Posted On: Wednesday - April 24th 2024 6:47AM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Artificial Stupidity
The post is not about a Queen album.* Also, it may be a welcome change from our fixation on Lionel Shriver and her book. (I'll get back to that very shortly.)
I talked to a guy while traveling who had been to the recently held big "Masters" golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. This is maybe THE big one when it comes to American golf tournaments. It's also supposed to be one of the great golf courses, although I wouldn't know - I'm not a golf course architect. I've never even wanted to pretend to be a golf course architect.
The man and his family of golf enthusiasts had had tickets for that Saturday, the 2nd-to-last day of the 4. I was interested in how one watched in person - to me it's more of a thing (like football) that is easier to watch on TV, if you're going to watch at all, which I'm not. He told me about the particular location where they'd been situated, with a good view of the green of one hole (15th, maybe?) tees to a couple more, and so forth. I asked about pictures he may have taken.
No, sirreee. What was very surprising to me is that not only do the tournament officials not allow mobile phones to be on, with good reason, of course, but mobiles, cells, handies, whatever you call them, were not allowed there, period. You'd get kicked out if they found you having one on your person.
That seems kind of cool. I remarked to the guy that it might be very pleasant to be forcibly without these things and also around others who are forcibly without them for a day. That Saturday had been a nice day there, and even I, a non-golf-enthusiast - I'll be glad to drive the buggy around** - would have appreciated the beautiful greenery and the relative peace and quiet.
So, nice job, Augusta National. [Golf clap.]
* Too many old boomer music references? Sorry. The first is from The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's American Dream - great song! The second is in reference to Queen's Night at the Opera and Day at the Races.
** That was a bigger thing for me before I had a driver's license.
Comments (2)
Mania, by Lionel Shriver - book criticisms
Posted On: Tuesday - April 23rd 2024 7:24PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Books
(Continued from the basic book review.)
I wrote in our general review of LIonel Shriver's new novel Mania that the post would have been too long were all the criticisms I have to have been mixed in. (That sounds ominous!). This post has some relatively minor criticism of the book, but the next part will be a criticism of the opinions of the author. That I feel the need to write the 2nd part is a real shame, considering what I thought about her 5 days ago, before I picked up and read Mania. I will address the comprehensive comment by E.H. Hail under the basic review, as I write more tommorrow.
Here is some minor criticism involving this book. Firstly, I used the word "section" in the review to describe each alt-year (one of them a period) portion of the writing for a reason. Within each of those 8 - there's also something very interesting at the end - there are chapters, labeled as such, Chapter 1, etc. Well, that's downright confusing, as, while I was flipping to find my place I wondered "Wait, I've already read Chapter 2. Why is Chapter 1 over here?" Yes, I've heard of bookmarks! How about label them by alt-months within each alt-year to help with the chronology, or label them "Alt-'14 - Chapter 1", or at least at the top of each page, have the alt-year next to each chapter heading page?
OK, that's a really small thing, so let me get to the content of the story. That section [1972 - 2010] with all the background of character Pearson Converse's life has a long sad story of her being brought up by serious Jehovah's Witnesses. (I guess there aren't too many unserious ones.) This seems very important to the story, as it goes on for a while.
I had to go check the internet about "Lionel Shriver Jehovah's Witnesses" and came out with nothing in the author's background. However, she WAS brought up in a religious family, as her Dad was a Presbyterian minister who by one point become president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York. OK, fine, but I cannot see that childhood resembling the life of a JW child the way it was described in this novel. Has she written about anything like this in other novels or in her Spectator articles? Perhaps the author had friends who told her about this upbringing and the other side of the story of these folks that appear regularly on porches around the nation.**
The problem I have with this is that it never ended up having anything to do with the rest of the story. I can imagine it COULD have, in 2 ways: 1) IIRC, this writer did compare the Mental Parity movement to a religion, maybe later on in the story. However, I'd thought she would connect that up with the story of her JW upbringing from that 2nd section. 2) As Pearson Converse suffered more and more troubles when she stood out as the movement got worse, she mentioned that during trying times like this, one seems to go back to depend on one's family. - back to her roots. Yet, the character does nothing of the sort.
Was the only reason for this whole part of the story that Mrs. Shriver could use with the great joke about her having escaped her family to her friend's family, seeing this as "The Witness Protection Program"?
Next, I think any reviewer or reader would tell you that the author's 2 or 3 page section in which she (Pearson Converse, but really Lionel Shriver) tells thye story of the cancelling of all movies, TV shows, and books that have any mention or display of stupidity versus intelligence is too much. Yeah, I know she was having fun with this. She may have had too many good examples in her head, Gilligan v the Professor on Gilligan's Island, Maxwell Smart, etc, to pass up. She's old enough to go back a long ways with this too! Regarding Maxwell Smart for example, part of her point is to show that even arguments to the effect of "the idea is to show that even stupid people can do a great job" and such would not fly. This does relate to the modern "Tom Sawyer has the word "nigger", but he's one of the good guys. I was just pointing that out." Nope, too bad. Logic does not count with these kind of people. Though this went on too long, that was a good point to make.
I will add a another small point, this one involving the writer's possible cluelessness about real-world household finances. In the Peak Stupidity review of The Motion of the Body Through Space (para 13) it seems that the writer went one way with the free-spending yuppie couple. With both out of jobs due to (yes) Wokeness, she painted too rosy a picture of their financial state, though, granted, neither of us about their 401-k's and debt, because, well, they're characters in a novel!
In this book, at one point only Pearson, the college English Instructor, has lost her job. Wade still has his tree business. Pearson doesn't think they will be able to afford the mortgage on the house. Let me tell you, tree guys can make LOT of money. He can make a mortgage payment with one tree. The loss of the adjunct faculty money is, what, $30,000 a year before taxes? (Wade can take cash. I sure would!) The picture of their family finances is wrong in the other direction here.
Finally, the reader of Lionel Shriver's novels or previous Peak Stupidity reviews of the same will know one particular element of her writing that is a bit off. She likes to use conversation between the characters to tell the story much of the time. That's fine in and of itself. However, these conversations, as I've written before, simply don't sound realistic, as high-level grammar and fancy words are used by most people in the conversation. I know, the narrator character in her novels is usually in a literary field, which is Mrs. Shriver's keeping it real (writing on what she knows). No matter how highfalutin, the characters in her novels and the characters in her life may be though, sorry, people simply don't talk like that in conversation. They don't talk with words from an Atlantic article. This is something one can get used to.
OK, I'll get to what I really wanted to write tomorrow.
* ... that is, along with writing you back there too. I wanted to get going on this post first.
** I'm pretty sure I mentioned the following somewhere, but this is kind of funny, so ... We had (usually) the same 2 nice black ladies come to the house for a period of 4-5 years, I think. Because I'd not early on treated them nicely but firmly with "We're just not agonna join. Sorry.", we were on the hook, or maybe we had them on the hook, but definitely not intentionally.
1) This one time I heard the knock and saw the silhouette of the 2 hefty ladies through the window blinds. With the lighting the way it was, I knew they could peer in and see someone moving easily, so I had to do an Army Basic Training style belly crawl below the window line around to another room. "Don't move! We gotta stay here for 5 minutes!"
2) This time I saw the maroon-colored American sedan parked in front of our house from a block and a half away while riding my bicycle home. I diverted to a cross street and got out the (see?) handy mobile phone. I called the wife to tell her to stay put until I told her the coast was clear. I had to get to a vantage point far enough to where I could get out of view in case they left in my direction.
Perhaps I should have been more forthright ... ;-}
*****************************
[UPDATED 04/24:] Added paragraph on the pop culture cancellation section. I'll add one more very small thing when I get the book back in my hands.
*****************************
Comments (10)
Mania, by Lionel Shriver
Posted On: Monday - April 22nd 2024 10:37AM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Books Totalitarianism
In the interest of laziness, I'll leave it to the reader to go to either this post or our Books topic key to find links to Peak Stupidity writing/reviews on other works of Mrs* Shriver.
This always happens! I can't do this review in one post. However, as opposed to writing a 6-part review along the sequence of the book as with The Mandibles, this post will be a basic review without the major criticisms. I'll leave those for the 2nd post. Then, I'll get to the political stuff. Oh, boy ...
The story in the dystopic novel Mania is of American and White-Western society being in the grips of a hard-core flavor of Wokeness** and the end results thereof. While one might associate Wokeness with race/ethnicity, sex roles, genderbending stupidity, and whatever else they can come up with, the story in Mania is of one particular flavor, intelligence. "Mental parity", per the novel, is a form of Wokeness in which the whole concepts of stupidity and its converse, intelligence, are anathema to polite society, in order that nobody be offended. As I'll get to in the criticisms, this is not really a separate flavor of Wokeness from what we have now. It's well connected to the racial flavor, so the concept, rather than being read as an absurdity, is something we all see presently to a degree. Whether the author meant to use the seemingly ridiculous MP (Mental Parity) as a "dog whistle" - haha, a term she destroyed early in the book - for race/ethnicity wokeness or just a stand-alone extension of what she sees around her is a question I think I know the answer to. (Later.)
Instead of a near-future dystopia, as in The Mandibles***, Mania is mostly alt-recent-history with just 4 years of the near-future. I don't know why it was necessary to do it this way, but my guess is that Mrs. Shriver wanted to show that this style Wokeness has been building since 2011, per her story, or per her own noticing, and this way the ending could end up being pretty much NOW.
The first section, [Alt-2011****], has an introduction to all the main characters. The narrator doesn't have a funny foreign name this time, for a change, just a funny American name: Pearson Converse. She (yes, again) is a mother of 3 kids, Darwin, Zanzibar, and Lucy. Wade is her long-term live-in "partner", although they had their youngest, Lucy, together, they'd never gotten married.
In this beginning, the Woke program is already well-developed. The story starts with the bright son Darwin having gotten in trouble in school for his use of language. Words like "stupid" (yeah, this site would be in TROUBLE), "dumb", and also the converse, "bright", etc. are offensive by this point. The quickly growing mental parity movement, the "last great civil rights fight", says that people should be treated equally regardless of their intelligence.
I can see that Mrs. Shriver could have picked up on the idea from seeing the recent dropping of SAT/ACT requirements and other standards for university admissions recently. (Some have been reinstated.) It's almost as if Lionel Shriver has been reading Steve Sailer. Here too, regarding the "new rules", as expounded by Emory on page 8:
Don't ever mention, or fish for, IQ, obviously, but also SAT and ACT scores or grade point averages. You're even meant to keep your trap shut about how well you did on newspaper quizzes on the major stories of the week. And forget asking about a performance on Jeopardy!Haha! That's quite uncanny, but it must be canny because, as I'll get into, I'm starting to think that Mrs. Shriver wouldn't get caught dead reading Steve Sailer.
In the '11 section, it's still OK for this family and (some) friends to make fun of and decry the stupidity of this MP Wokeness at home. However, they've already realized that careers and other prospects can be ruined if one isn't extremely careful to go along with it in public.
I'm going to skip most of the narrator's, Pearson Converse's, background as described in the (note, NOT "alt") section [1972 - 2010], because it seems to me unrelated to the whole rest of the story with the exception of one point. I'll get to that also in the next post.
I will mention here the important background, which includes Pearson's story of her 2 older kids, Darwin (boy) and Zanzibar (girl) having been conceived by sperm donations.***** Both were from a high IQ Japanese man. This, with Lucy's normal procreation from Wade and Pearson, serves the story of the book very well. Lucy, being not all that bright, is extolled for this - well, this gets worse - and the very bright older kids have their bright prospects dashed.
Moving along finally, in the sections that cover Alt-'12, Alt-'13, Alt-'14, Alt-'15, Alt-'16 and the retrospective Alt-'23, this Wokeness program builds, affecting all of American society, as the story covers the plight of our narrator, the 3 children, Wade, and Emory. I think Communist style programs like that CAN move very quickly, as described here. In the novel the PM movement goes from watching what one says and the cancelling of all kinds of books, movies, and TV shows due to the antics of anyone stupid or bright, or who can be seen as such, to more sinister things like the removal of children from the home for offensive speech. Anyone who is not completely down is suspect. This sounds eerily familiar...
In this novel and in reality, most people try to get along in life without trying to fight the movement, whether true believers or not, and it's often hard to tell. The latter point is a major part of this story, involving the bright, beautiful, and composed, NPR/CNN reporter Emory. Careers are ruined, and careers thrive, depending on whether one has the innate desire to fight the movement or to go along like a Red Guard.
I suppose a literary person would be most concerned about the speech/writing aspects of the new movement that prevent discrimination ANYWHERE based on intelligence. (An employer will get sued otherwise.) However, this movement includes, of course, the hiring of, say, engineers and doctors, the latter being another sad part of this story. All of this is a slightly different explanation for the crisis of competency in our reality today that Peak Stupidity has written about many times.****** As one would expect, a country under a Communistic mindset like this would not last very long economically. The high-level domestic and foreign political aspect of this is something that the author is simply not very good at, as this was NOT writing of what she knows.
The big struggle in Mania is also within Pearson Converse's mind, as she tries to understand the part of her personality that makes her resist the madness to the detriment of her job and family. Don't get me wrong - I'm with her. I also see, as the character does, that small acts of resistance often accomplish nothing and just get us into bigger and bigger trouble. That doesn't stop us.
Should our goal be just to hold on until we get to the other side? Who will determine what the other side looks like? Will our souls be in one piece when we get there? These are questions generally posed in this novel.
Now, as to the readability of this book and such, I'll just write a little bit here with the rest in the next post. It's a fairly short book - 4-8 hours should do you, unless you are "the S-word". With the author being a woman, just as with The Mandibles being a prepper novel with only the female view - nothing on rigging up electrical generation, etc. - this one has way, way too much of that feeeelings, deep womanly conversations stuff that is a big part of the story. It was too much for me. I hadn't come up against this while reading the other 3 Lionel Shriver books I've read.
Still, there are good plot twists even as the mental parity Wokeness goes inexorably in one direction... well, I won't spoil the story for you here. Mania is worth reading, especially for those few non-Peak-Stupidity-reading folks who really don't know what we're in for with these Communist movements. They don't just stop when they've reached some advertised "goal". Societal destruction is the end goal. This is usually unadvertised.
In the next post on this book, my criticisms will go from quibbles to important failings. The latter will show that I am no longer the Lionel Shriver fan I was, I'm really sorry to have to say.
* For the record again, Mrs. Shriver's first name Lionel does not indicate that she has transitioned, unless one means a transition from Brooklyn, NY lefty to Brooklyn, NY lefty who at least sees the light in some places. She was Margaret Shriver until 15 y/o or so, when, considering herself a tomboy, she decided she wanted to be named Lionel. I don't know if this had anything to do with n-gauge train sets or not.
** Peak Stupidity describes Wokeness as Political Correctness on steroids with the long arm of the law behind it.
*** What I really liked in that one was that the financial stupidity story showed a century-metered rhyming of history. The full title is The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. The actions of the US Gov't were something of a repeat of the Roosevelt Great Depression 1.0 era, but Americans were no longer the self-sufficient, hardy, and united people they were a century back. Things went much farther than last time.
**** I'll continue saying this until HALF the century is over, I guess, but we're one quarter way into this one. Can we drop the "20" now, dammit?
***** I also mention this to note that, coincidentally, a week before I read this book, I thought of writing a post on this same topic of sperm donations and nature v nurture. It'll be here eventually.
****** See Hotel Haiti - on Competence - - Harvesting the fruits of a half-century of Affirmative Action - Part 5 - - Demographics to DIE
Comments (7)
John Cougar Menstrualcramp?
Posted On: Saturday - April 20th 2024 8:47PM MST
In Topics: Music Humor
A Peak Stupidity favorite rock musician, John Cougar (as I knew him in the day) has been on a viral video due to his having gotten mad at some of the audience at a recent show in Toledo, Ohio. You can see the one, but I hate to leave it here with someone else's commentary, as I think I won't agree with most.
Mr. Mellencamp had a tantrum of sorts when a guy in the audience yelled out to him, in nicer words, to "shut up and sing". I can understand that attitude. I don't need to hear about politics I don't particularly like*, rather than what I came for, the music.
However, contrary to the assumptions inherent in articles I've read about this, he did not make a political rant that day. It was one of his stories he likes to tell between songs. Back in the late 1980s, I saw a great show by John Cougar, already Mellencaomp, and he told us of his musical beginnings for a few minutes. I still remember his telling us how he tried to impress his girlfriend by playing a cassette tape of his new song on the car player as they sat in the parking lot. Afterwards, she was all "well, yeah, it's OK, I guess ..." (I guess you had to hear it the way he told it.) Then he went back to his great music.
Here's a much more recent example from a San Francisco show:
That's part of the show. Mr. Mellencamp's reaction and tantrum in Toledo was likely due to his being a little crotchety with a few aches and pains. Also, he doesn't need to take any shit, or I sure hope so. I hope he's playing for the love of it and doesn't need the money.
He's no young rebel who jumps around on the stage and fights authority in the videos. Everyone get old. Maybe he didn't need the cusswords, but I'd have enjoyed his fun words of wisdom in the San Fran show.
