Rick Kinnaird

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.

Thursday, April 10, 2025

I am a Genius:

I had been thinking and saying to myself, “I should sell everything and get out of the market.”

I had started doing that – a little bit and then it happened. Boom, the market crashed, just like I knew it would. I was glad I had sold what I did, but kicking myself for not selling more.

Yesterday morning I saw a clip of him (you know who I mean) he was in a tux. He was saying to the crowd, “I know what I’m doing.”

That was all he said.

I have never heard him say anything that isn’t a lie or contains a lie.

So, I ran it through my Trump-O-Translator and it came out, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Later in the day I saw the DOW made a huge jump up.

I didn’t wait I got on-line and sold, doubling what I had sold before.

No, it wasn’t as good had I sold early on but it was better than staying in and watching everything go down and my guts twist at my hesitancy.

Today, the DOW is down bigly. Apparently, folks are realizing that not much has changed and it’s still bad.

Yeah. Well, can you think of a business that he has run that has been successful?

Some have said or written that whatever he touches turn to shit.

He’s done that to our government, to our economy and now he’s trying to do it to the world economy.

He thinks by saying it ain’t so, when it is, will take care of it. Whatever it is.

And if you don’t agree with him and say so publicly he will come after you.

How it will end:

It will end in blood. Maybe literally, maybe figuratively. Remember when Macron corrected him in the White House? He sat there with that goofy smile and then he shrugged? Yeah. That’s how it will end.

Every time he gets caught it’s a “Oh I didn’t mean that.” kind of thing, when clearly he meant exactly that.

His only motivation is to seek revenge and to appear to be powerful.

He is lazy and he cheats. He lies and he tries to cover it up by denial.

What to do:

Take to the streets.

Hound your representatives.

The message?

“This is not okay.”

What I am going to do:

I am appointing myself the trade representative for Heard and McDonald Islands.

I will contact the White House and let them know that Heard is ready to deal, not sure about McDonald.

These islands only have penguins on them, no people. Someone has to speak for the penguins! 

I know penguins look cute. A couple I know went on trip to see penguins in their natural habitats. When they came back they said if they never saw another field of ice and rock covered in penguin do-do that would be fine with them. And the smell! OMG, the smell.

Yes, Heard and McDonald are described as a pristine ecological environment, but I bet it stinks.

So my slogan will be, “Keep your stinkin’ hands off our stinkin’ islands!”

Yesterday, various white pasty faced officials were telling the public they had over 70 countries willing to negotiate on tariffs. Today, they are down to fifteen. What does the administration want? Who knows? They sure as heck don’t know. In fact, they admit it. “Let’s see what they offer.”

What Trump wants is to see countries grovel and beg.

And I willing to offer up some great groveling. I will see to it, at the U.S. government expense that 500 penguins will be shipped to the White House to perform their famous grovel courtship dance. This may include a rock. As in “I lay a rock at your feet to show you I’m your male penguin man.” They will shit in the Rose Garden. They will defecate in the Oval Office, and anywhere else you let them roam. Hey, you got some raw stinky fish? Great. I’m sure the kitchen can whip that up.

They will need protection. Listen, the Assistant Director of the FBI, a right wing podcaster with big muscles, has demanded a twenty man team to protect him 24/7. I’m sure you can do the same for the representatives from Heard. McDonald? Not so much.

And not so much protection for the previous assistant. He only took one guy as protection and that was only when he went overseas. And the director? Cash or Kash – whatever. He demanded his curtains be changed in his office. Why? I don’t know. He said he’s going to stay in Las Vegas and not move. Thank god. At least, he won’t know what’s going on, and that’s a good thing. (“Hey, get him some more chips.”) As to his assistant and his need for security, did you know that Heard and McDonald have a security service? Yes, H&McD Security. For a low monthly fee we will keep you surrounded in fowl 24/7. No one will attempt to kill you because it will stink so bad. 

This just in – Egg prices are up for the third month in a row. Last month they were $5.90 a dozen. Now? $6.22 a new record. What happened? 

Oh wait, he said, “I will bring down the price of eggs.”

Let’s run that through the Trump-O-Lator … “The price of eggs will soar like you’ve never seen before.”

Okay. Got it.

Carry on.