Hope for the hopeless: While you hold the center, the periphery frays; when you secure the periphery, the center decays.

And living in the empire, the land of the pharoah, as they're calling it, where any human being can be killed anywhere in the world at the whim of the intelligence forces, and the chief executive can declare a person an "enemy combatant," thus exempting that individual from the civil rights afforded merely criminal citizens, and this declaration cannot be appealed or reviewed. On a day to day level, for many, little has changed. The changes will come in the future, gradually, as living conditions and the basic assumptions of function change. Of course, its a race against entropy.

The forces of chaos can only be circumscribed - no thing or agent penetrates to the heart, because, unlike order, chaos is primal, the fundamental state - order is an afterthought, epiphenomenal, and the evolving persistence of chaos demands ever increasing energy expenditure on the part of the order-worshippers. Their scheme is a house of cards. The meanings they erect are fetishes to the ego and vain ambitions. There are local victories, of course, subjugated zones, degrees of tolerance. And, naturally, what has been done, will always have been done - this is the nature of occurence. But the goal to which they aspire - permanent, unassailable control - is an illusion, though it can be real enough in specific, timebound circumstances.

Image courtesy of julauch.