By Alan Caruba

As a book reviewer I receive countless requests to read books and, when I received one regarding “Kosher Jesus” by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, I was intrigued by the title. In addition to fathering nine children, the rabbi has written 27 books, is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and the profile on his website is filled with achievements and encomiums

I was, quite frankly, floored by his book. As a longtime informal student of world religions, I found his comparisons between the biblical and historical Jesus impressive.

As word of this book gets out, I suspect he will be contested by Christians because he meticulously reclaims the historical Jesus as quintessentially Jewish without a hint of the Christology that was applied to his life following his death at the hands of the Romans.

With some irony, it is another rabbi, Immanuel Schochet, who recently issued a letter banning anyone from reading “Kosher Jesus”, calling it heretical. Rabbi Boteach replied saying that “America is not Iran and rabbis in the American Jewish community are not the Revolutionary Guard.” Well said!

Debuting officially on February 1st, I suspect Rabbi Boteach is going to come in for a world of disputation from elements of the both the Jewish and Christian communities.

Their problem will be that Rabbi Boteach is a serious student of the Torah, the Talmud (rabbinical analysis and commentary on the Torah), and the New Testament.

His book is testament (no pun intended) to his central assertion that Jesus was a charismatic rabbi, a Jew preaching exclusively to Jews at a time when Israel was seeking to throw off the occupation of the greatest pagan power of his era, the Roman Empire.

Indeed, their rebellion would culminate in the destruction of the Second Temple and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews in 70 CE.

Rabbi Boteach dissects the gospels, all written well after the death of Jesus, and the writings of Saul of Tarsus, saying in effect, that Christianity wrongly asserts that the Covenant and laws of Judaism had been replaced by a religion based entirely on faith in the belief that Jesus died for the sins of the world and accepting him as a personal savior removes one’s personal responsibility to live a holy life, a righteous life, and one that accepts the Torah as God’s word and law.

Among Jewish and Christian martyrs who died for their faith, Rabbi Boteach places Jesus as the best known Jew in the world. He condemns the New Testament for seeking accommodation with the Roman Empire, composed of idol-worshipping pagans, by turning the historical Jesus into an enemy of Judaism and thereby letting loose two thousand years of anti-Semitism.

The rabbi is not seeking to convert Christians to Judaism and notes several times that Judaism does not proselytize. “Theologically, Christians and Jews think differently about the nature of the world.”

Instead, he seeks to restore Jesus “to his authentic Jewish roots” to “allow a new era of Jewish-Christian reapproachement to begin.” Indeed, in the wake of the Holocaust and the reestablishment of the nation of Israel, it is clear this change has been occurring.

In a time of resurgent Islamism, Rabbi Boteach rightly says that “Jews and Christians have so much in common, we must unite behind our democratic values, defend the embattled State of Israel, and participate in a unified front against those who have vowed to defeat us.”

Amen to that!

“Kosher Jesus” will not be an easy book for Christians to read because it rebuts much of what the New Testament has to say about Jesus. It eviscerates the claims of the gospel writers and of Paul, an apostle who never knew the Jesus he promoted as part-god, part-human, a distinctly pagan belief. The Romans routinely believed their emperors were gods. The Greek pantheon of gods had distinctly human characteristics and failings.

“Restoring his Jewish identity makes (Jesus) available to us as a flesh-and-blood hero who fought for what is right, in place of a celestial icon utterly detached from human experience”, says Rabbi Boteach.

The perfection attributed to Jesus, the rabbi notes, is comparable to that attributed to the Buddha and, in the Hindu faith, to Krishna. Humanity longs for such perfection, but Judaism believes that we achieve righteousness in our struggle to do the right thing, by our acts, not by faith alone.

Jews know it is human to fail and that is why God offers redemption. Indeed, the word “Israel” means “he who wrestles with God.”

I recommend “Kosher Jesus” to anyone who wrestles with God, who wrestles with their human imperfections, and who strives to live a righteous life.

Source: Alan Caruba (C)

Editor’s Note: We welcome your comments. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Jim Kouri

A former veteran Central Intelligence Agency operations officer was charged yesterday with frequent disclosure of classified intelligence to journalists, including the identity of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the identity and role of another CIA employee in classified activities, according to a U.S. Justice Department reported obtained by the National Association of Chiefs of Police.

“Prior to publication of his book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, [John] Kiriakou submitted a draft manuscript in July 2008 to the CIA’s Publication Review Board (PRB).

In an attempt to trick the CIA into allowing him to publish information regarding a classified investigative technique, Kiriakou allegedly lied to the PRB by falsely claiming that the technique was fictional and that he had never heard of it before.”

The charges result from an investigation involving CIA Senior Operations Officer  John Kiriakou that was triggered by a defense filing in January 2009, which contained classified information the defense had not been given through official government channels, and, in part, by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of certain government employees and contractors in the materials of high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The investigation revealed that on multiple occasions, one of the journalists to whom the 47-year old Kiriakou is alleged to have illegally disclosed classified information, in turn, disclosed that information to a defense team investigator, and that this information was reflected in the classified defense filing and enabled the defense team to take or obtain surveillance photographs of government personnel.

The journalists are not identified by name in court documents, but many believe that Kiriakou was a source for a June 2008 New York Times article written by Scott Shane.

There are no allegations of criminal activity by any members of the defense team for the detainees.

Kiriakou, of Arlington, Virginia, was a CIA intelligence officer between 1990 and 2004, serving at headquarters and in various classified overseas assignments.

He was charged with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for allegedly illegally disclosing the identity of a covert officer and two counts of violating the Espionage Act for the alleged illegal disclosure of national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it.

Kiriakou was also charged with one count of making false statements for allegedly lying to the Publications Review Board of the CIA in an unsuccessful attempt to trick the CIA into allowing him to include classified information in a book he was seeking to publish.

CIA Officer Betrays Fellow Intel Agents

The four-count criminal complaint, which was filed Monday in the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges that Kiriakou made illegal disclosures about two CIA employees and their involvement in classified operations to two journalists on multiple occasions between 2007 and 2009.

In one case, revealing the employee’s name as a CIA officer disclosed classified information as the employee was and remains covert (identified in the complaint as “Covert Officer A”).

In the second case, Kiriakou allegedly disclosed the name and contact information of an employee, identified in the complaint as “Officer B,” whose participation in an operation to capture and question terrorism subject Abu Zubaydah in 2002 was then classified.

Kiriakou’s alleged disclosures occurred prior to a June 2008 front-page story in The New York Times disclosing Officer B’s alleged role in the Abu Zubaydah operation.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who was appointed Special Attorney in 2010 to supervise the investigation, announced the charges with James W. McJunkin, Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they thanked the Central Intelligence Agency for its very substantial assistance in the investigation, as well as the Air Force Office of Special Investigations for its assistance.

“Protecting the identities of America’s covert operatives is one of the most important responsibilities of those who are entrusted with roles in our nation’s intelligence community.

The FBI and our intelligence community partners work diligently to hold accountable those who violate that special trust,” said Mr. McJunkin.

The CIA filed a crimes report with the Justice Department on March 19, 2009, prior to the discovery of the photographs and after reviewing the January 19, 2009, classified filing by defense counsel for certain detainees with the military commission then responsible for adjudicating charges.

The defense filing contained information relating to the identities and activities of covert government personnel, but prior to January 19, 2009, there had been no authorized disclosure to defense counsel of the classified information.

The Justice Department’s National Security Division, working with the FBI, began the investigation. To avoid the risk of encountering a conflict of interest because of the pending prosecutions of some of the high-value detainees, Mr. Fitzgerald was assigned to supervise the investigation conducted by a team of attorneys from the Southern District of New York, the Northern District of Illinois, and the Counterespionage Section of the National Security Division who were not involved in pending prosecutions of the detainees.

According to the complaint affidavit, the investigation determined that no laws were broken by the defense team as no law prohibited defense counsel from filing a classified document under seal outlining for a court classified information they had learned during the course of their investigation.

Regarding the 32 pages of photographs that were taken or obtained by the defense team and provided to the detainees, the investigation found no evidence the defense attorneys transmitting the photographs were aware of, much less disclosed, the identities of the persons depicted in particular photographs and no evidence that the defense team disclosed other classified matters associated with certain of those individuals to the detainees.

The defense team did not take photographs of persons known or believed to be current covert officers.

Rather, defense counsel, using a technique known as a double-blind photo lineup, provided photograph spreads of unidentified individuals to their clients to determine whether they recognized anyone who may have participated in questioning them.

No law or military commission order expressly prohibited defense counsel from providing their clients with these photo spreads.

Upon joining the CIA in 1990 and on multiple occasions in following years, Kiriakou signed secrecy and non-disclosure agreements not to disclose classified information to unauthorized individuals.

Regarding Covert Officer A, the affidavit details a series of e-mail communications between Kiriakou and Journalist A in July and August 2008.

In an exchange of e-mails on July 11, 2008, Kiriakou allegedly illegally confirmed for Journalist A that Covert Officer A, whose first name only was exchanged at that point, was “the team leader on [specific operation].”

On August 18, 2008, Journalist A sent Kiriakou an e-mail asking if Kiriakou could pick out Covert Officer A’s last name from a list of names Journalist A provided in the e-mail.

On Aug. 19, 2008, Kiriakou allegedly passed the last name of Covert Officer A to Journalist A by e-mail, stating “It came to me last night.”

Covert Officer A’s last name had not been on the list provided by Journalist A. Later that same day, approximately two hours later, Journalist A sent an e-mail to the defense investigator that contained Covert Officer A’s full name.

Neither Journalist A, nor any other journalist to the government’s knowledge, has published the name of Covert Officer A.

At the time of Kiriakou’s allegedly unauthorized disclosures to Journalist A, the identification of Covert Officer A as “the team leader on [specific operation]” was classified at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) level because it revealed both Covert Officer A’s identity and his association with the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) Program relating to the capture, detention, and questioning of terrorism subjects.

The defense investigator was able to identify Covert Officer A only after receiving the e-mail from Journalist A, and both Covert Officer A’s name and association with the RDI Program were included in the January 2009 classified defense filing.

The defense investigator told the government that he understood from the circumstances that Covert Officer A was a covert employee and, accordingly, did not take his photograph. No photograph of Covert Officer A was recovered from the detainees at Guantanamo.

In a recorded interview last Thursday, FBI agents told Kiriakou that Covert Officer A’s name was included in the classified defense filing. The affidavit states Kiriakou said, among other things, “How the heck did they get him? . . . [First name of Covert Officer A] was always undercover. His entire career was undercover.”

Kiriakou further stated that he never provided Covert Officer A’s name or any other information about Covert Officer A to any journalist and stated “Once they get the names, I mean this is scary.”

Regarding Officer B, the affidavit states that he worked overseas with Kiriakou on an operation to locate and capture Abu Zubaydah, and Officer B’s association with the RDI Program and the Abu Zubaydah operation in particular were classified until that information was recently declassified to allow the prosecution of Kiriakou to proceed.

In June 2008, The New York Times published an article by Journalist B entitled “Inside the Interrogation of a 9/11 Mastermind,” which publicly identified Officer B and reported his alleged role in the capture and questioning of Abu Zubaydah—facts which were then classified.

The article attributed other information to Kiriakou as a source, but did not identify the source(s) who disclosed or confirmed Officer B’s identity.

The charges allege that at various times prior to publication of the article, Kiriakou provided Journalist B with personal information regarding Officer B, knowing that Journalist B was seeking to identify and locate Officer B. In doing so, Kiriakou allegedly confirmed classified information that Officer B was involved in the Abu Zubaydah operation.

For example, Kiriakou allegedly e-mailed Officer B’s phone number and personal e-mail address to Journalist B, who attempted to contact Officer B via his personal e-mail in April and May 2008. Officer B had provided his personal e-mail address to Kiriakou, but not to Journalist B or any other journalist.

