Analysts at the CIA believe a Yemen-based branch of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda has supplanted its parent organization as the leading danger to the security of the United States.
Read more HERE.
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Friday, September 3, 2010
CIA: Al-QAEDA YEMEN BRANCH LEADING TERROR THREAT
Analysts at the CIA believe a Yemen-based branch of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda has supplanted its parent organization as the leading danger to the security of the United States.
Read more HERE.
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INTERNET BACK UP AND RUNNING
. . . life still hectic and dragging on some suspenses . . . STORMBRINGER posts will be back on track within 24 hours.
- SEAN LINNANE SENDS
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- SEAN LINNANE SENDS
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THOR THURSDAY
ZARDOZ was undoubtedly the nuttiest role Sean Connery ever played . . .
Zardoz was a 1973 science fiction/fantasy film written, produced, and directed by John Boorman, starring Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, and Sara Kestelman. Zardoz was Connery's second post-James Bond role (after The Offence).
PLOT
In the year AD 2293, a post-apocalyptic Earth is inhabited mostly by the "Brutals", who are ruled by the "Eternals" who use other "Brutals" called "Exterminators", "the Chosen" warrior class. The Exterminators worship the god Zardoz, a huge, flying, hollow stone head. Zardoz teaches:
"The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth . . . and kill!"
The Zardoz god head supplies the Exterminators with weapons, while the Exterminators supply it with grain. Meanwhile, Zed (Sean Connery), an Exterminator, enters Zardoz, hidden in a load of grain, and shoots (and apparently kills) its pilot, Arthur Frayn (identified as an Eternal in the story's prologue), and travels to the Vortex. The Vortices are hidden communities of civilization where the immortal "Eternals" lead a luxurious but aimless existence.
Arriving in the Vortex, Zed meets two women Eternals — Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman) — with psychic powers; mentally overcoming him, they make him prisoner of their community. Consuella wants Zed destroyed immediately; others, led by May and a subversive Eternal named Friend (John Alderton), insist on keeping him for study.
In time, Zed learns the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are overseen and protected from death by the Tabernacle, an artificial intelligence. Given their limitless lifespan, the Eternals have grown bored and corrupt: the needlessness of procreation has rendered the men impotent; meditation has replaced sleep; others fell to catatonia, forming the social stratum the Eternals name the "Apathetics". The Eternals spend their days stewarding mankind's vast knowledge, while doing little other than participating in communal navel gazing rituals. To give time and life some meaning, the Vortex developed complex social rules, whose violators are punished with artificial aging — condemning them to eternal old age and the status of "Renegade".
Moreover, Zed is less brutal than the Eternals think him. Genetic analysis reveals Zed is the ultimate result of long-running eugenics experiments devised by Arthur Frayn — the Zardoz god — who controlled the outlands with the Exterminators, thus coercing the Brutals to supply the Vortices with grain; yet Zardoz's aim was breeding a superman who would penetrate the Vortex and save mankind from its perpetual status quo. Earlier, the women's analysis of Zed's mind reveals that in the ruins of the old world, Arthur Frayn led Zed to the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from which Zed understands the origin of the name Zardoz — Wizard of Oz — bringing him to a true awareness of Zardoz as a skillful manipulator rather than an actual deity.
As Zed divines the nature of the Vortex and its problems, the Eternals use him to fight their internecine quarrels. Led by Consuella, the Eternals decide to kill Zed and to age Friend. Zed escapes and, aided by May and Friend, learns the Eternals' knowledge and the Vortex's origin in order to destroy the Tabernacle. Zed helps the Exterminators invade the Vortex and kill most of the Eternals—who welcome death and freedom from their eternal but boring existence. Some Eternals escape the Vortex's destruction, heading out to a new life among the Brutals.
Zardoz ends in a wordless sequence of images accompanied by Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Zed and Consuella, dressed in matching green suits, sit next to each other in the cave-like stone head and age in time-lapse. A child appears, grows, and leaves his parents. Eventually the couple turn into skeletons.
As out of control as the Seventies were, we were all shaking our heads in disbelief when this thing came out.
Zardoz was a 1973 science fiction/fantasy film written, produced, and directed by John Boorman, starring Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, and Sara Kestelman. Zardoz was Connery's second post-James Bond role (after The Offence).
PLOT
In the year AD 2293, a post-apocalyptic Earth is inhabited mostly by the "Brutals", who are ruled by the "Eternals" who use other "Brutals" called "Exterminators", "the Chosen" warrior class. The Exterminators worship the god Zardoz, a huge, flying, hollow stone head. Zardoz teaches:
"The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth . . . and kill!"
The Zardoz god head supplies the Exterminators with weapons, while the Exterminators supply it with grain. Meanwhile, Zed (Sean Connery), an Exterminator, enters Zardoz, hidden in a load of grain, and shoots (and apparently kills) its pilot, Arthur Frayn (identified as an Eternal in the story's prologue), and travels to the Vortex. The Vortices are hidden communities of civilization where the immortal "Eternals" lead a luxurious but aimless existence.
