There are no neutrals here

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.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Killing 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 Shreibtischtächter) 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.

And that it’s only Volume I.

(Imma be a while.)

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Liquid assets

Okay—I found this in my refrigerator:

Can’t decide whether to make meringues and lemon curd or sell them and pay off my mortgage.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

Fine dining

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.

Wednesday morning, here’s what I saw:

(Yes, he got the bit under the snow, too.)

It made me so happy.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: looking for it

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.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

If you don't know by now

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.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

How it's going

When last we met, the Big Snow of February 2025 was just beginning to fall Tuesday afternoon. Here’s what it looked like yesterday morning.

Wasn’t too bad, really. Spent a brisk hour shoveling snow and clearing off my car. Then I was free to enjoy it.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Happy birthday, Abe!

The snow started around 1400 in the People’s Republic, but these guys were ready for it when I took my morning walk:

And here was the Nandina about one hour into the snow:

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Dripping

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.

Good times.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Working as designed

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.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu