Weak links

As you know, the big news this week is that what passes for the best and brightest in our kakistocracy not only discussed operational plans for the US military to attack Houthi targets in Yemen a couple of weeks ago over the unclassified and insecure Signal platform, but they included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in the group chat, thus providing their very own really big security breach.

This prompted Signal's founder (and former Twitter head of cybersecurity) to tweet:

In the 1940s, the Allies kept operational details of Operation Overlord secret for 18 months, thus surprising the hell out of the Germans with the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944. But the vice president, national security adviser, secretaries of defense and state, White House chief of staff and CIA director happily blurbled and emojii’d their way through the attack planning and execution process for several days without checking who was on the group chat list.

Also—one of the members was actually in Moscow for part of this time, where we can be assured that his devices were monitored and the unsecured chat was greatly appreciated.

The rest of the week was them coming up with a whole flock of (different) lies (including while testifying before Congress) about what happened and elected Republicans assuring us that it’s a big nothingburger, happens all the time, what about her emails!

Well—this being the case, the only earworm we can have today is “Chain of Fools”, and who else to sing it but Aretha.

That women knew her fools.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Sweet

Well, okay—yesterday I was in the local Lotte market (which serves Asian and Latino customers) looking for a specific tea, and I came across a new word.

Turns out that jaggery is a type of cane sugar popular in South and Southeast Asia.

Now I’ll have to go back and see what it looks like on the hoof.

(Lotte didn't have the tea, despite the tea company's claim on their website.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Chocolate science

Last month I was entranced by the story of an opossum in Nebraska that ate an entire Costco cake that homeowners had put out on their deck because the refrigerator was too full to accommodate it while the family was preparing and eating a meal.

The Doggett family found that the female opossum had pulled the plastic cover off a Tuxedo chocolate mousse cake and eaten the whole thing, leaving only a trail of chocolate footprints from the rail to the deck furniture where it had curled up to recover. Concerned about its condition—it was panting and in distress—they called the local Humane Society, who sent an animal control unit out; they collected the marsupial and took her to a vet.

Post-checkup, the opossum—oh, why don’t we just call her Tracy—was moved to wildlife rehab, where she received chelation therapy to counteract her overindulgence. As with dogs, chocolate is thought to be toxic to opossums, but the belief has never been put to the test by observing one eating a cake larger than she is before.

Photo by Nebraska Wildlife Rehab

Now, naturally I heard this story first on social media, where the preponderance of users immediately identified with Tracy’s binge. Look—we’ve all been there, babe. Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

I also learned that Tracy chose well—very high marks all around for the Costco Tuxedo cake. Very high.

So, on my next run to top up my supply of butter and chicken breasts, I picked up one of them. Just in the spirit of scientific inquiry, you understand.

Let me just say: my hat’s off to Tracy. That girl’s got game. My first slice—maybe 1.25” thick—about laid me low. I mean—it’s mousse and sponge cake, covered in ganache, but damn is it rich. It took me 10 days to finish that thing.

If that marsupial can survive chugging the entire cake in one sitting, she’s got some serious gastric superpowers.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Dorian Gray and 100% OPSEC

So, Sunday we learned—in a lengthy screed on his inaptly named social media platform—that the Kleptocrat is extremely unhappy with a portrait of him that Colorado has hanging in the state capitol gallery. Evidently many imaginary people are angry about how (no doubt coming to him with tears in their big-man eyes to complain) awful it is. And he wants the (Democratic) governor to take it down because it offends his artistic sensibilities!

Not sure why this has only now come to the attention of the man with the nuclear codes; according to a story in Time, the portrait has been in situ since 2019, and was donated by Republicans. (I’m not posting it in my blog, but if you want to see it, here it is.)

Also—you’d think he would have bigger things on his mind than a portrait in a state that didn’t vote for him.

But you’d be wrong.

And then yesterday, we learned that before the United States struck several Houthi targets in Yemen earlier this month, national security officials not only initiated the plans over Signal, an encrypted but still not secure chat platform, but included Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, in their discussion.

Those involved in the chat included Michael Waltz, national security adviser (who initiated it); VP J.D. Vance; Director of Central Intelligence John Ratcliffe; Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense; White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; discount Goebbels Stephen Miller; and Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence.

In Goldberg’s account, when he was first invited to the group chat, he considered the possibility that it was some kind of influence operation; both foreign and domestic actors have interests in catching journalists in compromising situations. So he just stood by and observed. Throughout his account, he refers to each participant with their name in quotation marks, because their purported identity could not be confirmed.

“Vance” appeared to be the only member reluctant to start bombing; his concern seems to have revolved around getting “messaging” in place. Americans don’t know Houthis from a hole in the ground, so we’d need to be spun on why our forces are doing it. Also—as “Miller” chimed in, really, the Houthi threat to international shipping in the Suez region affects Europeans more than the US, so if we’re going to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, what do we get from it? We need that quid for that quo.

(Not his precise words, but we all know that the Kleptocrat is transactional and he has to get some vig off of everything.)

Goldberg finally believed what he was seeing on 15 March, when at 1145 EDT Waltz announced that the attacks would commence in two hours. And then, on the dot, they happened. He removed himself from the chat, which would have generated a notification to Waltz, but no one reached out to ask him why he left or, indeed, who he was.

Yesterday he sent emails to several of the participants asking for comments. He got a couple of fluffers from a Vance spokes and someone repping the National Security Council. Read the article—it will raise the hair on the back of your neck.

Not only were the highest NATSEC officials in the country (including the vice president) plotting military operations over an unclassified platform (evidently the government has bespoke systems for this purpose—well, they did before Elno and his DOGiEs appeared on the scene), but they also (presumably inadvertently) included a reporter on their group chat. High schoolers planning a TP party could do better at security.

How do we know that Waltz didn’t include SVR (Russian foreign security) agents on that Signal group?

Aside from Ratcliffe and Gabbard, I mean.

Naturally, Klepto replied to a question yesterday afternoon about the massive security breach, went all Sergeant Schultz. Really: "I know nothing about it." 

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Like that presidential portrait.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: tulips in the air

The builders who are converting five acres of parkland (the only green space in the 11-mile corridor cutting through the People’s Republic to Herndon) into 82 $1M+ townhouses left the construction gate open all weekend, so I walked through the site.

Thus I was able to enjoy the tulip trees at peak bloom, and for that I am grateful.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

My love account

In honor of United States’ egg woes—macro and micro—our earworm for today is “I’m Puttin’ All My Eggs in One Basket”, with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

No eggs for you!

Evidently that part of the kakistocracy that is not subsumed in kowtowing to the Muskrat and his DOGiEs’ campaign to dismantle government or unconstitutionally engaging in rounding up and expatriating people without any due process has been begging European countries for eggs.

No—I am not making this up. As of time of writing, the kleptocrat has asked Denmark, Finland, Germany and Lithuania if they would very kindly give (or possibly sell) us eggs, since they haven’t completely bollocksed up their poultry farming.

And—all have declined to help us out. (As an English friend of mine said: that's them off the Christmas card list, then!)

This guy inherited a strong economy and the greatest power in the world. All through his campaign, he denied both of these facts and promised to “restore” both wealth and power “on day one”. (That was also the day he would be a dictator.)

Now we’re begging Lithuania for any spare cackleberries they might have lying around.

(BTW: this Reddit thread from Tuesday just cracked me up.)

 What are the odds that within two weeks he’ll send in the 82^nd Airborne to some EU country to “liberate” crates of eggs for distribution in Red states?

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Forgettable

Back some 40 years ago, a guy in my American Sign Language class raved about Häagen-Dazs ice cream; I mean he was having a transcendental experience just telling our classmates how wonderful it was.

(Our class was held in a building about a block away from the HD shop that had only recently opened in Pasadena, across from the Bullocks store, RIP.)

Since then, I must have had it, but I don’t recall.

And then last week I bought a pint of what they’re pleased to call coffee ice cream (for which I’m thinking I paid nearly $5):

I have to report that this is the most beige, most tasteless ice cream I have ever had in my life. This includes vanilla ice milk.

I mean—just look at this:

It’s as colorless as it is flavorless.

(And it took me a week to finish off a pint.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

No eggsateration

I guess the good news here is that the local Wegmans has eggs.

The bad news is that customers are limited to 10 cartons per.

Meaning—the total number of eggs you can get on one trip through the check-out line is 120.

(This, of course, doesn’t preclude people doing what my mom used to do when there were limits on how many sale items one customer could by: she’d send all her children through different lanes [this was when supermarkets had more than one staffed lane open at a time] with the max allowed and just the right amount of money to buy them. Until Safeway wised up and put a minimum age requirement on people buying cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup for $0.10 each. Probably unconstitutional, but it worked.)

This makes me wonder: who could actually use 120 eggs? Where would they even store 10 cartons of eggs?

(Unless they’re buying for a middle school. Or maybe a neighborhood co-op.)

But the other bad news is that these eggs are $8.59 per dozen. That means (with tax—yes, Virginia taxes groceries), you’d be forking out $94.49 for that max allowed, so your mom better be giving you a Benjamin to hand over to the one staffed cashier at Wegmans.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: the Irish

Hmm? What’s that you say? Oh, right—Saint Patrick’s Day? Why, so it is.

It’s my take that “celebrating” the day is primarily a function of the Irish in America, who had huge chips on their shoulders what with being second-class citizens here. (They were not seen as particularly good for property values, particularly after the mass immigration following the Great Famine of the 1840s.) So they were putting on a swagger to flip the WASPS the bird.

Back in Ireland—eh, not so much. Yes, it was made a public holiday in 1903 as part of the whole idea of public (“bank”) holidays in the UK. But shortly afterward, another law was enacted that closed all drinking establishments for the day. (That stayed in effect until the 1970s.) So—not really so jolly.

(In the 1990s the Irish kind of woke up to the notion that Americans of all backgrounds used 17^th March as a jumping-off point for huge drink fests—including green beer in copious quantities. So in 1996 the government started “Saint Patrick’s Festival” to showcase the country and its industries. The next year it was a three-day event, kind of like your average Polish wedding.)

Okay, now that I’ve got that background out of the way, on to the Gratitude part of this Monday. I’ve always loved those right-brained, sweet-talking, ballad-singing, beauty-loving, cynically-inclined Irish, both here and in the old country. Especially after working in various areas of the tech industry for 30 years, where my right-brained, clear-talking, synapse-skipping cynical inclination stuck out like a lighthouse in a sea of tee-shirted and flip-flopped network engineers and software developers.

The Irish give me comfort and hope, reminding me that being this different is only a problem if you let the surprisingly cookie-cutter narrow-mindedness of the people in the Valley they call Silicon (who consider themselves the very vortex of innovative thinking and yet seem to have been implanted with virtual blinkers the instant they set up their first incubator) impose their values on you.

Yeah—Irish history is not a placid sail through drifts of rose petals. Hard, bloody, vicious even, with a lot of beat downs. And the fat lady has not yet appeared on the stage; so there’s a ways to go. But still they rise. Ya gotta love that.

In the past I’ve given you some music from Ireland, and; of course, Yeats. Feel free to reprise the pleasure; no charge. Even a small treatise on whiskey in Ireland.

So this time around I’ll just share a few photos from my trips there.

Kilmainham Gaol was built in 1796. It was intended to be a model of new prison management philosophies; but two years later there was a rebellion, and the building had to take on a slew of political prisoners, so that whole enlightenment thing pretty much went out the window.

It’s perhaps best known for holding 15 leaders of the Irish Uprising after the British suppressed it in April 1916. They were all executed in the courtyard by firing squad. One, Joseph Connolly, had been so badly wounded in the fighting that the Brits had to sit him in a chair for his execution; he couldn’t stand. It’s an ugly place, that courtyard, and the Irish pretty much keep it that way as a reminder.

I was taken by one of the doors—long since bolted shut—in that courtyard, and this is what I shot.

Up in Ulster, the first colony of Britain, and the last one standing, there’s a three-story high wall between the sectarian neighborhoods of Belfast. The community has used art as a means to mitigate it’s ugliness. There’s one section open to the public for comment, and you’ll notice that in 2019 the Irish had well got the Kleptocrat’s measure. Stevie, my tour guide, gave me a pen, and I added a line from Robert Frost: “Something there is that doesn't love a wall.”

But then, we’ll return to the whole drinking aspect mentioned earlier. Here’s a pub in Dublin, early afternoon. 

This is how you should drink, not crammed up against 1673 people you don’t know, all wearing green and yelling “begorrah” while slurping down green beer.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu