We are but Fortune's Fools ...

I've had better daze.

Yesterday I picked up reading David Crist's "Twilight War with Iran", where I had left off a week or so ago, as another coupla books needed to be finished before they were due (well, overdue really) and went as far as the Chapter in which he describes the USS Vincennes' shooting down of the Iranian passenger plane, killing all 290 people on board. I then got up this morning to read on Zerohedge about the Malaysian Air jet crashing on the  Russian/Ukraine border. Of course, it'll all be blamed on the Russkies, but what really went down, other than the aircraft, will probably never be known. Russia's LifeNews has the pictures of the NewDead, and it's very graphic and heart-breaking.

"Who now the price of this dear blood doth owe?"

Of all things, this pileup of mangled corpses reminds me of the end of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", when the Prince comes out and proclaims that "The sun , for sorrow, will not show his head", and, in Zeffirelli's version, he then says what's not in the original text, and lambastes the feuding families of Capulet and Montague, shouting at them the verity: ALL are punished! For, as he had stated so eloquently when he laid down judgement at the murders of Tybalt and Mercutio:

"I have an interest in your hate's proceeding,
My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding;
But I'll amerce you with so strong a fine
That you shall all repent the loss of mine.
I will be deaf to pleading and excuses;
Nor tears nor prayers shall purchase out abuses;
Therefore use none; Let Romeo hence in haste,
Else when he's found, that hour is his last.
Bear hence these bodies and attend our will:
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.

Thus does Shakespeare represent, in the 16'th century via the embodiment of the Prince, the ascendancy of State power over feuding families. Yet now, in this so-called globalized world, we somehow feel that a remote disaster touches us not, but we too, "Have an interest in your hate's proceeding", but have no prince to scold the feuding parties, as it's now the States whose rude brawls leave us lie a-bleeding.

The UN was formed to stop this barbarity, but its uselessness in that regard was never made more manifest than when Colin Powell sat before it and laid out a pack of lies that none believed and everyone accepted.

So we're five centuries hence, and nothing's changed,
At best, the world's just more deranged
For it's not just Russia, or Ukraine
that spattered those bodies o'er that bloody plain,
It's the thirst for power and the stoking of greed
That builds the armamentaria we just don't need.
When its uttered and sung like religious cant
It always gives voice to a Nationalistic Rant.
So I fear "This day's black fate on more daze doth depend;
This but begins the woe others must end."