Showing posts with label War on Terror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War on Terror. Show all posts

Sunday 4 June 2017

Street Theatre



Elizabeth Urquhart : 
I think you should do something, Francis.

Urquhart : 
I think so too - Cawdor..?

Cawdor : 
Accident of some sort - riot; explosion. 
Small bomb - minor injuries, IRA Code-Word... all of the usual Provo hallmarks
We could lay that on at... 90 minutes notice.

Urquhart : 
No... not this time - I was thinking some more like: 
a Happening.

Elizabeth Urquhart : 
Bit of Street Theatre - with a happy ending

Urquhart : 
And a moral, of course...


"The King of England is a Venetian Doge"

- Benjamin Disreali
Conningsby

Machiavelli wrote that the Venetians had “fixed in their souls the intention of creating a monarchy on the Roman model.” This is corroborated by a dispatch of the ambassador of Louis XII of France at the court of the Emperor Maximilian I some years later, which described the Venetians as:
traders in human blood, traitors to the Christian faith who have tacitly divided up the world with the Turks, and who are already planning to throw bridgeheads across the Danube, the Rhine, the Seine, and Tagus, and the Ebro, attempting to reduce Europe to a province and to keep it subjugated to their armies.
These megalomaniac plans of the Venetians were no secret. In 1423, the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo had urged upon his fellow oligarchs a policy of expansionism which would make them the overlords “of all the Gold and of Christendom.
The most penetrating indictments of the Venetians during this period were issued by Pope Pius II Piccolomino, who tried in vain to force Venice into joining a crusade against the Turks. A Venetian saying of this period was Prima son Vinizian, poi son Cristian. (I am a Venetian first, then a Christian.”

In his Commentaries, Pius II excoriates the Venetians for their duplicitous treachery, and establishes the fact that they are a pagan, totalitarian state. The Venetians, he says, have acted in their diplomacy:
with the good faith characteristics of barbarians, or after the manner of traders whose nature it is to weigh everything by utility, paying no attention to honor. But what do fish care about law? 

As among the brute beasts aquatic creatures have the least intelligence, so among human beings the Venetians are the least just and the least capable of humanity, and naturally so, for they live on the sea and pass their lives in the water; they use ships instead of horses; they are not so much companions of men as of fish and comrades of marine monsters. 

They please only themselves, and while they talk they listen to and admire themselves…. 

They are hypocrites. They wish to appear as Christians before the world, but in reality they never think of God and, except for the state, which they regard as a deity, they hold nothing sacred, nothing holy. 

To a Venetian, that is just which is for the good of the state; that is pious which increases The Empire…. 

What the senate approves is holy even though it is opposed to the gospel…. 

They are allowed to do anything that will bring them to supreme power. 

All law and right may be violated for the sake of power.
During many of these years Venetians were in a tacit alliance with the Turks. When, for example, a revolt against Venetian rule in Albania was started, threatening the Venetian naval base at Durazzo, the Venetians made a deal with the Turks to crush the revolt. On one occasion Pius II received the Venetian ambassador to the Roman court and condemned Venetian policy with these words:
Your cause is one with thieves and robbers…. No power was ever greater than the Roman empire and yet God overthrew it because it was impious, and He put in its place the priesthood because it respected divine law…. 

You think [your] republic will last forever. 
It will not last long. 

Your population so wickedly gathered together will soon be scattered abroad. The offscourings of fishermen will be exterminated. A mad state cannot long stand.


Saturday 3 June 2017

Certain Freezers - Constructivism



You made your examination under conditions which we cannot trust. 

We judge reality by the response of our senses. 

Once we are convinced of the reality of a given situation, we abide by its rules.


Certain Freezers - Poltergeists, Stigmata and Constructionism

" The only way he could do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home... namely, yours. 

Then he could jettison the bodies 
and make up any story he liked. "
Stigmata are nearly always anatomically incorrect, but iconically accurate - they closely match the wound locations on the crucifixes, statuary and icons in the stigmatics own church.


KIRK: 
Spock, you've got something? 



SPOCK: 
A fact, Captain. Physical laws simply cannot be ignored. Existence cannot be without them. 



MCCOY: 
What do you mean, Spock? 



SPOCK: 
I mean, Doctor, that we are faced with a staggering contradiction. 
The tranquilliser you created should have been effective. 



KIRK: 
It would've been effective anywhere else. 



SPOCK: 
Exactly. Doctor, in your opinion, what killed Mister Chekov? 



MCCOY: 
A piece of lead in his body. 



SPOCK: 
Wrong. His mind killed him. 



MCCOY: 
Come on, Spock. If you've got the answer, tell us. 



SPOCK: 
Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. 
Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality. 
All of this is unreal. 



MCCOY: 
What do you mean unreal? 
I examined Chekov. He's dead. 



SPOCK: 
But you made your examination under conditions which we cannot trust. 

We judge reality by the response of our senses. 

Once we are convinced of the reality of a given situation, we abide by its rules. 

We judged the bullets to be solid, the guns to be real, therefore they can kill. 

KIRK
Chekov is dead because he believed the bullets would kill him. 



SPOCK: 
He may indeed be dead. 
We do not know. 



KIRK: 
But we do know that the Melkotians created the situation. 
If we do not allow ourselves to believe that the bullets are real, they cannot kill us. 



SPOCK: 
Exactly. 
I know the bullets are unreal, therefore they cannot harm me. 



KIRK: 
We must all be as certain as you are, Mister Spock, to save our lives. 



SPOCK: 
Precisely. 

This.

This, You Can Trust.

Sunday 18 January 2015

HST



It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.

Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.

The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.

And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.

They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.

OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.

The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.

The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.


Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's books include Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, The Proud Highway, Better Than Sex and The Rum Diary. His new book, Fear and Loathing in America, has just been released. A regular contributor to various national and international publications, Thompson now lives in a fortified compound near Aspen, Colo. His column, "Hey, Rube," appears each Monday on Page 2.

from Spike EP on Vimeo.