An anti-Hitler foxtrot – shared for no particular reason
Here is Irving Berlin's "When That Man Is Dead and Gone" (1941) performed by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra with Tex Beneke and The Modernaires. The sound quality is good, especially coming from an old 78. Source: Internet Archive.
Scans of the sheet music are available in the Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University.
Donald Dump's bloodlust will cost many more lives and weaken the country far beyond what he's already accomplished in the past fourteen months. Whether he'll learn anything from his mistakes is doubtful, and what his hangers-on conclude is anybody's guess.
Vietnam should have taught us a bit of healthy humility, but instead our apparent reticence to use military force after the fall of Saigon came to be framed as a pathology, dubbed Vietnam syndrome. After the successful liberation of Kuwait in 1991, George H. W. Bush even proudly asserted, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
His son, George W. Bush, leveraged the return of a martial ethos to U.S. politics for even more extensive military interventions. Still grappling with the trauma of the second Bush's wars, the United States now has to come to terms with the unhinged bellicosity of an ignorant Donald Dump and his cabinet of clowns. Dump & Co. will grow richer from the undertaking, while the rest of us bear its human and material costs.
This report is devastating: Hannah Allam, "Trump DoD Axed a Program Meant to Limit Civilian Casualties", Propublica, March 10, 2026.
Our leaders are looking more and more like war criminals. So are the legislators who've been shirking their oversight responsibilities.
Allam writes:
Beyond the moral considerations … civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls "insurgent math": For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
SecDef and POTUS are too ignorant to grasp such things. They're more concerned with cultivating their public personas as manly Hollywoodesque action heroes. That's what they want to see in their mirrors, at any rate, but all I see are malicious buffoons.
This evening Jan Böhmermann called Hegseth the "U.S. minister for fragile masculinity" on his German satirical show ZDF Magazin Royale.
The spring sky is full of snow.
Seen at the No Kings protest today:
IMPEACH THIS FAUX-KING MORON!
Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.
– Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Random House, 2010), chap. 6.
When I see the destruction and the consequences of the occupation, I still naively think every time: 'It shouldn't be like this.' Every time it feels that Russian shells hit the building of reality itself and cracks run along its fragile walls, and the world now lives according to the cruel logic of a terrible dream, from which it is impossible to wake up.
– Oleksandr Mykhed, The Language of War (Allen Lane, 2024), "Explosion of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella."