Rick Kinnaird

Thursday April 22, 2021

With my last post I mentioned Ted had Covid. Some were disappointed to hear it was Nugent and not Cruz. 

Reading what Ted Nugent has said about Covid got me to thinking about what he says now that he can barely get out of bed. When faced with the reality of what one has denied what do they do?

It varies. Remember waterboarding? Sean Hannity said it wasn’t torture. Someone offered him a chance to experience it and he could never find the time to try it. A well known DJ in Chicago took up the challenge. He lasted three seconds before screaming for them to stop and declaring it as torture.

Then there were the patients in the ICU in Michigan that came in sick with Covid and wouldn’t accept the fact. It had to be something else. They were yelling at their nurses. When did they stop yelling? Stop denying? Answer: When a tube was shoved down their throat they stopped yelling. As soon as it was taken out they were back to denying.

What about the people who go to the Death Camps and deny the Holocaust?

Now we have a new threat. It’s people who are seeped in denial and believers in the most nonsensical of theories that are getting elected to political positions who are making laws and regulations based on their nonsense. 

It seems we may be washed away by a flood. A rising ocean and a burning land. Maybe then. No, forget it.

I have travelled the world and I have seen the structures that people have built to live in the next world, in the afterlife. So far, everyone I have seen will, at best, have the remains sitting undisturbed since they were put there long ago. 

I keep thinking someone would have said, “Now, hold on. How long have we been doing this? Doesn’t seem to be working.”

But that is not the nature of our collective cultures. It seems that each group gets an idea in their collective head as to what to do with the dead. An idea grows about an afterlife or a next world and preparing for it. This idea takes hold grows and preparations are carried out and then what?

Then nothing. There seems to be no heaven, no hell, and no afterlife. We may have to accept the reality that this is it.

Whatever you accomplish or don’t accomplish in this life, that is it. There ain’t nothing else. Now, maybe you don’t want to believe that, but really? Is there evidence of anything to the contrary? (Answer: NO. Despite all the chest beating, praying, foretelling, believing, coincidences.)

So now we get to today’s times and I have to ask myself, “Is there anything new here?” And yes there is, I think. Perhaps, it is something old in a new guise. Quanon. What is it? Not in particular, but as a phenomenon. It seems to be the mashing together of several strains of belief and technology in our society. Is it any different than the Shamans/conmen of old? 

The danger we now face is that there are enough of these people that they are now infiltrating our governments at all levels and infecting them with their nutty beliefs.

The danger we face is from terrorists, idiots, and authoritarians. Oh yes, and climate change, and global pandemics. 

PS Q u – is not the wine of Quanon is it? Is it? OMG! Could I be infected?

Wednesday April 21, 2021

Ted Nugent has Covid.

It can’t be true.

Covid doesn’t exist said Ted.

He’s so sick he can hardly get out of bed to pee.

Aw too bad.

Ted called it names.

Covid doesn’t care.

Ted blamed other nationalities.

Covid didn’t care.

Ted said it was a fraud.

Covid didn’t care.

It struck him down just like anyone else.

Maybe Ted should have listened.

Maybe Ted should have faced reality.

It’s hard for me to not say mean awful things and call Ted names, like the names he has called other people, other nationalities, and things he doesn’t understand and makes no attempt to understand. It’s weird isn’t it Ted (and Donald and Mike and Bolsonaro) that you can’t cover up facts like a virus pandemic with a PR campaign? Who Knew?

George Floyd’s killer got convicted. 

Two days ago, before the conviction was handed down, Maxine Waters said we should stay in the streets until the judgement is handed down and that we should be more confrontational, and get this – the right lost their collective minds! Where were they when rep Mo Brooks or Matt Gaetz were inciting a mob? Or when Rudy G was? Or Sean Hannity? I didn’t hear them say a peep.

Yet Maxine says stays what she says and all of a sudden they are concerned about violence?

PS Blooming Rosemary

Sunday April 18, 2021

Stream 1 – Satan and Satanism: Maya Angelou said something like, “when a person reveals themself to you, believe them the first time.” Is it so hard to understand what Donald Trump is? Was? And for what I can see always will be?

It’s been shown, spelled out, proven, over and over again – and yet – there are those who say, “Well, I don’t know.” To which I say, “Yes, you do.” 

What is it about the human condition that doesn’t allow people to accept reality?

Ah me.

In more interesting stuff – well, more interesting to me. A week or so ago I was at VMFA and picked up a catalogue on The Bourne Collection. Yeah, don’t get all worked up on the name. The guy was 19 in the mid 1940s went to Mexico and was part of the team that was shown Bonampak. His collection is of artwork from Mexico through Peru. Some of it may be fakes. It has been criticized for showing how someone who is trying to collect ancient stuff can be duped – possibly, and then whomever is writing the article points out “you know, like the Getty.” The forward to the catalogue has John Bourne’s article about being in Chiapas and living with the Lacandon. 

He mention his inspiration “Enchanted Vagabonds,” which is the true story of a couple that put out of San Diego Harbor in a craft they built and went down the coast of Baja to Panama. This was 1933. The boat was a kayak/canoe with sail. It was 16 feet long, 42 inches wide and drew 25 inches. It had a canvas bottom and they took it out into the Pacific Ocean! This was before RADAR and antibiotics. I’m only to page 25 and they’ve survived two horrific ocean storms, been picked up by rum runners, trapped inside a volcanic lava tube, and he’s stepped on a gaff that went 1/2” into his heel. His solution to keeping the infection down is to keep it clean and walk on it, which keeps opening the wound and letting it drain. OMG!

What was their inspiration? Richard Halliburton who they mention as having swum the Hellespont back in the 1920s.

The 1930s was probably the last decade of good old – what the British would call – “pluck.” Here these two idiots are in the middle of the biggest ocean in the world bailing for their lives with two canteens of water going to one of the most desolate inhospitable places on the planet and they are talking about adventure! The coast of Baja has few place where one can easily come ashore. No problem, when they get close to the rocks hop out of the canoe, hold the trailing ropes they threw over the side, stop the boat’s forward progress. She holds the boat back while he unloads it then they carry the boat to dry rock and camp out. 

Out of water? Make a still from the riffraff found from a wrecked ship that wasn’t so lucky, nor the crew so ingenious as to convert sea water into fresh. See the graves? OMG. 

But there is a through-line here from the 20s to the 30s to the 40s. Then there’s a more recent work “Barbarian Days,” which recounts one man’s quest to surf in the later part of the 20^th Century and into this millennia. 

Each story, each person, had pushed aside the norms of their day to look for something else. 

The opening of Enchanted Vagabonds recounts how this man and his wife had prepared for their trip for two years and at the last minute a group of five women, whom neither knew descended to say they were going to get an injection to stop them. This man said he had prepared by building a boat, learning to sail, reading and studying and doing things an adventurer would need to know but the one thing he had not prepared for was committees. How do you deal with committees?

Ah, the eternal question. Did pharaoh have pyramid building committees? What about Pakal in Palenque? Perhaps we will never know, and that might be for the best.

We have yet to find an ancient inscription that reads something like this “The Budget and Oversight Committee on Construction submitted their interim report …”

Saturday April 17, 2021

President Biden announced we are getting our troops out of Afghanistan. Well, is that good idea? What will happen there once we are gone? 

Here’s the thing. That country was last conquered by Genghis Khan’s grandson. 

They have been fighting ever since. It’s sad. It’s terrible. We’ve made some progress, but the cost to win is too high. Is that even the right kind of statement to make. What is winning in this case? How can you win when your opponent lives in another country and only comes over the border to fight? 

I heard a person speaking about it this morning. He’s a reporter, an Afghan. His insights were helpful to me. He said that we gave up on defeating the Taliban a long time ago. We pushed them back into some of the more remote and rugged areas (and northern Pakistan.) We have made progress in that people are getting educated. They have elections. It is a democracy. And he said that they can even hold their leaders accountable – somewhat.

He said once we leave the army we have trained, which he said there are parts that are quite good, will come face to face with the Taliban. It will be a civil war and it may go on for months or years.

That is all for the moment.

Carry on.

PS Buddha picking the dirt from under his pinkie fingernail. (Maybe not?)

Friday April 16, 2021

A big deal has been made of an intelligence report that said two things:

1 – The intelligence community is not certain about Russians paying bounties to kill American troops,

2 – Konstantin Kilimnik a Russian agent took internal polling data from Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, in 2016 and gave it to the Russian Spy agency. Kilimnik also tried to disrupt the 2020 Presidential campaign, like he did in 2016.

I don’t know what was so earth shattering about the Kilimnik stuff. I guess the fact that the intelligence community came right out and said it as opposed to earlier stuff that left it to us to put two and two together.

The question in my mind is the same one that was asked back when the head of the research firm was hired by Republicans to get opposition research on Trump, “What was Trump doing in Russia?” 

This question resulted in the Steele Dossier, most of which has been shown to be true and none flat out false.

We have all sorts of characters near Trump who have worked with Russians or their patsies. The Russian disinformation is a staple not only of right wing media but of most, if not all, of the elected Republicans elected to Congress. It’s not like they disavow it once it is pointed out to them. Oh no, they ignore the obvious and double down. 

My question is only are they fools and unknowing traitors, or are they knowing traitors? 

PS Wet n Wild – what I need: gym ready beauty products to keep up with me.