The name of the game

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”.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

 

Economic update

During my sortie to IKEA on Tuesday, I noticed a couple of things.

The breakfast in their cafeteria that used to be $.99 15 years ago (and may have gone up to $1.99 five years ago, which was probably the last time I was there) is now $2.49.

But their bacon is really amazing, so it’s absolutely worth it.

And the 100-pack of tea lights, which used to be $2.49, is now $4.99. Even so, that's only $.05 per light, so they’re still the best bargain in candles around.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Retail therapy

I went to IKEA yesterday:

Yes, that was my entire purchase: $75 worth of candles. I like dinner by candlelight.

May be time to install smoke detectors, tho.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

When pigs fly

Okay, I know this video is shot through the screen, so it may not be immediately clear to you what you’re seeing.

But what you’re seeing is a wren, eating bacon.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: walking the walk

You may be aware that the environs of the District They Call Columbia had some Weather last month. Big drop of snow and then sub-freezing temperatures for more than 10 days. Weather forecast was so bad that the incoming leader of the free world moved the inauguration ceremony into the Capitol.

(Haha—no. The Kleptocrat was afraid of high winds blowing up his hair helmet. And, also, he knew that the attendance numbers would be even lower than in 2017. He was basically hiding.)

Anyway, the result for me was that, in addition to my car being literally frozen so I couldn’t even jump the battery, my walking was curtailed due to snow and ice on sidewalks and the W&OD. About Wednesday of last week, I could finally walk about half my usual distance by sticking to the bike lane in the street, but couldn’t go off-street safely until Saturday, after it rained all day Friday.

Man—did it ever feel so good to get out the past two days. Weather’s still bizarre: it was 44F on Saturday when I went out and 23F yesterday. But clear and windless, so excellent walking weather. Both days I had more energy throughout the day, and a better mood. Yay, endorphins! 

And that’s my gratitude for today: being able to rack up the steps.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Mis versos del alma

Great. The Kleptocrat has announced plans to build a “migrant operations center” at Guantánamo Bay, “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs identified by the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.”

I have thoughts.

He's building a concentration camp to hold up to 30,000 people his goons identify as “criminal aliens”, in the most hidden and inaccessible place the US controls. The current facility at Gitmo maxes out at 800, and there are currently about 100 prisoners—uh, “detainees”, whatever—there. Imagine what it will take to expand that to 30,000. Either he’s thinking of letting the construction contract to his buddies, or he’s expecting to use slave labor to get the job done. ¿Por qué no los dos?

This choice is not accidental. Guantánamo is the 21^st Century analogue of Poland, which was where the Nazis located their six Todeslager—the killing centers of Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Oh, yeah—they built “concentration camps” in Germany and occupied western countries, but for the real work of genocide, they put the facilities far from the Vaterland, so Germans wouldn’t smell the smoke coming from the crematories.

Even people in South Dakota and Wyoming might object to that sort of thing, job prospects in prison management notwithstanding. Not in theory, you understand; just NIMBY.

To put the scale of this “detention center” into perspective: 30,000 is roughly the population of Rahway, N.J.; Gloucester, Mass., Winter Park, Fla.; Juneau, Alaska; Bangor, Maine; Laramie, Wyo.; or East Palo Alto, Calif. It’s the undergraduate student body of the University of Southern California, Clemson University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst or the University of Iowa. Pulling something like that out of the Kleptocrat’s ass because it’s the best way to hide crimes against humanity—well, what could possibly go wrong with that process?

We started down this path of lawlessness in the pursuit of geopolitics when George W. Bush announced the Great War on Terror and repurposed the naval station to imprison men scooped up in raids all over the Middle East and West Asia—often just on the say-so of others who had scores to settle. (Much the way people ended up in Dachau or Sachsenhausen on being denounced by their neighbors.) And then held them in prison without trial for years. Our hands are not clean. But man—we’re just diving face first into the abattoir with this insanity.

Since the White House has declared that shoplifting $100 in merchandise constitutes major crime if you aren’t White (basically), this means that people with anything less than a US passport in documentation can be swept up and jailed without due process, because migration. (It was the first bill he signed in office, the so-called Lakan Riley Act.) And those people could end up in Guantánamo. Because once he’s built the facility, he has to justify it by filling it.

