they say - not just the state of that State, but the sudden interest in Federalism by the people (whether they know it or have ever heard that term or not). That Kung Flu PanicFest with the varying degrees of Totalitarianism seen among the various States may have gotten Americans deciding that they may want to actually change residency based on politics.
It helps a lot that Ron DeSantis is the Governor.
(I am surprised that I have never heard this slogan before.*)
I just don't ever see tourist stores so overtly political, especially in the direction of Conservatism. They had the usual funny signs about fishing - "Old fisherman never die - they just smell that way", etc., but this was but one of only a couple of such stores, and there were no political items pointing in the other direction in either. So, that was refreshing!
The B&B place we stayed in is owned and run by a lady who came down from the northeast a few decades back. It didn't take long to figure she was cool enough to talk to about a few things. Not just that, but she was steering ME to Michelle Bachmann Globalist China-run W.H.O. videos by the next morning. I had to ask, rather than speculate later, "Were you Conservative before you moved down to the South?" Yes, she was. I try to get myself to remember, no matter how "blue", or more like Totalitarian, any of the States are (yes, even California), there is a big percentage 30% 45% even, of the population that is Conservative and "didn't want ANY of this shit." Some end up in Florida.
I want to soon write that post on tipping, and then another about cash being King, the latter being brought into my mind on this trip. As we figured the bill, though I had a CC on file, I was offered a better deal - simply, no CC fee, was all - if I paid with check or cash. I didn't have quite the cash to spare (nothing like the amount in the image was required!), so I used a check. I ventured that, "yes cash is a good way to go", and she volunteered "yeah, why give the Government any more than you have to?" A woman after my own heart, she is. I'll write more on this in another post.
The guests of the B&B are all on this same page, politically, I was told, but this proprietor didn't know about the same regarding the Snowbirds in the town. I sure hope they don't screw up this nice neck of the woods, errr swamp. Our time was made that much nicer there by the like-minded people.
PS: I wish I could tell you where, but this is a very small spot and that wouldn't be keeping OpsSec, as the ex-military preppers will tell you.
* In the comments, I wrote "making American Florida", but that doesn't make sense ... yet.
Comments (7)
Hey, hey, GT(EE)T, how many kids did you depress today!
Posted On: Thursday - April 13th 2023 6:55PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity California Global Climate Stupidity Scams Muh Generation
The chant I'm trying to use here is an oldey, one that went "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" back in the Vietnam War time. That's 60 years old, but these things get re-used. My problem was that Greta Thunberg, whom I tried to refer to, has 3 damned middle names. She is actually Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg, per a duckduckgo blurb, that search results page being interesting in and of itself. (See below.)
I'm glad to see little Greta having a good time bicycling. California, formerly a near Paradise, now lost is still a beautiful place, landscape-wise. It doesn't look like Greta is riding any kind of serious bike for exercise, but hopefully Arnold can "pump her up" - double entendre neither intended nor desired here. Exercise is very good for the mental as well as physical health. Greta has been in DIRE NEED of this.
I'd seen the picture a few days ago on Instapundit, but upon searching for it, I got to the DW site (Deutsche Welle, said - by DW themselves - to be "Germany's international broadcaster") with their article Climate summit draws calls for emergency action. Climate Summit and Emergency Action! - don'tcha' know?! Yet, these 2 are out riding bikes in the sunshine of Kallyfornyah... no, no, I've got no problem with that. It is mentally healthful, while being duped by Globalist control freaks into spending one's days being scared and scaring the BeJesus out of the gullible of the world is NOT.
Mr. Schwarzenegger organized this big Climate Summit in Vienna, in his original homeland. Greta said there:
"You cannot rely on people reading between the lines or searching for the information themselves" about detailed climate change issues, Thunberg said, calling for a complete change in the way society deals with the issue.As is her thing, she berated the Big Shots at the conference - "op officials, businesses, investors, civil society and climate experts as well as representatives of regions and cities from around the world" - because they talk but they haven't done anything. Oh, the Globalist elites would like to change whole economies, but there has been some resistance. The Globalists, unlike little Greta, realize that this is a scam and there's no big Emergency. Greta can't understand this yet.
The climate crisis is an emergency, and should be treated as such, not discussed as a way to generate green jobs and economic growth, she said.
"For too long, the people in power have gotten away with basically not doing anything to stop the climate and ecological breakdown. They have gotten away with stealing our future and selling it for profit."
I don't know how involved and actually scared muscle man Arnold Schwarzenegger is, but I know the deal with young Greta. Here is a Death Metal version of her alarmism for your enjoyment to give you an idea of the fear she introduces. (I know I was scared... Death Metal, I mean ...)
As per a few comments here, this constant Climate Calamity℠ cacophony can't be very good for the young people who are subjected to it. That may be the case for them daily, in school, on the internet, and, in the worst cases, by the ctrl-left parents too. They're being told that the "Planet will die" and very soon - in their lifetimes. To stop this, things that take widespread action to change whole economies must be done, NOW!, before it's too late. OTOH, Peak Stupidity happens to be looking forward to that Point of Know Return.)
Sure, during the 40 year long Cold War, young people were told, rightly for the most part, that a nuclear war might happen any time, if someone screwed up, or if we lost ground to the Soviets. It wouldn't kill the planet, but it'd sure kill a bunch of us. However, this was something that the US military and millions of engineers and technicians were working on preventing continuously - "Peace through Strength". Or else, the politicians would have talks and relieve the tensions (you know, what with the high-class hookers that hang out at Reykjavik and places like that). We did have to ramp up the military budget to "keep up", but it wasn't like our whole way of life had to change, for the worse.
Then, you've got Peak Stupidity over here telling the world that economic doom is coming. Yes, it is, but an individual can get prepared for it, and there's always an other side to it after the financial pain. (We worry more about the turmoil causing an in for the Globalists and Commies who are ready to complete their goals any time now.) Young people mostly don't care - many are Socialists and want to see it burn.
I could see a youngster getting scared shitless over this Emergency in which the Earth's Climate will be "out of balance" and "out of control!" That'd be the end, Greta's only friend, the end, besides Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even if not on-board with the BS, parents may not know how to explain this program of the elites using a scientific scam to try to gain greater control of the economies of the world. It takes a lot of effort.
If that effort is not spent, or the kids aren't taken away from the Government Indoc Camps and other sources of this barrage, kids can get mentally unhealthy. Greta has been a victim of this, but she is also a perpetrator. Arnold, he's got no excuse - he's freaking 75 years old and should not be falling for scams.
How many young people have actually killed themselves due to depression, with this Climate Scam having been a major factor? Has Greta sent them to Valhalla?
For a humorous ending here, this was the beginning of the search results for "Greta Thunberg middle name" on duckduckgo:
I don't know what kind of spectrum Greta is on, but I don't think it's Asperger's. Is there a name for the disorder that involves being a big dupe during one's entire childhood?
Comments (15)
A not-so-Great Clips experience
Posted On: Tuesday - April 11th 2023 5:53PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity Customer Care
Peak Stupidity readers should be well versed in the stories of a big pet peeve of mine (hence, the curmudgeonry topic key) about retail establishments and the entering of customer data. A phone number is all they want most of the time, likely just to keep a record of your particular transactions without a CC number involved. (Or, yeah, they want to sell a list of them to some marketing company.)
My 1990s land line number works fine for this - I probably have it memorized better than when it was my actual phone #! This has worked fine, except when I'm just not in the mood, and I tell 'em, "I'm just paying cash for these battery terminals, don't worry about it.", "No thanks, I'm just getting this box of candy is all", or "Just getting a haircut. Is that OK?" It helps if I tell them to "Just put in any number you want to.", especially for the Millennial types who are not aware that you can get stuff done without computers.
I reported on the hair-cut place, Great Clips, back during the early part of the Kung Flu PanicFest, in mid-June of '20. The gory details of in On the charges of Kung Flu rebellion - I plead Immunity.. That time, they were SERIOUS! They absolutely had to have a real actual number to track me in case someone came down with the sniffles and they'd have to... what? bring the fancy chair that'd I been sitting in to a biohazard site and burn it? Who knows? It was the Black Death 2.0, so I needed to get with the Panic! OK, OK, I broke down and gave them the REAL NUMBER of my friend's old 1990s landline.
That was not the case during my recent, very brief visit. I figured I might need a professional job, or I'd have asked my wife to cut it. I hadn't been there in half a year, and it's not enjoyable in the least. The place has 3 to 4 fat black ladies, some friendly, but even then, there's nothing to talk about. Didn't these places used to have friendly hot chicks at least?
A I walked in and as usual, it was the usual "what's your phone number"" I don't know - again, just being sick of this crap, I guess, I told the lady "just came to get my hair cut, you don't need the computer." There was no discussion - she just glared. 10 seconds later: "Do you want to cut my hair, or you have to do something on the computer?" She did, and a switch flipped in me. I walked out with no plans to ever come back. My wife is getting better at it too!
It's just another way to get both out of the rat race of Artificial Stupidity and off the grid a tad. Oh, and the place would have made $12 with 2 or 3 bucks to the lady for a tip, in a total of ~10 minutes. Speaking of off the grid, that'll get us 10 more pounds of beans and the mylar bags to put 'em in.
Comments (26)
Non-Governmental Tax-supported Red Cross encourages the Invasion
Posted On: Monday - April 10th 2023 8:39PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Scams
Americans who have been around awhile, during that later stage of real, not-so-corrupt, high-trust America may think of the Red Cross as that wonderful volunteer group that has helped the wounded during wartime since the middle of the 1800s, collects and distributes blood (about 45% of the "market" in the US), and teaches water rescue. One may think of of famous nurse Clara Barton.
The beginning of the international Red Cross was in the Summer of 1859, as an idea of Swiss businessman Jean-Henri Dunant and later a few others, but starting from the publicity he spread based on his experience. He had been on a business trip to Italy to talk to Napoleon III about problems in Algeria (a country that the French were involved for a long time). From Wiki:
When he arrived in the small Italian town of Solferino on the evening of 24 June, he witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino, an engagement in the Second Italian War of Independence. In a single day, about 40,000 soldiers on both sides died or were left wounded on the field. Henry Dunant was shocked by the terrible aftermath of the battle, the suffering of the wounded soldiers, and the near-total lack of medical attendance and basic care. He completely abandoned the original intent of his trip and for several days he devoted himself to helping with the treatment and care for the wounded. In 1876, the committee adopted the name "International Committee of the Red Cross" (ICRC), which is still its official designation today. Five years later, the American Red Cross was founded through the efforts of Clara Barton.There you go. For a century and a half, Red Cross personnel have had a special arrangement with (most) warring powers, to be able to help the wounded without getting shot at. It's been a noble cause.
Then comes mission creep, and the leftward or Globalist creep of most large organizations whose founders and early backers are long gone. The prolific and informative VDare writer A.W. Morgan reported about a month back: Great Replacement Update: American Red Cross Joins Treason Lobby, Helps Illegals Across Border. That isn't the idea that motivated the noble John Henri-Dunant and Clara Barton. Mr. Morgan says:
We should have expected it: The American Red Cross is helping the Great Replacement by giving maps and safety tips to illegal aliens who are trying to invade the United States, and the organization isn’t just helping them once they get here. The outfit provides guidance for traveling through dangerous regions of Mexico, instead of discouraging the dangerous trip.I haven't given blood but maybe once in my life, but I respect those who do. I guess I don't yet suggest they boycott the organization, but who knows what you can trust about the modern, partially government-supported "NGO" called the Red Cross. Per Mr. Morgan:
As with other non-governmental organizations, the Red Cross uses tax dollars. That figure is $350 million. So, again, white Americans are paying for their own genocide by demographic conquest.They are giving away American treasure. Maybe it'll be American blood and treasure soon. Read the whole article if you want a lot more details.
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AlGore and the Calamity Doomers: The Point of Know Return
Posted On: Saturday - April 8th 2023 8:09PM MST
In Topics: Music Global Climate Stupidity Environmental Stupidity
This week has turned into AlGore week and another week* of Climate Calamity™ discussion. Maybe it will all be behind us sooner than you probably think, but I'll get to that later.
I hope you watched the very short video of a ranting AlGore making the prediction about the seas boiling. Well, while trying to dig out some of his old standards, errr, predictions, on the near-future climate of the Earth, I came across one that had 2 of them. (That "Snows of Kilimanjaro" - great name for a movie, BTW - prediction was one already mentioned, but I somehow have this memory of this Professional Alarmist predicting a more general forecast about snow: We in America would not see snow falling after a few years.)
Until this recent rant at the WEF, I recall these predictions from the man mostly from the '00s, 15 or more years back. They were short-term predictions, with deadlines already past. Now, look, the climate of a planet shaped like a sphere** and with an atmosphere is a complicated thing. I wouldn't be on the case of this guy, if he were making these predictions in the Farmer's Goremanac. No, he has been berating us for 2 decades with these dire warnings to scare the 'tards and politicians (but I repeat myself) and enable the Globalists to enact plans based on this utter bullshit. So, yes, we will gloatingly point out the now-proven-wrong predictions.
From the Natural News site*** we can see Al Gore’s climate change predictions IMPLODE as everybody realizes the North Pole didn’t completely melt. That article is from over 5 years ago. Here are just a couple of these predictions:
... we found it prudent to remind our readers that roughly nine years ago today, Gore predicted that many of you were going to be swallowed up by rising sea waters caused from tons of melting ice.That means he said this 14 years ago, so in '09. I don't know who he meant by "you", but he had to be alive and strong enough to put up with an AlGore rant. Let's say that's 20 years old in '09, so, with an average lifespan, but your perhaps not being a good swimmer, this will happen to YOU - that 20 y/o in the audience - before 2070. We should see something by now though, right? If it's a linear process, we should have seen a foot or two rise, otherwise, he's only talking to the "you"'s that reside in prisons at lower than 10' above sea level. (Let's see, "not a good swimmer" and "in prison", who might that be? "That ice cap be raciss, man!!") The rest of us would be able to do a gradual 10 or 20 year evacuation, precluding even the costs of U-Haul rental.
Again in 2009, Gore told an audience in Copenhagen, Denmark, that there was a “75 percent chance” that during “some summer months” the “polar ice cap” would disappear completely within “five years.”OK, like with the weather forecast more than occasionally (and more than 25% of the time!) we got lucky on the 25% side. Yeah, but the ice in the Arctic has not nearly disappeared, and it's also been 180% longer a period of time that's passed. Wildly wrong again!
In case the reader is wondering what's the point of this post, much less of "know return", or if this is post of no return, let me get to it. This one is not about the AlGore being spectacularly wrong in his predictions of climate change. Let me paste in this excerpt from the same article, out of order.
In January 2006, Al Gore claimed that “within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return” and “a true planetary emergency” due to human-caused global warming.It's not just this particular alarmist that's been saying "point of no return", "it'll be too late", "beyond fixing", etc. Most of them give out some kind of deadline like that as a warning. We need to DO SOMETHING! By "we", we mean the governments of the world, with your tax money, and you need to comply! Otherwise the Earth will be beyond the point of no return. (I don't think they mean some perturbation that takes us completely out of orbit.)
Instead of worrying, though, some of us Climate Deniers™ - yes, I DENY any existence of any kind of atmosphere, hence climate, on this planet - I'll pay for my own O2, thank you very much - where was I? Instead of worrying, I am really looking forward to the point of no return. Will the AlGore, the rest of the WEF, and little Greta, give up and go home on that date? They could then spew all the CO2 they like out the exhausts of those large-cabin BizJets with no hidden guilt. It'll be over! We'd have lost. Nothing left to do then for the elites but go home and hunker down at the beach house with sand bags handy until... no, there will BE no next conference, right?
At that point, we deniers can run our economies with no interference. There'd be no point in controlling the production and use of energy. They said it would be too late. Watt would be the point? It's all over, 4-leaf clover. The fat lady done sung. I, for one, will welcome the Climate Calamity™. Hopefully this song will help us understand.
Nope, it didn't . It's a great sound though, anyway. If you like that guitar riff, well, that's due to REM guitarist Peter Buck having taught the Decemberist guitarist a thing or two. Unlike most REM songs (especially the early ones), you CAN make out the lyrics, but these ones don't make too much sense either. It doesn't matter. Also,there is an official video from the band, but the thing is distractingly stupid.
Finally, for an understanding of the homohone-error-looking title, we refer to a song from 3 1/2 decades earlier, the band Kansas. It's The Point of Know Return, the title song of an album released by this band in 1977.
The band Kansas was from, yes, Topeka, Kansas. There was thing back then about naming bands after places. Boston was another, and I know there were more. I guess people were proud of where they were from then. The Decemberists, from Portland, Oregon, named themselves after revolutionaries in 1825 Russia.
Thanks for reading and commenting another week, Peakers. We'll do some catching up with articles I've got in some of the 100 browser tabs open here (no kidding either) next week. There's also the comparison calculation of solar influx to the Earth vs. man-dissipated energy, from commenter M's suggestion. Also (and thank you, Mr. Hail):
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[UPDATED: 04/09:] Yes, it Easter today. On a minor note, I fixed "self-titled" vs "title song" ("cut", they used to say), the latter being correct, obviously, for that Kansas album.
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* The most recent time was over a weekend, really, when we discussed Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder and The Greenhouse Effect and Beyond: Part 1 - - Part 2 and Part 3.
** Yeah, I know they all are and pretty much gotta be by the physics. However, within the very definition of the cause of weather (not the climate, but they symptoms of it) is that it is due to "unequal heating of the Earth's surface". You need Ringworld or Discworld (the latter not being a Sci-Fi title even) to avoid this. The tilt of the axis sure doesn't help matters, dammit!
*** I've been on that site before, and haven't seen anything I've disagreed with.
Comments (26)
MTG v AOC, Afterword: Women in politics
Posted On: Friday - April 7th 2023 3:01PM MST
In Topics: Trump US Feral Government alt-right/MAGA ctrl-left Female Stupidity
The comparison between these 2 US Congressladies we made on Peak Stupidity last time was about the political ramifications of geography and demographics more than anything else. As per some of the comments, along with my own thoughts, the question that arises is "Do we want women in politics in America?"
I have said NO, many times. Sure, we could watch the drama on youtube clips as the huge difference in ideology, the high spirits of these 2, and then there's AOC's rack, have us hoping for a good old cat fight. That's not the kind of serious politics that would help our country though.
Regarding these specific ladies, AOC is an avowed Socialist, too young to know a damn thing other than about dressing sexy and serving mixed drinks. MTG's politics are right up our alley here, in contrast. She first brought up the phrase (not the idea, of course) of "national divorce". I've seen more recent tweets or quotes from her that are to my liking beyond anything I've seen from the rest of the actual Conservatives in FS, the few there are there. It's great stuff!
However, are these tweets and in-person squabbles going to change anything or even help anyone attempt to? MTG and AOC probably both believe in the ideologies, but this is a lot of drama that is not part of any plan to actually get change done. Hmmmm, who does this remind me of? It's coming to me ... lots of tweeting drama ... lots of talk instead of planning ... constant squabbling... Got it! Donald Trump was the first Woman President.
Say what you want about (some of his) backers and his big mistakes*, but Ronald Reagan is an example of how you get things done politically. He had men working with him (yeah, on HIS side) developing strategies to get what he wanted - the end of the USSR was the big one. That's men's work, making plans and carrying them out. Where are these men though, nowadays? Are they also spending too much time on the internet... like your blogger here?
* See also, 1986 Illegal Amnesty - Ronald Reagan's regrets.
Comments (11)
Hail to You and "A Tale of Two Garlands"
Posted On: Thursday - April 6th 2023 7:35PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Websites Pundits Anarcho-tyranny
(Image off of Mr. Hail's site.)
Peak Stupidity has a serious amount of hatred of men like Merrick Garland. It probably wouldn't be there if he weren't in a position of great power as the US Attorney General. We've pretty much said our piece on this man a couple of weeks ago in Merrick Garland - The Potomac Regime's Lavrentiy Beria.
It's the complete Anarcho-Tyranny of the arresting and holding of the J6 Political Prisoners that has me seeing this man as no better than a henchman of some tin-pot Latin American Commie dictator. As Mr. Hail added in the comments under yesterday's post:
...I just happened to hear a news report today, few hours ago, in which they gave the names of three or four more arrested January Six'ers. They read the names and alleged these people had "damaged barricades" or something, which helped allow the Insurrectionists to assault police. At least two of the names were women. The news-man announced "the arrests keep coming"...Someone pinch me, please. I'm still in this silly nightmare in which I'm stuck in Venezuela!
It turns out that Mr. Hail has been spending lots of time researching and writing his latest post - A tale of two Garlands: A study of U.S. political development through the contrast of two U.S. attorneys general, 1880s vs. 2020s. The other Garland in the article is Augustus Garland, a politician from Arkansas, who was also the US Attorney General, but way back in the free America of the late 1800s.
I've read about 1/2 of it, but I'm not up to the good part in which E.H. Hail discusses (I sure hope), how this henchman of Anarcho-Tyranny got to be who his is today. Please check it out. We may not have time for other than 1 or 2 posts here through the end of the week. Good night.
Comments (3)
Epic AlGore Climate Calamity™ Rant: Boiling the Oceans with A-Bombs
Posted On: Wednesday - April 5th 2023 7:31PM MST
In Topics: Global Climate Stupidity Globalists Environmental Stupidity Science
It'll take me a while to get sick of this one:
Let's take it from (near) the top:
The accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by six hundred thousand Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the Earth! That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers [great for innnertubing! .. in a lawnchair, BTW], and creating these rain bombs!No, that's not rain, that's spittle.
The exploding of 600,000 atomic bombs a day sounds like a lot of energy released. As Peak Stupidity has noted along with commenter M (under the previous post) and others, the solution to pollution is dilution. Well, energy is not pollution, but the idea is still that the Earth is BIG, and we are small, even with our atomic bombs.
Let's do the math. The internet says that the world's oceans take up 325 million cubic miles.* That times 5,280 ft/mile cubed gives us 4.78 x 1019 ft3 of water. At 64 lb/ft3 for seawater, we get 3.06 x 1021 lb. I want to go SI now, so that's about 1.4 x 1021 kg of seawater.
Let me take that number from yesterday of the energy released from 600 thousand of those measly old 15 kTon A-bombs. It's 3.8 x 1016 kJ. The assumption here, to be give all credit we possibly can to Mr. Gore, that ALL the energy from these bombs is transferred to, and stays in, the oceans. It'd be better if we detonated those 600,000 A-bombs underwater come to think of it, as in some of that old Cold War era testing. Al Gore would probably want it this way.
The specific heat of water is 4.2 kJ/kg-K ( It varies a tad with chemistry, P, and T, but I'd be happy with just one significant digit for this sort of thing.) ΔT = E/mc gives us a temperature change of 0.0000056 C or 6 1/2 millionths of a degree C daily.
I don't know the average temperature of the oceans, but in Al Gore's favor again, we'll use value on the high side, say 25 C. It's a 75 C rise to get to 100C. That'd take, let's see now ... hmmmm... oh, about 32 thousand years, but remember, that's assuming NO heat transfer to the atmosphere is occurring, an utter impossibility. Wait, but even that wouldn't get the ocean boiling. The energy during all those 32 thousand years of exploding 600,000 A-bombs daily being transferred to the seawater is what's called "sensible heat". That's energy input to raise the temperature of a substance, not to change its phase. The "latent heat" is the latter. For water, this latent heat of vaporization (liquid to gas) is 2,200 kJ/kg. To take the oceans from 100C liquid to 100C vapor (at atm. pressure) would take another 3.1 x 1024 kJ. 1.2 x 10-8 of the ocean would be boiled daily, so there's another 222 thousand years we've got, or about 1/4 million years in all, before the oceans boil. Whewww...
Or, we could stop the economy, so's we wouldn't do that 600 thousand A-bombs worth of energy damage to the Earth each day. I mean, come on, you don't want your great (x 10,000) grandchildren, down from Traverse City to St. Pete, to not be able enjoy a day at the beach, do you? "The water is boiling! There are no hockey games on, they've got Krispy Kreme instead of Duncan Donuts, and I'm sitting here talking to these rednecks about college football at the Early Bird Special gummin' down my creamed corn and drinkin' sweet tea!"
Preacher Gore, we appreciate your enthusiasm for the Religion of Climate Calamity™ so much. However, I don't think we need to worry about the boiling of the oceans right now. The Earth abides... same as it ever was... same as it ever was... same as it ever was!
* This does not include the 3% of the rest of the water on Earth that's not in the oceans. The AlGore didn't mention the Great Lakes, so I believe our readers in Duluth, Chicago, Muskegon, Marquette, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester, and Traverse City can rest easy at this point.
Comments (34)
Epic AlGore Climate Calamity™ Rant: Heating up the Atmosphere with A-Bombs
Posted On: Tuesday - April 4th 2023 9:50PM MST
In Topics: Global Climate Stupidity Globalists Environmental Stupidity Science
We haven't heard from Climate Calamity™ alarmist Al Gore in years. That's because we make that extra effort not to. This video I came upon, though, was like looking at a slow-motion carbon-neutral train wreck. I couldn't look away. This is from the WEF at Davos, as former Vice President and proto-Greta Al Gore hung out pontificating with the carbon-positive jet-setting Globalists.
I'd like to comment on every stupid thing Mr. Gore said in this rant but there's no time... from what they tell me. The end of the planet is nigh.
Now, I did a a quick look on Wiki for info on Al Gore just to see if he was this drop-out I'd read about. Really, the facts of the bio give not so bad a picture of the man. Of course, he was a silver-spoon politician's son brought up in Washington, FS and placed in the St. Albans School for the rich and pampered. He could have been one of those "Fortunate Sons", but he enlisted in the army and went to Vietnam - as a journalist - in order to avoid the stigma, knowing already he was going to be a politician.
Al Gore did finish his school at Harvard, but had done poorly (C's and/or D's) in his science classes, hated math, and graduated with a degree in... what else?: Government. Per Wiki, "In his senior year, he took a class with oceanographer and global warming theorist Roger Revelle, who sparked Gore's interest in global warming and other environmental issues." How could this one class make the man into the raving, ranting deluded lunatic he is today?
It wasn't like he was in a seminar class with Greta Thunberg. Professor Roger Revelle was a real scientist, a pioneering oceanographer before, through, and after, the WWII years. Dr. Revelle's work in Oceanography had him studying this "Global Warming" THEORY (mind you - they were more honest then) from the standpoint of the oceans, of course. His idea was that the oceans can absorb this CO2 that was being worried about. Eventually, after the increasing saturation of it (remember partial vapor pressure, etc?) the ocean water would absorb CO2 less readily. Yet, Dr. Revelle was called the "Father of the Greenhouse Effect", and seems to have been the Climate Crisis guru that Al Gore needed to back him up for his Earth in the Balance book. Revelle died in '91, just before Al Gore's VP campaign with Bill Clinton.
Gore's alarmism worked for a while, but it wasn't so alarming to me and thinking Americans yet, as the Globalists and Communists had not gotten ahold of it as a weapon to ruin economies with yet. For Al Gore to still show his face in among the ranks of the Climate Calamity™ Crowd really takes a lot of gall at this point, due to his (D in) Science predictions being shown to be, to put it nicely, unsound. HIs most precise one (precision is not accuracy), from his Inconvenient Truth movie of '06 said that within the decade there would be no more snows of Kilimanjaro. No, it still snows there. More broadly, there was a 75% chance (in '06) that within 5 years - by '11, then - that during "some summer months" the polar ice cap would disappear completely. You can't get a good model out of that guy.
Let me discuss the money-rant from the video here though:
The accumulated amount [of CO2] is now trapping as much extra heat [ENERGY, damn you!] as would be released by six hundred thousand Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the Earth!I'm not really sure when this accumulated amount started, but let's go with the statement as is. I looked up the kilo-tonnage* of the "Little Boy" atomic bomb. It was a measly 15 kTon bomb. There are nuclear bombs that release 60 Megatons, 4,000 times as much, via a fusion reaction, as those Hiroshima ones. (Hell, you can't even GET those old fission bombs anymore. ebay might have a few old aftermarket ones, but do you really know if they're gonna work?)
[Cannot find the proper Alt key for spittle - Ed]
Exploding 600,000 old fission bombs of questionable shelf-life every day is a lot of work. Why not explode 150 of those big ones? Exploding 150 of these "Tsar Bombas" each day would be easier, and we could pummel certain blue cities with them daily in the process. Either way, for alarmist Al Gore calculations' sake, the energy released by those 600,000 15 kTon bombs is 3.8 x 1016 kJ.
I was pleased with myself for having calculated the mass of the atmosphere by using the surface pressure (15 lb/in2) times the surface area of the earth (there's a g in there), and its matching within 10% the number I later found on line - ~ 5 x 1018 kg. The simple energy accumulation of "sensible heat" is E = mcΔT, rearranged as ΔT = E/mc**, so I get a temperature increase of 0.0076 C.
I didn't do this just for the fun of it, but to show that this whole comparison is not what Mr. Gore thinks it is. Did he think he was comparing a steady input of energy (the daily bombs) to some rate of energy accumulation in the atmosphere? He says "accumulated amount" referring to CO2 which has supposedly warmed up the Earth a tad to a new equilibrium. I think he means to say those 600,000 Little Boy A-bombs are adding energy to the atmosphere at this daily rate, thinking this means "the Earth", however that control volume is described, will heat up daily. If that's the case, that 0.0075 C/day = 2 3/4 C yearly. Not hardly! Even the most extreme Climate Calamity™ scaremongers don't use that number. We are not adding the accumulated amount of CO2 every day anew, and even if we were (we guys with large-cabin BizJets to take us to places like Davos, that is), there wouldn't be a continuous linear effect.
Assuming this 600,000 daily A-Bombs worth of energy - that 3.8 x 1016kJ/daily - was calculated by someone who knows his ass from a smoking A-bomb crater in the ground, the accumulated CO2 has raised the T of the Earth by 0.0076C. That's not worrisome enough for the Globalists and Communists. Should we be using the Tsar Bombas instead. Right now we have a Climate Gap? I don't really know what to do about that... really... other than... OH. We need money!
I believe ranting Crazy AlGore erroneously means the former, a rise of 2 3/4 C yearly, so that's why he's worried about the oceans coming to a boil. We'll do the boiling oceans calculation tomorrow. This is kinda fun!
* It's a weird measurement unit alright, but it means the amount of TNT exploded that would release the equivalent energy. A kTon "yield" = 4.18 x 109 kJ.
** c is the specific heat. I'm simplifying, as there are 2 variants and I'm just taking it for Nitrogen gas. It doesn't vary much, and it is a nice round 1 kJ/kg-K. (K could be C too, as we're talking temperature differences.)
Comments (7)
The internet from China, circa 2017
Posted On: Monday - April 3rd 2023 10:42AM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites China
Peak Stupidity has strayed from our mission lately, wading through the weeds of geekland. This has involved the recent posts about the growth of various websites and the internet itself (at least the www portion), as per Graphical history of the most visited web sites and It's all page views nowaday. I wrote those 2 to expand on some thoughts in the curmudgeonry post Peak Search Results. No, the internet is not stupid. Is it making people stupid? Yes. So, we're not totally off mission here, and getting back to it.
In the comment thread under the post linked-to above, Mr. Hail brought up a few questions about the access to American (foreign, in general, I guess) websites in China. I can vouch only from 2017 and back a decade, but I will start with a quick discussion of the situation from '07-'09.
It was 3 in the morning in Manchuria, meaning I was wide awake. China is about half a day off from America, time-wise, depending on your time zone and daylight/standard time. The young lady was slumped over the counter asleep. I had to nudge her to get service. Doubting correctly that a White guy would know any Mandarin, the girl held up 2 figures, and we both understood for an hour. Whoa, whoa, wait, it's not THAT kind of story and Peak Stupidity is not THAT kind of site! This was an internet cafe, and she meant 2 元 - equivalent to 30¢*, for an hour on-line.
I could get to any site I wanted to, such as my yahoo mail accounts and my favorite political blogs at the time - The American Spectator, VDare, Gun Owners of America, etc.
This was anonymous too. I'd just handed the girl coins or bills for the 2 . Flash forward only 2 years, and these same places wanted to see an ID, which they took and made a copy of. That means for me, a driver's license that nobody in '09 would know what to to with. For Chinese people, that meant one's National ID Card - motto: Don't leave home without it.
I realized that I've already discussed this to a lesser extent in Dashed high-hopes for China - Part 2. (See also Part 1.) Let me get to Mr. Hail's comment.
The year 2017 was the last time I was in China. The connection on this regular old desktop computer was not great, but I spent time going to my decade-later normal websites. yahoo.com (for email): No problem. gunowners.org: No problem. vdare.com: No problem. unz.com: No problem. google.com to search for peakstupidity.com (but of course!) and write posts (didn't have the commenters then): No problem. youtube.com: Bzzzzzt!! That means embedded videos and all else too. One cannot view youtube videos in China.** This was either before bitchute and rumble or at least before this blogger had heard of them. I would guess they are blocked too.
Actually, I don't remember if any message came to the browser, but the browser window or frame was blank. This was a shame too, as I wanted to share some favorite music of mine with a guy there, while in the country and from back at home. Also, as I noted, he could have read Peak Stupidity, but without the videos, you can't get the point of 1/3 the posts.
Here's my take on the whole deal there. The CCP can control Chinese content from China. It can probably control Chinese content from the rest of the world pretty well. These people, though, even with some real English ploficiency, are not going to understand the snarky humor, and subtle and even overt points that Steve Sailer makes. It's beyond them. Why not block Gun Owners due to "the People don't have the guns.", then? Maybe they figure that most Chinese people can't read English, so it's not worth the trouble to go through all these sites.
Ironically, I've been on occasional hotel lobby computers that had certain pages of Steve Sailer's and other Unz Review writers blocked. It was weird, as one blog post of Sailer's, for example, would be OK, but another not, and I didn't see the point. Someone "called" them in? Yet in China, I could go all over the site. Now, had I posted not so nice remarks about Winnie the Pooh-for-life or the CCP FROM China, who knows?
* It still is, approximately, as the government pegs the Yuan to the Dollar.
** That is, unless it's changed since '17. Maybe the CCP has new censorship software that can handle youtube now..
Comments (11)
It's all page views nowadays
Posted On: Saturday - April 1st 2023 10:25PM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites
C'mon guys! Whaddya' need a refresher course?
In case the reader is wondering, yes, Peak Stupidity will keep using that bit from airplane mechanic Fletch right on through the life if this blog!
Anyway, when listing the various metrics that can be used to rate the popularity of websites in yesterday's post Graphical history of the most visited web site, I neglected to give one other standard metric - that would be "page views", meaning the number of times visitors' browsers requested any of the pages of the site in question. A "visit" could include many page views by the same IP # within a certain time frame.
Commenter Hail had a long interesting listing of some of the things he noticed in the video. One of the caveats I would bring up relating to number of site visits is that that metric is not always a great measure of web site popularity or use when you compare, say, google to yahoo. The latter being what they called a "portal", someone may have gone there, read 4 news stories, then logged in and read his email, then used the search feature to find another site. Later, on google he may have pulled up that front page and did one search. The reading and use of those dozens of yahoo pages comprised one visit, as did the one page on google.
I will answer Mr. Hail's post in the comments tomorrow. For now, we've got to sign off for the week. Thanks for reading and writing in. Those posts to to come that we keep referring to, more on MTG v AOC, that post on (actual) greenhouse heat transfer, the UK PanicFest unrealized story, and others will come eventually. Have a good night!
Comments (23)
The latest Papal Bull from So-Called Pope Francis
Posted On: Saturday - April 1st 2023 7:47PM MST
In Topics: Bible/Religion So-called Pope Francis
(Graphic lifted as is from VDare.)
Peak Stupidity has been blessed to have not read a thing in quite a while about so-called Pope Francis. His name came up again today though in an Allan Wall post on VDare. Of all the writers on the VDare site, Mr. Wall is the one who comes across to me as the most low-keyed. If he sounds pissed, well... A couple of days ago, he posted Vatican Document Repudiates The "Doctrine Of Discovery" Are All Western Hemisphere Nation-States (Including The U.S.) Illegitimate?. He excerpted some writing from the Associated Press:
The Vatican on Thursday [March 30] responded to Indigenous demands and formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property laws today.Writes Mr. Wall:
A Vatican statement said the papal bulls, or decrees, “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples” and have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.
Papal bulls ”have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith”? Really?Not being Catholic, I wouldn't know. It's nice not to have to pretend the so-called Pope has some divine right to put out a (bunch of) bull. More from the AP:
On Thursday [March 30], these Indigenous leaders welcomed the statement as a first good step, even though it didn’t address the rescinding of the bulls themselves and continued to take distance from acknowledging actual Vatican culpability in abuses. The statement said the papal documents had been “manipulated” for political purposes by competing colonial powers “to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesial authorities.”Mr. Wall again:
It said it was right to “recognize these errors,” acknowledge the terrible effects of colonial-era assimilation policies on Indigenous peoples and ask for their forgiveness.
Is the Vatican saying that all post-1492 Western-founded colonies which became nation states of the Western Hemisphere are illegitimate?Any bishops or cardinals reading the blog today? (I haven't gotten around to checking for Vatican IP numbers.) Listen, please learn this now, and learn it good: YOU! DO! NOT! HIRE! LATIN AMERICANS! FOR! THE! POSITION! OF! POPE! Most religious leaders there are Liberation Theologists, which means they are Communists. If you're having a hard time recruiting, get Vatican HR to interview in Eastern Europe again, Africa, Newfoundland, whatever, but just don't go Latin American.
So-called Pope Francis has been stupidity working against Christianity by encouraging mass immigration. Now he wants to cancel the history of and pride in everything Western civilization accomplished over the last 4 1/3 centuries. Now there's some papal bull from a real papal bullshitter.
Comments (4)
Graphical history of the most visited web sites
Posted On: Friday - March 31st 2023 6:00PM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites
After writing yesterday's post on web search sites over the years, I was trying to find a graph of the increase in the number of pages on the web, that is separate html, asp, php, whatever files. That's by no means the only measure of growth of the www.
My metric would be be better than the simple # of sites, as amazon would only count as 1 for the former count, while there a probably millions of different pages that can be viewed (either as flat html pages or as put together by the server-side software like asp, etc.) However, those 2 measures tell us what's out there to look at but not what information people are getting, with viewing it being yet another matter.
One could go by # of bytes sent across the
There are the other standard stats that are kept up with, such as number of site visits per time, number of visitors per time, and then, number of unique visitors over a given duration.* Peak Stupidity gets those from our hosting company.
It's the first one, number of visits, in his case, per month, that we can watch on the great video HERE.
The site I linked to does have some interesting writing too, but the video is below:
This video is great for showing who was who from 1993 to 2022, almost 30 years. One must remember that the horizontal scale is continually getting larger. Sites may show relative decline - the bars will shrink - yet the are still growing in number of monthly visits. I thought about it, and this was probably the best way to do it, with that huge growth. Engineers would suggest a log scale, but most people wouldn't get that. If you kept the same linear scale, you'd see tee-tiny bars on the left for a couple of decades.
Enjoy this cool graphical history of the top sites over time!
Oh, I'd suggest keeping the sound turned off. I didn't like the music. It's not at all necessary.
PS: Most of the various stats on internet size don't take into account intranets. Many companies have thousands to millions of pages for their employees to browse. Without giving access, they wouldn't be hit by the web crawlers, and those company's servers would not provide stats. (Maybe on total bytes sent around via the ISP somewhere?)
* This latter one is not quite like a rate. 10 unique visitors in a month doesn't equate to 120 unique visitors a year.
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[UPDATED - late 03/31:] The same video is now embedded here , from Adam Smith's own youtube channel. And no sound too! Thanks again!
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Comments (21)
Peak Search Results
Posted On: Thursday - March 30th 2023 5:20PM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites Curmudgeonry
There is such a thing as a search in the real world, but we mean on the internet here. I left that out to keep the title short, as I did, just as importantly, the world "useful". We're talking Peak Useful Internet Search Results, really.
Has this peaked? From my experience it most certainly has. This is the case for searches for non-political, information, while the direct censorship, delisting, unfair ordering, etc. are a whole 'nother story, that's not the subject of this post.
I can remember the very first internet search I ever undertook. It was neither a search for girly pictures or for cat videos. It was a search for "Northwest Territory shirts". Sometime in 1994, I'm pretty sure, I was trying to stock up on well-made flannel shirts from these people and the store (K-Mart or Target) no longer carried them. I didn't expect to buy them on-line and, in fact, couldn't imagine doing that. I just wanted a company phone number or anything to lead me to more shirts. That search was unsuccessful. Not enough information was on the web yet.
As an aside (which I'm pretty sure I wrote about already, but speaking of bad, actually MISSING search programming, I can't find it), I had no idea what was going on with a computer on the internet in those mid-1990s - til about '97. I went to this one hour "Intro. to the Internet" class at the library that confused me even more with talk of "The Archie" and "The Veronica" and "The Gopher". (Thank you, Alarmist.) All they needed to tell me was: "You are using the 'browser' program. It displays the information coming through the modem with special formatting to show this web 'page'. That formatting stuff is called 'HTML'. The search engine is just another website that has some programming which sends another web page back to you." 5 minutes of that sort of thing would have sufficed.
That leads me to another quick digression, one which is also in the footnote of the link above. Search "engine' is the term they use. I hate that. Software people love to appropriate terms that come from the real mechanical/electrical world. It makes them feel like engineers, which is the BIG ONE, that use of "engineering" for what's not. I'll use search "site" or "program" instead of "engine". None of these search sites are "a machine that converts energy into mechanical force or motion.".
That "Archie" thingy, as I just now found out, was one of the very early search engines. I'm sure I got around on the internet for stuff after that shirt search, but, without a computer at home, I can only remember any real use of these sites starting in 1998.
By about that time, you had your yahoo's, your alta-vistas, your infoseeks, your lycoses, your excites, your askjeeves (later just ask), and even your dogpiles. Yeah, and I don't know who picked the name of that latter site, and that one gathered info from other search engines. Only 3 of those I was able to write here from recall memory, and my search just now had others that I didn't include because I just don't recognize them now.*
It was really hit-or-miss with the searches then. I felt lucky fo find good results for a page that wasn't on a regularly-used website, say a popular news site. There was also not THAT much on the web in the late 1990s, compared to today. One of the sites I listed above was a cut above the rest though, but when google came along, it all changed. Hate 'em now, sure... definitely, but it was really nice to have a good chance of getting useful results by using google. That's how the company became successful, by giving useful search results.**
We got into the heyday of useful internet searching. The programming behind these sites got more and more sophisticated, and the www has contained a greatly and ever-increasing amount of information on it since the beginning. How would we get to a peak in this searching business though?
On results pages, I find that there is just too much chaff now, distracting me from a target that may be on page 17 (which most of us never look at). I see 3 factors:
1) The big sales sites often take up the top spots. This happens not just when I put in a noun for something that's for sale on the web, but even when I put more terms in that make it obvious I'm not looking to buy said thing.
2) Websites that create search-matching blurbs that are bogus. This is the most annoying to me, as, same as with junk mail, I hate being the sucker that clicks there. You put in "Virginia laws about blah" and it'll have just that in the blurb. The site will have some basic information about the laws on "blah" in general, but will not have "Virginia" in it. This blurb will show up with Tennessee in it if your search with "Tennessee laws about blah".
