Home » Posts tagged 'unity'

Tag Archives: unity

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Towers to Heaven: The Alchemy of Prophecy, Terror, and Unity

Towers to Heaven: The Alchemy of Prophecy, Terror, and Unity

They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek is Apollyon (that is, Destroyer).

– Revelation 9:11

At the end of last month, I read an article that claimed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was foretold by a “20 Year Old Movie”. The film was a 1998 thriller entitled “Enemy of the State” starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman.

My curiosity aroused, I selected the show from my electronic catalog and watched it unwind; similar to the way I once queued up songs on jukeboxes in the halcyon days preceding the matrix.

In the film, Gene Hackman played an Edward Snowden-type National Security Agency (NSA) contractor gone rogue who revealed to the viewers the U.S. government’s high-tech surveillance capabilities. Two decades ago when the film was released, the surveillance grid disclosed therein would have seemed far-fetched. But not today. Now, in the aftermath of 911, the Patriot Act, and the Snowden revelations, those capabilities are not only common knowledge, but are the subjects of ongoing daily headlines.

The antagonist in the film was played by Jon Voight, a power-hungry NSA bureaucrat who assembled a team of technology experts and security agents that blackmailed Congress and even murdered a senator.  The politician was killed to aid the passing of a Patriot Act-style bill that would have, in effect, drilled the final screw into the coffin of the Fourth Amendment.

The film called to mind multiple recent news stories ranging from high-tech espionage, to social media spying and censorship, to CIA programs like UMBRAGE which masquerades as computer hacks by foreign governments, to the Awan brothers and the murder of former Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich.  Essentially, the plot demonstrated Senator Chuck Schumer’s warning to President Donald Trump in an MSNBC interview on January 3rd, 2017:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

An Affirming Flame

An Affirming Flame

According to an assortment of recent news stories, this Thursday, June 18, is the make-or-break date by which a compromise has to be reached between Greece and the EU if a Greek default, with the ensuing risk of a potential Greek exit from the Eurozone, is to be avoided. If that’s more than just media hype, there’s a tremendous historical irony in the fact.  June 18 is after all the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, where a previous attempt at European political and economic integration came to grief.

Now of course there are plenty of differences between the two events. In 1815 the preferred instrument of integration was raw military force; in 2015, for a variety of reasons, a variety of less overt forms of political and economic pressure have taken the place of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. The events of 1815 were also much further along the curve of defeat than those of 2015.  Waterloo was the end of the road for France’s dream of pan-European empire, while the current struggles over the Greek debt are taking place at a noticeably earlier milepost along the same road. The faceless EU bureaucrats who are filling Napoleon’s role this time around thus won’t be on their way to Elba for some time yet.

“What discords will drive Europe into that artificial unity—only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle—which is the decadence of every civilization?” William Butler Yeats wrote that in 1936. It was a poignant question but also a highly relevant one, since the discords in question were moving rapidly toward explosion as he penned the last pages of A Vision, where those words appear.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress