Last Brave Act

http://www.stargate-sg1-solutions.com/wiki/1.22_%22Within_The_Serpent%27s_Grasp_Part_1%22_Transcript

STARGATE WIKI


1.22 "Within The Serpent's Grasp Part 1"


EXT—CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN TUNNEL ENTRANCE, DAY

INT—HAMMOND'S OFFICE

[Hammond is feeding pages into a paper shredder one sheet at a time. O'Neill arrives at Hammond's doorway.]

O'NEILL
Got a minute, sir?

HAMMOND
C'mon in, Jack. Have a seat. Ya know, I never anticipated how much paperwork is involved in shutting down a facility. Not exactly the last brave act I wanted to do before retiring.

O'NEILL
So you're still just gonna throw it in, huh?

HAMMOND
Well I was a month away from retirement before we started the SGC. The only thing that kept me here was…well, let's face it, it was a pretty wild ride.

O'NEILL
Yes, sir. Personally, I don't think we should be getting off that ride just yet.

HAMMOND
Colonel, we've been through this. I agree with you, but we have our orders.

O'NEILL
They're ill-conceived orders, sir.

HAMMOND
I agree, but they're orders just the same, and I for one follow orders.

O'NEILL
Even though we are the only line of defense protecting this planet?

HAMMOND
I know that.

O'NEILL
I know you know that, sir. You're still just going to chuck it, huh?

HAMMOND
You don't think I tried everything to prevent this shutdown? I went back to Senator Kinsey twice. The second time, he had me forcibly removed from his office.










From 1/2/1990 ( General of the Armies of the United States and United States Navy Fleet Admiral Thomas Reagan my biological brother walked into the office of George Herbert Walker Bush and after giving him adequate direct verbal warning to defend himself General of the Armies of the United States Thomas Reagan used his fist to physically hit George Bush in the face with enough physical force to leave George Bush unconscious on the floor of his office because George Bush has murdered United States Navy SEALs in Panama and because George Bush is a cowardly violent criminal and because George Bush is an active severely treasonous agent of the Soviet Union and Communist China violently against the United States of America ) To 3/6/1998 is 2985 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 1/4/1974 ( Richard Nixon - Letter to the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities Responding to Subpoenas Requiring Production of Presidential Tape Recordings and Documents ) is 2985 days



From 1/2/1990 ( General of the Armies of the United States and United States Navy Fleet Admiral Thomas Reagan my biological brother walked into the office of George Herbert Walker Bush and after giving him adequate direct verbal warning to defend himself General of the Armies of the United States Thomas Reagan used his fist to physically hit George Bush in the face with enough physical force to leave George Bush unconscious on the floor of his office because George Bush has murdered United States Navy SEALs in Panama and because George Bush is a cowardly violent criminal and because George Bush is an active severely treasonous agent of the Soviet Union and Communist China violently against the United States of America ) To 3/6/1998 is 2985 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 1/4/1974 ( premiere US film "McQ" ) is 2985 days



From 3/2/1944 ( premiere US film "With the Marines at Tarawa" ) To 7/4/1976 ( at extreme personal risk to himself my biological brother Thomas Reagan the civilian and privately financed astronaut in his privately financed atom-pulse propulsion spaceship successfully intercepts the Comet Lucifer in the outer solar system and diverts it away from the planet Earth ) is 11812 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 3/6/1998 is 11812 days





http://www.tv.com/shows/stargate-sg-1/within-the-serpents-grasp-2-7340/

tv.com


Stargate SG-1 Season 1 Episode 22

Within the Serpent's Grasp (2)

Aired Friday 8:00 PM Mar 06, 1998


AIRED: 3/6/98



http://stargate.mgm.com/view/episode/2521/index.html

STARGATE

THE OFFICIAL MGM SITE


Stargate SG-1 / Season 1 / Within The Serpent's Grasp

Within The Serpent's Grasp

Original Air Date: 03/06/1998










http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4376

The American Presidency Project

Richard Nixon

XXXVII President of the United States: 1969 - 1974

7 - Letter to the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities Responding to Subpoenas Requiring Production of Presidential Tape Recordings and Documents

January 4, 1974

Dear Mr. Chairman:

This letter is in response to the three subpoenas issued by you as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities and received on my behalf by White House Counsel on December 19, 1973.

These subpoenas call upon the President to produce all of the material in his "custody or possession, or the custody of the Executive Office of the President, or the White House, actual or constructive . . ." which are described in extensive attachments. Only six months ago, your Committee concluded that recordings of five conversations were necessary for your legislative determinations. Now, in one subpoena alone, you list, with widely varying precision, some 492 personal and telephone conversations of the President ranging in time from mid-1971 to late 1973 for which recordings and related documents are sought; and, in addition, in the same subpoena, recordings and related documents are sought for categories of Presidential conversations, identified only by participants and time spans measured in months and years. A second subpoena seeks production of thirty-seven categories of documents or materials, one of which is "'President Richard Nixon's Daily Diary' for January 1, 1970, to December 19, 1973," a period of approximately four years.

As I stated in my letter to you of July 6, 1973, "Formulation of sound public policy requires that the President and his personal staff be able to communicate among themselves in complete candor, and that their tentative judgements, their exploration of alternatives, and their frank comments on issues and personalities at home and abroad remain confidential." I anticipated that even quite limited, selected disclosures of Presidential recordings and documents "would inevitably result in the attrition, and the eventual destruction, of the indispensable principle of confidentiality of Presidential papers."

To produce the material you now seek would unquestionably destroy any vestige of confidentiality of Presidential communications, thereby irreparably impairing the constitutional functions of the Office of the Presidency. Neither the judiciary nor the Congress could survive a similar power asserted by the Executive Branch to rummage through their files and confidential processes. Under the circumstances, I can only view your subpoena as an overt attempt to intrude into the Executive to a degree that constitutes an unconstitutional usurpation of power.

As you are aware, substantial numbers of materials have been provided to the Office of the Special Prosecutor for possible use with grand juries. With respect to whatever portions of the materials covered by your subpoena may be relevant to matters now subject to grand jury investigation, and potentially, criminal trials, disclosures to you, and through you to the public, could seriously impair the ability of the Office of the Special Prosecutor to complete its investigations and successfully prosecute the criminal cases which may arise from the grand juries.

Incurring these adverse consequences by complying with your subpoena would, on the other hand, serve no legislative purpose which I can discern.

I recognize that in the current environment, there may be some attempt to distort my position as only an effort to withhold information, but I take this position to protect the Office of the President against incursion by another Branch, which I believe, as have my predecessors in office, is of utmost constitutional importance.

Accordingly, in order to protect the fundamental structure of our government of three separate but equal branches, I must and do respectfully decline to produce the materials called for in your subpoenas.

Sincerely,

RICHARD NIXON










http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071824/releaseinfo

IMDb


McQ (1974)


Release Dates

USA 4 January 1974 (Seattle, Washington)



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071824/fullcredits

IMDb


Full cast and crew for

McQ (1974)


John Wayne ... McQ










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: From: Kerry Burgess

To: Kerry Burgess

Sent: Tuesday, May 9, 2006 6:01:15 PM

Subject: Right


I wonder if this is where that guy painting the picture was standing?

http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=aN.47.619681_-122.348911


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 09 May 2006 excerpt ends]










https://maps.google.com/?ll=47.619185,-122.348408&spn=0.000003,0.002064&t=h&layer=c&cbll=47.619185,-122.348918&panoid=BVyOEGFKscSu3Kb6gc72jw&cbp=12,354.7,,2,1.78&z=20

Google Maps


156 4th Avenue North, Seattle, Washington, United States

Address is approximate










http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html


Stephen King

The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition


Chapter 37


“Now that I think about it, I am dancing on the grave of the world. Another beer?”

Stu took one, and thought over what Bateman had said.

“It’s not really the end,” he said at last. “At least, I don’t think so. Just… intermission.”

“Rather apt. Well said. I’m going back to my picture, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you seen any other dogs?” Bateman asked as Kojak came bounding joyously back across the road.

“No.”

“Nor have I. You’re the only other person I’ve seen, but Kojak seems to be one of a kind.”

“If he’s alive, there will be others.”

“Not very scientific,” Bateman said kindly. “What kind of an American are you? Show me a second dog—preferably a bitch—and I’ll accept your thesis that somewhere there is a third. But don’t show me one and from that posit a second. It won’t do.”