I don't know how these ones work. The web crawler program has got to find both parts on one page, and how does the blurb that you won't find on the site get put into the database as it appears by the search programming? These assholes must have some clever algorithms, but I detest their wasting of my time just as with the clever of the junk mailers.
3) An inordinate amount of information on the web. That should be good, of course. You may very well get 20 blurbs that are pretty close to what you searched for, but you can't find the right extra word(s) to help the programming pull out what you really want. Maybe it's just asking too much, or, I'm not doing it right.
Getting useful results from an internet search has gotten harder over the last few years. When was Peak Search? I say, somewhere in '10 to '15, but you all let me know your ideas on this.
Finally, even with the best and most honest search programming in the world, back in September '18 Peak Stupidity compared Search "Engines" vs. Real Experts, and concluded that sometimes the latter can save us googles of time.
* BTW, the wiki page on older search engines did a terrible job.
** Successful as far as customer usage, that is. As far as google's success as a spy operation, well, I and most customers didn't understand that yet. Many people still don't.
Comments (27)
Give People Money: The book
Posted On: Wednesday - March 29th 2023 5:00PM MST
In Topics: Humor Economics Books Socialism/Communism
While writing the Gnu Gnomes of Zurich post last week, I tried to find that book called "Money" (With some sub-title likely) on-line, just to refer to it. I had no luck.. However, this is a screenshot of a title that was listed on the 3rd or so page of my search for "Money"*:
My first thought was "Oh, man! I didn't know the Babylon Bee published books, too." But no, this is no joke. I found that author Annie Lowrey means it.
Imagine if every month the government deposited $1,000 into your checking account, with nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy, but it has become one of the most influential and hotly debated policy ideas of our time. Futurists, radicals, libertarians, socialists, union representatives, feminists, conservatives, Bernie supporters, development economists, child-care workers, welfare recipients, and politicians from India to Finland to Canada to Mexico--all are talking about UBI.For those 2 bolded categories, yeah, well they might be TALKING about it, but almost always with the use the word "retarded" somewhere in there. India, Finland, Canada, Munich, everybody's talkin' 'bout
Hmmmm, UBI? "Give People Money" sounds so stupid, it just might work!
Wait, though. Didn't this country have some pretty recent experience with a Proto-UBI. It went on for most of a year during the Kung Flu PanicFest, with the help of $4,000,000,000,000 or so nicely printed out by the FED. I don't think you'll find very many Americans, even Economists and book authors, who were very impressed by the results of the experiment. (That is, excepting those right in the midst of it, getting that $600 weekly for months at a time in Summer of '20, idling away the hours watching Netlix, reading Peak Stupidity, and occasionally going outside to help out in some peaceful protest or two.)
Yet, still, 3.86 STARS out of 5. And, she's got a sequel! How do you explain the readership?
About the author:Ohhh, that explains it.
Annie Lowrey
2 books 49 followers
Annie Lowrey is a contributing editor for The Atlantic. A former writer for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and Slate, among other publications, she is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. Lowrey lives in Washington, DC.
* The caption is from a 2nd search later on, for this post.
** Without the internet, I know only one guy who would have had a slight chance of being able to give me the name of the band for this music reference. The band was called M, and (Everybody's talkin' 'bout) Pop Muzik is from 1979.
Comments (9)
Mr. Jones and me
Posted On: Tuesday - March 28th 2023 5:46PM MST
In Topics: Commies History Movies
This is a short movie review, since I just watched a very good political/history flick called Mr. Jones, as recommend by someone on-line. (That was probably on unz.com, but if it was here, please speak up - I'd like to thank you for this one!) This movie is from 2019. IMDB lists two other movies with this title, a 1993 one with Richard Gere as a Manic/Depressive guy and another 2013 one that says: A young couple moves to the woods and soon finds their nightmares and reality colliding.. (Hmmm, a prepper movie? - I may look for this one too.)
As for our post title, well, that's a pretty decent Counting Crowes song* from their heyday. I added "and me" also because I'm pretty down with the truth-seeking Mr. Gareth Jones, the star and actual historical character. He's my type of guy.
The story of Mr. Jones took place in the year 1933. Gareth Jones had recently been a foreign affairs advisor to fellow Welshman and former UK PM (1916-'22) (David) Lloyd George. Mr. George was of the Liberal Party, but not much of a big figure anymore by this time. Mr. Jones was let go by Lloyd George, on good terms, and he decided to do, or continue to do, freelance reporting. After having conducted an interview with Adolph Hitler, which amazed everyone in the movie (just timing) and got Mr. Jones rightly worried about the man, he decided to just up and interview Josef Stalin. Spoiler alert: That didn't happen. (Because this is history, with maybe some embellishment, I don't have any hesitation to include spoilers in the review of this movie.)
Gareth Jones obtained a visa and went to Moscow. This is where the movie's antagonist and real-life antagonist of things good and truthful comes in. That would be New York Times "Man in Moscow" and Pulitzer*** prize winner Walter Duranty. Giving the reader a Wiki reference here might seem a dumb idea, as their bias on not-exactly-factual stuff is too much. However, one might go there to see an example of Walter Durantyism in action on his own page. I'm sure the average Peak Stupidity reader knows that Mr. Duranty was a knowingly duplicitous booster of USSR Communism.
With a little messing around with his job recommendation letter from Lloyd George that he carried, in the age before White-Out, no less, Mr. Jones, got himself out of Moscow and on the way to the Ukraine to check out the breadbasket that was "Stalin's gold". What he saw there was horrific.
The situation was not as the foreign hobnobbing reporters and the Soviet handlers in Moscow had claimed. People were starving in the Ukraine in the event now knows as the "Holodomor". The Ukrainians were being forced to ship the grain they had grown there up to other parts in the USSR. Not only that, but it was bitter cold. The scenes here are bleak and extremely sad.
In this one scene from the movie, Gareth Jones is helping load a few bags of stolen grain, so as not to stand out as a reporter.
Multiple millions died there and then, from 1932-'33. Mr. Jones was an on-the-scene witness. Once he got back to Moscow after a harrowing journey, he had it out with Mr. Duranty, other reporters, and the Soviet apparatchiks.
I won't give you the whole of it, and also, other details from history were left out of the movie. The rest involves the verbal battle back home of "truths" between Duranty with his lies and Mr. Jones with his actual truth. Mr. Duranty won this in the short/medium-run, but I hope and think that Mr. Jones (long dead via murder in the USSR on another trip at 30 y/o) will win in the long term. This movie is helping.
Walter Duranty is made to look even worse as a man as I had thought of him before watching the movie. I also had no idea before about the countervailing efforts of Gareth Jones. There was a long and important period of time, the whole 1930s and right on through WWII, when the terrible effects of the Communism in Russia were not known well by the world. It was evil men like Walter Duranty - his reasons varying between wanting to live the good life and pressure - who were a big part of this.
In the range of 2 to 5 million people are believed to have been starved by someone more evil than the lying Duranty. That'd be USSR leader Josef Stalin. This was done to hide the economic failures of Communism*****. There are 2 factors of the evil here of Communism itself.
1) It can lead to the economic devastation like the Holodomor. Things something like this happen about every time Communism is tried.
2) That Communism must include Totalitarianism to continue to reign long means that there can be men with the power to make something like this happen.
Movies showing the evil of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis must number in the hundreds. Those that show the evil of Stalin and his Commies are very few. I applaud the makers of Mr. Jones for their excellent work. That this movie is only 4 years old is very surprising.
2 thumbs up from Peak Stupidity! Caveat: This is not a date movie. (Unless your date is also a member of the John Birch Society...)
PS: Seeing as this IS a review, OK fine: The casting, the lighting, the set decorations, all the production values****, they're fine. As long as a movie is not blurry, jerky, or woke, I don't care about all that.
There is a very pretty woman involved (playing one of the reporters), but nobody gets even to 1st base with her in the movie. (It was probably better in real life or off the set.) It's bleak******, but it's history.
* That song came out almost 30 years ago. I never understood the meaning of the lyrics, but it had a good melody.
** I really wonder if the use of the term "journalist" in conversations throughout this movie was historically correct. Was the term in use in 1933? I remember "reporter" being used during my early lifetime.
*** For my whole life, I thought it was "pull-it-zer", but they pronounced it "Pew-lit-zer".
**** Thanks you, Alarmist, for the term.
***** Some claim a genocide factor too. I don't know.
****** One other thing besides ** that I think may be off is this: Would the Ukraine in March (when Mr. Jones was to arrive per the visa bureau lady) be THAT cold and snowy then? Maybe it was an extra hard winter.
Comments (7)
The future's so dark, I gotta wear night vision goggles
Posted On: Monday - March 27th 2023 2:56PM MST
In Topics: Music China The Future Orwellian Stupidity Bible/Religion Female Stupidity iEspionage
There may be gleaming bright trains, planes, and cities in China, but that title describes what I see for the future of the place. Peak Stupidity knows more about the Middle Kingdom than your average American, so we have commented extensively about the place. The reader ought to know that we try to be fair. We call out stupidity worldwide, most of it here in America, because WE LIVE HERE! Also, per our Peak Stupidity apology to our Chinese readers, we have had plenty of good things to say about the country, when it fits.
Our take on the quickly rising Orwellianism in China being that's being enabled by the amazing level of electronics/sensors/software of today's world is mostly contained in our 4-part review of the book We Have Been Harmonized by German writer Kai Strittmatter. See Part 1 - - Part 2 - - Part 3 and Part 4 . If you want to scare the BeJesus out of yourselves, read the book, not just the review.
Thanks to the commenter "Truth" on The Unz Review , I got to see the 5-minute video (shown below) that really drives home just a part of what's going on.
HBO's title is China’s "Social Credit System" Has Caused More Than Just Public Shaming. I'm glad someone gives a damn enough to make a video like this without extolling the system shown. Take a look:
Commenters on unz.com humorously compared what's going on in this village in China to the experience with Home Owners' Associations. Though they joke, they may understand this as I do, that with the use of the electronic systems, this is not just HOAs on steroids. This is 1984 II: Big Brother Strikes Harder.
This is what hard-core busybodying and do-gooding can come to. I don't think Miss Zhou Ai Ni is doing this just for the 50 bucks a month. That won't get you anywhere in China these days. No, Information Collector Zhou LIKES doing this.
You'll see what this is coming to near the end, when it comes to being able to buy (and I assume sell too). Well, Information Collector Zhou's neighbors don't have to wear bar codes on their foreheads, as we had thought would be the way of Revelation back in the 1980s and '90s. They don't even have to get an implanted chip, as far as I know. They just can't do much without that piece of iCrap iEspionage on them, in addition to dealing with the human espionage lady.
I understand the point of and reason for the existence of Equifax and the financial credit scores. Then, there came CarFax* with some scores on our cars, which I don't want much to do with. Now, the Chinese have social credit scores. Hey, I have been doing very well over the last 20 years with a financial credit score that reads: "- - - ". (No data.) I try to deal with local friendly mechanics who don't care about my CarFax. (If you're not planning on selling the car, it seems an intrusion into my privacy.)
From an encounter with the usual problem neighbor recently, I see I might have a problem keeping a social credit score of more than 400, using about the same scale as Equifax (and the others). How does one live with a low one of those? You're gonna be hungry. You'd have to live in cave in Yunnan with the Kung Flu bats in order to maintain dashes.
At 2:03: “Now in our community, neighbors get along very well. There are no fights.” Yes, everyone's got it bottled in nicely. Everything will be all nice and serene, in these villages ... till it isn't. One episode of the old 1990s comedy Seinfeld covered this. Lloyd Braun explains the future of China, if this stuff continues:
BTW, I didn't see subtitles at that spot, but I swear I heard this busybody Big Sister's name as Zhou Ai Ni. How appropriate is that! The given name (last 2 syllables) mean "I love you." Yes, they all love you, Big Sister Zhou. Sure, that's why they're smiling. It's not because this may as well been a particular one of those Twilight Zone episodes come to life.
To end the post, how about some music? Just in case you somehow missed the better of the1980s pop music (what, were you not born yet or something? That's no excuse!), here is the song from which our post title was taken.
The band had a clever name - Timbuk 3. This song from their 1986 debut album Greetings from Timbuk3 was this American band's only hit. Timbuk 3 was not your usual pop band at all, officially consisting (at the time of this album) of the husband and wife duo Pat and Barbara MacDonald.
* Dang! There's ANOTHER post I meant to write.
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The Gnu Gnomes of Zurich
Posted On: Saturday - March 25th 2023 1:12PM MST
In Topics: Genderbenders Humor Global Financial Stupidity Economics Big-Biz Stupidity
It was at least 15 years ago when I read a book that was just called Money, I'm pretty sure, but maybe with a subtitle. This interesting book had a chapter about some of the big financial dealings that have been going on for centuries in Switzerland, a country known for chocolate, clocks, precision machinery, neutrality, and big Finance (the latter 2 of which may clash on occasion.) That chapter in the book about money was called "The Gnomes of Zurich".
I didn't figure they are real gnomes, because I guess there's gno such thing*. However, one can picture these guys in little caves in the mountains, deciding the fates of many with their Big Finance wheeling and dealing. I'd figured they're kind of like elves, but without the free-spending ways of, say, Santa's ones.
If you've been keeping up with the latest banking crisis, with more to come, there's commentary about whether focusing on the DIE initiatives may have just slightly distracted the big cheeses at Silicon Valley Bank and others from concentrating on the actual point of their business,
There's this big global investment firm that's been around for 167 years called Credit Suisse. They've been having problems lately too. Besides the silver and gold bars that are minted by these money-men, I don't know too much this outfit. However, knowing of their being headquartered right there in Zurich, Switzerland, I picture some of those Gnomes of Zurich employed at the place, per my imagination and that one book, gnome sayin'?
Regarding the travails of Credit Suisse, Steve Sailer posted a hilariously titled post a few days back regarding one of this company's head honchos, Don't Worry: Credit Suisse Is in Strong, Exquisitely-Manicured Hands. What he and John Derbyshire** also (partly) were commenting about was one high-level manager named Pippa Bunce. "Pips Bunce is Head of Global Markets Technology Core Engineering Strategic Programs at Credit Suisse."***
The thing about Pippa is that he is gender-fluid. He is a she part of the time, likely based on odd/even days of the month.
That is Pippa Pig Bunce, Credit Suiesse's CRO. In this case, CRO doesn't stand for Chief Risk Officer, as one might think. It just sounds the same to our non-German-speaking ears, but Peppa Bunce, looking here more like a gnu than a gnome, is the Chief Risqué Officer.
Thank you, thank you! We'll be here all week. Oops, that's till now, so look for more Stupidity goodness next, week, still at a sporadic level for now. Enjoy the Spring.
* There are real gnus, aka wildebeests, however. I do not refer to the good open-source software people in the title though.
** The writer John Derbyshire used to work at the very place, not as a gnome, but as a geek. and, no, they are not exactly the same thing. He posted his thoughts on the DIE banking programs in As A Former Credit Suisse Risk Management Shlub, I Ask: Is DEI Bringing Down the Banking System?
*** There is zero engineering going on there, so they ought to drop the use of the word - one of my pet peeves.
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Merrick Garland - The Potomac Regime's Lavrentiy Beria
Posted On: Saturday - March 25th 2023 6:24AM MST
In Topics: Commies US Police State US Feral Government Totalitarianism
I want to thank commenter E.H. Hail for clueing me in on the recent story of yet more Americans being taken Political Prisoner by the Potomac Regime for the events of 1/6/21. I saw the number 2,500 - to be reached - in a search result blurb by The NY Times, but I will not click on the old defunct "newspaper of record". The Gateway Pundit keeps up with this, and it's been I being remiss about checking there daily. His latest post is TUCKER Shows MSNBC Video of Trump Supporters on Jan 6 Throwing Things at Capitol Police – They Were Doing This Because Police Were Killing Rosanne Boyland. Rosanne Boyland was one of 4 Americans known to have been murdered that day by Regime police. Peak Stupidity has only concentrated on the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by Capitol cop Michael Leroy Bird, as that was the most clear-cut murder.
The guy in charge of Federal prosecutions is the head of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General. Zhou Bai Dien appointed SCROTUS-wannabe Merrick Garland to this position officially on Jan 20th of '21, but the news of this selection came out 2 weeks earlier, on Jan 6th. How timely!
I waded through the wiki file on this guy for "just the facts,
Merrick Garland has spent a long career in the Federal legal system. (I'm not gonna label it "justice".) He was mentored and employed by various high-up justices, most of them left-leaning. He'd get his better jobs when the Democrat party had the power to employ him, and sometimes go back to corporate litigation** or academia (at his Alma Mater, Harvard) during the years when he was not on the Feral payroll.
As a prosecutor,. Garland got involved heavily in the Oklahoma City bombing case and whatever else was considered "domestic terrorism" (Yes, that does fit the OK City deal, but who the real terrorists are is still an open question.) Though normally completely opposed to the death penalty, Garland was instrumental in seeking the death penalty for Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Was he told to put that one to bed?
As a judge, Garland has tended to side with the Feral Government when it comes to regulation (siding with government agencies) and when it comes to "National Security". He likes the 1st Amendment but not so much the 2nd.
The long ratcheting-upward career of Merrick Garland kept slipping when it came to the grand prize, appointment to a position as a Supreme Court judge. In '09 President Øb☭ma had him as one of 9 finalists to replace David Souter, but wise Latina Sonia Sotomayor got the job. During the next year, Judge John Paul Stevens retired, but, though Republican cuckolds like Orrin Hatch supported Garland even, Øb☭ma appointed Elena Keegan. By this point, one might well have wondered exactly what Merrick Garland thought of Affirmative Action. Suck it up, cupcake!
That's not all, as far as Garland's tough time clawing and scratching for SCROTUS. When Judge Antonin Scalia died under somewhat mysterious conditions, BTW, in Feb of '16, Øb☭ma nominated Garland (first out of 3 lame-ass picks) for the job. Finally! Well, except Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a rare moment out of his shell, went along with other Republicans who had already stated that that they would not consider any nominee put forth by Øb☭ma, and that a Supreme Court nomination should be left to the next president of the United States.
Under McConnell, the Senate's Republican majority refused to consider Garland's nomination, holding "no hearings, no votes, no action whatsoever" on the nomination. Per Wiki's political scientists and legal scholars, this was "unprecedented". It's called playing hardball. The GOP ought to play that more often.***
Poor, poor, Merrick Garland. They stole his dreams and paid him with
Was he appointed due to his expertise, so to speak, in dealing with "domestic terrorists"? Bai Dein's, or whoever's, decision could very well have been made right on that day, 1/6/21. He is ultimately responsible for the taking of simple protestors, trespassers, and at the worst, rioters, as Political Prisoners for years now without trial. In the meantime, as we all know, a whole summer (in some places, still ongoing) of burning and looting in big cities around this country by antifa Commies and BLM thugs resulted in almost ZERO punishment. Some of them are getting paid off by city governments for their "work" in this destruction.
All the people that Wiki quotes say that Merrick Garland is a most brilliant legal mind. Does he not see the hypocrisy and unequal treatment of the J6 vs antifa/BLM, not to mention the blatant violations of US Constitution B.O.R. Amendments VI and VIII? Well, he's a brilliant legal mind, so he can work the system well. That doesn't imply he's a person of integrity who will apply the spirit of the law.
He's not. Merritt Garland is an evil individual. Where does this come from? How'd he get on this evil vendetta against the White population of America? From Wiki, this is kind of weird, but interesting:
In April 2021, Russia imposed sanctions against Garland, including prohibiting him from entering Russia. This was in retaliation for U.S. expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats, a sanction imposed by the United States against Russia for its SolarWinds hack, aggression against Ukraine, and interference in the 2020 U.S. election. [Ahhh, geeze... that last was the HUGE purchase of $100,000 in Facebook ads by some Russian dude or something. This is SERIOUS.- ONE! HUNDRED! THOUSAND! DOLLARS!]There's the over-a-century-old feud going on, see, between the Garland family, that's Garfinkle at the time, and the Russian Empire. Per Wiki, Merritt's grandparents fled said Russian Empire early in the 1900s, to come here and foist a fortunate grandson on the American people.
The big excuse for the taking of what may be 1,500 or so MORE Political Prisoners is this White Supremacy angle, as if there's any group of these bigger than 2 people in America that isn't composed of Feds. However, whatever it is, protests about election fraud, pushback against the Population Replacement project, refusal to be berated and eliminated under DIE, it's all White Supremacy nowadays. The apparatus to enforce this evil is something I could have warned the reader about 21 years ago, 'cept I didn't have a blog. Motherland Security and the War on Terra provides the method for the Totalitarians that infest the Potomac Regime.
The writers on Wikipedia seem fine with all this. A current nominee for the Newspaper of Record (along with The Babylon Bee), The New York Post, takes a different view from that of Wikipedia - Merrick Garland’s deranged ‘one-sideism’ on terror by a guy named "The Post Editorial Board. (Just give your name next time!) Thank you, NY Post. I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this evil Attorney General for what he is.
I'm pretty sure everyone but the seriously stupid, your AOCs and Nancy Pelosies, know that there was no Insurrection and these people were generally harmless. (The Regime cops who killed 4 is another story) This is in contrast to the "harmlessness" of the massive antifa/BLM riots and arson. That's not the point though. Merrick Garland knows too - his point is to warn patriotic Americans that, next time they think of protesting the Totalitarianism of The Regime, they could most easily be taken Political Prisoner and held for YEARS in a Washington, FS gulag under terrible conditions. Even 2 years after the fact, they can just be taken. ("Show me the man ...) Best to stay out of it and let it all happen... collect your measly paycheck and eat ze bugs... that's how they want you to think.
My original point, long lost to this post till now, is that I want to know where and how long ago you'd have to study to have an example of Totalitarianism that we see right in front of our eyes, regarding our fellow normal Americans. Besides GateWay Pundit, check out the videos on J6 Truth site to see this 3rd-world Banana Republic behavior. (Even in those places, this stuff happened only during those swings of the pendulum to Communism and back.) The USSR of much of the 20 century provides an example. China from 1949 till the death of Mao in 1976, but arguably now provides another.)
The treatment of the J6 is simply not America. The Potomac Regime's actions are that of a Communist country. Merrick Garland is its Lavrentiy Beria. "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime."
* As for how it's going for some of these Political Prisoner in the regime gulag, here's a quick story from the same pundit, from over 700 days in there already: J6 Political Prisoners at DC Gulag Leak Heart-Breaking Video from Inside Jail Praying and Singing National Anthem – VIDEO
** Interestingly, one of his cases involved his acting as counsel to an insurance company suing to reinstate an unpopular automatic seat belt mandate. I freaking HATE those things. (At a motel on a long road trip in some '90s Eagle(?), I made the mistake of opening the door when I wasn't quite stopped yet - the thing jammed, and I had to use the emergency latch for the rest of the trip.)
*** Once Trump got in, he nominated Neil Gorsuch, who was confirmed by the Senate. President Trump got 3 judges in there. I hope they don't go native.
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Updates/corrections for 4 posts
Posted On: Thursday - March 23rd 2023 9:36AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Environmental Stupidity The Neocons Peak Stupidity Roadshow
First of all, let me say that something political is going on with me right now, which may distract me from any more blogging for this week. That's even with the handful (at least) of posts that are on deck. What's going on may or may not turn into something that will be covered on Peak Stupidity. We'll see.
Regarding 4 of our fairly recent posts, let me add or explain more:
The Religion of Recycling:
In this post, we added an even more gloomy view of the economics of recycling than had been our contention in the old post (with the favorite title of mine) Toward Sustainable Stupidity. We referred the reader to this old post, but I'd completely forgotten an intermediate post on this, which was Make Stupidity Sustainable Again. Luckily there's not that much overlap.
The middle post contains discussion of an article from a writer from The Manhattan Institute. He discussed the economics of recycling, though still mixing in the Global Climate Calamity™ garbage, the latter for which there is NO landfill deep enough!
Trump v DeSantis: Round 5 - The Ukraine/Russia War(mongering):
In that post of a week back in praise of hopefully-soon-to-be-President Ron DeSantis, we included both his and Trump's* responses to Tucker Carlson about the war-mongering that America is yet again involved in. At then end of an excerpt from Neocon Extraordinaire David Frum, I wrote (in bold there too): "This is a Neocon Red Alert: Someone important cares about Americans more than Israel!"
That doesn't really fit, in the case of this particular war. I should have just stated that someone important cares more about Americans than the Deep State and Globohomo wants him to. The Neocons, lots of them Jewish, have this big centuries-long problem with Russia, so that is part of their motivation for having instigated this mess back in '14. Then, the MIC too is also loving it.
Starbucks Wokeness Backfire:
The say, "Go woke, go broke". That's only the case if the
Per the post linked to here, what would be the nicest location near me took out the outdoor seating due to what some may call Typical Teen Behavior. I haven't been back. Our speculation in that previous post was that maybe the drive-up pick-up business is all they need. Nope. I just heard they're closing within a month. Heckuva job, Shultzie!
Potentially lethal combination of Cheap China(?)-made crap and low competence:
Finally, we refer to this non-political post from mid-March. What a relief that is, too. That post was about burned-out red-light bulbs and the hazards there-from. I looked at one of the few intersections that were the subject of this post. In this case, the one at the intersection at the bottom of a hill, with bad sight-lines, the stoplights there ARE LED types.
Yes, one of the red lights is STILL out. It's in the direction of the worst sight-line (to the left, anyway), at the bottom of the hill, in the direction in which the other side with faster traffic as the default green. Watch out! I had thought one of many great advantages of LEDs is that individual LEDs could burn out, leaving plenty to remain, with the unit being replaced when total brightness get below a certain level. Nope, but this one is black. I suppose it's the circuit board, or connection to it, for this one out of 3 in the fixture that is the problem.
I wonder if the LED units last much longer than the old incandescents, as they normally do in other applications.
* From Trump, we got much more the next day.
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[UPDATED 03/24:] Added 3rd item, bumping red-light update to 4.
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