The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King, author
excerpt, Chapter 17
The static slowly cleared.
" - Lion, Team Lion, do you read, Blue Base? Can you read? One two three four this is Team Lion - "
"I’ve got you, Team Lion," Starkey said. "This is Blue Base One."
"Problem is coded Flowerpot in the Contingency Book," the tinny voice said. "Repeat, Flowerpot."
"I know what the fuck Flowerpot is," Starkey said. “What’s the situation?”
The tinny voice coming from Sipe Springs talked uninterrupted for almost five minutes. The situation itself was unimportant, Starkey thought, because the computer had informed him two days ago that just this sort of situation (in some shape or form) was apt to occur before the end of June. 88% probability. The specifics didn’t matter. If it had two legs and belt-loops, it was a pair of pants. Never mind the color.
A doctor in Sipe Springs had made some good guesses, and a pair of reporters for a Houston daily had linked what was happening in Sipe Springs with what had already happened in Arnette, Verona, Commerce City, and a town called Polliston, Kansas. Those were the towns where the problem had gotten so bad so fast that the army had been sent in to quarantine. The computer had a list of twenty-five other towns in ten states where traces of Blue were beginning to show up.
The Sipe Springs situation wasn’t important because it wasn’t unique. They’d had their chance at unique in Arnette—well, maybe—and flubbed it. What was important was that the “situation” was finally going to see print on something besides yellow military flimsy; was, anyway, unless Starkey took steps. He hadn’t decided whether to do that or not. But when the tinny voice stopped talking, Starkey realized that he had made the decision after all. He had perhaps made it as long as twenty years ago.
It came down to what was important.
excerpt
https://www.press.org/newsroom/religious-beliefs-are-totally-arbitrary-author-dawkins-tells-club
The National Press Club
Religious Beliefs Are "Totally Arbitrary," Author Dawkins Tells Club
Heather Forsgren Weaver
October 03, 2013
Sally Quinn, editor-in-chief of the Washington Post’s “On Faith” Blog, interviewed Dawkins. Quinn said she decided she was an atheist at age 5. It took Dawkins a bit longer, until the age of 17 to reach the same conclusion, she said.
Dawkins dismissed as “exceptions” Quinn’s remark that some people leave their faith and then return to it. “The great majority of the world follows the religious tradition of their parents and that is totally arbitrary,” he said.
Most people turn to religion to understand things that are not yet understood scientifically, Dawkins said. “You would have to be pretty dead intellectually to not want to know where we came from,” he said.
People are drawn to religion from “wishful thinking” that they will see their deceased loved ones again, Dawkins said.
“It might be comforting to believe that you are going to survive your own death,” he said, but “just because you want something to be true doesn’t make it true.”
https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/wildfire/court-records-arson-suspect-admits-setting-old-trails-fire-25-other-fires/293-fc07494b-28e4-475f-acd2-ca40002f90d7
KREM2 CBS Spokane
Author: KREM Staff
Published: 1:42 PM PDT August 6, 2026
SPOKANE COUNTY, Wash. — The man charged with setting the Old Trails Fire in Spokane County is now facing additional arson charges after a court hearing Thursday.
Judge Jeremy Schmidt found probable cause to charge Aaron Farinacci with four additional counts of arson for fires the suspect told a detective he's set since last summer.
McCollam says Farinacci agreed to a recorded interview after he was arrested August 3, where "the defendant provided information previously unknown to law enforcement, to include his setting of additional fires in Spokane County that threatened human lives, structures, woodland, and property."
McCollam said the suspect also provided more details about the Old Trails Fire and "insight into his state of mind and intent in setting the fire."
A detective interviewed the suspect, where he denied setting any fires for 90 minutes, before eventually fully describing his plan to start and “maximize the spread” of the Old Trails Fire, court documents show.
“He feels fire is powerful, beautiful, and that things that go through fire experience a kind of rebirth,” the detective wrote of what the suspect told him.
He told the detective he planned the Old Trails Fire for two weeks and researched the weather to find a day with high winds and heat and low humidity. He also said he has researched other arsonists and ways to create time delay devices for setting wildfires.
He said he selected the location where he set the Old Trails Fire after walking the railroad tracks because he knew the fire would be bad, but did not intend it to get as large as it did. He stood there for some time ‘arguing’ and ‘fighting’ with himself about starting the fire, before putting together the time delay device and putting it in the grass.
Battlestar Galactica - tv miniseries - 12/08/2003, 12/09/2003
(from internet transcript)
Tigh: Ship's doctors say that at first glance, everything in Leoben's body appears human. Internal organs, lymphatic system, the works.
Baltar: Right, well the tissue sample yielded unique chemical compounds during the cremation that reveal the nature of the sample to be synthetic. (He feigns surprise.) So he was a Cylon?
Adama: Yes, he was. And now we have a problem.
Tigh: A big one.
Adama: If the Cylons look like us, then any one of us could be a Cylon.
Baltar: That's, that's a very frightening possibility.
Adama: We need a way to screen human from Cylon. And that's where you come in.
Baltar: Me? Umm...
Tigh: Rumor has it you're a genius.
Oblivion (2013)
(from internet transcript)
Jack Harper: I know I'm dreaming. But it feels like more than that. It feels like a memory. How can that be? March 14th, 2077. Five years since the mandatory memory wipe. And I'm still haunted by these dreams.
Stargate SG-1
"Past and Present"
TV-series season 3 episode 11, 10/15/1999
HAMMOND
Colonel, what if Dr Fraiser's unable to reverse whatever caused this?
O'NEILL
I don't know.
INT—INFIRMARY, SGC
[Fraiser shows the visitors their MRI results on a monitor.]
FRAISER
Now if you look at the blue areas, you'll see that you all have the same identical obstructions in your temporal lobes and hypocampus sections of your brain. I'm not exactly sure what it is, except it's some sort of residue between the synapses. So it's possible your old memories are intact, they're just not accessible.
DANIEL
So the memories are just blocked.
FRAISER
Literally, yes.
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 12:25 AM Pacific-timezone USA Friday 08/07/2026
