Archives for April 2025

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

I have read or skimmed three articles on the President’s first one hundred days. None of them mention anything he has done to help, be it people, the economy, our standing in the world, anything one would associate with governing. The overall comments say that it’s been chaotic, and unfocused. Unfocused in the sense that if he claims he doesn’t like something or that he wants to change it he has no ideas as to what he does want. Tariff negotiating teams from other countries have left without answers. When they get in the room and ask they are told to offer something. Like what? No answer. They leave.

The first article I read was from Rolling Stone listing one hundred things he’s done. I stopped at about forty. Too depressing. Another article talked about Musk losing power with his CEO approach to trying to run the U.S. government. The funniest line in the whole article (the only funny line) was that once cabinet secretaries were appointed they “wanted to run their agencies.” Weird. I know. The third article I read listed, by category, all the areas Trump was seeking revenge. It’s staggering. We aren’t talking a hit here or there. We are talking law firms, media outlets, … The list went on for over half a dozen areas.

I also read a fourth article about a group of scientists who were told they had 24 hours to wrap things up and leave. What did they do? They are the group that identified Hep C. If an outbreak is suspected they look at the samples sent to them and they can tell if it’s all from one source. They can then work with local officials to contain the source. In one case it was a clinic and a doctor not using blood vials properly. Now? All gone. Samples are coming in from other places and they are sitting waiting. But it gets worse. They have highly specialized equipment and they can’t just flip a switch to turn it off. They have refrigerators that keep samples a -20 and -80 degrees. They have two decades worth of evidence so they can pinpoint a possible source of infection. They have a database that is very fragile and needs to be maintained. If it or the samples go so goes two decades or more of data, that can’t be recovered. In this group if someone is leaving they workout a transition plan for someone to take over that person’s work. It takes one to two years to do so. They have tried to get access. It was granted for a week or two and extended again til late April. They are trying to maintain their equipment and shut things down properly. It takes time. The cost? Well, if there’s a Hep C outbreak it will go undetected and can become a major outbreak.

All this got me to wondering, “What has Trump done to help us?” Did I already say that? Yeah, I think I did, but it is worth repeating. Can anyone think of anything?

I’ve also read that the majority of our medicine comes from China. Take penicillin. The last lab here that made the stuff shutdown in 2004. No more ships are coming from China. No one is building new factories here because of the tariff threats. I mean, would you? He may change his mind tomorrow. It takes years of planning to build a factory.

The article on Musk says his power is waning and he didn’t save one or two trillion, but maybe 150 billion, but that is even questionable and much of that savings will be taken up with the cost of court cases and termination costs of contracts. 

Meanwhile, it has been reported that one of the DOGE employees happened to buy stock in companies that will benefit from the cuts. Huh? Who could have guessed?

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

I read an article that said you can tell when we are headed for a recession: skirts get longer, people buy the little liquor bottles, men stop buying underwear, and women stretch out hair and nail appointments.

Then I read that another way to tell we are in a recession is that the strippers get fewer tips, and smaller, or customers don’t show up at all. Brothels experience a slowdown. This economist say shows that there isn’t as much discretionary income. ie People dpn’t have money to spend.

Okay, those are predictors. I had heard that strippers had been saying their tips were smaller and less of them. But yesterday I read one of the big Las Vegas hotel chains is closing several of their hotels due to lack of guests. Maybe not, when I went back to confirm all I could find was six hotels were cutting concierge service. This due to “evolving customer preferences”. Oh, okay. Maybe. Several of the big hotels are closing, but that’s been in the plans for awhile. 

The Mirage is closing and will reopen in a year or two as a Hardrock Hotel. 

The Tropicana will close and  be imploded and replaced by a baseball stadium.

Another report says the Seattle port is a ghost town with the last ship from China coming in now and there aren’t anymore coming. Another ship lands on the east coast on May 10th and that’s it. So much winning.

Meanwhile, how are the tariff talks going? Well, from what I understand several tariff talk groups have come from other countries to talk and they have left with nothing because they could not figure out what the Trump team wanted, other than groveling.

We are seeing a rise in measels. A disease that had been listed as eradicated in 2000. There is also on the rise drug resistant gonoreha and tuberculosis. This and there bird flu which could break out at any moment and make Covid look like nothing.

Pete Hegseth has just announced he terminated the “Women, Peace, and Security” program (WPS). He said the military hated it and it was a woke Biden initiative. It was passed in Trump’s first term. It was championed by Ivanka and Rubio. Good work Pete!

Tuesday April 29, 2025

“I went to Harvard.”

“You went to Harvard?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last year.”

“Wait, you walked onto the campus at Harvard?”

“Yes.”

“You weren’t admitted to study there were you?”

“Heavens, no.”

And one can easily see the intellectual dishonesty of the above. One can say they “went to Harvard” if they walked onto the campus, but that in no way means they applied for addmission and were accepted.

One could even lie about walking on the campus of Harvard and say they went to Harvard. Who would know?

Now, let’s say your whole life has been lived like that. Fibbing, telling lies, boasting about things you claimed to have done but really hadn’t. What if it got so bad that you staged things to make it appear that you had done them? What if you had paid people to come to a rally and act like they supported you? 

What if you repeated those lies over and over again until you kind of believed them?

What if you got others to repeat those lies? What if you bullied and threatened people telling them that if they didn’t act like they believed those lies they would be hurt in some way. Maybe, lose their job? Maybe, their family is threatened by a chrank caller? Or perhaps you are investigated by the IRS? Something.

Why you’d be President of the Unitd States!

But I didn’t start writing this to talk about that. No. I came to tell you how my negotiations on trade on behalf of Heard and McDonald Island are going.

Would you believe that I got ushered into the White House?

Would you believe that I got to talk to tha assistant to the undersecretary of the vice soething or other?

They were very excited to hear from me. They wanted to know if they could count Heard separate from McDonald in terms of tallying up the number of deals they were doing.

I told them I thought this was the only way to go because the folks (and by that I meant penguins) on McDonald were really obstreporous and I thought were perhaps Nazis. Nazi penguins! Imagine that.

No sooner had I gotten the words out of my mouth than both Elon Musk and Stephen Miller burst into the rooms, inguiring, “Nazis?” Elon started jacking off his straight arm salute. He couldn’t seem to stop himself. It was like an animitronic doll saluting and turning, saluting and turning. Meanwhile, Miller was babbling about some “Camp of the Saints” and zero policy and immigrants and he wasn’t allowing any shit leaving immigrants into this country. He obviously knew something about Heard and Mcdonald because if there’s one thing penguins do is shit, and it stinks.

Would you believe that?

No?

Okay, well how about …

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

I’ve watched trailers to Tulsa King the new series by Sylvester Stallone. It’s about an older gangster who will break up an office or a car dealership or the salesman to make them offers they won’t refuse. 

I’ve seen John Wick stuff and The Equalizer stuff. I’ve read that Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington are really nice guys in real life. However, in these movies they are killers. The idea being that those they killed deserved to die.

Remember 24? That was, I think, the impetus for Cheney and the W administration to create black sites out of the U.S. to torture people. 

I remember Rudy Giuliani back when he was a New York prosecutor saying that when they were listening in on mobsters’ conversations they changed after the release of The Godfather. They had learned from the movie how they were supposed to talk!

Okay. Okay. Where does this leave us? 

Well, let’s add in the far right rhetoric. They have ideas that the government is corrupt and full of goons and layabouts. They have been parroting solutions for decades. Well, ever since I can remember, and I’m going back to childhood. I remember Robert Welch saying Eisenhower was a communist. It’s why I don’t buy that grape jelly. (And it tastes terrible.) 

There has been this continuous undertone of crazy stuff to do to “fix” the U.S. Remember John Bolton saying you could take the top two layers of the U.N. and not lost anything? Stuff like that.

Or Ron Paul, father of Rand, who advocated fixing the economy with diddling with the interest rates (called Austrian Economics – rejected by most mainstream economists – BTW.)

There is no end to this kind of crazy talk. Add to this orchestrated campaigns by various governments to stir up confusion. Hunter’s laptop? Right. The Italians found evidence of a high level politician acting criminally. Oh wait it was the guy who sent a Special Prosecutor and the Attorney General to Italy that they found evidence on? Oh well, forget that.

