I don’t know what specifically prompted me to put I You We Them - Journeys beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today on hold at the library. The typical process is I’m reading about something that
references a source, so if I want more information, I check the Fairfax County
system to see if they have it. Could be a book review, could be a tweet, I just
put it in the system and pick it up when it’s ready.
Some books take a while, of course—especially if there’s
been a book review in WaPo; by the time I hit the catalog, I’m number
347 in the queue. So when I finally get the “it’s here” notice, I’ve forgotten
when/why I put it on hold.
That wasn’t the case with this one; I think it might have
been a few days between my request and receiving the ready notice. I was
delayed for a few days because I wanted to finish Book and Dagger (about
academics’ roles in the OSS during World War II) before I launched I You We
Them. So when I squeaked into the local branch one day before the hold
expired this week, it was a surprise to see this was waiting for me:
All I knew about it was the title and the subject matter,
which is “desk killers”. It’s a term (translated from the German Shreibtischtäter)
that came up in the wake of Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson, CEO of
United Healthcare in December. The term was initially applied to Nazi bureaucrats
and other white collar workers who made the genocide machine run so
efficiently, but there have been arguments that we have plenty of desk killers
working in enterprises ranging from pharma to oil to auto manufacturers to
insurance companies.
Well—let me just say that I was somewhat nonplussed to find
something more than 1000 pages long and weighing 1.25kg.
Last Monday afternoon I wasn’t really
hungry enough to make dinner, so I got a club sandwich from the local Silver
Diner. They add mozzarella cheese and ham to the standard turkey, tomato, bacon
and lettuce. When I’m in the restaurant, I just tell them to hold the ham, but
I figured since I was taking it out, I could just pick it off the sandwich and
give it to Foxy.
I gave him one bit that night, along with
a handful of the fries that came with the sandwich. (I never give him enough to constitute a meal; just snacks.) Tuesday I put one bit out
early in the evening, which got covered with snow. I wasn’t sure whether he’d
already been by, or whether he’d be able to find the snack under the snow, so I
put out the last bit in a covered area, along with another handful of fries.
We had a bit of a rough week last week,
what with the Elno fuckery at home and JD Vance waving the administration’s
willie around at the Munich Security Conference (and then fist bumping German neo-Nazis
just to rub it in).
So today I’m just focusing on the
knowledge that no matter what’s going on in this human-caused hellscape, there’s
always something beautiful. I can be grateful for that.
Well, here we are at the absolute pinnacle
of Romance—Saint Valentine’s Day. If you’re thinking about dining out tonight
and haven’t booked a table, fuggedaboutit; tomorrow the prices will be lower,
anyhow. To get into Trader Joe’s yesterday, you had to pass through a wall o’
bouquets ready for lotharios low on funds.
Love is, as they say, in the air.
But that’s only part of romantic love. Valentine’s
Day is like a Hallmark movie: it’s all about the appearance of passion. We all
know that the story goes on after Stacy and Todd fade out and the credits roll.
Very often the next chapter is full of screaming fights and slamming doors. And
the one after involves Todd crying into his beer with his bros while Stacy and
her posse slap back cocktails and tick off every single one of Todd’s
transgressions.
That session lasts the whole night.
I was interested to discover that one
organization has recognized and even celebrated this aspect of love. Through
today, Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary in rural Marion County, Ore., will write your ex’s
name (in cat-safe icing) on a heart-shaped mass of meat and feed
it to one of their residents. Your
donation of $50 to $75 also gets you a video of the very satisfying meal.
(The director of Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary
reports that people are also sending in donations with the names of work
colleagues, friends, spouses and other sundry miscreants to become wildcat chow.
This is their fourth year of offering the much-needed service.)
So, in keeping with the full scope of the
day, we’re having Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, sung by the
Indigo Girls.
I’m getting into the mood for the wintery
mix predicted for the environs of The District They Call Columbia today by reviewing
pix I took of one of the Storms of January.
It’s February, 2025, and I’m grateful my Social
Security payment appeared in my account on Friday afternoon.
