Holy sound

Since we in the United States are rounding the corner on Thanksgiving, I’m giving you “Gratitude”, by Earth, Wind & Fire, as today’s earworm.

’Nuff said.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Historic FAFO

Eighty years ago today, the International Military Tribunal convened in the nearly destroyed city of Nuremberg. Its purpose was to hold accountable the (surviving) leaders of Germany for the World War II horrors that went well beyond the previously held norms of warfare. It was the first and most groundbreaking of many war crimes trials in Europe. (Which continued for decades; the last significant trial of a Nazi was held in 2015, when SS junior squad leader at Auschwitz Oskar Gröning was convicted of accessory to murder in 300,000 cases; he died before serving his sentence. In 2016, SS guard at Auschwitz Reinhold Hanning was convicted of accessory to murder; he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. As of 2024, there were still cases pending.) The thinking at Nuremberg, though, was that for crimes of such a scope as the Nazis perpetrated, it would not suffice to nail a few low-ranking perpetrators; those responsible for designing the criminal strategies and for giving the orders needed to be held accountable.

There was a bit of “we have to learn from our mistakes in 1918” in the very notion of the proceedings. (That also contributed to the decision three years before that nothing short of unconditional surrender by Axis powers would end the fighting. No bargaining, no negotiating, no weaseling—all or nothing.) There was also a good deal of, oh, differences of opinion on how to handle the big Nazis. Stalin wanted them all shot out of hand (maybe a quick run past a tribunal on the way to the scaffold), and Churchill was of a similar mind. (For context, the Soviet Union suffered more than 20 million deaths—military and civilian—between 1941 and 1945, and Britain would take nearly a decade to crawl out from the destruction.) FDR and Truman held out for legitimate trials, with defense attorneys and a judicial panel following legal standards. The French nodded their heads.

One of the issues presenting itself in this very notion of a tribunal was, in fact, what legal standards do you follow? There are international rules of war (yes—there are!), but the Nazis blew past them when they invaded the USSR and was fairly loose in following them in Western Europe. The question arose: what constitutes a crime that stands out in the mechanized destruction of that war, and what constitutes a crime for people who kept their hands remarkably clean because of their distance and their altitude in the organization?

Eventually the Allies settled on four charges for the head Nazis:

Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity
Crimes against peace (planning, initiating and executing a war of aggression)
War crimes (fairly established internationally: killing civilians, mistreating POWs, deportation*)
Crimes against humanity (political, racial and religious persecution of civilians; genocide)

*Oh—hey!

The conspiracy charge was where they got some of the defendants who had been the farthest away from actual gunpowder and the slave labor.

There was a lot of pushback in Germany—and other places—that this would be a show trial, “victors’ justice”, sauce for the goose that the ganders would never taste. (Basically—whataboutism writ large.) But the Allies carried on. They laid out procedural rules, gave the defendants attorneys, assigned prosecutors and empaneled a bench of judges from the four major powers. They had to accommodate three systems of jurisprudence (Anglo-Saxon, French, Russian), build out a courtroom, ensure simultaneous translation of all activities, tend to the health of the 23 defendants present (Martin Bormann was tried in absentia), keep the lights on and continuously negotiate the gigantic egos of most of the participants, on both sides of the dock for nearly a year.

At the end of the trial, 19 Nazi leaders were found guilty of one or more of the charges and 12 received death by hanging sentences. Wilhelm Keitel demanded a firing squad as more befitting his military service, but it was denied. Turns out if you’re sentenced for a criminal conviction, your crime trumps any previous condition. Hermann Göring (who also demanded a firing squad) cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide the night before execution.

Of the defendants sentenced to prison terms, only Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess served out their full terms (the former 20 years, the latter life, until his suicide in 1987). Speer whined for the rest of his life.