How many investigations, inquiries, and sub-committee hearings have the Republicans held that have alluded to crimes and misbehaviors by the Democrats that have been found to be based on nothing but innuendo and false assumptions? All of them as far as I know. This, over time, has an effect.

So where are we now?

The recent headlines tell us what is about to come:

We are on the verge of a recession,

Our withdrawal of aid to foreign countries will lead to the deaths of millions. Rubio and Musk will go down in history as some of the greatest villains of all time.

Our hollowing out of government will lead to less taxes collected, few services, and a military in chaos.

We are now taking people off our streets without arresting them and either putting them in detention centers or sending them to terrible prisons overseas.

Our research and educational institutions are being attacked and many will wither.

We are on the verge of the worst collapse the world has ever seen: economically, politically, morally, militarily and every other way. We are entering a dark age. Is there a way out? I don’t know.

*Many folks in the U.S. have probably never heard of Don Pedro. He’s kind of the embodiment of our bad habits. The dance, as far as I was taught, is kind of like the Mexican Hat Dance we learned in grade school.

*The two other people in the photo are unnamed and as far as we know are currently residing in El Salvador.

Sunday,April 13, 2025

We were watching the Dave Letterman interview show last night. His guest was Caitlin Clark. I never cared for Letterman on the Tonight Show because his brand of humor was to make fun of people and that is really putting them down, but on this show he doesn’t do that. He’s a pretty good interviewer.

The show cuts between various scenes of he and Caitlin doing things. He’s interviewing her in an auditorium setting. They go duckpin bowling. She’s very competitive. He said to her that she has to win. She responded that she wants to win. At one point they are tossing grapes into a glass at the end of the table. She’s winning.. He tosses a grape and it lands on the rim cutting the grape halfway through. “That never happens!” exclaims Dave. “Doesn’t count,” says Caitlin.

In one scene Dave is interviewing her coach from Iowa, Lisa Bluder. “What were some of the things she had to learn?” asked Dave.

“Clock management,”responded Bluder, “ and how to be a leader.” 

Caitlin talked about that in the auditorium interview. She and Bluder both acknowledged that a leader makes everyone around them better. 

And I thought about Donald Trump, has anyone said they were better for being around him?

I’ve heard Mark Cuban say a good business person makes those around him richer. Well, I guess Trump has done that with actions by those around him becoming wealthier by trading on insider information. Not only is the White House a showroom for cars; it’s now a pump and dump stock shop.

I know there’s a book out about Trump entitled, “Everything Trump Touches Turns to Garbage.” or some title akin to that. But making those around him better? No. Never heard that one. Making people grovel. Making them turn on their own principles – yes. Getting them to talk about having sex with someone other than their spouse while their spouse is secretly listening so he can have revenge sex – yes. It’s a kind of making them less. I win because I put you one down. winning by cheating? Yes. Winning by merit? No. I mean have you ever seen a Trump golf match televised? You see him riding around in a golf cart, but never actually hitting a ball. Those who have played with him say he cheats. How did he win golf tournaments you ask? Essentially, no one else was in them. He’s admitted as much. If he buys a golf course he creates a tournament and plays the course. No one else is signed up, because no one else heard  about it. He wins.

I’m not sure I’m completely correct on how he wins tournaments. In checking I found that he has won previous championships where “No one saw him play.” That’s more like it.

I for one would like to see a televised match between him and dear leader Un as in Kim J. (Okay I ghettoed up the North Korean leader’s name.) In a museum in NK there’s an exhibit which display’s Un’s father’s round of golf where he got three holes in one. Remarkable? Not really. Imagine that game? Who would you root for? USA! USA! NK! NK all the way! 

Yeah. Nevermind.

BTW I have it on good authority that Heard Island does get inhabited by humans every once i awhile. They are HAM radio operators who set up a station so that their fellow HAMs (?) can get a hit and record it in their books. To my knowledge, they paid no tariffs to the penguins. That situation may change in my ongoing negotiations with the White House. McDonald Island? Yeah. They ain’t playing ball. No hits. No news. Nothing. They are nasty penguins over there.