We need to talk about Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Posted On: Wednesday - June 2nd 2021 10:14AM MST
In Topics: Books
What's this novel got to do with stupidity? It's the usual situation here: I read the whole book, it's my blog, so this will be a post. This is not the first novel Peak Stupidity has written a review on, but novels ought to have shorter ones, right? Only, for the last novel* by this author, Lionel Shriver, we had a 6-parter! That was a big exception as that last one I reviewed, The Mandibles, was a very realistic dystopian near-future story with a lot in it that would be useful to, or at least argued about, by we preppers. (That's at least on the economics side of things - not guns and ammo, gardening, or back-up power.) See Introduction, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Conclusion.
When I mention that book, people often recommend this one. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a POWERFUL book. That's the first thing I thought of after finishing it. I can't say that "I couldn't put it down", because it is 400 pages, after all, and I had stuff to do. It's just a hell of an emotional story, and Lionel Shriver is a great writer.
Kevin from the title is the son of the narrator, and he ends up shooting and killing and injuring a bunch of his high school classmates** at the end of the book. Wait! No, that doesn't spoil the book. Seriously! See, we are told that from the beginning, and even on the book jacket, so you're gonna know that soon enough, even if not from Peak Stupidity. Miss Shriver wrote this novel as a bunch of after-the-fact letters from the narrator Mom to her ex-husband, the Dad of this excitable boy*** Kevin. Really, Kevin is not the excitable boy type, but a child who never seemed to like, much less get excited about, anything at all in this world. That includes his Mom. Kevin is in jail during the duration of the book, as one might expect.
As with the conversation used to explain many parts of the story in The Mandibles, these letters sound just too hifalutin and literary to be real letters. That doesn't really detract from the realism in this one. Since the author has a huge vocabulary and amazing grip on the English language, she's writing of what she knows. Even if the narrator Eva's ex-husband Franklin didn't really need to read this kind of writing, the narrator could have been really writing like that, were she a writer, and she IS in the story. There are no reply letters, so it's one-sided anyway.
Lionel Shriver's writing of what she knows*** means that you're going to read everything from the viewpoint of a long-term NY City dweller, and you know what that means. The perspective about the rest of America, seen mostly in one chapter (letter) in which the author describes to her boy what she doesn't like about it, is from that of a New Yorker. There's her mention of the NY Times as if it's a very important part of life, and I have to except just this one part [top of page 207]:
For some reason I imagine it will reassure you that I still get the Times. But I seem to have misplaced the grid I once imposed on it to determine what parts were worth reading. Famines and Hollywood divorces appear equally vital and equally trifling. Arbitrarily, I either devour the paper soup to nuts, or I toss it smooth and cool on the stack by the door. How right I was, in those days; how easily the United States can get on without me.That the United States could get on swimmingly without the NY Times is something the author may not be able to fathom. BTW, as for leaving the US, Eva had made a career as a travel writer, owning a company that produced books for the low-budget young travelers going abroad. The feminism one would expect comes out in this book, but only in small doses, and Miss Shriver even shows the narrator going off the reservation of that subject, with her choice of a husband. Then the parenting*** part, the biggest subject of the novel, eschews any feminism, other than the subject of choosing to be a parent or not.
What about the subject of guns? The novel has loads of mentions of real school shootings that had happened up till the finishing of the book, from Eva and Kevin. (Eva is always writing about the past, until the very end, keep in mind.) Lionel Shriver does have the expected ignorance about guns in general, as with the one scene near the end of The Mandibles. Hell, every time she mentions a semi-auto rifle in here, it's called an "auto". Trust me, if a big gun control agenda seemed to be the theme of this book, I'd have turned it back in to the library about 1/2 way into it. Believe it or not, it is not.
I ask the Peak Stupidity to believe me when I say it's worth ignoring this minor New Yorker**** mindset to enjoy this gripping novel. After the beginning of the novel, with its description of Eva and Franklin's happy marriage, we hear about Eva's very tough decision making about whether to have a kid. Her bio-clock has come mostly around to 12 O'clock, but that feminist mindset tells her that enjoying the child-free life is more important. OTOH, Franklin is keen to be a family man. As soon as Kevin is born, there is no normal mother/child bonding, and the boy is seen to be a problem right away.
Then, we get to read lots about the upbringing of this mass murderer, as few snippets of Eva's interactions with people after the fact are described, including visits to her son in the pen. The family life is described, which includes the signs of what's coming from Kevin, as Franklin the husband, being an all-American Dad type and a glass-half-full guy about his son, just can't see it all coming. Each chapter, which is another letter, starts with some current events, and then discusses Eva's thoughts on portions of this family life and what were the things going wrong.
It's great reading, and even after one gets to page 400, the end, there is a nice quick honest auto-bio by the author. (It has some interesting things about the publishing world too, as nobody wanted this one, in general.) Then, the author discussed the reaction to the novel. Miss Shriver notes in these afterthoughts (included in at least the copy I had) that the Amazon and other comments on her novel had some great discussion based on the readers' different takes on what the real conclusion of the story was. Was it about nurture, that Eva was never fit to be a Mom, or was it nature that caused Kevin to kill all these kids? Of course it's not a real story, but throughout the book, I was under the impression that the author was conveying that it was nature. There are some bad seeds, and you may get the one in a million that is just a step beyond and just plain evil. I am so glad to have experienced the opposite!
5 stars go to We Need to Talk About Kevin from Peak Stupidity. Thank you so much for the great reading, Lionel Shriver.
PS: One very minor weirdness in the book is that all the years that begin in a "1", as in before the year 2000 are written with a capital "I" (with the crossbars - don't know what font you're looking at right now) instead of the number one. This is everywhere, and even the publisher's address on the copyright page is in zip code I0007, and the book was reprinted in 20II. Well, during that reprinting, someone must not have had the extra funds to pay for all those ones, or something. It's a number, right?! I could have sold her I000 "1"s for a discount. Who does this? I don't have The Mandibles on me now, so I can't check if that's a Lionel Shriver idiosyncrasy.
* I'm not purposefully trying to sound like the literary type, such as John Derbyshire ("I decided to look up some more books from this guy", to paraphrase from interesting monthly "Diary" article), much less a Ron Unz with "I wanted to look into this more, so I read 14 books about it yesterday" - I mean, I believe him, I guess, but it may be more beneficial for him to just step the hell outside. I'm usually not able to even read the books that just come my way via recommendations and availability from the library.
** Yeah, and to be correct, one teacher and a cafeteria worker too.
*** That is, with the exception of motherhood itself, which she admits that she was worried about, in her afterward about the book at the end.
**** Oh, wait, she never says she lives there, but she is "based" there, and in London. Yeah, based there, but not "based". Steve Sailer has made fun of that expression before, cluing me in to notice it more.
Comments (4)
David Cole's got an agenda too, but it's a distraction
Posted On: Tuesday - June 1st 2021 9:50AM MST
In Topics: Pundits Kung Flu Stupidity
Peak Stupidity does not want to get into full pundit-on-pundit mode here. From that post of ours:
In the article linked to near the top, and hundreds or thousands like it "printed" every day, the people under discussion in the article are often other pundits. "Pundit-A's article last week, was subject to a nasty review by Pundit-B, who received lots of likes, but also was torn to shreds by Pundit-C, who is not always right, so let me set him straight here." This crosses over into the TV-pundit world too. "Pundit-C will be interviewed by TV-Pundit-D on his show come Sunday morning, and I will point out his stupidity on my blog Monday and interview Pundit-E about it"Exactly! (Well, I wrote it.). So it's not really that important in politics which pundit wrote what about this other pundit's opinion, when an insignificant percentage of Americans read any of it to begin with. However, those who do care can still learn something.
It's all in their pundit world, and one wonders how important all the discussion is, even though it may be about all the major problems of the day. It could be VERY IMPORTANT stuff for the public to know about (some of the time), but these guys need to think about once in a while that, hey, not 10% of the American public has ever heard the names of any of you people, and maybe 2% read any of you people consistently! What's the point, then?
Commenter Adam Smith brought up a David Cole article in Takimag called House of Faucistein that compares theories of the origins of the Kung Flu*. I am in agreement with one of Mr. Cole's main points, which is that all the theories - straight-outta-bats, Chinese shoddy Virology lab safety**, or purposeful bioweapon (American OR Chinese) - have had only circumstantial evidence given by their supporters. I've got two things to say about that part
1) In the middle of the article, the writer makes some fun of "Phrenology Today cover model Ron Unz 's (thanks for the tip, Adam - I had to look it up, before I could LOL) theory of this being an American bioweapon. As I've written to Mr. Unz himself, all the evidence is circumstantial - pretty much guesswork.
2) It doesn't sound like Mr. Cole has read Mr. Nicholas Wade's*** article that we discussed and linked to here. That's not the be-all-to-end-all, but it's based on scientific theory, at least, and NOT circumstantial evidence.
Though this column is so sarcastic that I couldn't really tell what David Cole is getting at for quite a while, besides maintaining that all Kung Flu origins theories are flimsy, it's that Americans will be led to find some theory to use for their politics anyway, but are being patsies for the Chinese. In this he picks on the GOP and even Tucker Carlson, who seems to be a real truth seeker IMO.
After reading this, I remembered a column by David Cole, somewhat coincidentally, seeing as I don't read him all the time, from March 2020. I found it there on Takimag - Speak the Truth, Shame the Chinese. That column was not so sarcastic. It's a big expose of those "wet markets", and he gives a history of past incidents such as the SARS virus in '03, saying:
As the Chinese people fought for their right to spread zoonotic diseases, Chinese activists fought to keep the West from noticing.And:
So let’s not forget.So, using just as flimsy evidence as the other Kung Flu origin theorists do, and without seeming to have read one piece of readable scientific support for the shoddy-lab-safety, Mr. Cole is sticking with his story that it's the wet markets. As one can read above, he is under the impression that Americans and other Westerners should DO SOMETHING about it, or SHOULD HAVE for years.
Remember that COVID-19, like SARS, began because of specifically Chinese customs, practices, and fetishes.
Remember that during and after the SARS outbreak, the Chinese knew that the wet markets were a danger, yet they were allowed to prosper.
Remember that experts predicted that a bigger, badder SARS would eventually be born from the wet markets. COVID-19 is the most predictable calamity in modern history.
And remember that a ban on Chinese wet markets would have prevented COVID-19. This was the most preventable calamity in modern history.
Sure, cut off the travel to/from China when these new strains come out. Give out travel advice. Bring immigrations levels WAY down, permanently. Send infected Chinese visitors home. It's not the business of America and anyone else to tell these Chinese people what they can sell out in the streets of Wuhan, though. It's not our business. Maybe we should tell people in Africa, Thailand, or San Francisco, Provincetown, Mass, and Key West, Florida to stop screwing each other in the ass? That would stop a lot of virus spread too, wouldn't it?
I believe Mr. Cole was frantic about his guess of the cause of the Kung Flu, wanting ACTION YESTERDAY! was because he is a Panicker. From just above that last excerpt from his March '20 article:
And now we have COVID-19, which has disrupted the entire world. One-third of the earth’s population is under some sort of lockdown. Livelihoods are ruined, economies destroyed, hundreds of thousands are ill and tens of thousands are dead. And the Chinese government, the Chinese diaspora, the political left, and the media want you to forget how COVID grew from the willful failure of China to learn the lessons of SARS.There's a Panicker if I've ever seen one.
Mr. Cole hasn't thought deeply enough. Maybe the (mostly southern) Chinese taste for weird-ass creatures to eat has caused these viruses. However, the Chinese didn't force American State Governors to close down small business, then even beaches and swimming pools. They didn't make the face diapering laws (though they probably did make a hell of a lot of money off of the sales of 'em). No, the PanicFest is on the American governments and the American people who fell for this. The PanicFest is a much more important issue than the origins of the Kung Flu. The PanicFest was used in China to add more layers of Orwellian control and in the US to add another layer of the Police State, supplementing that born out of 9/11 20 years back.
People like David Cole and Ron Unz are on the wrong side of the PanicFest and, in their small ways, have helped enable governments to not let this "crisis" go to waste. Each can stick to his different pet theory till Kingdom Come. Nobody's gonna change either of their minds, I'm sure. Yet they are both greatly distracted by the real problem.
* Gonna have to stick with this one for the most part, as it's one of the topic keys.
** The 1st two are not mutually exclusive though, as some say the virus came from the lab to the "wet market" where Chinamen buy strange animals to eat, some of which could transfer this virus. I guess the fundamental cause there is still shoddy safety at the lab.
*** Not a scientist either, but just a science wiiter.
Comments (21)
Something to celebrate on this Floyd Memorial Day
Posted On: Monday - May 31st 2021 8:17PM MST
In Topics: Humor Race/Genetics
Was it actually Sunday, and we just make it Monday to give government officials another day
(I don't know the tweeter. I don't receive 'em - I just screenshot 'em.)
I've heard this same joke regarding someone else, but who it was eludes me.
I'll do some reflecting about what the real Memorial Day is about too. I was on a Civil War book reading kick about 20 years back and have a WWI movie in the DVD player to finish watching.
Comments (11)
A State of Fear
Posted On: Monday - May 31st 2021 2:01PM MST
In Topics: Books World Political Stupidity Kung Flu Stupidity
You gotta go to the Russia Today site to get the real news sometimes, just as the Russians would have had to grab a bootleg Wall Street Journal back in the 1970s. I found a couple of interesting articles back on May 19th, this one about a book called A State of Fear regarding the still-ongoing Kung Flu PanicFest in the UK. Russian times says New book exposes UK’s unethical psyops team that ramps up anxiety over Covid-19 to control a compliant public.
This post is not a book review, but I'll just excerpt a few passages from the RT article:
By any measure, the coronavirus situation in Britain should be looking pretty rosy by now, as Covid-19 cases are down, hospital admissions are down, deaths are down and vaccinations are up. The NHS has not been overwhelmed, the pubs are open and the kids are free to hug their gran. So, why the glum faces?Well, in general, when you live in 1984 Oceania on steroids, you're not gonna smile so much.
Something seemed off kilter last night as the TV news screened images of holiday-hungry Brits arriving in Portugal, a teenage cancer survivor hugging his nan after a year of forced separation and a bunch of lads in a Barnsley pub drinking pints and watching the football play-offs.That's the same story here. "We're almost through this folks, due to your safety minded-people in your face diapers. We've got a new President who CARES ABOUT SCIENCE!, and therefore a new vaccine, approved just after election day." "Oh, but wait... one more thing ..." [/Totalitarian Columbo]
These scenes of jollity were tempered with news from India of a new variant that had arrived in the UK and was proving wildly virulent, perhaps threatening the freedoms we had longed for, if its spread continued unabated. The message was clear: restrictions on our freedom might have eased from Monday, but we could be back in lockdown unless we can manage this latest ‘scariant’ from the sub-continent. Stay alert. Stay afraid.
RT article writer Damien Wilson:
I’m sorry, but this time I just don’t buy it. Enough with the scare tactics, the dashboard of death and the prophets of doom. It’s quite clear the vaccine is working. I’ve had both doses on the very clear understanding that it works, and I don’t expect I’ll be hospitalised or die even if I do at some point contract the virus.You people brought on this perpetual state of anxiety yourselves by believing in government and following its edicts. That's the root of the problem. Now, they know they can fuck with you forever.
But PM Boris Johnson and his government are addicted to fear and the control it gives over a compliant public. As journalist Laura Dodsworth makes the case in her new book, ‘A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised [SIC!] Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic’, the British public needs to push back on this constant bait and switch aimed at keeping us all in a perpetual state of anxiety.
But things quickly soured (the deterioration). No sooner had thousands boarded their flights to the sun than BoJo announced it was inadvisable to travel to countries on the UK’s amber list, that the Indian variant posed a major threat to those who refused to vaccinate, that plans were being drawn up for a return to the loathsome local lockdowns, and that ‘freedom day’ on June 21 was most probably a non-starter. The abuse continued.Yes, but as a loyal
As Dodsworth discusses, fear diminishes over time, but by announcing an easing of restrictions, the government faced losing the psychological grip over a malleable public that it had worked so hard at establishing and then enforcing by draconian emergency laws.See, that's no good...
Aided and abetted by what the author calls its team of “unelected psychocrats” – the behavioural [SIC!, OK I can't keep this up.] insights experts who advise the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) – the government has encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the pandemic. One unnamed member of that team, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), said they were “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology” on the British public.I don't usually suspect a conspiracy when it's likely more an intense mass of parallel stupidity and/or evil, but this story seems to fit that bill. Government and the Lyin' Press worked together to keep the Brits cowering.
Another anonymous member told Dodsworth, “In March [2020] the government was very worried about compliance, and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear.”
Gavin Morgan, one SPI-B psychologist who was prepared to be named, admitted, “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government.”
Establishing control was relatively easy. A straightforward effort was in the choice of data and graphs that were shared with the public at the regular press briefings from Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer for England Professor Chris Whitty. Professor David Paton, a professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University, called the duo’s appearances “the ultimate psyop”.
I've excerpted about half the article, but the rest is worth reading. Here's how the writer Mr. Wilson ends it:
The creepy ‘psychocrats’ pulling the strings have been rumbled, and as awareness grows of their role in the government’s inept management of the pandemic, they’ll scuttle under the furniture like cockroaches caught in the light, leaving the politicians fully exposed and expected to explain themselves. And then the real fun begins.No they won't, and you wish.
Comments (17)
Mortality addendum
Posted On: Saturday - May 29th 2021 8:39PM MST
In Topics: Kung Flu Stupidity
Firstly, Peak Stupidity apologizes for the big gap in posting, compared to normal operations, in addition to the fact that there'll be only 4 real posts this week, counting this one. It's not that I got burned out from the work for Wednesday's post I had to get my thoughts together on some number discrepancies from that post.
Upon looking at the actual death numbers from the years '15 to '19, I realized that they are a few percent higher than the numbers calculated from the spreadsheet. That total death number for each year is buried in a note underneath one of the other graphs in each of those CDC .pdf files. Yet, this is the file with the mortality rate for each age group. These were multiplied by census data on ages of Americans, if you recall.
I came upon 2 things to explain this discrepancy, one small, and one potentially large but somewhat unknown. See if you can think of what that 2nd one is, considering that the CDC got death certificate numbers from health departments, while the US Census Bureau gets its population numbers by, well, going around and taking a census (or collecting forms thereof). Not everyone answers the census, in particular a certain crowd that lives "in the shadows"
I'll have a post on this on Monday. In the meantime, here are just a few numbers from my spreadsheet calculation for 2020. (The Census numbers for 2020 were in a format of death rates for every age to the year, so I had to just do a slightly different job.)
Whoa, that's even more of a difference from the base number of the '15 '19 average. No, the reader may complain that "if they are all off, what's the point?" The point is the difference between the CDC's stated method vs. calculation expected death numbers for a normal year. Again, I don't trust their methods. If you don't trust mine, I can dig it, but then I'll explain what I think makes up the difference for each year, seeing as the CDC's own total doesn't match their age-based rates x the population groups.
Another thing to back up what I showed Wednesday was this study, done by or for the National Institute of Health just last month. It was pointed out to me by a commenter called "Turtlelamp" on that same iSteve thread. This one deals with the EXACT same problem. They looked at the March-August '20 period only, and don't mind their certainty of how many excess deaths were actually OF the Kung Flu:
An average of 1 370 000 deaths were reported over the same months during 2015 to 2019, for a crude excess of 301,400 deaths (128 100 non-COVID-19 deaths). However, the 2020 U.S. population includes 5.04 million more persons aged 65 years and older than the average population in 2015 to 2019 (a 10% increase). After population changes were taken into account, an estimated 217 900 excess deaths occurred from March through August 2020. [my bolding]That's a difference of 83 1/2 thousand in just 6 months!
Please don't think that Peak Stupidity is going into analytic-hysteria mode. I'm sick of the whole thing, but I wanted to do this to point out discrepancies to the iSteve crowd. I don't care where the origin of the damn thing was either, as opposed to Ron Unz with his big crusade. The real story here is the PanicFest.
Comments (17)
Hey, what's the deal with excess deaths, anyway?
Posted On: Wednesday - May 26th 2021 7:10PM MST
In Topics: Kung Flu Stupidity
This post is NOT a stand-up comedy routine, but the Kung Flu PanicFest itself is a lot closer to one.
Let's talk "excess deaths" today. This is something I did preliminary number-crunching on a couple of months ago already, but never got around to doing rigorously (see postscript). A late Steve Sailer PanicFest post - Weekly Total Deaths Finally Returning to Normal - got me going again. His big EXCESS DEATHS! graph shown there is from this CDC page.
(The reader can go to either of the links above to see this better. I'm just trying to show the shape here, shrinking it way down to fit this page though.)
What are excess deaths? Simply, it's the number of fatalities in America in a time period minus the "normal" number of fatalities. Sound simple to you? No, well first of all, what is normal? One can average out a few years to get that, which ought to take out some of the variability from bad flu years, lulls after bad flu years, wartime (not a factor yet, luckily), etc. You get some sort of average, but ...
Here's my problem right away with this CDC graph. That orange "normal" curve is too damn level! If one understands that the American population is aging fairly quickly historically, as I do, one can see that this base curve CANNOT be right. Please look at it greatly enlarged on that CDC page. It hasn't gone up at all from January of '17 to May of '21. There's something wrong.
Last Fall, when Steve Sailer and others started bringing up this excess death business, their point was that, no matter what kind of shenanigans are going on, more people dying mean it must be the Kung Flu having a big effect. That's not a sure thing either, but then I'll get to that in another post. In this post, I'm looking at something very simple. It does not involve "cases", deaths FROM vs WITH Covid-one-niner, or anything medical. It's just pure numbers, from the US Census Bureau and the CDC itself, the latter regarding "regular" deaths (if that's a thing).
Months ago, I went search for exactly what the heck was going on with this base curve. From the methodology notes at the bottom of the same CDC page linked-to above (and by Mr. Sailer), one can read the following:
Weekly numbers of deaths by age group and race/ethnicity were assessed to examine the difference between the weekly number of deaths occurring in 2020 and the average number occurring in the same week during 2015–2019 and the percentage change in 2020. [My bolding]Whoa, whoa, wait a cotton-pickin' minute here. That average may not cut it. So, I went and found some nice US Census tables, even conveniently in .xlsx (spreadsheet) format. Here's a sample from the '19 one**, but I found them for '15 - '19:
Very good stuff. These (with the other 4 years) are nothing but information on the ages of Americans. One can see from a few of these that the higher-age brackets are getting bigger. It's no huge change, but it's enough to matter.
The next thing I needed was "normal" mortality numbers for these different age brackets. It took me an hour or so of searching to find Statista (which is nothing more than a site that sucks in statistics from elsewhere and displays them, I believe) page with this info. The only bad thing was the brackets there are 10-year ones. While I was writing comments under that latest iSteve post, I found out that this info. came straight from the CDC (yes, CDC again!) .pdf files like this one for '19. In fact, the CDC one for '17, with bar graphs for '17 and '16, was missing the under 5 y/o and 5-14 y/o age bracket, exactly as Statista was. (I just used a 4 yr. average instead of 5, but see next paragraph.) Here's a sample from the '19 CDC .pdf report:
Alright, so I went to the
(That last row "85" should say "85+". Calc thought I was doing an operation. It is smarter than me, so ...)
See those 2 numbers at the bottom? (Image-wise, I had to cut them off from the right side of the spreadsheet and paste them underneath). Those are the gist of this post. Taking the '19 normal death numbers minus that CDC '15-'19 average gives a difference of > 101 thousand more deaths. That's not even thinking of 2020, when the Kung Flu "hit us like a ton of ... something..."*** Subtracting the '15 normal deaths from '19 gives 217 thousand more. It's just that Americans are getting older. It doesn't look that was being taken into account for properly.
While writing comments on iSteve, I found a NY Times article that alleged the CDC did some linear regression for this base curve. I worked out a number for 2020 for that. However, I'm not sure how the NY Times alleges the CDC did that. It may have been much more complicated. However, that doesn't change the fact that the damn "Excess Death" graph has that orange curve that doesn't reflect a population increasing in age, period!
They'll be more philosophical ranting about this in an another post to come soon.
PS: I finally got my spreadsheet foo going from, well, it's been quite a while. I'm doing nothing at all fancy, but I just needed to get to a certain, USABLE computer, as in usable for computing, and get going. It was pretty fun really, and man, did it save a lot of time versus calculating and writing on paper. I was even able to import in numbers from those census bureau site .xls files. (I'm using OpenOffice Calc - we've come a long way from Lotus 123... actually NOT, in usability, though I'm sure in computing power and memory limits.)
I'm happy with my lack of errors, though, from my calculations of this past Sunday. After lots of crunching, the death numbers, if off at all, were off by just single digits out of hundreds of thousands.
So Peak Stupidity did not meet its 1st promise made in Unz Review comments, but we've met are fall-back goal. It's still Wednesday, right?
** Careful clicking on this though - it will open up your Excel program. You can get it to open another program, such as OO Calc.
*** I would use 2020 American population numbers by age, but I couldn't find the exact same format. I did recently find it for EVERY year of age. Hell, I got spreadsheets, so I'll work on that shortly.
Comments (13)
A blast from the past, and Jimmy Buffett
Posted On: Tuesday - May 25th 2021 7:37PM MST
In Topics: Music History Science
We are extremely bad about missing anniversaries of historic events here at Peak Stupidity. I'd thought I was only a week late, but this one is a year and a week late, I realized today.
Mt. St. Helens in Washington State looked like this* before May 18th, of 1980:
A couple of months over 41 years ago, in March of 1980, many earthquakes, not damaging at 4 to 5 on the Richter scale, and build-ups of magna pushing out portions of the rock gave loads of warning that "this thing is gonna blow". The few people that lived in the area, other than lodge owner Harry Truman** staying at the shore of Spirit Lake, evacuated upon orders of Governor Dixie Lee Ray. This story was on the news as I recall, quite a while before the event. On May 17th, 50 carloads of property owners went up to retrieve their important stuff.
There aren't that many good pictures. Not everyone and his brother had a camera on him back then.
At 8:32 A on the 18th of May, after no significant warning signs earlier that morning, a huge landslide of 0.7 cubic miles of material moved down the mountain at 110 - 155 mph. That exposed the magma and steam under pressure which proceeded to blow up the top 1,300 ft. of the mountain. Wikipedia has a pretty good account here, and I'll give a few more factoids taken from there.