Well, but it’s Friday, innit? So our earworm for today is “Guantanamera”, a folk song based on a poem by 19^th-Century Cuban poet, nationalist and philosopher José Martí. The poem is about a girl from Guantánamo, but she’s a proxy for his love of Cuba. He would be appalled by these plans.

Let’s hear Cuban artist Celia Cruz singing it.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Oh, poop

People—what the almighty hell is wrong with you?

I see this all the time on the W&OD train; dog walkers think their civic responsibility is met if they bag their animal’s poop. No need to carry it to a trash bin.

But when you’re within 20 yards of a bin? Explain this to me. Now.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

H2 O my

So, this happened yesterday:

Only (and I know you're be amazed by this):

And these replies were pure gold:

God, but we are well and truly fucked.

Medical wonder

Yesterday I had occasion to have a CT abdominal scan. The prep for that required that I ingest 1.5 bottles of what is pleased to call itself a barium smoothie.

Let me just say that it’s not so much a “smoothie” as a “slimy”.

The scan itself lasted less that 15 minutes, from being called to the waiting room to exit. That was a breeze.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

Gratitude Monday: mobility

Three things you need to know: I am from LA, a place where without access to a motor vehicle, you are completely dead in the water. Public transportation was a joke when I was growing up and you needed a car to accomplish the basics—get to work, buy groceries, get to swimming lessons at the Y. I walked to school, K-12; that was the only thing that was walkable in my youth.

The second thing: I drive a 2001 Saab. It only has 115K miles on it, so I rightfully expect to get another 136K before I need to think about replacing it. The battery is about two years old, but I don’t put a lot of miles per year on it.

Third: There was snow/wintery mix on the 17^th, and up until Saturday, we’ve had many days of temperatures that didn’t rise above 20F; they went down to single digits a couple of nights.

I had no reason to drive on the MLK weekend, but I was going to go out to breakfast with a friend on the holiday. She couldn’t get out of her cluster parking lot because it was an icy hill, and when I went out to start to car, the battery was completely dead.

Well, I ordered one of those portable battery chargers, because I knew once I got the car started, it would be okay. It arrived on Tuesday, but when I went out to connect it, I found that the snow on my car had turned to ice, and the hood was frozen to the frame. I couldn’t get it open.

For a couple of days, I chipped away at the ice, but with temps in the 20s, I was getting no help from nature. And I needed milk. Then I remembered—my neighbors were both in Seattle, and he’d left me the key to Das Auto. He’d already asked me the week before if I’d started the car, and was clearly disappointed when I said I hadn’t, so I thought he wouldn’t mind if I drove it to Trader Joe’s.

Das Auto started straight away. It took a while to scrape off the windshield and rear window (it’s an SUV), but while I was doing that, the driver’s seat was heating up. Let me tell you—the most amazing invention of the 20^th Century is not the polio vaccine or rocket engines, it’s heated car seats. Streets in the People’s Republic were clear and I made it to TJ and back without incident on Wednesday. And I drove it the next day to pick up something I needed for a medical appointment today. The Saab was still frozen shut.

Thursday afternoon, I was sitting at my desk and saw my neighbor waving at me through the front window. Back from Seattle. I handed over the key straight away; he told me to feel free any time to come down and sit in the heated seat. He also said we could try hot water on Friday to free the hood.

Well, Friday morning I went out and was ecstatic to feel the hood pop up when I pulled the latch. And that battery charger worked a treat. I got all the icy scraped from my windows and drove around town. Went to the library, bought bleach and tea—and felt the most wonderful relief and freedom. Selkie doesn’t have heated seats, but I wasn’t worried about some yahoo ploughing into me while driving someone else’s car.

If you are not a Southern Californian, you may not fully grasp what a difference this made to me. It was as though the sun had come out; hope returned to my life.

So my gratitude today is for having my car fully operational again, but also for being able to use my neighbor’s car in a pinch.

And, of course, for the heated seat.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu