Finding The Hope In Mass Murder, Plus

Please rise for your NEW national anthem, plus (other) music

Sep 07, 2025

Cemetery in Hiezu, Tottori, Japan with Mt Daisen in background (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

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Finding The Hope In Mass Murder

This is in relation to the regime, in the person of Whisky Pete and probably Trump, ordering a deadly assault on what looks more and more to have been a boatload of migrants heading somewhere other than the U.S., and which looks more and more to international law experts as having been a war crime or crime against humanity or some such.

And which incidentally would have been such, the experts say, even if these had been gang members headed for the US with a boatload of fentanyl, because drug smuggling isn’t a death penalty offense, and none of the rules of war, which is what the regime say we’re in, were observed anyway.

Whoever actually murdered the people on the boat, whoever gave the local order and whoever pushed the button—these people have to be looking askance at the regime’s twisty-turny, floundering efforts to find a legal justification for the act. Because they’re supposed to have refused it if it was an illegal order, and it can’t have escaped anybody that everybody in a more senior position has either immunity from consequences for damn near anything done in office (Trump per John Roberts) or the guarantee of a presidential pardon if they stay on Trump’s good side.

Among Whisky Pete’s first orders of business was the purge of senior military officials who were seen as not white enough and not complaisant enough, followed by a mass purge of experienced military lawyers. The crew want to know that when they demand something illegal of the military, they’ll get it, preferably with some traditional legal cover but if not, whatever. That didn’t happen during the practice regime, or at least not this noisily and not in a way that previous presidents hadn’t gotten away with.

(If all the living ones got together and one of them asked “who among us has not blown up a bunch of people without legal justification,” nobody would raise their hand.)

But now it has, and the best summary of the official regime position is probably JD Vance’s response on the late Twitter to someone who said, in reaction to his clarion call for similar murders, “that was a war crime.”

“I don’t give a shit what you call it,” said JD.

Authoritarian regimes often have an uneasy relationship with their militaries, even when the regime is run by the military. And often enough it’s not the flag officers who give the leaders sleepless nights, but the younger and less predictable officers in the next tier down—your colonels and majors and the like, who are in direct command of the personnel doing the actual killing, and who control more or less all the weapons.

A regime can take pains to keep any of those officers from building any kind of power base that might threaten the regime they’re supposed to be keeping in power, but that’s usually to the detriment of the military’s other function, the war-fighting part.

Anyway, what I’m hoping is that these lower-level career officers with their necks maybe literally on the line may be seriously examining their options with respect to following illegal orders and perhaps with respect to other, less straightforward matters. This could make a real difference when they’re occupying our cities.

That’s what I’m hoping. I am hoping for fucking mutineers.

Please rise for your NEW national anthem

I ran across this while I was writing yesterday’s bit and hadn’t heard it before and really, I have no idea what it’s about but it’s perfect. It’s poetry. Will you all please rise for your national anthem.

“Never in a million fucking years did I ever think I’d ever see your fucking face again.”

Amen.

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Music

The rest of the music. A few years ago it seemed like every other tune on the algorithmic play list was some incarnation of Jack White. White Stripes, Raconteurs, solo, whatever. That lasted about six months(!). Lately it’s been Adrianne Lenker or her band, Big Thief. Which is fine; Jack White was fine too. I’m just remarking.

Liz Lawrence, Peanuts, “Yeti”