Rick Kinnaird

Sunday, February 16, 2025

We saw Wicked – finally. In a movie theater.

It was different than the play. They didn’t play up the mall rat speak of Galinda, the good witch. They tried. They hinted at it, but it didn’t quite come off, which was okay. What they did instead was to play up Elphaba, the green one, and how she was really smart and good and trying. This as opposed to everyone else who was just keeping their heads down and trying to be one of the gang. Talk about a pastiche for what is going on right now in this country. Oh man. It was spot on.

They saw cruelty and did nothing. They pretended not to see. They heard gaslighting reasoning and went along. 

In other news, I read last night how a person was fired from the Park Service. It was heartbreaking. A job they loved. Naturally, it was done in as cruel as bureaucratically possible. No warning. Cutoff from all systems. Boom. See ya.

I had heard that USAID folks were let go with no warning and cut off from the app that would allow them to be extracted if in danger. This is the kind of thing Trump did to Comey. Fired him when he was out west and they got pissed when he heard that Comey took the FBI jet back to the east coast.

It’s also interesting that I have heard of no fraud or abuse that has been found. I have heard:

– The interestingly only the agencies that are investigating Musk and his companies are being whittled down or done away with.

– That six AGs have quit rather than drop charges against the NYC mayor. One of them is an arch conservative. And the thing is they aren’t dropping the charges, just letting them sit and fester to see how well Adams does in letting ICE into churches, jails, and hospitals to rip people out of those places.

– That Guantanamo is going to be used for hard care criminals that are to be deported. Yet, those that have been sent there don’t fit that description.

– That they let everyone go who was taking care of our nuclear weapons and decided to let them back in on a provisional basis.

– That spending and the economy is way down. That everything Trump complained about being too expensive under Biden is up, way up. Eggs, Gas, clothing – doesn’t matter it’s up.

– We now have an HHS Secretary that says we should take an eight year break from vaccine research. This while an outbreak of measles is in Texas, ebola in Africa, and bird flu has moved to cows and humans.

– We have the main author of dismantling the government as outlined in Project 2025 is now head of OMB.

– Elon has called for the blocking of Reuters from having a government contract. The Reuters he is referring to is a separate company from the Reuters the news service that has written investigative articles about his companies. Well, they are owned by the same parent company so close enough.

Carry on. 

I have to wonder when will reality hit them so hard that they will be washed away, and what will be left when it does?

Yes. Well. Important matters await my immediate attention. I need to see about repairs to the Bat Signal. After those damn kids crawled all over it. Fortunately, or unfortunately they didn’t turn it one when one of them was on the lens. Could have fried them. It’s dangerous when you don’t know what you are doing. But if you don’t know? Well, C’est la vie. (That French or is it Spanish, for ”i’m sorry they don’t live here anymore.”)

MEGA!

Eggs at the local grocery store $6.08 for 18.

That’s $4.06 a dozen.

Ahd there’s only one choice.

Remember the good old days?

Eggs were $2.59 a dozen, even less.

And you had choices.

Now?

Fuggetaboutit.

Thursday, February 6, 2024

Elon Musk, reportedly the world’s richest man, is continuing his attacks on the poor. USAID is being shut down, as is Head Start.

He is turning up the screws on Federal employees to resign. He did this at Twitter and is being sued for not living up to what he promised.

Meanwhile, his gang of six, the boys in short pants, have been given access to the keys to the kingdom in the form of the Treasury Department’s payment system. What they will do to that is yet to be determined.

60 Minutes has turned over its tapes of their interview with Kamala Harris to the FCC. Part of Trump’s on going $10B suit that CBS showed Kamala in a positive light.

Fighting between Rwanda and the Congo has left 3,000 dead and the Red Cross says there will be more.

Ukraine is appealing to conservative American Christians to help keep the aid flowing by attending the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC.

Trump has said Gaza should be turned into a resort. Nice beaches and all that. Hey Donnie, the last time you suggested this boffo idea it was North Korea, right down the road from Un’s concentration camps for political rivals or anyone for that matter who showed anything but total subservience. How’d that turn out?

Hello? Hello?

And in other news efforts to contain deadly diseases have been shut down. It’s the mantra of the Republicans to, as one article explained it, treat infectious diseases like mega-donors. By cutting off funding to NIH and cutting ties to WHO there are now reports of outbreaks of avian flu and ebola. These organizations had contained and were close to ending HIV, TB, and malaria. But hey, why not give them a chance to go wild again?

