From the brilliant The Three Conjectures by Richard Fernandez.
-1 X 10^9
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man’s forehead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Comments on this entry are closed.
Iran and it’s satellite subsidiaries pretty much need to be turned into ” glass topped” parking lots.
Sigh.
“Its.”
Thank you.
This is why Clausewitz wrote about friction. Seriously. OK, I’ll spell it out because 90% of boneheads won’t study Clausewitz in detail. If you’ve only ever studied Sun Tzu, you’re not even on the playing field. Friction in war prevents escalation to full violence, which otherwise is the trajectory of every war. It’s a fakking axiom, mate.
Quite right there is currently no political or religious controlling authority over all of Islam. This is why war objectives include “killing the enemy or destroying his will to fight.” There is no capitol, no Berlin, to seize.
America, according to the contemporary American Clausewitz, Victor Davis Hanson, wants a few things in every war she’s ever fought. She wants autonomy of control (Supreme Command over any alliance), victory of outcome (war outcomes vary from denial of the enemies’ intent all the way to unconditional surrender of the enemy), and brevity. We cannot get brevity this time. We did not get brevity in the French and Indian War (9 years), Seminole Wars (longest in our history until Af Fag Istan), Vietnam, and one of the most interminable wars we’ve fought, The Indian Campaigns (Wikipedia text says 1540–1924 [intermittent]). We don’t get unconditional surrender. We do get unity of command, if we’re smart enough to keep it. I’m looking at you, Obama.
That’s all for today. Class begins again tomorrow.
“Katy, bar the door.”
What does the ^ mean in the exponents? My math was 65 years ago, and I don’t recall any carot-ed exponents. We wrote ’em thusly: xᶻ.
I don’t understand, the people you are attacking in are in your own cities. You can;t nuke yourself, or Paris, or Stockholm.
scrivener:
Simple.
Start with appending “Except Mohammedanism” to that comment about “Freedom of Religion.”
And btw, your passive-aggressive pose of “I don’t understand” marks you as an adolescent Marxist to anybody over the age of 15. Just trying to help.
Hi BillH, it’s a common syntax in computer programming languages these days to express exponentiation as x^y, x to the y’th power. Computer languages do not normally parse non-symbolic character formatting. I suppose they could, if they parsed HTML, but there’s too much ambiguity involved in that for maintaining control over your program’s operations. Note: FORTRAN used “**” as the exponentiation operator.
scrivener, apropos of the pictures on the Web showing the 50’s and 60’s college gals of Afghanistan all dressed up with the latest and trendiest Euro and American fashions … no need to worry about that.
If we have crossed the Rubicon and glassed a few foreign cities tit-for-tat over depradations to ours, I would reckon that their co-religionists inhabiting our cities would suddenly find lots of very good reasons to look and act just like all the rest of us.
Which is to say, most people most of the time prefer to adapt and conform to the dominant culture.
Keep in mind that obliteration of the jihadist enemy (whose ‘atomic’ or bio weapon(s) may be supplied by the North Koreans) will be welcomed by the jihadists as it gives them a martyrdom pass into Paradise.
Since we should expect the jihadists to be dispersed among non-jihadist populations, both Muslim and non-Muslim, are we to respond by bombing ourselves into oblivion along with our enemies?
There are at least four ways to save ourselves.
1. Convert to Islam
2. Help or force, as necessary, all Muslims to leave Islam for non-murderous belief systems.
3. Develop accurate Lie and Truth detection methods/equipment and remotely test everyone constantly as a means of ferreting out the monsters. Cell tower-cell phone remote connectivity is the analogy to be adapted.
4. I’m working on a best of all approach. I urge you to do likewise. I suspect that #3 holds most promise, though it will have some serious negative consequences; we may be safest only when we think the truth!
He’s got ’em on the list — he’s got ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed — they’ll none of ’em be missed.
England is rapidly becoming an islamic puppet state, and they’ve never really liked us. France is not far behind, and they practically hate us. The NORKs, the Iranians, the Chinese, the Russians…the end game is approaching rather fast, and I expect things to speed up in the near future.
So, this entire post is based on the theory that the nukes of the west still work.
After 50 or so years of government maintenance, with no actual tests in that entire time.
With thanks, I think, to Derbyshire, who makes me look like an optimist.
Iran does not have, and never had, a Nucular, or Nuclear weapons program.
BillH, It’s FORTRAN.
“Iran does not have, and never had, a Nucular, or Nuclear weapons program.”
You forgot the /sarc tag.
Rob De Witt
Sigh.
“Its.”
Thank you.
Dang autocorrect on my phone.
Sigh.
This is, from this moment forward, an “Its / It’s” bitching and moaning free zone. Don’t make me stop the car, kids.
Generational Dynamics is a rather interesting site that keeps one updated on how the opposing sides are coalescing and slowly building allies in our next great war. He is quite familiar with Bannon and the fourth turning and how Muslims will be distributed on each side. Sunnis are not your friend.
Thanks John and Bob. Didn’t realize I was reading computer code in the post. Looked like plain text to me.
Suggestion: create a “Strong Horse Is Terrible” list.
This S.H.I.T. list would be declared to include any country that does not:
1. Renounce terrorism and eradicate it domestically.
2. Recognize the equality of women in all respects.
3. Permit the free practice of all religions including no religion at all.
Any attack on Americans or their allies anywhere in the world will be deemed to have originated from one or more of the states on the S.H.I.T. list, and all citizens of such states will be considered complicit in the attack, regardless of their country of residence. The response to such attacks will be at a time and place and method of our choosing, and will be effected without notice.
There are two ways a state can be removed from the S.H.I.T. list:
A. Compliance with the above three principles, or
B. Conversion into a sphere of ionized gasses expanding at hypersonic speeds.
It’s common for computer language syntax to leak into ordinary text. Technical people have all seen instances of how our carefully-formatted formula text with super/sub scripts, special operators, and other notational artifacts are rendered into gibberish once we e-mail it and open it up and print it on platforms and OS versions not the same as it was created on. None of us want to be that guy who sent out a formula that was mis-interpreted by the implementer and caused the bridge to fall and the rocket to explode and the satellite to crash into Mars. And even now, with this post, if I wanted to create a properly formatted exponential x^y with superscripts, I’d have to go research it on the web and try three different html markups, and check it on the preview. Too much effort for so little benefit. And so among ourselves, we use computer language syntax to be exact in our written texts, and the habit leaks over into lay texts. Another example is the operator “±” (plus or minus), which we often write as “+/-“. There’s just no guarantee across time and space that the target reader will see the intended glyph. They may see a blank or a box or an umlautified British pound currency symbol
“…citizens of such states will be considered complicit…”
======================================
Would you like to be held responsible for the actions of US politicians?
Doesn’t anybody know how to think any more?