London Bridge is burning down, burning down...

Safe, sane, civilized London, revealed over a minor incident to be a powderkeg of unrest and violence just waiting to explode. If staid, quiet London can erupt without warning, what does that say about the rest of the unstable world that teeters on the brink?
Lord Curzon, visiting Qom on his tour of Persia in 1889, describing its fanatical inhabitants, said "[it] is one of those places where an accidental spark may be fanned into a disagreeable flame." How surprised he would be that the same could have been said of his great London little more than a century later.

While normally I align myself with those oppressed by the wealthy elite plutocrats, not in this case. These aren't the downtrodden rising against their capitalist masters, these were "feral youth" as I heard one commentator describe them. These aren't intellectuals and poets pushed to desperation by tyranny and responding with violence--these are uneducated, illiterate louts of society, the rabble of the digital age, using modern technology as their torches and pitchforks, flashmob of peasants. The looting is always the giveaway.
Those truly battling authoritarian rulers don't smash into stores to steal videogame consoles and overpriced sneakers. They burn the icons of the power structure, not their own bars and grocery stores. They plunder the wealthy, not their own shopkeepers.
A revolutionary sets fire to the mansion of his persecutor; a fool burns down his own house.

I loved it when David Cameron said that "social media" had to be controlled to prevent this kind of thing. Ha! Weren't the West just recently patting their own backs with smug self-congratulation when this same "social media" aided the people in the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt?
I'll bet Mubarak wholeheartedly shares your sentiment, Mr. Prime Minister.

You don't get to praise the sword when it cuts your way and complain when it cuts the other: hypocrisy.
I love the way technology invariably comes back to bite the ass of its ardent supporters.

The British police responded with such astonishing flaccidity, totally caught off guard. Had I been in command, an unceasing torrent of live rounds would have poured into the rioting crowds. Death toll in the thousands, probably. Fuck water cannons and "plastic bullets" if you have to wait for them, use the guns you've got, now.
There is a big difference between protecting innocent citizens and the legitimate social structure from rampaging criminals versus brutal suppression of freedom-seeking masses by a corrupt regime keeping itself in power; the West has something to learn from the despots, in that shooting into a violent crowd isn't necessarily always a bad thing.
The cops appeared to have no resources at all, not even tear gas. So much for the scary vision of Britannia under the heel of fascist stormtroopers.

Outlying suburbs of Desolation City

Still out of sorts. The vile boggy heat, the ennui. A month to go in purgatory. From the dread of certainty to the dread of uncertainty which in this case is ever so preferable. 

When I was a kid, I read a lot of comics, all kinds. There was something about the goofy innocence of the Archie comics that had a strange appeal for me, a kid more usually obsessed with gory hard-core science fiction.

I recall especially Little Archie's nemesis Dr. Doom and his idiot assistant Chester; after every failure of Dr. Doom's nefarious plans, he would be seen sailing away onboard a ship named The Pride of Walvis Bay.

When I lived in Amsterdam, I dated a South African girl and learned that if you spoke Dutch, then you came as close as possible to speaking Afrikaans, the descendant of the language of the Dutch Boer settlers. On a map of southern Africa she was once showing me, I saw city named Windhoek, which I knew meant "Windy Corner", in Namibia, and there, nearby, that haunting name of so long ago: Walvis Bay.

I think I'm going to go there. I've crossed the equator twice, but never been as far south as the Tropic of Capricorn. Walvis Bay is a windy desert city cooled by cold currents of the Atlantic shore. My imagination is captivated.

It looks like the end of the world, calling out to me with a siren song. The place where I will die. 

All because of a peculiarly exotic place mentioned obliquely in a comic book decades ago that I never forgot.