Arriving in the Vortex, Zed meets two women Eternals — Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman) — with psychic powers; mentally overcoming him, they make him prisoner of their community. Consuella wants Zed destroyed immediately; others, led by May and a subversive Eternal named Friend (John Alderton), insist on keeping him for study.
In time, Zed learns the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are overseen and protected from death by the Tabernacle, an artificial intelligence. Given their limitless lifespan, the Eternals have grown bored and corrupt: the needlessness of procreation has rendered the men impotent; meditation has replaced sleep; others fell to catatonia, forming the social stratum the Eternals name the "Apathetics". The Eternals spend their days stewarding mankind's vast knowledge, while doing little other than participating in communal navel gazing rituals. To give time and life some meaning, the Vortex developed complex social rules, whose violators are punished with artificial aging — condemning them to eternal old age and the status of "Renegade".
Moreover, Zed is less brutal than the Eternals think him. Genetic analysis reveals Zed is the ultimate result of long-running eugenics experiments devised by Arthur Frayn — the Zardoz god — who controlled the outlands with the Exterminators, thus coercing the Brutals to supply the Vortices with grain; yet Zardoz's aim was breeding a superman who would penetrate the Vortex and save mankind from its perpetual status quo. Earlier, the women's analysis of Zed's mind reveals that in the ruins of the old world, Arthur Frayn led Zed to the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from which Zed understands the origin of the name Zardoz — Wizard of Oz — bringing him to a true awareness of Zardoz as a skillful manipulator rather than an actual deity.
As Zed divines the nature of the Vortex and its problems, the Eternals use him to fight their internecine quarrels. Led by Consuella, the Eternals decide to kill Zed and to age Friend. Zed escapes and, aided by May and Friend, learns the Eternals' knowledge and the Vortex's origin in order to destroy the Tabernacle. Zed helps the Exterminators invade the Vortex and kill most of the Eternals—who welcome death and freedom from their eternal but boring existence. Some Eternals escape the Vortex's destruction, heading out to a new life among the Brutals.
Zardoz ends in a wordless sequence of images accompanied by Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Zed and Consuella, dressed in matching green suits, sit next to each other in the cave-like stone head and age in time-lapse. A child appears, grows, and leaves his parents. Eventually the couple turn into skeletons.
As out of control as the Seventies were, we were all shaking our heads in disbelief when this thing came out.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
ON OBAMA
The President Without A Country
By Pat Boone
By Pat Boone
"We're no longer a Christian nation." - President Barack Obama, June 2009
"America has been arrogant." - President Barack Obama
"After 9/11, America didn't always live up to her ideals."- President Barack Obama
"You might say that America is a Muslim nation."- President Barack Obama, Egypt 2009
Thinking about these and other statements made by the man who wears the title of President . . . I keep wondering what country he believes he's President of.
In one of my very favorite stories, Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country," a young Army lieutenant named Philip Nolan stands condemned for treason during the Revolutionary War, having come under the influence of Aaron Burr. When the judge asks him if he wishes to say anything before sentence is passed, young Nolan defiantly exclaims, "Damn the United States! I wish I might never hear of the United States again!"
The stunned silence in the courtroom is palpable, pulsing. After a long pause, the judge soberly says to the angry lieutenant: "You have just pronounced your own sentence. You will never hear of the United States again. I sentence you to spend the rest of your life at sea, on one or another of this country's naval vessels - under strict orders that no one will ever speak to you again about the country you have just cursed."
And so it was. Philip Nolan was taken away and spent the next 40 years at sea, never hearing anything but an occasional slip of the tongue about America. The last few pages of the story, recounting Nolan's dying hours in his small stateroom - now turned into a shrine to the country he foreswore - never fail to bring me to tears. And I find my own love for this dream, this miracle called America, refreshed and renewed. I know how blessed and unique we are.
But reading and hearing the audacious, shocking statements of the man who was recently elected our president - a young black man living the impossible dream of millions of young Americans, past and present, black and white - I want to ask him, "Just what country do you think you're President of?"
You surely can't be referring to the United States of America , can you? America is emphatically a Christian nation, and has been from its inception! Seventy percent of her citizens identify themselves as Christian. The Declaration of Independence and our Constitution were framed, written and ratified by Christians. It's because this was, and is, a nation built on and guided by Judeo-Christian biblical principles that you, sir, have had the inestimable privilege of being elected her President.
You studied law at Harvard, didn't you, sir? You taught constitutional law in Chicago ? Did you not ever read the statement of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and an author of the landmark "Federalist Papers": "Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers - and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation - to select and prefer Christians for their rulers"?
In your studies, you surely must have read the decision of the Supreme Court in 1892: "Our lives and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of Mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian."
Did your professors have you skip over all the high-court decisions right up till the mid 1900's that echoed and reinforced these views and intentions? Did you pick up the history of American jurisprudence only in 1947, when for the first time a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson about a "wall of separation between church and state" was used to deny some specific religious expression - contrary to Jefferson's intent with that statement?
Or, wait a minute, were your ideas about America's Christianity formed during the 20 years you were a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ under your pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Is that where you got the idea that "America is no longer a Christian nation"? Is this where you, even as you came to call yourself a Christian, formed the belief that "America has been arrogant"?
Even if that's the understandable explanation of your damning of your country and accusing the whole nation (not just a few military officials trying their best to keep more Americans from being murdered by jihadists) of "not always living up to her ideals," how did you come up with the ridiculous, alarming notion that we might be "considered a Muslim nation"?
Is it because there are some 2 million or more Muslims living here, trying to be good Americans? Out of a current population of over 300 million, 70 percent of whom are Christians? Does that make us, by any rational definition, a "Muslim nation"?
Why are we not, then, a "Chinese nation"? A "Korean nation"? Even a "Vietnamese nation"? There are even more of these distinct groups in America than Muslims. And if the distinction you're trying to make is a religious one, why is America not "a Jewish nation"? There's actually a case to be made for the latter, because our Constitution - and the success of our Revolution and founding - owe a deep debt to our Jewish brothers.
Have you stopped to think what an actual Muslim America would be like? Have you ever really spent much time in Iran ? Even in Egypt ? You, having been instructed in Islam as a kid at a Muslim school in Indonesia and saying you still love the call to evening prayers, can surely picture our nation founded on the Quran, not the Judeo-Christian Bible, and living under Shariah law. Can't you? You do recall Muhammad's directives [Surah 9:5,73] to "break the cross" and "kill the infidel"?
It seems increasingly and painfully obvious that you are more influenced by your upbringing and questionable education than most suspected. If you consider yourself the President of a people who are "no longer Christian," who have "failed to live up to our ideals," who "have been arrogant," and might even be "considered Muslim" - you are President of a country most Americans don't recognize.
Could it be you are a President without a country?
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/patboone.asp
- Sent in by my good friend Mark the Ferret . . . S.L.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
OBAMA's FAILED STIMULUS PROGRAM COST MORE THAN THE IRAQ WAR
Summarizing the highlights of such an analysis:
* Obama's stimulus, passed in his first month in office, will cost more than the entire Iraq War -- more than $100 billion (15%) more.
* Just the first two years of Obama's stimulus cost more than the entire cost of the Iraq War under President Bush, or six years of that war.
* Iraq War spending accounted for just 3.2% of all federal spending while it lasted.
* Iraq War spending was not even one quarter of what we spent on Medicare in the same time frame.
* Iraq War spending was not even 15% of the total deficit spending in that time frame. The cumulative deficit, 2003-2010, would have been four-point-something trillion dollars with or without the Iraq War.
* The Iraq War accounts for less than 8% of the federal debt held by the public at the end of 2010 ($9.031 trillion).
* During Bush's Iraq years, 2003-2008, the federal government spent more on education that it did on the Iraq War. (State and local governments spent about ten times more.)
Read more at the Washington Examiner
* Obama's stimulus, passed in his first month in office, will cost more than the entire Iraq War -- more than $100 billion (15%) more.
* Just the first two years of Obama's stimulus cost more than the entire cost of the Iraq War under President Bush, or six years of that war.
* Iraq War spending accounted for just 3.2% of all federal spending while it lasted.
* Iraq War spending was not even one quarter of what we spent on Medicare in the same time frame.
* Iraq War spending was not even 15% of the total deficit spending in that time frame. The cumulative deficit, 2003-2010, would have been four-point-something trillion dollars with or without the Iraq War.
* The Iraq War accounts for less than 8% of the federal debt held by the public at the end of 2010 ($9.031 trillion).
* During Bush's Iraq years, 2003-2008, the federal government spent more on education that it did on the Iraq War. (State and local governments spent about ten times more.)
Read more at the Washington Examiner
BE ADVISED
I'm about halfway through Phase 2 of an un-GAWD-ly move - that's why today's posts are late - I'll be without Internet hook up tomorrow, so I'm posting Thursday's stuff today.
Everything should be back on track by Friday, Saturday at the latest . . .
- S.L.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA CLAIMS CREDITON IRAQ WAR
From Donald Douglas' AMERICAN POWER
For all of the socialism and Islamist-appeasement of this administration, the one thing that has bothered me the most about this president (and candidate in 2007-08) is his screechingly perverse antiwar ideology and opportunism. Barack Obama was the most antiwar Senator in Congress throughout 2007 and in 2008 he tried to play both sides of the fence: After opposing the surge he then turned around and hailed its success, while insisting once more that the war was wrong . . .
. . . read it all here.
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For all of the socialism and Islamist-appeasement of this administration, the one thing that has bothered me the most about this president (and candidate in 2007-08) is his screechingly perverse antiwar ideology and opportunism. Barack Obama was the most antiwar Senator in Congress throughout 2007 and in 2008 he tried to play both sides of the fence: After opposing the surge he then turned around and hailed its success, while insisting once more that the war was wrong . . .
. . . read it all here.
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