The IMT of 1945-46 was the precursor of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. I concede that the world’s attempts to hold the worst criminals in the world accountable have fallen short. And I acknowledge that one of the stumbling blocks arises from the United States being really uneasy about applying the term “war criminal” to actions we take in our interests. (Yes, we should have held a state funeral for irony long ago.) Dick Cheney and George W. Bush should have been in the dock alongside Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, and the Kleptocrat’s ass should have been there since his drone strikes in Yemen and Syria in his first term. Now he’s just taking the piss, thanks to the Roberts SCOTUS’ immunity ruling.) But—like 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean—it’s a start, and we should build on it.

But here’s an interesting thing, when I searched on the Nuremberg trial (using Duck Duck Go, because I’ve had it with Google), this was at the top of the results.

So—we have a long, long way to go.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Java on the run

Okay, ordinarily I’d present this vanity plate in a cluster of them.

But this SUV had more than just the personalized license. (Which is not immediately clear to me. Does JR have a JD, and is he the third Virginia car owner to do so? Do JD and JR have three offspring? I do not know.) First there was the tailgating warning.

But there was also this on one of the side windows:

Are they a coffee delivery service? Does the driver always have coffee on hand? Is the car fitted out to make coffee?

They’re telling me something, but I’ll be blowed if I know what it is.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Many stories

Okay, one of my neighbor families is preparing to move, after living in the cluster since the 70s. So, as you might imagine, there are things to be cleared out.

All kinds of things, including:

I haven’t yet had an opportunity to ask about this one.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

Gratitude Monday: All her glory

After a really slow start, I was gratified a few weeks ago to see that Nature was getting her Autumn on.

But it turns out, she was only just starting.

I’m so grateful for the brilliant golds and scarlets of the past two weeks. I cannot look at any of it without joy filling my being.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Everybody knows

Today’s earworm is some advice from Nina Simone for the Democratic party. The Dems weren’t her specific target when she wrote it in 1964—in an hour of concentrated fury. It was her response to the murders in Mississippi of Emmett Till (lynching), Medgar Evers (shot in the back), and the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four Black girls.

I’m just going to let Nina Tell her own story.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Working hard

There were three or four of these crates left out for trash pickup on Monday. I thought the slogan was…interesting.

So I found their website. Um.

This is their holiday offering.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Oof!

Some people were having a bad morning last Friday.

At first I thought it was just the SUV that had rammed the curb. Then I realized the Mini was involved.

And then I saw the two cars that were being towed already.

This morning I saw the SUV. Didn't look too bad, but probably thousands in repairs.

.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Remembrance

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, an armistice went into effect between the armed forces of the Central Powers and those of the Allied Nations. And thus ended, not with a bang but a whimper, the worst systematic slaughter the world had seen up until that time.

From August 1914 until November 1918 around 8.5 million soldiers of the various armies and navies were killed, and another 21 million wounded. Maybe six million civilians were killed and I don’t have figures for further collateral damage.

I’m also not counting the death toll from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, or the Russian Civil War, both of which are related to the conflagration.

World War I was one of those appalling confluences of technology, politics, idiocy and willful refusal by those in positions of power to view the world as it really was and not as they expected or wanted it to be. Among the worst offenders were the military commanders, the generals, the field marshals, the planners and the strategists.

What they essentially ignored was the fact that the invention and implementation of the machine gun gave the tactical advantage to the defensive, and that the frontal charge, even by mobile troops like cavalry, simply couldn’t work against entrenched forces with this new technology.

Every time I revisit this war, in books, in film or TV or on the battlefields, I’m poleaxed all over again at the utter blindness and criminal stubbornness of the professionals whose business it was to send men into battle for a purpose (to win battles, gain territory, destroy enemy armies, ,bring about some change). Because again and again they proved Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

And, frankly, it’s not like they didn’t see it coming. There were European military observers at many of the battles of the US War Between the States, when the prototypical use of entrenchments and rapid fire indicated things to come. And at the battle of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, western military observers practically outnumbered the combatants and saw first-hand what happens when infantry charges machine gun emplacements. (Among the observers were Ian Hamilton, later to command the British debacle at Gallipoli; John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force; and Douglas MacArthur. Don’t get me started on MacArthur.)

The First World War is a nightmare of pitched battles and wholesale slaughter, repeated again and again throughout a four-year night. It exhausted nations, natural resources, gene pools and national political and moral fiber. It left a legacy of open wounds, disillusion, broken dreams and broken faith, and I don’t think we’ve fully recovered from it 92 years on.

The problem is, in my view, that we haven’t really learned from it, although we’ve been paying for it all along. Old men were too traumatized by 1914-18 to step up to the plate in 1933 in Manchuria or 1938 in Munich to scotch the snake (which by then was armed with 20 years of improved weaponry, like tanks and tactical fighter-bombers; as well as ideologies that would have wilted the moustaches of Wilhelm II or Franz Josef I). Willfully blind to the realities of Stalin’s rule, western leaders gave away the farm in Eastern Europe, and then gathered to their bosom surviving Nazis to help fight the Cold War. (And, 80 years beyond that, now we have technologies including satellite navigation, drones, handheld missile launchers, dirty bombs, assault rifles and mass communications undreamt of 100 years ago. And nuclear devices.)

We've even got bona fide Nazis guiding policies in our own government.

And then there’s the situation in the Middle East. All the result of or exacerbated by that Great War, and all living on beyond the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.

You notice I’m short on any answers to these situations. Me—I start by remembering.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: the start

Today I’m grateful for the spectacular results of last Tuesday’s elections. Republicans lost ground in every state, and often by insultingly large margins.

Here in the Old Dominion, Democrats took the three statewide offices (governor, lieutenant governor & attorney general), as well as a large gain in the legislature. I’m really hoping they can undo a lot of the damage the current (Republican) regime caused in the past four years. County elections, too, saw Republicans unseated, even in places where the incumbent thought his ass was thoroughly planted in office.

You will know about the New York City mayoral race. Despite billionaires contributing $40M to PACs supporting Andrew Cuomo, NY Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani absolutely danced to victory, with more than a million votes. Cuomo and a flock of other wealthy soreheads have sworn they’re going to leave the city (and the state, apparently) because “communism” and “taxes”.

They really know how to threaten people with a good time.

In addition to whatever benefits electing people to office high and low who aren’t ravening ideologues may have, Tuesday pissed off the Kleptocrat royally. The old guy spent so much energy spluttering at the results that he plumb wore himself out and slept through most of his public meetings on Thursday and Friday. I imagine there was a severe ketchup shortage in the White House dining room.

We are not out of the woods. The administration still had time to fight multiple court orders to release SNAP funds that more than 40 million Americans need to provide food for themselves and their families. ICE, Border Patrol and local LEOs are keeping up their Stasi raids on American neighborhoods, violently ripping individuals from their homes, workplaces and autos and stashing them in secret confinement. SECDEF Kegsbreath announced that we’re “facing a 1939 moment” and therefore we are no longer in peace, but on a war footing. (Not clear to me whether they’re going to run a false-flag Gleiwitz incident, maybe in Venezuela; or Greenland; or Canada.) And the Speaker of the House is still keeping members from the Capitol to avoid swearing in the duly elected Adelita Grijalva, who will cast the deciding vote to release the Epstein files. Li’l Moses still knows and sees nothing and the House has been in recess since the end of September. Oh—and the government is shut down because the Republicans crammed provisions to cut Medicaid and ACA subsidies from their “clean” budget bill, and Democrats are not of a mind to make Americans choose between food and healthcare. The shutdown has exacerbated the screwed-up air traffic control system, which was one of the targets of the DOGiEs for force reduction earlier this year, so that the administration announced this week that flights in and out of the 40 busiest airports in the country will be reduced. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (an “alpha male” absolutely terrified of getting on public transport) added this weekend that the situation is dire and will affect travel for the Thanksgiving holiday later this month.

So—yeah, we have miles to go before we sleep. But the gigantic, neon two fingers up to everything these bastards stand for gives me hope. And it makes me grateful.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu