The Icy Flame, Mad Monk Mix

Live on, thou damned!
–Baudelaire, The Double Room

Life is the lash
Driving us on
Toward the flame
Without haste
Without pause
Calm, cruel, fixed
Indifferent to us
Its raw material that serves some purpose
We cannot know
Into the chilling fire, slave-soldiers!
Into Nature’s maw!
This command the only counsel
Of a universe without conscience
And desperate Man takes his own
He imagines worlds beyond
Over and above this grave
Clear of its stench and toil
He peoples them with his beloved
Who wait there serene and knowing
Holding the Secret in trust
He blasphemes Nature’s Holy Writ
As He works to will these things
He works in defiant futility
Despite Her daily proofs
Of disease and calamity
The endlessly varied forms
Her harvest of death takes, like
Myriad mutant troops enforcing Her terror
And She claims with equal indifference
Her rebels and Her slaves
But behind Her cold disdain
Concealed by Her advantage in time
Her actions reveal some jealousy
Of Man’s last means of resistance
His undying imagination
And frail She may be after all
Behind that horrible beautiful face
So we may as well call Her bluff
Though we know Her game is rigged, and
Sing defiant you fading voices!
We last, we last and
We have no fear, for
In that crucible of ice and dust
In that fire that will not warm
There, final and eternal
Only there
We are
At long last my tiring friend
No longer alone.

Rum, Sodomy, and the Rag

Fun facts encountered while looking up aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), presently anchored alongside Syria:

Reports began surfacing immediately after delivery in May of 2009 of issues with the ships toilet system. As of November, 2011, the entire system has gone down at least twice, rendering all 423 commodes in the ship’s 130 heads inoperable, with many more incidents that have rendered either half of the ship, or sections of the ship, without operating sanitary facilities. In one ship-wide incident, a repair crew spent 35 non-stop hours attempting to return the system to working order. The system is said to suffer breakdowns when inappropriate materials such as feminine hygiene products are flushed down the toliets.

Ask not for whom the strife bodes…

The New York Times knows multiculturalism when it sees it (abroad):

Sectarian Strife in Diverse City Bodes Ill for All of Syria

With all these models of truly multicultural (as opposed to whatever is meant by the phrase here in the States) societies around us, you’d think our elite might question its policy of planned ethnic diversification. Because while ethnic cleansing has a long, bloody history, ethnic diversification has none at all. That is other than history’s many examples of imperial powers importing one population to displace another–we are the first to inflict this upon ourselves–which has always been just a means of ethnic cleansing. What part greed and what part stupidity propel our elite’s actions remains a mystery to me.

Glib Talib

The Taliban are now deploying snark:

NATO figures show that enemy attacks declined by 8 percent during the first nine months of this year compared to the year before. The United Nations, on the other hand, reported in September that insurgent attacks had increased by 39 percent in the first eight months of this year.

Referring to the gradual drawdown of military forces that has begun in Afghanistan, the Taliban statement read, “If [Nato Secretary General] Rasmussen and all his allies leave Afghanistan completely then the attacks on them will reach zero and he can propagate the notion even more and say that the number of Taliban attacks have fallen further.”

Needs work, but looks like some aspects of Westernization are taking hold.

Contextualized for Your Protection


I love this. Tintin is being sold with a familiar, reassuring paper band:

A spokesman said: “This is why we took the unusual step of placing a protective band around the book with a warning about the content and also included an introduction inside the book by the original translators explaining the historical context.
(…)
The warning reads: “In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Hergé reflects the colonial attitudes of the time…

“He depicted the African people according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period – an interpretation that some of today’s readers may find offensive.”

A Waterstones spokesman confirmed that the book had been switched to the graphic novels section of its stores four years ago, and that since then its position had not changed.