Rick Kinnaird

Thursday, June 26, 2025

You may have noticed I haven’t been writing much. There are two reasons for this: grandkids and there’s nothing new.

When I say there’s nothing new I mean it’s the same old garbage recycled in a different form. It’s worse and more offensive. I can’t help but think that every problem this president has wrought he brought upon himself. There has not been a peep about improving people’s lives since he was elected. And the bombing of Iran? It’s been pointed out that if he had just stayed in the deal the world would be in a much better situation.

So there’s really nothing new there. What might be considered new this time around is how he and those around him are systematically dismantling our government. Is that because he’s a Russian asset? A tool of the ultra wealthy? Or something else? I was struck by a post I saw a few days ago where a woman dumped the BBB (Big Bucking Bill) into ChatGPT and asked for analysis. It came back and concluded it was a blueprint for an authoritarian take over and that it was well crafted in certain areas (maybe all?). In other words, it was not a sloppy pasted together piece of legislation. 

There is also the many scenes of masked unidentified men detaining people. I wonder which will come first: someone “standing their ground” and shooting some of these people, or folks deciding to dress up like this and go rob and rape? It’s hard to say, but I don’t think we are far off from either if not both.

As to grandkids I have one thing to conclude – there is a reason to have kids when you are young. 

That is all. Carry on. I’ll be working on the Mayan Lunar Series. Don’t hesitate to ask me about it. Hello? Hello?

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

This was the question Paul Krugman asked yesterday. I’ve always liked Paul because he’s a serious fact based economist. That’s why he won a Nobel prize in economics. What he says is spot on. Yesterday, he asked the above question and what he meant was, “are we serious about being a country?” because our leaders sure aren’t acting like it. What did he mean? Where’s the evidence? Hum?

As Paul usually does he presents evidence. Data to support his claim. Weird, I know.

Okay so where to begin? Start with the dollar. Paul pointed out that when interest rates on U.S. Treasuries go up, typically, so does the value of the dollar. This indicates faith in the idea that the U.S. will cover its debts. That it won’t default. However, in the most recent data this is not what is happening. Treasury rates have gone up and the value of the dollar has gone down. This indicates a lack of faith in the U.S. dollar.

He points to Mexico. They had a similar crisis where interest rates went up in that country and the peso went down. This indicates a lack of faith in the government to act responsibly, something we associate with third world countries. But now that lack of faith has come to our shores.

Why might there be this lack of faith? The U.S. has never defaulted and Paul points out that we have the money to cover our debts. But, he asks, do we have the political will to do so? And do we have the competency? He points out that Trump enacted his tariffs on “Liberation Day.” It was obvious that there was no plan. Why, for example, would you declare a huge tariff on China without stockpiling the rare earth minerals they provide? Why also did the Liberation Day plan slap tariffs on islands that had no residents, only penguins? The economic markets reacted as the administration had been told they would – by tanking.

So the administration backed off those tariffs and enacted new ones, all with the same lack of planning as before. The China tariff policy was the work of Peter Navarro. He’s been advocating putting tariffs on China for years. Peter is not an economist, and I dare say, not very smart. In his books on the subject he quotes what he says is an economist and expert on tariffing China, turns out it’s a person that doesn’t exist. The name of the fictitious person is none other than Peter Navarro but with the last name being a rearrangement the letters of his last name – Ron Vara.

The one thing that Trump seemed to actually contribute to this reckless and stupid stuff was to make sure Russia was not tariffed.  There’s a lot we still don’t know about Trump and Russia. This goes back to his first campaign where a server in Trump Tower – NYC was directly connected to a Russian server. Which raises the question now, as it did then, “Who is Trump working for?”

Then there is the budget bill. It will give huge tax breaks to the very wealthy while destroying the social safety net for everyone else, and it will explode the deficit. Paul asks again, “Does this look like a responsible government?”

And then there’s Elon Musk and his drug use. His behavior has been hugely harmful to the functioning of this government and has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world, For what? Well, we can speculate, but Krugman’s assessment is that he’s surprised more capital hasn’t left our shores. He thinks that people can’t believe how mush our country has changed economically. He thinks that those folks are clinging to the belief that an adult will enter the room. They are in for a rude shock.

Thursday, May 8, 2025

Is Trump’s mental state declining or has he been this stupid all along? It’s a question that some or wrestling with. I’m not. It doesn’t matter. What is amazing is how he has managed to wreck all that we have as a country in such a short time. All without doing much legally. After one hundred days he and the Republican legislature have passed five pieces of legislation. He and the Republican Congress are working on “One Big Beautiful Bill.” That’s what they are calling it. If passed there will be huge cuts to Medicaid. The immediate effect will be to wipe out rural health care in this country. That’s Trump’s voters mostly. Ah well, screw ‘em. He doesn’t need them anymore.

And as to his comment that kids maybe will need only two dolls (increased later to 3, 4, or 5) I have to ask, “Couldn’t the billionaires like the DeVos family get along with one or two fewer yachts?” In 2017 it was reported they had ten yachts, two helicopters, and four airplanes with a net worth of $5.1 billion. As Education Secretary she was busy ravaging the public schools by funneling that money into charter and religious schools.

What if we went back to the good olde days? When Eisenhower was President and everyone had a choice of a good job. Sounds great. You in Betsy? Oh and the tax rate on the wealthy? 90% 

Seems fair to me.

But enough. Let’s talk Trump and call it what you will: stupidity? failing mental capacity? lack of competence? 

Some of the people he appointed to do various jobs are beginning to realize that maybe they need to know something about the job they were appointed to do.

Trump, God bless him, never did and never has. His idea of doing a job is to hold a press conference or rally and say a bunch of stuff and move on. If anyone says something like – The King Has No Clothes – well, they are fired, silenced, bullied and or insulted. 

But now, simple questions seem to be difficult for him to answer. Words that are common in the modern English language he seems unfamiliar with, like “strollers” he calls, “the thing you carry babies around in.”

Or simple obvious visual pictures he doesn’t understand. The most glaring example was the picture of the tattoos on a person’s four fingers. This was touted as spelling out ‘M-S-1-3”. To make the point the characters : M S 1 3 were printed on the picture over each of the digits. 

In an interview Trump thought and repeatedly stated that the Helvetica characters were clearly shown on the person’s fingers. He had no idea, not a clue that it was photoshopped. In fact, I’d wager he doesn’t understand that concept.

Many times when questioned he responds, “I don’t know.” Even to the simplest and most obvious softball questions. Like, “Do you believe you have to uphold the Constitution?” Answer, “I don’t know.”

It’s either “I don’t know”, “Not my job,” or “It’s someone else’s fault.”

Thursday, May 1, 2025

If there is anything you get from China, buy it now. That includes paper products, toys, and Christmas decorations. In a few months, maybe weeks, they won’t be on the shelves. Our President summed it up by saying, maybe a little girl won’t get three dolls for Christmas and will have to settle for only two. This prompted Lawrence O’Donnell to speculate on Donald’s name if he was in The Sopranos to be “Donny Two Doll.”

Me, I only want one doll. A voodoo doll. And I don’t have to tell you who the doll would look like.

It would come with a box of pins. Each pin would be tagged with names like: The Economy, Foreign Policy, Immigrants, Tariffs etc.

Moving on. Apparently, Elon Musk is moving on. Having to start smelling like bad fish in the Oval Office he says he’ll only come back one or two days a week to stink up the place. But he and his DOGE team took a few souvenirs. No he didn’t take the silverware. Remember, Mitt Romney saying he had “Binders full of women”? Yeah, well the Doge boys took “Laptops full of data.” Your data. Data from Social Security, the IRS, Immigration … and it is reportedly going to be put into a master database so he can track anyone in the country. Just like China! Hoo Rah.

This will make Cambridge Analytica look like child’s play. 

Was this the whole point of Doge? It certainly wasn’t to save money, or make the government more efficient.

I can’t quite figure it out – yet, but I can say this. There was this set of ideas on the right and with the tech bros that government was inefficient, and filled with layabouts. That government needed to be run more like a business, that the fat needed to be cut. But that is not what they did. They went in and indiscriminately fired people, made ridiculous demands, and left. The result may be the biggest mass murder in history, the ruining of our national research, the weakening of our soft power and influence and that’s just what I can think of as I write. It’s worse than that, of course.

I had the honor of working for one of the greatest companies in the world back in the 80s. The CEO left and went into government to help them become more efficient. He quickly realized that government was a different beast and that how it operated was different than how a company worked. As the CEO of a company he could give an order and expect it to be carried out. He learned that in government that didn’t work so well. You had constituencies, that you had to cater to and convince. The goals of government are much different than that of a company. A company wants to make a profit, in government they are most often doing something because no one else will do it exactly because it isn’t profitable. 

Take health insurance. A private insurance company wants to make a profit, the bigger the better. In a private insurance company paying out money to people is an expense. Keeping expenses low is a goal, hence people don’t necessarily get all the financial help they need. In government run insurance the goal is not to make a profit but to make everyone healthier. 

If we had government run health insurance it has been estimated that not only would everyone be covered, but no one would go bankrupt trying to pay for health care. Would it be cheaper? You bet. Current estimates run to $468 Billion cheaper. Yeah, but what about quality? Well, I dunno, the estimate is that 68,000 lives would be saved every year, and that overall health as measured in life expectancy would increase. You can measure U.S. life expectancy against other countries and see we rank at the bottom. So, if I were to pick: live longer, be healthier and spend less money doing it I’d let the government handle it.

Yeah, but then you don’t get to choose. Yeah, you don’t get to choose between one crappy program or another. Ask yourself this, “Why do people pick Medicare over private health insurance?”

Here’s another thing to look at – the minimum wage. I dare say that if you are making minimum wage you can’t survive. You have to cut somewhere – be it rent (live in your car?), food (eat the food in the burger joint you work at when no one is looking), health care (free clinics or don’t go) etc. 

But what if we (as in “we the people”, as in “the government”)took every Metropolitan Statistical Area (Defined as “ Metropolitan statistical area (MSA) A geographic entity based on a county or a group of counties with at least one urbanized area with a population of at least 50,000 and adjacent counties with economic ties to the central area.” – Thanks Google.)

What if we took each one and said, “How much does it cost to live there?” Then divide that into hours per week (40? 37.5?) to determine what a person would need to make to live there, and make that the minimum wage for that area. I know. I know. Walmart managers heads would explode. But think about it.

Ya see. If you believe the purpose of government is to serve “the people” then the decision is easy. If you believe in something else, like scamming as much money as you can but dress it up as patriotism or immigrants are coming to take your jobs. Well? What can I say?

Jon Stuart pointed out that Mrs. Trump got paid $40 million for a documentary about her life. This would be enough money to pay for all of Ken Burns’ documentaries for decades. or for the current special on the planet with 30 mill left over – something like that. I hope she’s ordered her Christmas decorations because otherwise the White House may look really barren in December.

Update: The port of Seattle has business. In fact, it is slightly up. However, they believe this is a rush to get stuff here before the tariffs and the future does not look good.

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?