Terrorist Attack in Brussels

Because of course there are terrorists in Europe. Brussels shooting: 'Europe shaken' after two Swedes shot dead - BBC News

Two Swedish nationals have been shot dead and a third person injured in Brussels, in an attack which prosecutors are treating as terrorism. [SNIP]

Brussels is on its highest terror alert as the gunman, who appeared to have an assault rifle, remains at large.

Click thru for details, and the meaningless things being said by politicians.

The Belgium-Sweden Euro 2024 qualifier football match (soccer) was canceled but some people want it to resume. ("They need to sort our their priorities." With apologies to Ron Weasley.)

Because guarding borders is a very 20th Century idea.

As these stories often do, it reminded me of the poem "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. The entire text of the poem, it isn't long, can be found below (after the break). The part I always think of is...

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;

Civilization was nice while it lasted.

The Second Coming
  — W. B. Yeats

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?

It was written in 1919, after the First World War.