The albums that I know well from Mr. Cougar Mellencamp are American Fool, Uh Huh, and Scarecrow This song is from the first one, from 1982. It's Close Enough for Rock & Roll. Yeah, 42 years makes a difference, in all of us.
John Cougar Mellencamp is a lefty, as one might expect. However, I apologize to him here for having watched the viral clip and having considered writing a quite different post. OTOH, a commenter on youtube came up with this post's title, and I could not resist!
Next week, we'll try to get the Climate Calamity™ (with a review of a whole documentary) in, along with the review of Lionel Shriver's book. (I'm just finishing the latter now.) There'll be plenty more than that though. There has been an unceasing amount of stupidity coming to us, so, enjoy. Thank you all so much for reading and writing in.
* Back in the 1980s and for quite a while afterwards, this Hoosier musician was concerned about the loss of family farms in the midwest, with a great song about this, Scarecrow, title song to that album. Now that support of Americans and America is something you don't see too much. I appreciated his efforts at the time.
Comments (10)
Circular firing squad Exhibit B
Posted On: Friday - April 19th 2024 11:38AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Race/Genetics Socialism/Communism
Peak Stupidity noted another example (call that one Exhibit A, as this could go on a while) of this problem with the (Steve Sailer-coined) Coalition of the Fringes 2 posts ago. The weakness in this Coalition built only upon hatred of the White Man in America shows up especially under Socialist circumstances... more so when there aren't too many White men around either.
That's my usual source*, and the article is here. Here are the monetary figures the City Brothers reckon they need to take care of the Chicagoland
On Monday, the Budget and Government Operations Committee of the Chicago City Council voted 20-8 to send Mayor Brandon Johnson’s request for $70 million in additional City funding to care for illegals to the full Council.The debate on this money got heated because ... GDLOS!**:
CBS News reports that the request is part of a spending plan announced by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in February. The State of Illinois and Cook County pledged a combined $250 million to help fund the crisis, which is anticipated to reach at least $321 million for shelter and services this calendar year.
During the heated debate, Ald. Chris Taliaferro of the 29th Ward said, “We are not taking care of our own. We have all but forgotten the residents on the West Side and South Side.”The South Side, former home of one Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, has long been known to have many black people, many who need a hand-
Will the long-term black residents spend their money more wisely than those Venezuelan criminals newcomers? Here's what they need those hundreds of millions from the (largely White, I assume) taxpayers for:
9th Ward Ald. Anthony Beale added, “We don’t have money for after-school programs. We don’t have money to help our kids get off the street. Yet, we would just blow money left and right. That’s a fundamental problem.”More basketball courts = fewer shootings. Note that Chinatowns would be violent ghettos had the basketball courts not been built for the little ones, so they could sit on the benches in the sunshine and study for their SATS.
“And when we talk about this money, and as important as our children are to us, a place like Ogden Park, the field house is to the Inglewood community, where shootings take place, where every economic indicator, health indicator, everything, everybody should be jumping to that to protect our children and give us the things we need,” said 17th Ward Ald. David Moore.
I'll just sit on the porch swing reading circular firing squad stories like this and eat my popcorn. I took the SATs long ago, and I don't care for basketball.
* My problem with getting posts off news from The Gateway Pundit is that there are so many posts added daily, and they are very current. The stupidity flows quickly these days. I end wanting to write 2 or more a day from there. It may be time to get back to some of the less timely, but possibly more interesting stuff.
I will be ready to write that review of Lionel Shriver's new book by tomorrow, time permitting, and then I want to write about Steve Sailer's latest post on Jews and Progressivism. The latter will take some time...
** Gimme Dat, cuz Legacy O' Slavery!
Comments (4)
Steve Sailer on future elections
Posted On: Thursday - April 18th 2024 7:24PM MST
In Topics: Commies Pundits Global Financial Stupidity
I wanted to make sure and write the previous post first, as it was coming anyway, and I didn't want readers to think Peak Stupidity is down on Steve Sailer in general.
I got to 20:45 in his interview by Peter Brimelow, as Mr. Sailer was giving an overview of the support of Trump and Trump's flaws. He then talks about future elections (after '24) and "...hopefully there's new generations out there that can kind of square the circle for Republicans ..."
I'm sorry, but I don't know how to address that kind of talk without telling someone to "open your eyes, man!". This talk about getting improved GOP candidates together is all very Pat Buchanan-esque, the Pat Buchanan of the 2020s, stuck in the political mindset of the 1980s. This is not (American political) business as usual. It's very late. We're not dealing with Tip O'Neils and Jimmy Carters. The US Gov't is filled with American Communists bent on destruction.
There are Political Prisoners rotting in FS dungeons, the election process is Banana Republican, and the treasonous Motherland Security Chief has enabled an an invasion of 10-15 million foreigners in the last 3 years. It's really, really late in the game.
I will hate to actually see it when it comes, but the demise of the US Dollar ("It's the economy, stupid.") at the end of all the Financial Stupidiy may cause a disruption that forestalls the complete transition of America to a Totalitarian Communist Police State.... or, we'll go straight to it even quicker, I dunno ... Future elections?!
OK, fine. I'm calm and collected now, though not as much as Steve Sailer is. I'll watch the rest of the interview now and Ann Coulter/Peter Theil later or tomorrow.
PS: No offense intended with "It's the economy, stupid." That political expression comes from over 30 years back with Bill Clinton. I would like to know if Peter Brimelow, formerly a Finance writer and pundit, sees what's coming a little better. He does, at least, see whom the enemy are.
Comments (10)
Steve Sailer's concepts in action
Posted On: Thursday - April 18th 2024 6:37PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Pundits Race/Genetics World Political Stupidity
I'm over here watching a video interview of Steve Sailer by VDare's Chief Peter Brimelow.* Between my reading of (about 1/3 of the articles so far**) Mr. Sailer's book Noticing and this interview I can see all of the many great concepts that Mr. Sailer has either originated or brought to the minds of Conservatives.
A couple of them are the Coalition of the Fringes and the Circular Firing Squad that can form from the former. I won't define these, as I think most Peak Stupidity readers know this illustrious pundit. (If not, look here and here, respectively - there's overlap, of course.)
Lately, it's the latter concept that has been coming to mind, as I've been seeing the protests by pro-Palestinian/pro-Gaza people, blocking roads to airports, getting in the faces of politicians, etc. Peak Stupidity does not take the side of either these would-be=ragheads or the leftist Jews (too large a share, unfortunately) who may be SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I TELLS YA! that recently their (other) homeland has not been completely supported by the US Feral Gov't and the Establishment.
What is going on?! Well, it's been arguably a century that you've had these stupid worries about a near monolithic White American population somehow being threatening to you and the other stupidity about some old plaque on a statue meaning America takes in all the refuse of the world. Here we are now. You all have pushed hard for this. You've had the Establishment on your side for 60 years to enable this project. Ooops, some of the folks you imported don't like you at all.
That Coalition of the Fringes that is supposed to include everyone but traditional American White people has a rift you can drive a Mack Truck through. (Well, except when the road is blocked.) I'm not sure how you thought this would hold together. This portion of the Coalition hates your guts.
This portion that hates your guts has got some political power now. Heckuva Job, ADLey!
PS: Heh! One of the first Steve Sailer posts I'd read, on The Unz Review, at least, had that sarcastic "Heckuva job, Brownie!" line which I see he's used a bunch of times. Mr. Sailer being the big movie buff, I thought for sure this line was from a Clint Eastwood Western movie. Guess not ...
* I've got Ann Coulter and Peter Theil lined up too, on Dieter's Twitter. Yes, "Dieter's Twitter" would indeed be a great name for a band, some sort of band...
** I'm about 1/2 way through Lionel Shriver's Mania after 3 hours or so, so that review will come first.
Comments (6)
How dare you, Hunter?!!
Posted On: Wednesday - April 17th 2024 8:16PM MST
In Topics: Humor Environmental Stupidity Zhou Bai Dien
Presented without comment:
Comments (2)
The old days of light-hearted politics
Posted On: Wednesday - April 17th 2024 7:57AM MST
In Topics: Elections '16 - '24 Curmudgeonry Americans US Feral Government
I was thinking of this post a year and a half ago (that's when these pictures are dated), but it can now be an addendum to our recent post Trump v Bai Dien and 2020s v 1980s.
It hasn't been all that long. As with the general belief by most Americans that Federal elections were not going to change the whole country around or anything, I don't think it's been that long there since there wasn't nearly the hatred between one side and the other that there exists now. The ctrl-left has generally been more hateful than the right, but there was still room for fun not so long ago.
America's inexorable slide toward ruin was apparent to me just about 30 years back. However, it wasn't very immediate, so one could be strongly against a Clinton, Bush, even an Øb☭ma but still make light-hearted fun.
I remember these skits on Saturday Night Live. Maybe it's just my age at the time, but I didn't see this stuff as being written and performed out of hatred. The entertainment industry has been biased left as far back as I can remember, but they used to make fun of everyone they could do a good job on. You had the 3 Presidential candidates back in Summer '92, Bill, George, and Ross. I can remember the particular mannerism by which each was made fun of.
Going forward 12 years, I can remember a friend and I enjoying a cartoon-style video of Kerry v Bush, something about JibJab - that was the series or the artist, I don't know, but we could still laugh at the whole thing.
Only a few years ago, I still used this one:
It's different now. When the other side is blatantly cheating, taking a thousand Political Prisoners, working very obviously completely outside the law to persecute the other guy, there's no demand for that comedy anymore. Sure, we ridicule Dementia Joe, JoeTato, what have you, but that's just because ridicule is one of the only weapons the right has left.*
* Or so people imagine. Federalism, a national divorce, or a House of Representin' with 200 MTG's, well, that's different. It's extremely late though ...
No comments - Click here to start thread
MTG calls out Mayorkas as the treasonous asshole he is
Posted On: Tuesday - April 16th 2024 9:07PM MST
In Topics: Commies Immigration Stupidity US Feral Government
I would have called him a Communist too. Motherland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is right there implementing the plan for final destruction of this nation. He knows what he's doing and seems fairly smug and nonchalant about it.
No, Marjorie Taylor Greene alone will probably not get the Senate to even get started trying this man, as the impeachment vote by the House requires, much less to convict the Commmie. Still, this kind of thing warms my heart. Is MTG the only member of Congress that hasn't been "gotten to" yet? Otherwise, you'd think you'd see more of this. Americans are extremely pissed. A good rep should represent that. MTG most assuredly does here.
(She's so mad at this fucker that she got flustered even and confused the point on who should have been deported at 02:43. We all got the point though.)
PS: Though Forbes might have intended this clip, titled SHOCK MOMENT: Marjorie Taylor Greene Outright Confronts Mayorkas About Laken Riley In Furious Tirade, to be unfavorable toward her - I can't really tell - the comments are pretty patriotic, with some standard stupidity interspersed, of course.
Comments (6)
IRS Deadline Looms: Women and Minorities Filing Separately Hardest Hit!
Posted On: Tuesday - April 16th 2024 6:47PM MST
In Topics: Humor US Feral Government Race/Genetics Taxes
Alternate headline: Tempers flare and fight breaks out, as Blacks! in Houston struggle to file income tax on time. Fortuitously, shots did not ring out.
Note one thing. In the title here I didn't write pay, just file.
From The Gateway Pundit a couple of days ago, we read CHAOS: Houston IRS Office Closes Early Due to Fighting .
There is nothing like waiting until the last minute to file taxes.Don't I know it, brother! I'm gonna start on the forms as soon as I finish this post.*
I had no idea that black people had this much civic virtue. I mean, I'm already a couple of days late and don't particularly give a rat's ass. Those people in Houston, man, they got to get those 1040s in by nightfall. Otherwise, you in trouble wid da man!
The IRS office in Houston, Texas closed early on Saturday because a fight broke out in front of the building. Numerous people were lined up to get help with their taxes.Such dedication!
Tempers were out of control as impatient taxpayers were waiting for assistance. The deadline to file is Monday, April 15th.
“Unfortunately, they did everything as a walk-in, no appointments and that’s really what caused all these problems,” ‘said Henry Castro, another visitor at the IRS center,'” Fox 26 reported.Regarding this last bit, I really do sympathize with that crowd. We had to do some passport business at the big post office, and it was nearly the same story. Appointments that COULD be made in this case might be upheld, but you'd still wait. In the meantime instead of walk-ins being able to sign a sheet when they came, the lady came out later and tried to get the 6 (she relented and brought it up to 10) first people in the office signed up for the day. Yeah, well, that wasn't so clear. The whole thing was extremely third-worldly, which I made known verbally. Coincidentally, I'm sure, there were lots of 3rd-world people there that day, generally the ones behind the counter, working for the Feral Government. For a short while my temper did flare, but had the situation gotten worse, I would have just walked out before those shots might have decided to ring out.
Anyway, from the original local FOX news story:
Hundreds of people were lined up at the IRS building hoping to get help with their taxes. Instead, a field assistant from the IRS said they had to shut down early because of a riot that broke out.Now, we see what this is really about. "Identity Verification"? That smacks of the illegal immigration racket. From the IRS on that:
Tempers flared outside the Internal Revenue Service’s building as hundreds of people trying to file their taxes and get identity verification were turned away.
The IRS proactively identifies and stops the processing of potential identity theft returns. You may receive a notice or letter asking you to verify your identity and tax return information with the IRS. This helps prevent an identity thief from getting your refund.Now, some may be on the ID-theft victim side here, and many may not. I also can guess that many of these last-minute filers had money coming back to them. They usually do that first time they can in January - a friend of mine worked a few seasons at H&R Block and told me how much the illegal aliens cheated with made-up or Latin-America-residing dependents for nice supplemental "socialize the losses" income. Perhaps these people just got around to it and want to make sure they've got a check coming.
So, there was CHAOS among the tax filers in Houston there, but I can't say these people were generally actual tax payers. I doubt it.
White people CHAOS is different. They may just crash Piper Dakotas into IRS office buildings. The Robert Stack-attack in '10 was also in Texas, but up in Austin. The very last paragraph of that wiki page is interesting:
The Internal Revenue Service formally designates certain individuals as potentially dangerous taxpayers (PDTs). In response to an inquiry after the attack, an IRS spokesperson declined to state whether Stack had been designated as a PDT.What do you do about a PDT, get a robot to open his forms? All this is mostly done on-line though. How about those people in Houston the other day? Potentially Destructive Taxeaters?
* Seriously, that's the case. It's not that hard but painful nonetheless. I could not cajole my son into doing it, as I did last year - see Kids Eating Goldfish and Doing Taxes and our follow-up, Kids Getting Audited and Going to Camp.
No comments - Click here to start thread
Lew Rockwell and the 2 Smiths
Posted On: Monday - April 15th 2024 7:06AM MST
In Topics: Internets Websites Pundits Liberty/Libertarianism
Due to my loss of entertainment after, well, trying hard, at least, to stay off The Unz Review site, I have gone back to a few old haunts. I can say that my time on the political internet started right at a quarter century ago. Wow! I remember where I was that year, which helped me recall some of the various sites I would peruse in that bygone era.
I'd thought I'd gone to LewRockwell, named after Libertarian site-owner pundit/author Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., way back. Sure enough, from the "About" page, I see that the site started right then. (In that early stage of the net, I could see the writers even having paid HIM, being so glad to be someone ON THE INTERNET!) The about page says:
The daily news and opinion site LewRockwell.com was founded in 1999 by anarcho-capitalists Lew Rockwell [send him mail] and Burt Blumert to help carry on the anti-war, anti-state, pro-market work of Murray N. Rothbard. Among the hundreds of LRC writers over the years, some of the most prominent are:I won't paste in the list, but a lot of them bring back memories from over 20 years back.
Reading some of these people a quarter century later makes me think that either I've gotten smarter since then or some of them have gotten dumber, no, wait, probably have not ever been quite as smart as I'd thought they were then. There are a few good writers whose work still rings true, but most are disappointing.
LewRockwell.com has a prepper bent. That makes sense for a site full of economic pundits who have been seeing the encroaching ruin for so long. One prepper lady is pretty simplistic, so no more reading from her. Then, lo and behold, the same 2 "Smiths" as I remember from way back still write on this site. One would be Charles Hugh Smith, with his articles from his Of Two Minds blog. I always liked the guy, but then, the first post I read of his in many years, on gold and the dollar, did not seem particularly right to me.
There's also still one Brandon Smith, about whom I have a funny story from that long-ago era. On his own site, now defunct*, this Mr. Smith had some article that included a short bit about the War Between the States. This one mentioned South Carolina "marching on Fort Sumter". Uh... no... I was fairly polite with my correction, as unsnarky as I could be, noting that it would have been difficult for these soldiers to march across 2 miles of the Atlantic Ocean (Charleston Harbor) to the fort. I explained that I liked the article and did not correct him (solely) to be snarky, but that readers may discount his good points due to this error.
I'd want to be corrected on something like this, as embarrassing as it would be. A thanks would be due to the commenter, one would think. That wasn't the case, as this Brandon got mad and gave me a hard time about my correctional comment. I'm glad we weren't on twitter! I did not relent, but those were my last comments and my last reading of Brandon Smith's writing.