A pyroclastic flow consisting of very hot volcanic gases, ash and pumice formed from new lava, as well as pulverized old rock, moved down the mountain northward, accelerating quickly to around the speed of sound. It ended up covering 230 square miles. More than 4 billion board feet*** of timber was destroyed or damaged.
An ash cloud blew out and up to 12 miles high. The winds aloft ended up dropping it mostly to the northeast, covering eastern Washington State and many areas well east in fractions to a few inches of ash. The total area covered was 22,000 square miles. Ash continued exiting the volcano for 10 hours. A total of 540 million tons, or 0.3 cubic miles (uncompacted) of ash was thrown out.
From 55 to 60 people were killed by the volcano, most by asphyxiation and some by burns. Harry R. Truman was one of them. Spirit Lake, near which the man died at his lodge, is filled with blown-down trees to this day.
I was young at the time, and didn't realize what a major event the eruption of Mt. St. Helens was.
I don't know. No, I don't know. I don't know where I'm agonna go when the volcano blows.
For the Parrotheads, this is a really fun song, even by Jimmy Buffett standards. It was released 9 months before the Mt. St. Helens eruption, as the title song of the Volcano album****. Hey, White Man's reggae. No bitching about the White Man, just about nature. Sweet!
OK, Mr. Buffett used to write lyrics that would date the music occasionally, and this is one. I'll include the last part:
But I don't want to land in New York City.
Don't want to land in Mexico.
Don't want to land on no Three Mile Island
Don't want to see my skin aglow.
Don't want to land in Comanche Sky Park
or in Nashville, Tennessee.
Don't want to land in no San Juan airport
or the Yukon territory.
Don't want to land no San Diego
Don't want to land in no Buzzards Bay.
Don't want to land on no Ayatollah.
I got nothing more to say.
Let's see. I get the reasons for about half of those. How 'bout you?
OK, one more lyric line: "You better love-a me now or love-a me not." What a great songwriter!
The Coral Reefer Band (at the time) was:
Jimmy Buffett – vocals, acoustic guitar
Keith Sykes – guitar, background vocals
Barry Chance – lead guitar
Andy McMahon – Fender Rhodes
Mike Utley – piano, organ, clavinet
Harry Dailey – bass guitar
(Wiki has info on more musicians playing on this song.)
* It did have visible changes since early that Spring due to the build up.
** Harry R. Truman, not to be confused with Harry S. Truman, was a businessman, bootlegger, prospector, and lodge operator.
*** One board foot is one square foot of 1" thick lumber.
**** That album has quite a few good ones. The hit single Fins is good, but I like Boat Drinks better, along with Chanson Pour Les Petits Enfants ("Songs for the small children").
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Chaos under Covid - Josh Rogin
Posted On: Tuesday - May 25th 2021 10:56AM MST
In Topics: Trump China Books Kung Flu Stupidity
This is a book review addendum, if you will, of the last chapter of the Josh Rogin book Chaos under Heaven that Peak Stupidity posted a long review on this past Saturday. The reasons for this post are that I'd not quite finished the book when I wrote that review, and that the final chapter, which is about the Kung Flu virus, its origins, and its effect on US-China relations, was one that I'd told Ron Unz in a comment I hadn't read yet.
That latter bit is interesting, as Mr. Unz wrote an uncivil reply comment to me* under his 2nd-to-latest (I haven't bothered with his latest) post on his American bioweapon theory of the Kung Flu's origins - "The Truth" and "The Whole Truth" About the Origins of Covid-19**. The reply was to my simple quick question as to whether Mr. Unz had read Mr. Rogin's Chaos under Heaven. Mr. Unz dismissed the book with the words "Isn’t he that WaPo lab-leak Neocon? I’ve never heard of his book, but why in the world would I want to read that sort of garbage?"***
Well, that brings up the material from our main review. Mr. Rogin is somewhat of a neocon, as we explained there, but his view of the Trump Admin. - China relations was pretty balanced. Mr. Rogin is especially no fan of Steve Bannon. What's really funny here is that the last chapter of Chaos under Heaven, just called "The Coronavirus" is very very much like the Nicholas Wade paper Peak Stupidity discussed and Mr. Unz touted in his post I refer to as supporting his American bioweapon theory.
Mr. Wade's paper DOES NOT support Mr. Unz's theory. Yes, it supports 1/2 of it, only the point that the virus is not likely, per Mr. Wade, to have come from natural mutation/replication animal progression origins. In this last chapter of his book, Mr. Rogin's writing is so close to that of Nicholas Wade's, if Mr. Wade didn't get it directly out of Mr. Rogin's book, then they both got it from the same sources. There are two examples of this: 1) The point about those bats with very similar deadly SARS viruses in caves in Yunnan**** not being obviously able to fly 1,000 miles with this virus and 2) The story of 6 miners in those caves getting wicked sick with same COVID-type symptoms, with 3 of them dying from it. It's nearly the same wording. Mr. Unz mistakenly, IMO, used Mr. Wade's article to bolster his case, but then this book ought to be the same in that respect.
I'll leave Mr. Unz's opinions behind now and continue with this chapter of the book. Just to stay in some sort of order, the biggest deal for Josh Rogin, way before the PanicFest of '20, was the "Wuhan Cables" ***** of early '18. This was about what was going on at the Wuhan labs. American health and science officials went to the Wuhan labs in late '17 and found out how lax the safety standards and personnel training was for a lab doing dangerous research. Higher level diplomats came in March '18 and sent two, what, strongly-worded cables? Though kept secret, the author himself was instrumental in digging them up from some sources and getting them to government officials. Back then, nothing much was made of it.
Once the news of the virus got out, in late '19 and early '20, there was an initial friendly call between Trump and Xi about it. As usual, Trump believed the guy and dismissed the worry very early on. Not much later, when the PanicFest started in earnest, he tried to do the right things (at least trying to cut travel from China early on).
I'll skip most of the rest of the Trump administration politics on the Kung Flu for an attempt at brevity. The big point I want to make is that Mr. Rogin is very dismissive of the bioweapon theory, on the CHINESE end and has nothing to say about that of an American bioweapon theory of origin. (With all he writes about Wuhan, Dr. Shi - the bat lady, if you recall, and the germs themselves, it would not even be thought of, from a reading of this book.)
The author brings up Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton's Chinese bioweapon charges of 2/16/20. Mr. Cotton is a neocon, though only of the "invade-the-world" variety, not the "invite-the-world". (He's very good on the immigration invasion issue, per VDare.) Mr. Rogin maintains that Senator Cotton screwed up the politics with these charges, as the arguments against it and vituperation from the Chinese made the Wuhan lab origin theory go more into the background. One thing this says is, contrary to Mr. Unz's not-having-read-the-book view, Mr. Rogin is not some complete Neocon warmonger on this.
There's some interesting stuff here, with a little deviation from the Wade article too. A number of other very similar viruses to the SARS-Cov-2 (the BIG ONE! ) are mentioned, one important one being what was called RaTG13. That one was found in the bats out in Yunnan and then in the Wuhan lab bat shit samples. It was then experimented on with special genetically-engineered mice, plenty of them sent readily from that UNC research center - Chapel Hill, NC, with ACE2 receptors in their lungs so they could get sick from this virus in the same way as humans.
What deviates from Nicholas Wade's article is that Josh Rogin discusses much subterfuge and covering-up by the Chinese lab people including Dr. Shi. She, OK, Shi, is not made out to be the diligent honest bat-shit lab scientist here.
There's a bit of confusion here for me on the point of these two similar viruses. The author is careful not to say explicitly that "gain-of-function"****** work was done. Then again, how did that first RaTG13 virus get to be the SARS-CoV-2 one? Was it the mice? Is that not the same as gain-of-function work? I don't know.
Another point of mine is this: What specifically makes the work done in that lab, and the same with similar work in America, NOT bioweapons research? Is it just the intention? Is it the lab name, called a "Virology Lab - level BSL-4", rather than "Department of Offense Bio-Lab"? Either way, the stuff can be deadly. All you do to turn gain-of-function results into a weapon is get a vial and get on a plane. (Bring plenty of wipes!)
Man, I just can't keep these things short, as I just read this and want to include all the interesting parts. Let me get back to the Trump/China politics during the Kung Flu PanicFest era just to summarize them per Josh Rogin. Trump and all of the administration finally got wise to all the bullshit out of China during the summer of '20. They realized that the huge damage to the American economy, from the Kung Flu - no, it was from the ensuing PanicFest, actually - was a bigger deal than their measly round 1 trade deal and other politics. It was pretty late to play hardball. Additionally, the Chinese were using the Kung Flu PanicFest to exert influence all over the world, threatening the loss of, well, shit like defective face masks for one...
Mr. Rogin, being from CNN and the Washington Post after all, was not happy with the last Trump moves. Along with other moves, they involved the administration's looking into the cultural-sabotage outfit Confucius Centers, sending home "researchers" in science/engineering who were associated with the Chinese military, and closing of the Houston, Texas Chinese consulate that was full of spies. Talk aboutcher no-brainers!