Apparently, part of the MAGA cult belief is that vaccines and disease prevention is bad. To show their distain not only do they not get vaccinated, they don’t wash their hands. That’ll show them.

And in international get tough affairs Trump has gotten both Canada and Mexico to bend their knees to the great orange one! They’ve agreed to do things that they agreed to do when Biden was President. Way to go Donnie!

Egg prices have skyrocketed and gas is above $3.00 pretty much everywhere. What happened? Transgender chickens. Yeah, that’s it.

PS It’s been pointed out that what I thought was a bull is a cow. Who knew cows had horns? I took a picture of two signs one was clearly a cow, The other I ASSumed was bull. My bad.

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Concept everyone should understand:

Macro Economics – The study of the big picture of an economy. It looks at questions of:

How much money is in the economy (that’s cash and credit cards).

Micro Economics – The study of individuals and companies and their money needs. 

Do they have enough money to pay their bills?

Do they have access to loans and credit?

Inflation – Prices going up.

Deflation – Prices going down.

What determines a price is how much someone is willing to pay for something (and how much money they have to pay for it.)

Demand – How much people want something. This is measured in increased or decreased prices.

There are two types of demand:

Inelastic – You gotta have it no matter what. e.g. Gas to get to work. Medicine without which you will die.

Elastic – Gas to go on vacation.

All modern governments have a central bank. Ours is The Federal Reserve (The FED). Its job is to take money out of the economy if inflation is going too high. They do this by issuing Treasury Bonds (often called Notes or TBills). By offering higher interest rates people will be more likely to invest in them. In o doing that money is taken out of the economy. People don’t have it to spend. Prices come down.

If they want to put money into the economy they lower interest rates; people don’t buy them. Other notes come due and the money from those TBills goes back into the economy. People have more money to spend. Prices go up (ie inflation).

In general, economists and central bankers like a slightly inflationary economy. It makes paying off the old debt easier and everyone keeps getting more money.

There are some who don’t like a centralized bank and think we should do away with it. Others subscribe to wacky ideas about fiddling with the interest rates of TBills or something and that will somehow fix everything. I don’t understand it. It seems short sighted and or stupid. But Rand and Ron Paul push these ideas and they are encapsulated in what is know as The Austrian School of Economics. (This btw is dismissed out of hand by all other economists.

I mention the Austrian School because I fear we might be in for another round of this stupidity or a variant of it. Elon Musk has been given access to look at the bill paying mechanism the U.S. government uses. It is a mechanical thing. It does all the bill paying of the Federal government (there are a few minor exceptions.) Your name and social security numbers would be in that system.

I have to ask, “Do you really want someone with no elected or civilian background rooting around in there?”

Musk has made pronouncements that lots of things should not be getting paid. He also has said he wants to switch the backbone of the government TBills to blockchain, whatever that means.

Economies run on confidence. If one isn’t confident they won’t spend. They will hoard or put their money into something extremely safe. That used to be TBills, but now with Musk in there who knows?

Another favorite place to store your money is in gold (GLD) or Silver (SLV). There are other ways to buy gold and silver. Some folks don’t like it (Motley Fool and Warren Buffett), because there is no way to tell what it’s going to do other than people not knowing where else to put their money.

I’ve been worried that Trump would wreck the economy. I didn’t think he’d do it this fast. He’s sent up a few flares, and then withdrawn them. As my friend Corey used to say about kiting – there are sucker winds. those are winds that when you decide you are done for the day and pack up all your kites a wind comes up. One is tempted to break out another kite. Corey said don’t do it. They are sucker winds and as soon as you get your kite out the wind will die. I feel this way about the economy.

Biden left us the strongest economy in the world. Trump had bad mouthed it all during his campaign. I remember him talking about Robert Kennedy Jr. saying, he was going “to let Bobby do his thing.” Apparently, that applies to Elon too.

Elon is as dangerous as Kennedy. Just on the economy. What do you think is going to happen if he diddles with the Treasury Department’s payment system? I can hear him now, “These payments are illegal so we stopped them.” Then someone will have to go to court, prove him wrong and by then it might be too late for whomever.

February 1, 2025

Cymer’s light source only worked, though, thanks to a new laser that could pulverize tin droplets with sufficient power.

…

fans that turned a thousand times a second,

…

the company learned to use magnets so, so the fans floated in the air, sucking heat out of the laser system

…

The company proposed a laser with four components: two “seed” lasers that are low power but accurately time each pulse so that the laser can hit 50 million tin drops a second; four resonators that increase the beam’s power; an ultra-accurate “beam transport system” that directs the beam over thirty meters toward the tin droplet chamber; and a final focusing device to ensure the laser scores a direct his, millions of times a second.

Every step required new innovations. Specialized gases in the laser chamber has to be kept at constant densities, The tin droplets themselves reflected light which threatened to shine back into the laser and interfere with the system; to prevent this, special optics were required. The company needed industrial diamonds to provide the “windows” through which the laser exited the chamber, and had to work with partners to develop new, ultra-pure diamonds. It took … a decade to master these challenges and produce lasers with sufficient power and reliability. Each one required exactly 457,329 component parts.

from CHIP WARS by Chris Miller

Pages 227 & 228

This is where chipmaking was five or six years ago. There are two fabrication plants left in the world that can make these kind of chips. It is so expensive that companies like IBM gave up as did the royal family of Saudi Arabia in their backing of a company.

China spends more on buying chips ($206B in 2017) than they do on oil.

Now for the good news or should I say the bad news ranked from best to worst:

1. Another plane crash, this time in Philadelphia suburbs. Because it crashed in a populated area it means the pilot was unable to divert it. And it had just taken off so it was loaded with fuel.

2. Senate sub-committee voter 11-0 to approve Russell Vought for head of OMB. That’s because the Democrats refused to show up. Vought is the architect behind Project 2025. The blueprint of how Trump is going to dismantle the U.S. government.

3. Kash Patel is being questioned about his statements about the FBI and other things. He has said that he would shut down the FBI main building in DC and open it up the next day as “a museum of the deep state.” It has also been revealed that on a Seal Team Six operation that was going into the Niger/Nigeria border the team needed permission to cross into Niger airspace. He lied and told the folks they had permission. While the troops were in the air they learned they hadn’t received permission. When confronted Patel answered that it didn’t matter because no one was killed.

4. FAA didn’t have a director because he resigned on Inauguration Day. SpaceX had a missile launch that blew up and rained pieces onto the Caribbean and South America. Flights had to be diverted. Thousands could have been killed. Musk thought the flight was “very entertaining.” He was pissed when the FAA grounded his rockets until they figured out what happened. No worries, the guy in charge of grounding is gone and when the plane and helicopter collided the day before there was no head of the FAA. Trump hadn’t gotten around to appointing one. Being the non-class guy that he is he refused to go to the crash site (What? I’m going to look at the water.) Blamed it on DEI and expressed no sympathy or understanding.

5. Rachel’s 1/30/25 program led off with the experience and background Lloyd Austin had before becoming Secretary of Defense. This included overseeing multiple combat operations and tours at the Central Command etc. etc. etc. His replacement? Had been in an Air National Guard unit, and a host on a Fox weekend show. He also has a huge Iron Cross tattooed on his chest. (Excuse me. Cross of the First Crusade – very popular with Christian Nationalists and white nationalists.) Rachel ended the segment with photos side by side of Austin (a black man) and Hegseth (a white man) and said, “I don’t think DEI is the problem here.” Hegseth’s first duty was to immediately reveal the ranks of the soldiers killed in the helicopter crash. Protocol is to wait at least 24 hours. 

One of the three killed name was not revealed by request of the family. This led to media speculation that it was a trans gender woman and she was specifically named. She was alive and immediately took to social media to say, ‘Not me.”

6. Robert Kennedy Jr. said that there was evidence from a study in Poland that said black people don’t need as much of a Covid vaccine as white people. it was finally figure out that he meant a study by a “Dr. Poland,” who has repeatedly said his study says no such thing and stop saying it does.

7. Elon Musk and his “team” has asked to have access to the Treasury Department’s payment program. This is tightly guarded and only a few people have access. This is the nation’s checkbook. It’s how everybody and every entity gets paid. The guy in charge asked. “Why do you want that?” He’s gone.

8. Trump has fired the people who led the investigations into Jan 6 and the documents case. He has asked for the names of everyone involved in either case. This is hundreds if not thousands of agents. If he fires them Kash Patel will be looking at a much smaller agency and the dream of making the headquarters building a Deep State Museum much easier.

I may not have the order of severity correct. But make no mistake Trump and his goons are out to destroy the functioning government (What? You like “radically transform” better?)

Would impeaching him do any good? Look who’s net in line – Vance. After that Speaker Johnson. None of them have a clue and or if they do it’s in the wrong direction.

Some folks are choosing to only check in from time to time. This is an effort to preserve their sanity.

If someone’s at the door. Do I answer? Hide? Get my gun?