It’s quite the statement, actually,
because a year ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me to be concerned. But for the
past 20 days a feral pack of loser incels has been swarming like locusts from federal agency
to federal agency, connecting devices to systems holding the most sensitive
information in the country, downloading and adding data, and generally whizzing
on everything within reach, under the aegis of a ketamine-stoked über willie-waving
incel while the Adderall-addled president jerks around the media between rounds
of golf and plans to use the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for WWF
competitions.
I mean—Pillsbury Spock has tweeted “Death
to USAID”, stopped all payments to the National Institutes for Health (thus
halting critical scientific and medical research), held up the threat of mass firings and promised to move into the
FAA and air traffic control systems (coded in COBOL) to “fix them”.
Like he did to Twitter.
So, yeah—when I didn’t see my monthly
retirement payment (reflecting the money I’ve paid into the system for
decades), I got green around the gills. And when I finally saw it on Friday, I
was relieved. And grateful that—despite their best efforts—some of the
government is still working. So far.
Well, alrighty then—Cadet Bonespurs
proposed Tuesday that the United States take “a long-term ownership position”
of Gaza by sending US troops to clear out all the Palestinian residents of the
region (sending them to as-yet to-be-named countries permanently) and following
them with US companies (mostly ones with his name on them or in which he has a
financial stake) to develop all that beautiful beachfront property.
I have thoughts.
That he did this by way of welcoming
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is just cherce. I mean—don’t get me
wrong, Bibi would love nothing better than to hand off the ethnic cleansing of
Gaza to someone else; it saves him money and maybe gets about 2.2% of the
world’s opprobrium off his back. But I’m not really sure how happy he’d be to
have an outpost of the United States in his backyard, looking over his shoulder
and making strong suggestions on how he should run his little satrapy.
The notion that Gaza’s neighbors Egypt and
Jordan should take on 2.1 million displaced Palestinians because the Kleptocrat
is waving his willie is also interesting. There are literally generations of
Palestinians who’ve never been allowed out of the Jordanian refugee camps to
which they fled in 1948 because they’re considered alien and troublesome. Both
Jordan and Egypt have been quite clear over the decades that they do not
welcome Palestinians. At all. I do not know how much money we’d have to throw
at them to get them to appear to change their minds about this, but I don’t
think we have enough.
In fact, I’d be interested in Bonespurs’
brain burps on where he expects to find the “good, fresh, beautiful piece of
land” for the displaced millions. Rwanda, perhaps? Madagascar, maybe? Possibly
he’ll annex all of Cuba and move them there. As for finding the “some people to
put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and
enjoyable”…yeah, okay: I can see Peter Thiel, Eric Prince and some others
sniffing out some very profitable contracts coming down the pike. After they’ve
finished building out and managing the concentration
camp in Guantánamo Bay (you know that’s going
to be a for-profit prison, right?).
Dunno yet how the apocalypse-loving
evangelicals are reacting to this. On the one hand, Bonespurs is talking about
turning the conflict that’s meant to usher in the End Times into luxury resorts
and high-end time shares (neither of which they can afford, unless they're "pastors" of megachurches). That’s not Written in the Book, I don’t think. On the
other, Mini Moses Johnson and his co-religionists have had some kind of chip
implanted in the space where normal people would have a cerebellum, which
prevents them from saying anything critical about their God-sent messiah. So
it’s a paradox.
Evidently all the talk on the campaign trail about keeping US troops out of foreign wars was just so much bullshit. Go figure.
And all you American supporters of
Palestine, who didn’t think Kamala Harris would do enough to help your brothers
and sisters, so you voted R, or third party or not at all: welcome to find out.
I hope you’re happy with your choice.
The rest of you: don't let this shite distract you from the 24x7 fuckery going on in federal agencies by the World's Richest Ketamine Freak and his muskrats. He's playing kid in a ketamine shop with our data from Treasury, and is moving on to "fix" the aviation system. Nothing scary about that, eh?
Well, anyhow—it’s Friday, so in honor of
all that new beachfront development, let’s have something truly classy for the
first president to use the bully pulpit to hawk his cheap-ass schlock merch.
Has to be Frankie and Annette singing “Beach Blanket Bingo”.