With the exception of the epilogue, the author must have finished writing sometime in the Fall of '20, as the election hadn't happened yet. I've got 2 or 3 problems with his take on the American politics of election '20, which I'll likely post about.
Where Josh Rogin himself stands on the panicker/non-panicker spectrum is obvious from just one paragraph on page 283. As the author traveled with National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien to Scottsdale, Arizona to a conference about the CCP's global ambition and influence. He ends that section ("The Gloves Come Off") on that sequence of political events with the ominous one-sentence paragraph:
Two weeks later, O'Brien was diagnosed with COVID-19.OMG! I think we're supposed to shake in our cheap China-made boots here.
Josh Rogin sure seems to have a lot of inside knowledge of this last chapter of the Trump Administration's China politics. This is very interesting stuff that Kung Flu origin worriers really ought to read. I'll take exception to those 3 items of stupidity to expected out of a Lyin' Press writer later. What it still comes down to is that I trust even this Washington Post reporter more than I do the Chinese Communist Party.*******
* Later on in the thread, though, Mr. Unz was much more civil in another couple of replies and even thanked me for linking to a John Derbyshire column. The Derbyshire column was on his OWN SITE, BTW! Ha, I guess he really is a busy guy with all that writing, skimming/chiming-in, and software work. I was really surprised that Mr. Unz was so glad Mr. Derbyshire had pointed out his writing, even when stating that he (Mr. D) didn't think Mr. Unz's theory that likely compared to the Wuhan lab screw-up theory. Though Mr. Unz is a big shot in some ways, I guess Mr. Derbyshire is much more known as a writer.
** It has 943 comments as of now, but they won't be displayed with the post without the reader clicking at the bottom - a smart thing, IMO, as if you don't want to read comments, unlike me, you can load a much smaller amount of text.
*** Then, the insult had to come out - the guy is just high strung - claiming I have written nothing intelligent about China (that he's skimmed, anyway) from 11 times being there, while he has written papers and read lots of books. OK, Ron. I told the guy to visit sometime in '19, dammit. I really did want to know what he'd think if he went there.
**** It's out there way southwest of Wuhan, directly north of Vietnam.
***** WTF is a diplomatic "cable" now anyways? Did the message go under the sea?
****** What crappy terminology there! That's a subject for another quick post.
******* It could be that the book audience is slightly different from the Lyin' Press/TV Infotainment crowd, so the same lies won't fly in this format.
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Content Note: "Excess Deaths" calculations to come likely on Wednesday
Posted On: Monday - May 24th 2021 8:41PM MST
In Topics: Websites Kung Flu Stupidity
No, this is not a "site note", which in the past has meant I'm getting screwed in the ass by some change with SSL or hosting. This is an apology post about missing some content today.
I'd promised in the comments under this Steve Sailer post on the Kung Flu, or Flu Manchu as some are wont to say., to put up a post today with the following: From reading the CDC's own web site, their method of calculating "excess deaths" does not well take into account the aging of the US population.
Rather than write more tonight, I will explain in the post or two to come on this. Anyway, for readers from the unz site, I didn't meet my goal, as today got extremely busy. There are loads of other posts to write, so I think I'll put those in while I decide how to present my numerical story.
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PC yard sign parody
Posted On: Saturday - May 22nd 2021 8:13PM MST
In Topics: Humor Political Correctness
Our illustrious commenter Adam Smith linked to the sign below a good while back. I spent 3 hours at least on that book review, to this post will have no further comment. Good evening all, and thank you for reading.
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Chaos under Heaven - Josh Rogin
Posted On: Saturday - May 22nd 2021 3:23PM MST
In Topics: Trump China Books World Political Stupidity
Peak Stupidity mentioned that we'd have a review of this book Chaos under Heaven*, by Josh Rogin, a few weeks back in our post Mandate straight outta Hell. I read most of the book back then, but I am just now going over the last chapter, on the Kung Flu, so I'll discuss it later in a separate post.
The author of this book is a long-term journalist of the Lyin' Press magazine departments (Newsweek, Foreign Policy, Bloomberg View, the Washington Post, and so on) along with TV department CNN. He calls himself a "Neoliberal" and "Constructionist". I've never heard of the latter, and heard of the former term plenty but have no idea what a Neoliberal is supposed to be. What Mr. Rogin IS, however, is a Neocon, though he doesn't know it. He's got this definition in an explanation of the difference between a Neocon and a "Conservative Hawk" [p. 155], as he wrote:
Bolton was not actually a neocon like Pence. Ideologically, he was more of a conservative hawk, like Pompeo. (The difference between neocon and conservative hawk -- often overlooked even in DC -- had to do with how much one felt the factors of democracy, freedom, and human rights should factor into America's foreign policy and its use of hard power. That distinction most often surfaced when policy makers were talking about bad governments that the United States worked with, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Neocons wanted them to change; conservative hawks wanted them to stay close allies.)First of all, if John Bolton is not a neocon, nobody is. I see this distinction of the author's, but then that makes Josh Rogin a Neocon anyway, from what I read here.
Chaos under Heaven, as the sub-title relates, is a story of high-level relations between the US and China during the Trump administration. Mr. Rogin wrote this book from a position of in insider in the Trump Administration. It's his journalist posting, I guess, but this guy sounds like he was in on all these meetings, or at least talked to the important people in all of them. The book is mostly about meetings in fact, ones within the Trump Administration, ones between Trump and President-for-Life Xi, Trump officials and Chinese officials, and anything else - meetings, meetings, meetings.
The "Chaos" in the title refers to President Trump's ways. The author's take on Trump's China policy, in general, is explained right in the prologue [p. xxi]. It's a combination between "flailing" and his "love affair with China's dictator-for-life" (and I can believe both), and a different narrative in which Trump wanted to set his various advisors against each other in order to get competing opinions. It's hard to tell what Josh Rogin thinks of President Trump in general, but it's not all a negative view.
The reader may recall, as I do now that I read about it again in this book, that the first big interaction between the two powers with Donald Trump on-board was a deal about Trump's taking a congratulatory phone call from the Taiwanese President Tsai in early December '16. Well, the Chinese diplomats were bound to get their panties in wads over that one. Peak Stupidity has reported on their pushing of the 3 big airlines left in the United States to change the maps in their in-flight magazines** in Western airlines bow down to China Commies' petty whims. and Airline Taiwan-nomenclature brew-haha prequel. Josh Rogin mentions this very incident, from a few years back.
Besides a few minor flaws in Mr. Rogin's truth-telling abilities, of which I'll get to later, he wrote a fairly interesting book, considering it's as policy-wonky as one can get. I could keep track of a couple of handfuls of the main diplomatic characters on the American side, but not all of these people. Mr. Rogin breaks down the 4 years of policy making and negotiation with the tough-ass Chinese into the diplomacy realm (just getting along with them), the trade realm, and the human rights realm. It's that the latter was important to the author and the Trump officials at all that makes them Neocons.
We've discussed the situation regarding Hong Kong and Taiwan in that "Mandate straight outta Hell" post linked-to above. The gist of that is "none of our business anymore", "We're broke here." and "Let 'em take care of themselves." This pushing of China about the Uighurs is Neoconnery, as I guess the author would put it. No doubt, the Chinese government has done a lot of evil to these people. It's a voluntary genocide on the Uighur people (either become culturally Chinese or bust). It's just not our business though. This kind of talk only encourages the CCP to mouth off often about Americans and their racism and xenophobia (AS IF!). Yes, that's hard-core lying, while there's a lot more truth in the Chinese being genocidal to these Uighers. I still recall the lefties back in the mid-1980s, when discussing El Salvador and the Commies there- "We can't be the policemen of the world." When's the last time you've heard that one? It's been a while, and I'd suggest Conservatives start appropriating that line.
Let the Chinese deal with those Moslems as they see fit. That brings up the material that Mr. Rogin goes into regarding American diplomacy and Uighur activists in America [p. 208]. There's a bunch of trouble, with Mike Pompeo even involved, for this particular guy, one Bahram Sintash "from Chantilly, Virginia". (Oh, a "Virginia man", I see.) Yeah, his Dad was catching hell out there in Xinjiang for resisting Chinese oppression. Yeah? Listen, we can't keep importing people from all over that end up recruiting the US Feral Gov't to solve their damn family problems. Go home and take care of it, Virginia man! We've got big problems here already. Secondly, why have another diplomatic liability to have to bargain something else for?
One could substitute any other country for Xinjiang in the paragraph above. As evil as the governments of the Middle Kingdom have been to their countrymen, they still want to keep the same countrymen at least, and they make a big effort to control who lives there***. (Yeah, I know Tibet was a separate country before and Xinjiang was only claimed by China since the1700s, a moment ago in China-time.)
Enough of the "human rights" stuff. Let me first point out a piece of pure stupidity on the Mr. Rogin's part and then get to the important meat of this book. As the author discusses the inroads the CCP has been making with a cultural invasion of US institutions****, he has a section in Chapter 12 ("Waking Up") called "Political Tools". On page 215-216 he writes:
The Chinese government sponsors language programs, education exchanges, and research, much of which is constructive or benign. Independently or through these programs, hundreds of thousand of Chinese students study at American universities, bringing value to these schools and taking a better understanding of the United States back to China. The vast majority of these students have no connection to the Chinese state and are simply trying to get an education and better their lives. They are the victims both of their own government's abuses and of Americans' discrimination and racism, which are exacerbated by some of Trump's statements and policies.I almost said "fuck it" and stopped reading right there. It's just that this is roughly 2/3 into the book, and this review needed to be written. Thankfully that paragraph of stupidity above is by far the worst in Chaos under Heaven.
Oh, but that doesn't mean I won't answer this bullshit. No, the "bringing value" may have been very true in the 1980s, when America really got a very few of the best and brightest rather than "deals" like the Chinese Visiting Scholar Scam that we "get" now. They are not victims of anybody. They didn't have to come over here to begin with, and that last (bolded) part is just downright ridiculous. Americans are as tolerant as anyone of foreigners. We are way too tolerant, in fact. The Chinese don't have millions of students, post-doc hangers-on, and family members on all types of visas, so shut the fuck up,
Back to the meat of the book, the story of the trade dealing. The important thing for America is to get out of this American-politician-caused unfair deal - see The Chinese are not happy with their > 20 year-long unfair! trade deal with America. A lot of this book covers these negotiations, which is the interesting part to me. If you wonder why President Trump couldn't get things done, this book describes the reasons. These reasons could apply to other areas of policy just as easily. Again, Peak Stupidity emphasizes that you don't start out by hiring people who are not on your side.
I can't recall every back-and-forth bit of deal-making on trade between our countries that the author covered, even a few weeks later. There's a lot to read about it. This book will disabuse one of the notion that President Trump didn't try hard or do anything, as it did me. The Chinese are in the cat-bird's seat though, now. This book covers a lot of the arrogance of the Chinese government officials, at least, and I don't chalk that up to the Neoconnery of Mr. Rogin.
This is not the 1990s when the Chinese wanted America's help in building up their manufacturing, and we still had an economy an order-of-magnitude bigger. That's all over. They don't need us for this. (I mean, they have millions of Chinese here, just fraction of a percent of whom they could have send them whatever information they do need.) The Chinese play hard ball politics. Chinese President-for-Life Xi Jinping is not one of Trump's American politician golfing buddies. Sure, they may disagree, but they're both Americans, and they can talk to and understand each other. Xi Jinping is not your buddy, Donald Trump. He is pushing for whatever is good for the CCP and China, which in and of itself is fair enough. He and his CCP are devious and will not compromise unless it's part of a trick. There is plenty of this type of thing described in this book. Let me put it this way: From this book I have learned that there's another book that I absolutely DON'T want to read. That would be Donald Trump's Art of the Deal. From all the information in this book (just from the facts, not the Neocon opinion), Donald Trump sucks at deal-making!
Yes, Donald Trump thought Xi Jinping would just be on the level with him, once they got to know each other and all. As Zhou Bai Dien could even tell him, were he not probably compromised by his son, "C'mon, man!" The book title aside, it was not all chaos, and President Trump meant well. However, now we don't even have someone who means well, so we are really and truly screwed.
* The subtitle is: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century.
** Lotta damn good that did them, as those in-flight magazines are a thing of the past, I'm almost sure (they are still gone right now). The Kung Flu PanicFest was the last straw due to "Surfaces!! Eeek!", but this was coming anyway, with passengers having too much to view on the electronics to pick these things up.
*** There's a short post I want to write about this, from a personal anecdote, coming next week, now that I recalled it.
**** This was discussed in more detail in a book Peak Stupidity reviewed last year - We Have Been Harmonized, by Kai Strittmatter. We wrote a 4-part review: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4,
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Crash of the CPR smart dummy
Posted On: Friday - May 21st 2021 7:09PM MST
In Topics: Humor Artificial Stupidity Healthcare Stupidity
(Extra limbs sold separately.)
With the Artificial Stupidity topic key, the reader will find many posts decrying the trend in the modern world to make every damn thing smart (see Coffee Machines and Jet Airplanes - machines taking control). Smart phones are the worst of it, but there have to be smart cars, smart toasters, smart toilets (? They come to you when you're ready, I think...) This post is about the latest one I've heard of, a smart CPR dummy - yeah the hardest part about writing this post was sifting through my head for the best title.
The healthcare worker of our family has to do a recertification on CPR every 2 years. She's got a deadline coming right up. Well, she tried to get this done just after her work time in order to save on a commute. I kid you not - the CPR dummy was down. His software must have crashed. He was not so smart that day, so training had to be postponed. I still remember the day when dummies were just dummies, the CPR type and even the ones in Washington, FS.
Peak Stupidity has embedded this The Office scene before, I am pretty sure. This is one of the funniest pieces of TV I've ever run into.
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The current real estate boom as prepping for inflation
Posted On: Friday - May 21st 2021 9:47AM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity Preppers and Prepping Economics Inflation
(This image may not be the best, as it suggests people bailing out. It's all I got right now.)
I wasn't sure for a while it was just our local area or State that was experiencing rising housing and land prices all over. I met a real estate agent while traveling and she informed me that people were making offers above and beyond asking prices on exurban houses along with undeveloped land.
From reading a bit, I see that it's more widespread. There is the huge inflation that we have seen in building materials, whether temporary due to supply shortages* or a permanent increase. That would encourage people to buy existing houses, of course, and bring their values up some. This Fortune magazine article attributes the reason for inflation of suburban and rural property to the Kung Fu PanicFest's causing permanent changes to work habits. That people will work from home more, and they want more space, is the gist of it, though they speculate on other reasons.
We at Peak Stupidity can speculate too. As related to the PanicFest, along with last years BLM/antifa mayhem, many of are realizing something the preppers could have told us long ago. The first then they will tell you is that cities are not the places to be when the SHTF - Shit Hits The Fan. (If you're gonna be any kind of prepper, you start off learning the terminology, and SHTF is number 1.) The ctrl-left in the blue States, or really, blue areas more than States, of the country are doing this bugging out, as I've seen in my area. Yes, they are the cause of the problems back in their old country, but that doesn't stop them from getting the hell out.
Secondly, this PanicFest has been just another excuse, and a BIG ONE, for the US Feral Gov't to create trillions of more US dollars in a short time. You just can't keep doing stuff like that and expect the buck to buy the same stuff it did last year. Oh, the BLS can get creative with their baskets of goods**, and come up with those 1-2% APR numbers, though they had to admit to an April 4.2% yoy CPI rise, as per Ron Paul's Big Government and Big Inflation. (Just double it, and you'll get closer to the truth.)
As much as most American wouldn't know the Federal Reserve from the Federalist Papers, people's general observations and instincts often help them do the right thing. "Shit's going up. That's all." That's the answer from about anyone I ask the question "hey, why is it higher now?" to, whether the insurance agent***, a guy at the hardware store, the waiter, and then the tax assessor. OK, the latter has an easy answer too: Real Estate is going up, duh.
So, everything is going up, causing everything else to go up. That's the story that they are sticking to. It's the same as the wage/price spiral business they'd tell you in the late 1970s, except wages are at a lower relative level and not rising as much. This whole inflation thing is 1970s redux. I know people like the retro stuff, like POS blenders that look like the old well-built Osterizers or retro Camaros, Mustangs and Chargers, but inflation too? Really?
Housing and land are real. The US dollar is a piece of green paper**** or bits on a computer somewhere. Even people who don't read Peak Stupidity, Zerohedge, or Ron Paul columns can still wise up.
PS: We have discussed Housing Bubble 2.0 on the West Coast especially on this site (see here, here, here, and here.) Was that all garbage, seeing as no bust is forthcoming? I don't know. It's hard to separate inflation from real increase in value.
* It's not like we are running out of forest in this country. It might be more about whose money is more worth taking for the lumber (aka, China's).
** We've got lots of discussion of hedonics, substitution, and other fun stuff in posts with the Inflation topic key.
*** Regarding my house insurance, at least he did have a good answer: Replacement cost is going up due to the big rise in building materials.
**** I did get 2 Sacajawea coins out of a vending machine recently, though.
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MEMO FROM MIDDLE AMERICA includes Kung Flu sense
Posted On: Thursday - May 20th 2021 6:42PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Websites Pundits Dead/Ex- Presidents Kung Flu Stupidity
Peak Stupidity has mentioned VDare's Allan Wall before, in posts and even our almost 5 year-old review of the site. He's one of the originals and one of our favorites of the many great writers featured there.
Allan Wall's latest column, Soros Evangelical Russell Moore Still Shilling For Left, Teams Up With Dubya To Promote Mass Immigration* is great reading for one thing above and beyond the normal good immigration stupidity reporting. He's branched out just a tad, maybe as much as VDare would be happy with, into the Kung Flu stupidity.