“I’ve seen cows,” Stu said thoughtfully.

“Cows, yes, and deer. But the horses are all dead.”

“You know, that’s right,” Stu agreed. He had seen several dead horses on his walk. In some cases cows had been grazing upwind of the bloating bodies. “Now why should that be?”

“No idea. We all respire in much the same way, and this seems to be primarily a respiratory disease. But I wonder if there isn’t some other factor? Men, dogs, and horses catch it. Cows and deer don’t. And rats were down for a while but now seem to be coming back.” Bateman was recklessly mixing paint on his palette. “Cats everywhere, a plague of cats, and from what I can see, the insects are going on pretty much as they always have. Of course, the little faux pas mankind commits rarely seem to affect them, anyway—and the thought of a mosquito with the flu is just too ridiculous to consider. None of it makes any surface sense. It’s crazy.”

“It sure is,” Stu said, and uncorked another beer. His head was buzzing pleasantly.

“We’re apt to see some interesting shifts in the ecology,” Bateman said. He was making the horrible mistake of trying to paint Kojak into his picture. “Remains to be seen if Homo sapiens is going to be able to reproduce himself in the wake of this—it very much remains to be seen—but at least we can get together and try. But is Kojak going to find a mate? Is he ever going to become a proud papa?”

“Jesus, I guess he might not.”

Bateman stood, put his palette on his piano stool, and got a fresh beer. “I think you’re right,” he said. “There probably are other people, other dogs, other horses. But many of the animals may die without ever reproducing. There may be some animals of those susceptible species who were pregnant when the flu came along, of course. There may be dozens of healthy women in the United States right now who—pardon the crudity—have cakes baking in the oven. But some of the animals are apt to just sink below the point of no return. If you take the dogs out of the equation, the deer—who seem immune—are going to run wild. Certainly there aren’t enough men left around to keep the deer population down. Hunting season is going to be canceled for a few years.”

“Well,” Stu said, “the surplus deer will just starve.”

“No they won’t. Not all of them, not even most of them. Not up here, anyway. I can’t speak for what might happen in East Texas, but in New England, all the gardens were planted and growing nicely before this flu happened. The deer will have plenty to eat this year and next. Even after that, our crops will germinate wild. There won’t be any starving deer for maybe as long as seven years. If you come back this way in a few years, Stu, you’ll have to elbow deer out of your way to get up the road.”

Stu worked this over in his mind. Finally he said, “Aren’t you exaggerating?”

“Not on purpose. There may be a factor or factors I haven’t taken into consideration, but I honestly don’t think so. And we could take my hypothesis about the effect of the complete or almost complete subtraction of the dog population on the deer population and apply it to the relationships between other species. Cats breeding without check. What does that mean? Well, I said rats were down on the Ecological Exchange but making a comeback. If there are enough cats, that may change. A world without rats sounds good at first, but I wonder.”

“What did you mean when you said whether or not people could reproduce themselves was open to question?”

“There are two possibilities,” Bateman said. “At least two that I see now. The first is that the babies may not be immune.”

“You mean, die as soon as they get into the world?”

“Yes, or possibly in utero. Less likely but still possible, the superflu may have had some sterility effect on those of us that are left.”

“That’s crazy,” Stu said.

“So’s the mumps,” Glen Bateman said dryly.

“But if the mothers of the babies that are… are in utero … if the mothers are immune—”

“Yes, in some cases immunities can be passed on from mother to child just as susceptibilities can. But not in all cases. You just can’t bank on it. I think the future of babies now in utero is very uncertain. Their mothers are immune, granted, but statistical probability says that most of the fathers were not, and are now dead.”

“What’s the other possibility?”

“That we may finish the job of destroying our species ourselves,” Bateman said calmly. “I actually think that’s very possible. Not right away, because we’re all too scattered. But man is a gregarious, social animal; and eventually we’ll get back together, if only so we can tell each other stories about how we survived the great plague of 1990. Most of the societies that form are apt to be primitive dictatorships run by little Caesars unless we’re very lucky. A few may be enlightened, democratic communities, and I’ll tell you exactly what the necessary requirement for that kind of society in the 1990s and early 2000s is going to be: a community with enough technical people in it to get the lights back on. It could be done, and very easily. This isn’t the aftermath of a nuclear war, with everything laid to waste. All the machinery is just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along—the right someone, who knows how to clean the plugs and replace a few burned-out bearings—and start it up again. It’s all a question of how many of those who have been spared understand the technology we all took for granted.”

Stu sipped his beer. “Think so?”

“Sure.” Bateman took a swallow of his own beer, then leaned forward and smiled grimly at Stu. “Now let me give you a hypothetical situation, Mr. Stuart Redman from East Texas. Suppose we have Community A in Boston and Community B in Utica. They are aware of each other, and each community is aware of the conditions in the other community’s camp. Society A is in good shape. They are living on Beacon Hill in the lap of luxury because one of their members just happens to be a Con Ed repairman. This guy knows just enough to get the power plant which serves Beacon Hill running again. It would mostly be a matter of knowing which switches to pull when the plant went into an automatic shutdown. Once it’s running, it’s almost all automated anyhow. The repairman can teach other members of Society A which levers to pull and which gauges to watch. The turbines run on oil, of which there is a glut, because everybody who used to use it is as dead as old Dad’s hatband. So in Boston, the juice is flowing. There’s heat against the cold, light so you can read at night, refrigeration so you can have your Scotch on the rocks like a civilized man. In fact, life is pretty damn near idyllic. No pollution. No drug problem. No race problem. No shortages. No money or barter problem, because all the goods, if not the services, are out on display and there are enough of them to last a radically reduced society for three centuries. Sociologically speaking, such a group would probably become communal in nature. No dictatorship here. The proper breeding ground for dictatorship, conditions of want, need, uncertainty, privation… they simply wouldn’t exist. Boston would probably end up being run by a town meeting form of government again.

“But Community B, up there in Utica. There’s no one to run the power plant. The technicians are all dead. It’s going to take a long time for them to figure out how to make things go again. In the meantime, they’re cold at night (and winter is coming), they’re eating out of cans, they’re miserable. A strongman takes over. They’re glad to have him because they’re confused and cold and sick. Let him make the decisions. And of course he does. He sends someone to Boston with a request. Will they send their pet technician up to Utica to help them get their power plant going again? The alternative is a long and dangerous move south for the winter. So what does Community A do when they get this message?”

“They send the guy?” Stu asked.

“Christ’s testicles, no! He might be held against his will, in fact it would be extremely likely. In the post-flu world, technological know-how is going to replace gold as the most perfect medium of exchange. And in those terms, Society A is rich and Society B is poor. So what does Society B do?”

“I guess they go south,” Stu said, then grinned. “Maybe even to East Texas.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they threaten the Boston people with a nuclear warhead.”

“Right,” Stu said. “They can’t get their power plant going, but they can fire a nuclear missile at Beantown.”

Bateman said, “If it was me, I wouldn’t bother with a missile. I’d just try to figure out how to detach the warhead, then drive it to Boston in a station wagon. Think that would work?”

“Dogged if I know.”

“Even if it didn’t, there are plenty of conventional weapons around. That’s the point. All of that stuff is lying around, waiting to be picked up. And if Communities A and B both have pet technicians, they might work up some kind of rusty nuclear exchange over religion, or territoriality or some paltry ideological difference. Just think, instead of six or seven world nuclear powers, we may end up with sixty or seventy of them right here in the continental United States. If the situation were different, I’m sure that there would be fighting with rocks and spiked clubs. But the fact is, all the old soldiers have faded away and left their playthings behind. It’s a grim thing to be thinking about, especially after so many grim things have already happened… but I’m afraid it’s entirely possible.”

A silence fell between them. Far off they could hear Kojak barking in the woods as the day turned on its noontime axis.

“You know,” Bateman said finally, “I’m fundamentally a cheerful man. Maybe because I have a low threshold of satisfaction. It’s made me greatly disliked in my field. I have my faults; I talk too much, as you’ve heard, and I’m a terrible painter, as you’ve seen, and I used to be terribly unwise with money. I sometimes spent the last three days before payday eating peanut butter sandwiches and I was notorious in Woodsville for opening savings accounts and then closing them out a week later. But I never really let it get me down, Stu. Eccentric but cheerful, that’s me. The only bane of my life has been my dreams. Ever since boyhood I’ve been plagued by amazingly vivid dreams. A lot of them have been nasty. As a youngster it was trolls under bridges that reached up and grabbed my foot or a witch that turned me into a bird… I would open my mouth to scream, and nothing but a string of caws would come out. Do you ever have bad dreams, Stu?”

