Finding Equilibrium
I rented Equilibrium yesterday. Similar fight scenes to The Matrix, but a more Farenheit 451 -like story and nowhere near the budget. Rated R for violence: lots of killing, mostly with guns, but some with swords and fire. Humanity wins in the end, but at a great price. Quicktime trailer here. Amazon's review:
A broad science fiction thriller in a classic vein, Equilibrium takes a respectable stab at a Fahrenheit 451-like cautionary fable. The story finds Earth's post-World War III humankind in a state of severe emotional repression: If no one feels anything, no one will be inspired by dark passions to attack their neighbors. Writer-director Kurt Wimmer's monochromatic, Metropolis-influenced cityscape provides an excellent backdrop to the heavy-handed mission of John Preston (Christian Bale), a top cop who busts "sense offenders" and crushes sentimental, sensual, and artistic relics from a bygone era. Predictably, Preston becomes intrigued by his victims and that which they die to cherish; he stops taking his mandatory, mood-flattening drug and is even aroused by a doomed prisoner (Emily Watson). Wimmer's wrongheaded martial arts/dueling guns motif is sheer silliness (a battle over a puppy doesn't help), but Equilibrium should be seen for Bale's moving performance as a man shocked back to human feeling. -- Tom Keogh
It was a rainy day, so the kids and I went to Finding Nemo. We liked it. Amazing what computer animation can do nowadays. Hopefully today we'll go fishing. Got Victoria her first rod yesterday while waiting for Christopher's karate class. The wife's out of town for the weekend, so while the cat's away, we mice are playing.
Jeff Bigler - Tact Filters - Take it from this fellow nerd. Mr. Bigler got it right. Hehe. [birdman]
isbn.nu "offers a quick way to compare the prices of any in-print and many out-of-print books at nine online bookstores. You can view the results with or without the shipping costs of a single book, and also find the fastest source for a book from ordering to delivery." [picks]
Steven Yates at LewRockwell.com - World Order 2021: Afterward - an exploration of the reality behind the ideas in Mr. Yates' fictional magnum opus of last week. We can stop the forces of globalization, but it will take lots of passionate work. [lew]
Henry Lamb at World Net Daily - U.N. influence in Alabama - the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty signed by Bill Clinton, but never ratified by the Senate, is being implemented in Alabama and across the U.S. by unelected bureaucrats and watermelons (green outside, red inside).
The meeting in Birmingham was to satisfy the requirement to provide for public input to a plan, the outcome of which was decided years ago. The people were told that the plan affected only the National Forests in Alabama. Truth is, that the plan affects all land in and near the National Forests. The federal government uses the Endangered Species Act, the Invasive Species Initiative, wetland policies, viewsheds, smart growth and a host of other policies, to restrict land use on private property to the point that the land will ultimately fall into the hands of the government, or an environmental organization such as the Nature Conservancy.
Alabama is not alone. Virtually every state and every community has been targeted to undergo a similar transformation into what Science magazine described in 1993 as "the transformation of America to an archipelago of human-inhabited islands surrounded by natural areas (p.1868)."
O. Ricardo Pimentel at The Olympian - Americans shouldn't believe a thing Bush says on Iran - it's becoming increasingly obvious that Bushnev lied through his teeth about Weapons of Mass Destruction™ in Iraq. We should have learned an important lesson from this war. Don't believe another thing the Busheviks say. And get them out of office, dead or alive. [whatreallyhappened]
John Silveira at Friends of Liberty - What kind of Americans sit on our juries? - an interesting perspective on the routine stacking of our juries against us. Why Mr. Silveira's opening paragraph, below, no longer protects us. [whatreallyhappened]
Our jury system is supposed to be a buffer between us--the citizens--and the government. It is there to prevent the abuse of power that governments have exercised since the dawn of civilization. Juries do not exist as an arm of the court, rather they are there as an arm of the people so that our own government can never arbitrarily throw those it has accused of crimes into jails like some banana republic dictatorships do. Nor can it fine them, confiscate their property, or execute them without the people's consent. Juries are not minions of the bureaucrats, the elected officials, or even the judges. They are there for us and are, in fact, the most powerful force in any courtroom where they are allowed to sit. To men like Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and Washington there seemed to be no way such a system could be subverted.
John Kaminski at Serendipity - 9/11 was a Hoax: The American government killed its own people - get out those tin foil hats, folks. Still, this is the most rational explication I've seen of reasons you should believe that the 9/11/2001 murders were done by the Busheviks, not a bunch of crazy Islamicists. If George W. Bush really is behind the collapse of the twin towers, he'd better have a damn good place to hide when the American people find out. His life expectancy will become extremely short. [whatreallyhappened]
Today, millions of people around the world are protesting the criminal destruction of the nation of Iraq. But these protests won't change the number of minds necessary to stop America's criminal madmen from continuing with their genocidal aim of enslaving the entire world.
What WILL stop them is spreading the realization that President George W. Bush and his billionaire accomplices in the oil industry perpetrated 9/11 as an excuse to begin the militarization of America for the purpose of world conquest.
Serendipity -
The World Trade Center Demolition and the So-Called War on
Terrorism - the title page for the site containing the story
above. More rational explication of an unbelievable thesis. I have
mirrored it
here.
Jon Dougherty at World Net Daily - U.N. to host global gun-control event - July 7-11 in New York City. Another meeting like the one in 2001 where the U.N. attempts to get the world's governments to disarm their people. U.S. out of U.N. U.N. out of U.S. [scopeny]
