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UNCORKED

Another executive order from me

by | Mar 17, 2025

The Storyteller

Another executive order from me

by | Mar 17, 2025

I’ve gotten a rave report from Bayfield, Wisconsin, that relatives of a friend slaughtered a hog and put on a pork feast for neighbours and that fresh pork compared to store-bought is like gin compared to turpentine, but I dare not mention this in my own home because my love looks down on pork due to fairy tales she was read as a child. Those stories omitted the fact that pigs are omnivores and will devour a rat or lizard as readily as plants and flowers, and does the size of the prey place the Three Pigs on a higher moral plane than I with my bratwurst? Does a lizard not have feelings? Is a baby bunny not capable of loyalty?

I will say this for our Current Occupant, he has never come out against pork — he feasts on it and so does his man Musk — a herd is but a appetizer, billions of dollars’ worth of hog go down that gullet, he devours the tusks too, and the Man is the first Occupant in my lifetime who’s taken a swing at the Canadians, who due to their northernness consider themselves uppermost but who are trying to transport their chaos south — five political parties, two languages, an unsingable national anthem, round bacon — by way of a porous border.

The Occupant is ploughing new ground. His denunciation of President Zelenskyy, accusing him of starting Russia’s war against Ukraine, is new diplomatic territory for this country. Secretary Rubio, who was brought up to be anti-communist, is having to learn how to swim backward.

And now Reuters reports that the U.S. plans to deport 200,000 Ukrainians who fled to the U.S. legally, had an American sponsor, were financially responsible, simply as an act of cruelty to impress the war criminal who is our new ally.

The world wonders: “What will satisfy the man?” A presidential order requiring Bill Clinton to shine his shoes? Restoring capital punishment and hanging Joe Biden from the yardarm of a frigate in a rainstorm? The man is ambitious. Will we own the Gulf of America or can other countries use it?

To use part of the State of the Union speech to honour a boy cured of cancer even while paediatric cancer research funding is so low is not for the faint of heart. You and I would be hard put to do it. Members of Congress are not fools, they have assistants who read to them, and half of the Members stood and applauded when he denounced paediatric cancer without calling for funding to be restored. Great operas have been written featuring treachery on this scale. The Creating Hope Reauthorization Act, extending incentives for paediatric drug development: dumped. The Give Kids a Chance Act, to allow children with relapsed cancers to undergo treatments combining cancer drugs with other therapies: which one of you could walk into a sick child’s hospital room and tell the family, “Sorry. Pack up and go home. Cancelled.”

The problem is that we need a King, and the Occupant is the person for the job. Create a constitutional monarch, but elective, not hereditary, because as we’ve seen in the U.K. the bloodlines can run thin and the heirs can be pale and snivelling. Give the king the power to ride in parades and wave and appear at dedications and grieve for the dead and pin medals on people. It’s the perfect job for a jackass.

The American people were looking for excitement.

Nixon was intriguing and Clinton flipped some skirts but Carter and Reagan were rather straight, and Bush 1 and Bush 2 were patrician and Obama was under severe restrictions as the First A-A and so he and the family had to be model prisoners for the whole eight years, keep their eyes straight and shoelaces tied, so the electorate decided to take a break and elect a playboy from Queens who needed rifle volleys and salutes, a chopper at the ready, and a golf course vacated for him and his four friends.

But the chaos. The gazillionaire in the china shop. The appointments of numbskulls. The clowning in Congress. How much is enough? Elect a king (or queen) every four years, give them the Smithsonian for a castle, let them be a spectacle for the amusement of the street people, and let some modest rationalist run the government. As Custer once said, “What could possibly go wrong?”

About Garrison Keillor

About Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor did 'A Prairie Home Companion' for 40 years, wrote fiction and comedy, invented a town called Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, even though he himself grew up evangelical in a small separatist flock where all the children expected the imminent end of the world. He’s busy in retirement, having written a memoir and a book of limericks, and is at work on a musical and a Lake Wobegon screenplay, and he continues to do 'The Writers Almanac', sent out daily to Internet subscribers (free). He and his wife Jenny Lind Nilsson live in Minneapolis, not far from the YMCA where he was sent for swimming lessons at age 12 after his cousin drowned, and he skipped the lessons and went to the public library instead and to a radio studio to watch a noontime show with singers and a band. Thus, our course in life is set.

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