My 666th Post

David Seaton's News Links
According to Google Blogger Dashboard, this is my 666th post since I started News Links way back in October of 2006, with the object of emulating my hero, Billmon, who has retired and whom I miss terribly.

Once I had the suspicion that Billmon was a professor named Sidney Winter, but I never had that confirmed. If the greatest blogger that ever lived isn't you Sid, accept my heartfelt apologies.

So, I have decided to dedicate my 666th posting to "The Beast" himself, Billmon.

If you have arrived in blogdom lately and never read the master, another devotee, Miguel de Icaza saved the gurumaharaj's entire production before it was yanked from cyberspace. You may visit the temple and lay offerings at Billmon's tomb at this address. And of course, no homage to The Beast would be complete without Yeat's poem:

"The Second Coming"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Outside of the tango, "Cambalache", no better description of our world has ever been written.

Tomorrow we can get back to who is best fitted to lead America into its imperial abyss. DS

A tribute to Billmon, the prince of bloggers

David Seaton's News Links

Billmon appears to really mean it this time... he is truly hanging up his spikes. He has a way of announcing his retirement from blogging from time to time and than returning like an opera tenor or a bullfighter for yet another farewell performance, but I get the feeling that this time he may be serious. So, with a little trepidation, I will pay him tribute. Billmon (whoever he is) has always been, by far, my favorite blogger: informed, fluent, witty, creative... I shall miss his blog terribly. To have Billmon quit and James Brown die in the same week is a hardly digestable, one-two punch. I'm a married man and I can understand the pressure he may have faced. In my case blogging helps me to do my research and keeps my hands warm and my ideas flowing for my "daytime job", which is writing about international affairs for a Spanish newspaper. My wife understands that my blogging is part of the process of putting groceries on our table. Billmon works in the financial sector and blogging for him has been a quixotic, labor of love/hate and political commitment. I imagine his old lady put a gun to his head. I truly respect that. I shall miss him terribly. My wish is that he would "come out" and write a book about the times we live in, where his blog was one of the few things that kept the bastards from grinding me down: "Illegitimati non carborundum." I will never give up hope that like the "lost Mahdi", Billmon will someday return. DS