Okay, my strategy for overwintering my
citrus orchard did not exactly work to plan.
How it started:
How it’s going:
I was getting conflicting information on
what to do about the dwarf trees—take them inside for the winter; no—trees need
a dormant period, leave them out but insulate their roots. And given the
winters we’ve had for the previous three years or so, it seemed safe to go the
latter route.
However, once we got that extended period
of below-freezing temperatures last month, my hopes, well—they basically froze.
So I’ll have to try again this year.
Interestingly, my gardenia bush made it
through fine, and I didn’t even bubblewrap it. Perhaps the clue is the larger
pot?
I thought it might be grief
for my sister manifesting itself, or
perhaps my anxiety that started on Election Day and has ratcheted up every day
since. My doctor ran me through some tests, none of which indicates anything
(visibly) organic, so I’ve just lived with it.
But last week I saw somewhere (either
Reddit or Bluesky) an announcement for a two-hour class on how to “Build a
Community”, put on by an organization called The Barnraisers Project. I’m
not the community organizer type, but I thought that learning more about
community and how to build one would be better than not learning, so I signed
up.
Friends—I’ve never felt two hours go by so
fast. (This was only beaten by the 90
minutes I spent in a black cab
touring Belfast six years ago.) I—like everyone reading this—have been to
enough well-intentioned meetings, run by well-intentioned people, which drift
all over the place and devolve into individual rants or hand-flapping to have
had some trepidations about this. But Garrett Bucks not only knows his
community onions, he knows how to run a meeting—make everyone feel welcome and
valued, but keeping them on target.
Also—I cannot tell you how heartening it
was to be on a Zoom call with 91 other people from all over the country (and
beyond), who mourn what this nation has become, and are actively seeking ways
to unite and turn it back towards decency. For the first time in months, I am
cautiously optimistic.
And I am grateful.
(Plus—my intestinal tract appears to have relaxed some.)
Today’s earworm is dedicated to the little
Muskrat incel dogies. They must really feel like masters of the universe, as
they swarm into agency after agency, dicking with code and waving “findings of
fraud”. Some of them aren’t even old enough to drink legally, but they’re
definitely drunk on power. (Although probably still wondering why the hot
chicks won’t look at them.)
Enjoy it while you can, Bund brochachos,
because your power will be short-lived, but your disgrace will live forever.
There’s precedent for this. Viz:
It's got a great beat; you can dance to it. I give it a 2.
I received this notification/bill via
snailmail on Monday.
My first inclination was to ignore it,
because one of the trendier scams these days is a smishing thing: text (often
from some foreign country’s area code) announcing that you owe a road toll and
you can pay it by clicking here.
Yeah, no.
Look, I haven’t been on a toll road for
so many years that VA EZPass deactivated my account (while still holding on to
my $25 minimum; I need to get on them about that). So I knew I hadn’t incurred
any tolls on 22 January. Besides—this was for a tunnel in…Hampton Roads? That’s 182 miles
from me.
Well, I searched for DriveERT on the web,
and there is indeed such an entity. So I rang them Tuesday morning. Waited on
hold for 30 minutes (God bless speaker phone) and got their front-line help.
Which basically consists of: we photographed
the license plate, so how do you want to pay? I kept insisting that my car has not been outside of
Fairfax and Loudoun counties for well over a year, she sighed, asked me if I
own a GMC truck (no) and transferred me to their second-line support.
It took Dee (or maybe it’s D—I’m okay with
public support people using a pseudonym, as long as I have something I can
reference when I document the interaction) about 35 seconds to see that somehow
in their process they’d transposed two of the characters in the plate they
photographed, and she transferred the toll to the owner of that vehicle.
She got a kick out of me saying that if it
turns out that my car is travelling more than I am, I’m going to be upset. “It
went to Hampton Roads and didn’t even bring me back a tee-shirt?”
Between that and getting all my 2024 tax
info to the accountant, Tuesday was a good day.
Since the days back in the last century
when my sister drove a Datsun 510 station wagon that was basically held
together by political stickers, I've been fascinated with people who use their car’s
exterior surface as a thought canvas. So when I saw this new vehicle in the ‘hood,
I naturally paused to peruse. I mean:
Taking it by quadrant, we have:
And more granularly:
(This one references Woody Guthrie’s
guitar.)
Lest anyone have doubts about the overall theme, there’s the
vanity plate:
And from branding on the side panels of
the van, I believe that it’s associated with this group, which provides street
medics to the queer communities in the East Bay of San Francisco as well as in Brooklyn.
I totally respect their courage in going
behind enemy lines into a Confederate state.
Okay, given all the DOGE and general
Republican shenanigans currently going on in the Social Security
Administration, it occurred to me that this email was a bit rich:
The winter aconite was slower than usual
to appear—in the past it’s been early to mid-February. But
it’s here now, and each year it covers a little more territory.
Also, Saturday marked the return of
Scooter, back from hibernation.
Here’s where we seem to be this week: the
Kleptocrat has extorted a good chunk of Ukraine’s national resources in return
for…no security guarantee (but maybe not actually supplying Putin with weapons
of war). Pillsbury Spock and his minions are rampaging through federal agencies
in search of mythical “fraud and abuse”. Oh—and Spock’s companies are profiting
to the tune of $2M per day, and the FAA has just announced that they’re tossing
out Verizon, which has a contract to manage their communications, and
replacing them with Starlink. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been
terminated, including the ones managing nuclear safety and ebola prevention
programs.
In military matters, Cadet Bonespurs has
fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (a four-star Air Force general,
who happens to be black) and the (female) Chief of Naval Operations, replacing
them both with white men. In the case of the chair, the replacement is a
retired three-star general. SECDEF fired a flock of senior JAG staffers and
gave his reason as (and I quote) not wanting lawyers who “exist to attempt to
be roadblocks to anything that happens in their spots.”
What, you might ask, could be construed as
“roadblocks” that might be posed by…lawyers? Could it be instances where war
crimes are being contemplated? Or violations of the Constitution? Or actions
that contravene the UCMJ? Hegseth’s saying this like it’s a bad thing.
And on the health front, Texas is
currently experiencing an outbreak of measles—a disease that was eradicated in
the last century by vaccines—and an (unvaccinated) child has died.
Well—there’s more, there’s more, but I’ve
hit my limit.
There were a few bright spots, though. GOP
congressmorons—the ones who actually faced their constituents (many are
flat-out hiding)—were besieged by Republican voters who were not having their “hey—Dear
Leader has it in hand” spin. They were heckled and booed—by White people—and
they returned to DC visibly shaken. Not enough to risk crossing either Klepto
or Elno, but enough to consider what other career choices they might make.
On Tuesday, 21 employees of the carbuncle
DOGE outfit—who were subsumed earlier this year from the US Digital Service—resigned
en masse because they refused to be part of activities that made a mockery of
their oath to protect and defend the Constitution. This is the first time, to my
knowledge, that regular worker bees have taken this step; there have been
SIS-level resignations, but for these people, quitting your job in this kind of
on-the-edge economy carries financial consequences, and God bless every one of
them for taking a stand and telling the brochachos to get stuffed.
The second ray of hope came on Monday, as
hundreds of employees of the Housing and Urban Development Department returned
(as per Klepto mandate) to their headquarters in the District, to find that
every TV monitor on every floor of the building was playing a video:
Yes, it’s an AI depiction of the
Kleptocrat sucking Elno’s toe, to the latter’s audible enjoyment, with "Long Live the Real King" overlaid. We know it’s
AI not because Klepto is sucking off Elno; obvs that’s just fact. It’s AI because
Elno has two left feet.
(Although, well—maybe he actually does?
Has anyone seen him barefoot? Can you verify?)
Anyway—if generating that video weren’t
hysterical enough, it gets better. Apparently no one could figure out how to
turn off the video, which was on loop, so someone had to go to every floor and
unplug each monitor to stop the breakfast show.
So, today’s earworm is from 1975, the
Isley Brothers singing “Fight the Power”. Because—as overwhelming as this flood
of dangerous bullshit we’ve had dumped on us since 20 January is, we are not
without power. We can show up. We can speak up. We can stand up.
No—not someone sleeping rough. (That the richest country in the world can't provide shelter for all is a different outrage.) The
bastards who installed metal dividers in the benches with the backs with the
sole purpose of preventing homeless people lying down.
This is on Fairfax County property, so
they’re responsible. But I’ve seen the same benches in the Wiehle-Reston East
Metro station, operated by WMATA.
Okay, I confess that my approach to tax
filing information is…less than optimally orderly.
Which is to say—my collection of necessary
documents is a rabbit warren of paper copies that need to be scanned and
digital things that I’ve downloaded from various sites plus email attachments.
This is admittedly stressful, and it’s completely self-inflicted.
But—given that this past December I couldn’t
even get it together for holiday presents (which I have, but I just haven’t,
you know, wrapped and given)—I’m taking the fact that my goal is to have it all
uploaded to my accountant’s (rather crappy portal) by the end of this week as
an admirable aspiration and a hella forcing function.
Also—yesterday I was rooting around in the
file box with a collection of documents and found—mirabile dictu!—the 1099 from
the Virginia Employment Commission, which means (I hope) I’ll never have to
interact with them again.
It’s been another week in kakistocracy hell, hasn’t it? Since
Pillsbury Spock announced that he’s sending SpaceX engineers in to “fix” the FAA’s
systems (including air traffic control), we’ve had two incidents (one in
Toronto, one in Arizona). No one’s disputing the need to upgrade a system that
was built in the last century, but the notion that a pod of spotty-faced
brochachos can swarm in, survey a complex amalgamation of dependencies programmed
in COBOL for mainframes and hawk up a “solution” in a week is risible.
Especially ones from SpaceX, a company whose rocket
launches more often end up in a fireball than orbit.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of federal workers in dozens
of agencies across the country (including—kaching—the FAA!) have received termination notices via the
electronic equivalent of scratchings on a cocktail napkin. You’re out, turn in
your badge and laptop, take your crap; you have an hour. (No, I am not making
that last bit up.) No further information, no process. No legality, actually.
This means that the work these people were doing was halted
suddenly, little to no chance of a handoff, so…there it sits. If they were managing
a contract or responding to a citizen’s inquiry, well, obviously the Muskrats
decided that they were superfluous to requirements so all the contractor or the
citizen will get is bounced emails and a phone that rings but is never
answered.
Yay.
So today’s earworm is “Which Side Are You On?”, a union
song written in 1931 by Florence Reece, activist wife of a United Mine Workers
organizer in Harlan County, Ky. The union was locked in a fight against mine
owners, who used every tool in their box, including intimidation by the local
sheriff. After her home was raided by deputies one night looking for her
husband, Reece sat down and wrote this, which has been a union anthem ever
since.
You can find plenty of recordings of Pete Seeger, God rest
him, singing this, quite militant versions. But I’m giving you Natalie
Merchant, because it’s more reflective. This is a time for everyone in this
country to decide which side to take. Think about it.
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”.