Mr. Wall is a very civil, low-emotional-content writer, with just the facts and his gleanings from his experience. Though most VDare writers stick pretty strictly to the mission, reporting on all things immigration, in this one, Mr. Wall's opinion on the PanicFest shines through. It’s pretty hilarious too, and I haven’t noted his sense of humor before. I’ve never heard the term “Flu Manchu” before, but I like it and am kinda pissed at myself for not thinking of that one. Next, this guy uses the term “face diaper” right in this VDare article.
The subject of this column is an alleged Christian leader who's been discussed on the site before multiple times, one Russell Moore. Mr. Moore is a stupid pretentious cuck, and this column has plenty of his latest stupidity (maybe just plain evil against the American people) on display.
Allan Wall's words regarding the above tweet are some of the funniest I've ever read on VDare:
Such is Moore’s enthusiasm for what skeptics call the face diaper that he wore two the day he received the first of two inoculations. And he added this corny message: “This hobbit is vaccinated.”LOL! You don't expect that out of the staid, serious, and erudite crowd** at VDare.
Hobbits are probably smarter than Moore because they drink beer and smoke pipes and don’t fret about viruses.
But wait, there's more!! In the process of eviscerating Russell Moore, Mr. Wall, brings up a zoom call between him and ex-Presidente Jorge W. Boosh. I had not read before of Mr. Bush's new open borders pushing book called "Out of Many, One", and I wish I never had. The author has a lot to say about this guy too, who is turning into possibly one of the worst ex-Presidents EVAH.
Please read this latest Allan Wall column, Peak Stupidity readers. You will enjoy it immensely. You rock, Allan Wall! VDare is likely to get a strongly-worded letter about this guy from one of us.
* “MEMO FROM MIDDLE AMERICA:” appears before the main title. It is just the heading for many of his columns, seeing as a decade or so ago it used to be “MEMO FROM MEXICO”, written when he and his family lived there. His other columns, in which he gives us the real scoop as a Spanish-speaker, are usually “SAID IN SPANISH”
** Excepting one Lance Welton, who is a bit off the wall sometimes.
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Fort Snelling, Minnegadishu
Posted On: Wednesday - May 19th 2021 2:19PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity The Future
Fort Snelling was built early in the 1800s, when Minnesota was part of the American Western frontier. Parts of it were used as a graveyard for American military men starting in 1870. The original fort is on the east side, but the cemetery sits on the due south side of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, just north of the Interstate 494 and the Minnesota River, nestled between runway 30R and runway 35 of the airport.
While doing business in the area of the airport, I passed by the neatly organized grid of simple graves each marked by a white cross. The graves go out from the road as far as the eyes can see over the low rises, and it takes a minute to go past them all at 40 mph or so. Per wiki, there are just barely under one quarter of a million graves there, on 436 acres, which is over 2/3 of a square mile.
Then, I looked out at the streets again on the other side and the people in the light rail cars. This is likely not the most intense area of Somaliland in the formerly Great White North city of Minneapolis. However, there were plenty non-normal Minnesotans, if I can put it that way, in the area. The MSP airport area in general has very many, doing that work that Minnesotans apparently won't do anymore. (Well, it's hard when the Somalian lead won't hire Americans so readily ...) Don't get me started again* on the whole farce of a TSA that searches up American grannies and toddlers, yet allows Somalians to work out on the ramp among the airliners - oh, yeah, thorough background checks were done on all of them, THOROUGH, I tells ya'!
What'd those men buried in those quarter million graves with the white crosses die for? What would they think if they could see past the manicured green grass over to the road or out to the city on the other side?
* Something like it, though, is in this old post of ours - .Minnesota Nice, terrorists, and the Security State.
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Foo Fighters - Everlong
Posted On: Tuesday - May 18th 2021 11:16PM MST
In Topics: Music
As not really the biggest fan of Grunge music at the time, I had not idea until now that the Foo Fighter's lead singer/drummer Dave Grohl had been Nirvana's drummer until Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994. He formed his band after that, also in the Seattle, Washington area.
Everlong is the only song I can remember by this band, and it goes back almost a 1/4 century, to 1997, from their album The Colour and the Shape* One interesting thing is that, because Mr. Grohl had a thing for Louise Post of a band called Veruca Salt (no, never heard of them either), he not only wrote the song about her but wanted her on a little bit of backing vocals. She was in Chicago while his band was recording this in Hollywood, CA, so they got the audio over the land line. "Can you hear me now?" "No problem."
I'd almost completely forgotten about this once-favorite of mine. Since the song is from back when they still made very creative videos too, this is worth watching while listening to:
The Foo Fighters:
Dave Grohl – Vocals, rhythm guitar, drums
Pat Smear – Lead guitar
Nate Mendel – Bass guitar
Louise Post – Backing vocals on this song
* Why the British-style mis-spelling, I don't know.
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The Age of Entitlement - Christopher Caldwell
Posted On: Tuesday - May 18th 2021 7:00PM MST
In Topics: Feminism Liberty/Libertarianism US Feral Government Race/Genetics Books Morning Constitutional
This one was recommended in the Peak Stupidity comment section quite a while back by Mr. E.H. Hail of the Hail to You blog.
It's been quite a while now since I read this book. This is not the best way to write a review, though I have the book on me still and will refer to a few parts. The gist of Christopher Caldwell's '20-copywritten book The Age of Entitlement, is that the Civil Rights laws and court decisions have become a 2nd US Constitution, one that is nowhere near in harmony with the original. The great body of legislation passed in the mid-1960s by a Democrat Congress and gladly signed by the Socialist scumbag Lyndon Johnson was not nearly the whole body of this new constitution. The rest of it was written up by activist courts over the ensuing years, and is on-going today.
I have no problem with Mr. Caldwell's big thesis here. I don't get the idea from this book that the author is any big Constitutionalist, though, who would have voted for Barry Goldwater if he could have.* Though he mentions the big loss of freedom of association, due to those early efforts to force black and white people together in the 1960s and '70s, one gets the feeling that Mr. Caldwell would have been, and still is, one of those well-meaning do-gooders that he rightly sees as the cause of all this horrible change to American politics.
In fact, after the introduction, entitled 1963, the next two chapters, (2) Race and (3) Sex, had me almost sending this book right back to the library prontomundo. Regarding the former, let me say that I'm pretty sure Mr. Caldwell wouldn't get caught dead reading any Paul Kersey material. In this chapter on race, Mr. Caldwell does a nice job explaining freedom of association and then some of the staged ploys to claim discrimination that the left did in the 1960s and still does. However, throughout the chapter, I got the feeling that this author had no idea of what the South had been dealing with. He sounds just like the arrogant Northerners of yesteryear, who had no clue how certain black people behave. The chapter ends with his noting that civil rights had been sold differently to the American people from the way it went down. He still mentions this "especially shameful history." Ahhh, bullshit.
Next, in the chapter on feminism, it's the same story. Mr. Caldwell noted that feminist policy too was implemented by courts with new "court-mandated rights - of all kinds". He did a good job of explaining the passing but non-ratification of the moribund Equal Rights Amendment. (They tried, from '72 through '77, with 35 States ratifying - thank you, 15 sane States!) However, my reading of this chapter, is that, from its beginning to end, the author is perfectly fine with feminism in principle. In the 1st half of Chapter 3 he pretty much just badmouths those bad old days (before Maude?) in which goils were goils and men were men ...**
In Chapter 4 on War, Vietnam, that is, Christopher Caldwell writes a nice summary of that era, but still has this bit about "those who were heroically fighting for equality" [p. 76]. In Chapter 5 on Debt, I did not agree very much with his take on President Reagan. Sure [p. 110] candidate Reagan may have promised to undo affirmative action "with the stroke of a pen", but he couldn't, and he couldn't just abolish the Dept. of Education as promised due to, oh right, a highly Democrat-dominated House of Representatives his ENTIRE time in office - it averaged 59% Democrat over those 8 years. The same goes for Mr. Caldwell's assertions on the next page about the debt, that Mr. Reagan just up and borrowed way more than he spent. Hey, Caldwell, Mr. Original-Constitutionalist! Have you ever read Article 1? Congress writes the budget. Reagan was damn close to auto-veto-override mode by Congress, with it only taking from 45 to as low as 18 R traitors out of the 435 critters to do this.
The rest of the book, on Diversity (incl. Political Correctness), Winners, and Losers is to me a nice job done by Mr. Caldwell. He lays out the BS that Americans have been subject to very well. I would say a bunch of the thoughts there could have, or may very well have, been taken straight off of Steve Sailer blog posts. (He includes the story of the always colorful (well... ) Miss Rachael Dolezal even!)
Let me bring up one more pervasive problem I saw in the writing in The Age of Entitlement. It's something that I will explain better in a someday-upcoming review of Strauss & Howe's Generations/The Fourth Turning. Basically, Mr. Caldwell has too many episodes of Strauss-Howe syndrome, which, by my definition, means the explaining of his point with cultural/artistic/entertainment very specific happenings. To paraphrase this generically: "By the early 1980s people were more like this, as we note from these lyrics in this song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, along with two different movies that came out that had people that acted just like that. One of them said "blah, blah, blah", which is just another example of how people were getting to be like this." There is way too much of this Strauss-Howe syndrome in the book, unfortunately, for those who can detect generalized bullshit that can be supported or debunked with many different examples from the same period.
To summarize, The Age of Entitlement is a very readable book with lots of red meat for Conservatives who understand the cultural destruction and destruction of the old at least semi-Constitutional US of pre 1963. It'd be great if others, who do not understand yet, would read it. However, likely because the author wants to keep his various editor and opinion writer jobs, he couldn't go all full-truth conservative on the race and feminism chapters. He's got the few screwed-up ideas I mentioned above and that annoying Strauss-Howe syndrome too.
I still recommend this book, with a warning that you are probably not gonna like Chapters 2 and 3, at least. It's a good short history of the misery that has been foisted on straight White men over the last 58 years by many stupid do-gooders along with a few evil ones in the name of "Civil Rights". It's not been civil at all, and we have almost no more rights. Decent job, Chris Caldwell, decent job.
* He was born in 1962 though.
** Not Mr. Caldwell's line, but since I'm into 1970s Normal Lear sitcoms here ...
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Female Instincts: Nurturing v Socializing venue: the sidewalk
Posted On: Monday - May 17th 2021 6:24PM MST
In Topics: Race/Genetics Female Stupidity
(You wouldn't believe what search term came up very quickly with this image. Actually, maybe you would. I'm still chuckling!)
This is more anecdotal commentary, as per this morning's post. "This is easy!" [mashes big red Staples button] Sometimes post ideas just come one after another.
In this nice leafy* neighborhood, I saw a young Mom with a toddler and a stroller as I left the house. There was only one kid - often, they like to walk or even push the stroller instead of riding. Right then, I also saw a, let's say "n'd-up", old Crown Vic, not as nice as the one in the photo here. Just it being a Crown Vic makes the chances 90% it was a black guy driving, but with tinted windows, the odds go up to sun-coming-up-tomorrow" levels.
It's not like we don't have plenty of various folks driving by that don't live here. It's not that I think they all need to drive elsewhere either. (Heck, I'll go through the non-leafy neighborhoods myself ... in the daytime ... very carefully.) I just had some thoughts about the lady seeing this vehicle, with her little vulnerable toddler outside on the sidewalk.
What was she thinking? The basic un-suppressible thoughts (would that be the woman's lizard brain?) were bound to be "I don't want this guy near my kid." However, if she's one of the many ridiculous virtue-signalling lefties around with the BLM and "Hate has no home here." signs in the yard, I'm sure her high-level thoughts would lean toward "Oh, I feel NOTHINK! NOTHINK! [/Sargent Schultzie]. Everything is fine. Tinted windows are great. I would LUV for black people to move into my neighborhood!" {See our post from last year - It's a Beautiful Day in the Leafy Neighborhood.)
There were competing female instincts out there on the sidewalk this morning. The nurturing instinct, so strong in the female brain, would tell her that whatever it takes to keep that helpless boy safe, she must do. Females have a big socializing instinct too though, as in not making waves and doing what it takes to get along, even if it's NOT the right thing. In the world of today, in which the black race is exalted, the ladies with their yard signs and Facebook pages will give up all rights and dignity in order that we "all get along". We may be getting genocided into oblivion, but we'll all be getting along while we are. That's important, see?
Luckily, as with most instances of Nurturing v Socializing, this match quickly turned into a nice friendly social hour with no conflict, as, well, the guy drove on down the road. There was no reason for conflict. Everyone got along. It's only those occasional bouts in which the venue is a dark alley, the middle of a BLM protest, or the Town Hall meeting about the new Section 8 development, when the contest really gets going. Lately, Socializing has been beating all hell out of Nurturing.
* For all practical purposes, "Leafy" means "mostly White".
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1-888-NO-THANX
Posted On: Monday - May 17th 2021 10:29AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity Customer Care
The phone number above is NOT, I repeat, NOT the Peak Stupidity customer care line. We don't have one because we just don't care that awful much.*. Who knows who you'll get on that line, but I would bet money on one thing: You won't get a live person on the other end without going through some phone menu.
We haven't got into the Curmudgeonry very much lately, so it's about time for a quick one. I just plain don't like unnecessary phone "tree" systems whether tone-operated or voice-operated. In fact, I've NEVER partaken in the latter yet, and gotten away with it so far. That's not easy at times - learning the right combinations of "0"s and other numbers in an order that will not result in one's being hung up on takes some memory skills. (If you're gonna call again, when you get the Rosetta Stone of the system down, WRITE IT DOWN! Example: "Wait 5 seconds for the 'Por hablo Espaniol...' crap, mash 1, mash 0, 0 again, then 4".)
One of our vehicles has had a crack in the windshield for a couple of years, but this spring, once the sun got high, it decided to grow**. We noticed it go a few inches each time in about 3 steps already, so that's it. Luckily insurance covers this one, as this vehicle has got the comprehensive coverage.
Good deal - I'll get something out of all those years of premiums and no claims. (I should be thankful anyway.) Bing.com showed a number of places to get this done. One was near a friend's place, where he could pick me up to hang out while I waited. However, the one nearest him had an 888 number shown vs. local numbers for the others. Seeing as I wasn't shopping based on cost this time, that phone number alone made my decision for me.
I know I've written this stuff before, but there's times when a phone tree does help the business get one routed to the right person or makes you do the work of entering information, saving employees some time, as opposed to the customer! Maybe that brings prices down, I dunno always. However, when calling the auto parts store for a price or availability, ordering a pizza, or calling the hair cut place to see when they're open****, I don't want to give my life story. Just get it over with, and answer the damn phone like a human being! It's not like we're gonna do it fully automated anyway, so you waste 30 seconds to a minute (this is for small business, not even Big-Biz) running me around, and then "hello".
Publishing that 888 number rather than a local number cost the auto glass business $550 this morning.***** Nice going, guys! The other place had a girl that answered right away. I checked whether they could get the windshield for my year/make/model, they could, and so we simply did business.
Small business owners or potential small business owners: Please keep this in mind. Someone has to answer the phone anyway. Think about skipping that phone system. We know you're not a huge place with 100 "associates" who are "busy serving other customers and will be with you shortly, so in the meantime, say your, I dunno, favorite Major League Baseball team..." If that's what the idea is, you're not fooling us all. Just get someone to answer the phone WHEN THE CUSTOMER CALLS, and, while you're at it, think about not telling her to reel off a 15 second greeting either.
Hey, I've been there, long ago. Yes, depending on the business, you may get from 5% to 50% of the callers actually doing business. (I was on the low end of this.) Still, they are more likely to do business when they don't get pissed at your computer voices and hang up, or not call up in the first place. Just sayin'....
* I would expect that our regular readers understand that our offering of Peak Stupidity alerts was also done in pure facetiousness.
** Be really careful about spraying washer fluid, or water in general on the windshield when it's been out in the sun with any existing crack in it, especially if you have a dark-colored dash. There are two factors that work in concert: 1) The top of the dash radiates to the inside of the glass, heating it way up. This gives the inside of the glass a tendency to expand against the constraint of the outside, which is cooler and even cooler when sprayed with water. 2) There is a chemical effect from the bi-polar*** water molecules (as I read about in a paper long ago) that increases crack growth in glass.
You've got the big thermal tensile stress on the outside of the glass from the differential temperature, then the water exacerbates it due to both factors.
*** Yes, those crazy-ass water molecules!
**** If you're closed, why not go to voice mail, with the hours? If you're not, well, don't waste my time.
***** Yes, they billed the insurance company that much. I asked, and it would have been only about half that if it were me, paying cash.
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Sweet Seasons - Carole King
Posted On: Saturday - May 15th 2021 8:20PM MST
In Topics: Music
There's plenty to write about, but it was too much of a nice day to get a post or two going (and had an on-line respectful conversation with Ron Unz - amazingly!).
We've got two book reviews still waiting to be written, that national budget business, another post about Minneagadishu, and maybe a nice Libertarian post about health care I've been meaning to write. Oh, and don't forget funny cat videos... no, we're not that desperate yet.
In the meantime, to sign off for the blog week, Peak Stupidity gives you a 50 year-old song. No kidding, it's been that long. From her Music album early in her career, here is my favorite Carole King song, called Sweet Seasons. (The video doesn't mean much to me, so this is just for the audio.)
Carole King – Vocals, piano
Curtis Amy – Tenor saxophone
Oscar Brashear – Flugelhorn
Bobbye Hall – Bongos, congas
Danny Kortchmar – Electric guitar
Charles Larkey – Bass guitar
Joel O'Brien – Drums
Ralph Schuckett – Hammond organ
The song was written by Miss King and Toni Stern.
More stupidity is coming Monday. Thank you all for reading!
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