“Sometimes,” Stu said, thinking of Elder, and how Elder lurched after him in his nightmares, and of the corridors that never ended but only switched back on themselves, lit by cold fluorescents and filled with echoes.

“Then you know. When I was a teenager, I had the regular quota of sexy dreams, both wet and dry, but these were sometimes interspersed with dreams in which the girl I was with would change into a toad, or a snake, or even a decaying corpse. As I grew older I had dreams of failure, dreams of degradation, dreams of suicide, dreams of horrible accidental death. The most recurrent was one where I was slowly being crushed to death under a gas station lift. All simple permutations of the troll-dream, I suppose. I really believe that such dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and the people who have them are more blessed than cursed.”

“If you get rid of it, it doesn’t pile up.”

“Exactly. There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud’s being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more—that dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don’t dream—or don’t dream in away they can often remember when they wake up—are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream.”

Stu smiled.

“But lately, I’ve had an extremely bad dream. It recurs, like my dream of being crushed to death under the lift, but it makes that one look like a pussycat in comparison. It’s like no other dream I’ve ever had, but somehow it’s like all of them. As if… as if it were the sum of all bad dreams. And I wake up feeling bad, as if it wasn’t a dream at all, but a vision. I know how crazy that must sound.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a man,” Bateman said quietly. “At least, I think it’s a man. He’s standing on the roof of a high building, or maybe it’s a cliff that he’s on. Whatever it is, it’s so high that it sheers away into mist thousands of feet below. It’s near sunset, but he’s looking the other way, east. Sometimes he seems to be wearing bluejeans and a denim jacket, but more often he’s in a robe with a cowl. I can never see his face, but I can see his eyes. He has red eyes. And I have a feeling that he’s looking for me —and that sooner or later he will find me or I will be forced to go to him… and that will be the death of me. So I try to scream, and…” He trailed off with an embarrassed little shrug.

“That’s when you wake up?”

“Yes.” They watched Kojak come trotting back, and Bateman patted him while Kojak nosed in the aluminum dish and cleaned up the last of the poundcake.

“Well, it’s just a dream, I suppose,” Bateman said. He stood up, wincing as his knees popped. “If I were being psychoanalyzed, I suppose the shrink would say the dream expresses my unconscious fear of some leader or leaders who will start the whole thing going again. Maybe a fear of technology in general. Because I do believe that all the new societies which arise, at least in the Western world, will have technology as their cornerstone. It’s a pity, and it needn’t be, but it will be, because we are hooked. They won’t remember—or won’t choose to remember—the corner we had painted ourselves into. The dirty rivers, the hole in the ozone layer, the atomic bomb, the atmospheric pollution. All they’ll remember is that once upon a time they could keep warm at night without expending much effort to do it. I’m a Luddite on top of my other failings, you see. But this dream… it preys on me, Stu.”

Stu said nothing.

“Well, I want to get back,” Bateman said briskly. “I’m halfway drunk already, and I believe there will be thundershowers this afternoon.” He walked to the back of the clearing and rummaged there. A few moments later he came back with a wheelbarrow. He screwed the piano stool down to its lowest elevation, put it in, added his palette, the picnic cooler, and balanced precariously on top of everything else, his mediocre painting.

“You wheeled that all the way out here?” Stu asked.

“I wheeled it until I saw something I wanted to paint. I go different ways on different days. It’s good exercise. If you’re going east, why don’t you come back to Woodsville and spend the night at my house? We can take turns wheeling the barrow, and I’ve got yet another six-pack of beer cooling in yonder stream. That ought to get us home in style.”

“I accept,” Stu said.

“Good man. I’ll probably talk all the way home. You are in the arms of the Garrulous Professor, East Texas. When I bore you, just tell me to shut up. I won’t be offended.”

“I like to listen,” Stu said.

“Then you are one of God’s chosen. Let’s go.”










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: ----- Original Message ----

From: Kerry Burgess

To: Kerry Burgess

Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 2:45:01 PM

Subject: Re: Finally


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 10 May 2006 excerpt ends]



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 10:50 AM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Saturday 09 May 2015