I can't forget this, apparently, as it came back to me as soon as I saw the name still there on Lew Rockwell - it's such a good example of how not to treat a "customer". However, it's time to forgive after 20-25 years. He might have something well worth reading in his economics-oriented posts.
Such was my experience on the internets in days past ...
* LewRockwell links to Brandon Smith's own site Alt-Market, but this one says it started up in '11. It's not the old one in this story.
Comments (17)
Noticing, the book: Overview
Posted On: Saturday - April 13th 2024 7:00PM MST
In Topics: Pundits Books
Peak Stupidity has been looking forward to this new book by Conservative pundit and Noticer Extraordinaire Steve Sailer. As we noted at the bottom of this post regarding another favorite writer of ours, the 3 copies of Noticing arrived.
This post's title says "OVERview". An actual REview will be coming, but it might be a while. I can imagine reading this book in 6 ± 2 hours straight, but I want to savor it. I also like the idea that I'll be reading it while traveling some soon, so others may just "notice" the book. "Oh, yeah, it's the book by Steve Sailer, you know." "Steve Sailer?" "Well, yeahhh.", as if everyone should know him. Maybe people do. "Oh, he's the guy who just wrote a couple of posts about O.J. Simpson recently." "O.J. who? I think it's Bart or Homer you mean."
Anyway, I'll lay out the "chapters" here. The quotes there are to explain and avoid possible confusion - these chapters are not the smallest sections. Besides some introduction and afterwords, there are 14 sections called chapters. Each is on one of Mr. Sailer's favorite, or maybe more like one of his most important, areas of expertise, with 3 to 6 of his articles from the past (this is an anthology) in each. (The average is 4.2 articles per chapter.)
There's a foreword that I think would have been better called "Background" or "My Background". This is a quick occupational, political and literary background of Mr. Sailer. I just finished it, and it's pretty interesting - I hadn't known the half of it before. However, a foreword ought to be a few pages that explain his motivation for writing this anthology and maybe relate the chapters to each other in some way. Only the the last page and a quarter has this, but, if you've got an afterword, you've got to have a foreword, I suppose. That last bit starts with:
In contrast to the new inegalitarianism, I believe in the equality of the moral worth of all individual humans to be the subject of empirical analysis. In my ethical system, everybody counts and thus everybody is fit to be counted.A few of his very good examples follow, then:
That's not a popular attitude, to say the least.
When it comes to data analysis the contemporary rules are also plain to see. You are encouraged to notice some disparities but not others.
But it's hard to think up these kind of potentially constructive approaches under the current mindset in which the only permissible response to pattern recognition is to blame the pre-defined Bad Guys: straight white men.Yes, I do! However, we do all need to keep in mind that the people making these rules are well aware of what they are doing and aim to keep the rules they way thay are. They hate us, the "Bad Guys", and want us dead. That's how Communists operate.
Not surprisingly, American intellectual culture has tended to get dumber and duller under the reigning rules.
I hope you find my anthology a refreshing contrast.
Anyway, the 59 articles come from various publications, but I'd say more than half of them were published in TakiMag. I didn't realize he'd been on there for that long - from just skimming through, it seems like it's been 12 years or so. Other articles are taken from VDare directly, and then the older ones come from National Review (a few especially well-written ones), The American Conservative, and a couple of other publications. Those were from the time before Steve Sailer was unPersoned. The Unz Review is not one of the sources cited at the beginning of any articles, though I swear I saw the site mentioned within one of them when I skimmed through earlier. No UR commenters are mentioned - sorry, guys.
I see a slight chronological progression here (not necessarily with the individual articles), but otherwise not a real pattern. That's OK. Mr. Sailer says that many of his general topics are orthogonal to each other. (How many dimensions can he think in?) Anyway, here you go. The quick notes are mine:
Chapter One: Citizenism (4 articles)
Chapter Two: Invade the World, Invite the World (6 articles)
Chapter Three: The Sailer Strategy (3 articles)
Chapter Four: Villains and Heroes (5 articles) Note: Heroes and Villains is a Beach Boys song that Mr. Sailer must know and like. I guess he didn't want to use it directy.
Chapter Five: Human Biodiversity (4 articles) Note: This is not a Sailer-coined term. I just learned that it was first the name of a book by one Jonathan Marks.
Chapter Six: The Level Playing Field (4 articles) Note: Within this chapter (3rd article, p. 183) you will find, YES, an article on Golf Course Architecture! I DID try to read it. No can do.*
Chapter Seven: The Half-Full Glass (5 articles)
Chapter Eight: The Blank Screen (3 articles) Note: These 3 are about Øb☭ma.
Chapter Nine: World War T (4 articles) Note: Great prediction, I gotta say.
Chapter Ten: Sailer's Law of Female Journalism (3 articles) Note: I wish he had a few more in here. His getting into the minds of women is very illuminating to me.
Chapter Eleven: Jews and Gentiles (4 articles) Note: It could be "Jews v Gentiles", in the Peak Stupidity style, but that would have quite a different meaning.
Chapter Twelve: The Coalition of the Fringes (5 articles)
Chapter Thirteen: Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings (4 articles)
Chapter Fourteen: The Great Awokening (5 articles)
Look for an actual review of some sort in the medium future. In the meantime, we're bogged down, what with more Climate Calamity™ stupidity, fallout from the 4 year-ago Kung Flu PanicFest with a new attempt being made, that Babylon Bee style true story, and more ... depending on just what kind of war will be ongoing come Monday ... Thanks for reading!
* It's perfectly fine with me that he's got his niche obscure topics. After all, I doubt that discussion of the erroneous physics calculations done within exercise machine computer chips are the most exciting thing for our readers either! (Ask me more! I mean, if it is...)
Comments (18)
We are all Miamians now
Posted On: Friday - April 12th 2024 5:30PM MST
In Topics: Commies Immigration Stupidity History Zhou Bai Dien
I looked back and saw that Peak Stupidity has never had a post specifically about the Mariel Boatlift of 44 years ago this Spring/Summer/Fall. We did mention this important early battle of the immigration invasion in the following posts: Said in Spanish - Allan Wall with some encouragement (Sept. of '19 with Trump in office), Governor DeSantis fights the Bai Dien/Mayorkas-run Invasion (May of '23), and Spies Like Us, starring Manuel Rocha.
The reader with no knowledge of this even may want to read a very short summary on this Britannica page, a slightly longer summary on History.com, or the much longer wiki page.
There's some background I won't get into (see the links) behind the reason this mass exodus of 125,000 Cubans* happened at that particular time. Instead of preventing Cubans from sailing to freedom, for those months Communist Fidel Castro decided to cast out political prisoners and ALL kinds of prisoners. Nobody will ever know how many of each type came. Americans had respected those who extricated themselves from the evils of Communism, but then the numbers from anywhere (even Vietnam, I would say) hadn't been high enough to be considered a serious immigration invasion yet. This Mariel Boatlift, enabled by President Jimmy Carter, was different, and it had a lasting effect. Oh, and, some of those "Mareilitos" were mental patients - "Why not?" would be a good point made by Castro. "They weren't sending their best", that's for sure.
Because south Florida is the nearest part of the US, as some had been doing for years, since the Commies took over Cuba in 1959, this mass of humanity consolidated in the big city of Miami. It changed the city greatly. As an slight aside, Steve Sailer did some great noticing about this. He rebutted those economists who claimed Miami had such an amazing boost to its economy due to IMMIGRATION! with the point that it was the whole drug war run by these criminal "newcomers", with the cocaine and later crack, that was the big "amazing" economic boost. (Americans before didn't do this sort of work so much. Colombians did too, though.) However, all the big money and violence was not a good thing for your average old-time Miaimian.
I find this period pretty interesting, especially the "transportation" aspects of drug importation, and a friend has urged me to watch Cocaine Cowboys, a documentary of the period.** The excesses were amazing, what with guys buying 10 Italian sports cars for their friends on a whim and, per my friend's viewing, the amount of cash money in Miami was greater than all that floating around the rest of the country!
Well, fine, but when we used to drive down to The Keys, we'd gas up in Ft. Pierce, Sebring, wherever, depending on the route, and avoid the whole Miami area like the plague. Avoiding the areas of the few lost battles of the invasion was doable 30-odd years back. One didn't have to live there, so, OK, you had south Florida and southern California, and maybe a few other places that were not-exactly-American within America.
Over the ensuing 3 decades, the high level and steady flow of illegal and legal immigrants, at 1 to 2 million yearly slowly created not-exactly-American zones all around the country. Even with the social and cultural destruction we could deal, I suppose, as it's gotten slowly worse. Dark Brandon and his handlers and minions, however, have been running a Mariel Boatlift on steroids for the last 3 years though. We're talking a factor of 100. They are not all just one nationality, but the 12 million (that'd be 100x) contain a sampling of criminality from all over the world!
With all those nationalities, I noticed something during this Bai Dien invasion surges. I'll see some story about a horrific murder by an illegal alien, one of the "newcomers", or a rape of a 7-year old girl by one of the same, etc. I'll just guess the nationality as Venezuelan, and, whaddya' know, YEP, that's what the article will say. EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! Of course, other nationalities, such as the Salvadorans with the hyper-violent MS-13 gang, get in their share too. In the long run, the current mass importation of Africans, legally*** and illegally, will result in more violence here. However, the Venezuelans seem to have taken first prize as of late.
There's a similarity with that particular contingent and the contingent of Cubans that came 44 years ago. These people have left countries that have long been Communist. In the case of the Mariel Boatlift, it was only one generation by that time. In the case of Venezuela, the former crown jewel of South America, it's been a generation and a half now.
Communism leaves a long, lasting mark. Ask me about the long-term effects on the Chinese people sometime. The countries have not been the kind of places where a straight-arrow Jose Blose can get ahead in life. Violence pays in places like this. These are the people turning America into one big Miami. We're all Miamians now. Thing is, if we don't like it, we can't just all move up north to Ocala anymore.
* Something I hadn't known till now is that some of those coming during that period were Haitians, 25,000 of them. Also from the wiki page on the boatlife, one can read that America, and the Presidents of the era, were still serious people regarding this issue. Of course, the Black! politicians were up to their usual tribal stupidity:
Before 1980, many Haitian immigrants arrived on American shores by boat. They were not granted legal protection because they were considered economic migrants, rather than political refugees, despite claims made by many Haitians that they were being persecuted by the Duvalier regime. U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford denied claims of asylum in the United States for Haitian migrants by boat. A backlash by the Congressional Black Caucus ensued, which claimed that the U.S. government was discriminating against Haitian immigrants.Yes, it sure was. So, what's your point?
** I want to watch it, but the 'brary doesn't have it, so I'm waiting for a free on-line version... Anyone, anyone, ... Smith? ;-}
*** Post to come. I'm getting so behind.
Comments (5)
O.J. Simpson - No more running...
Posted On: Thursday - April 11th 2024 8:58PM MST
In Topics: Music Bread and Circuses
Later on, O.J. Simpson didn't do much running for 9 years, instead cooling his heels in Nevada's Lovelock Correctional Facility for armed robbery. He got out in '17, but he just died, so, change is coming, no more running ... blind.
I can see how not everyone would like the voice of Kevin Cronin of 1970s -'80s rock band REO Speedwagon. (That's as with Geddy Lee of Rush.) This is not the best song off of this band's cleverly-named 1978 album You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish, as those would be Roll with the Changes and Time for Me to Fly, but it fits this post somewhat.*
* We already featured Jackson Brown's Running on Empty, but there's a Doobie Brother's song ...
Comments (10)