Subsequently, Kiriakou allegedly revealed classified information by confirming for Journalist B additional information that an individual with Officer B’s name, who was associated with particular contact information that Journalist B had found on a website, was located in Pakistan in March 2002, which was where and when the Abu Zubaydah operation took place.

After The New York Times article was published, Kiriakou sent several e-mails denying that he was the source for information regarding Officer B, while, at the same time, allegedly lying about the number and nature of his contacts with Journalist B.

For example, in an e-mail dated June 30, 2008, Kiriakou told Officer B that Kiriakou had spoken to the newspaper’s ombudsman after the article was published and said that the use of Officer B’s name was “despicable and unnecessary” and could put Officer B in danger.

Kiriakou also denied that he had cooperated with the article and claimed that he had declined to talk to Journalist B, except to say that he believed the article absolutely should not mention Officer B’s name.

“While it might not be illegal to name you, it would certainly be immoral,” Kiriakou wrote to Officer B, according to the affidavit.

From at least November 2007 through November 2008, Kiriakou allegedly provided Journalist A with Officer B’s personal contact information and disclosed to Journalist A classified information revealing Officer B’s association with the RDI Program.

Just as Journalist A had disclosed to the defense investigator classified information that Kiriakou allegedly imparted about Covert Officer A, Journalist A, in turn, provided the defense investigator information that Kiriakou had disclosed about Officer B.

For example, in an e-mail dated April 10, 2008, Journalist A provided the defense investigator with Officer B’s home phone number, which, in light of Officer B’s common surname, allowed the investigator to quickly and accurately identify Officer B and photograph him.

Both Officer B’s name and his association with the RDI Program were included in the January 2009 classified defense filing, and four photographs of Officer B were among the photos recovered at Guantanamo.

In the same recorded interview with FBI agents last week, Kiriakou said he “absolutely” considered Officer B’s association with the Abu Zubaydah operation classified, the affidavit states.

Kiriakou also denied providing any contact information for Officer B or Officer B’s association with the Abu Zubaydah operation to Journalists A and B prior to publication of the June 2008 New York Times article.

When specifically asked whether he had anything to do with providing Officer B’s name or other information about Officer B to Journalist B prior to the article, Kiriakou stated “Heavens no.”

As background, the affidavit states that sometime prior to May 22, 2007, Kiriakou disclosed to Journalist C classified information regarding Officer B’s association with Abu Zubaydah operation, apparently while collaborating on a preliminary book proposal.

A footnote states that Journalist C is not the coauthor of the book Kiriakou eventually published.

Prior to publication of his book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, Kiriakou submitted a draft manuscript in July 2008 to the CIA’s Publication Review Board (PRB).

In an attempt to trick the CIA into allowing him to publish information regarding a classified investigative technique, Kiriakou allegedly lied to the PRB by falsely claiming that the technique was fictional and that he had never heard of it before.

In fact, according to a transcript of a recorded interview conducted in August 2007 to assist Kiriakou’s coauthor in drafting the book, Kiriakou described the technique, which he referred to as the “magic box,” and told his coauthor that the CIA had used the technique in the Abu Zubaydah operation. The technique was also disclosed in the June 2008 New York Times article and referred to as a “magic box.”

In his submission letter to the PRB, Kiriakou flagged the reference to a device called a “magic box,” stating he had read about it in the newspaper article but added that the information was “clearly fabricated,” as he was unaware of and had used no such device.

The affidavit contains the contents of an August 2008 e-mail that Kiriakou sent his coauthor admitting that he lied to the PRB in an attempt to include classified information in the book.

The PRB subsequently informed Kiriakou that the draft manuscript contained classified information that he could not use, and information regarding the technique that Kiriakou included in the manuscript remained classified until it was recently declassified to allow Kiriakou’s prosecution to proceed.

Upon conviction, the count charging illegal disclosure of Covert Officer A’s identity to a person not authorized to receive classified information carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, which must be imposed consecutively to any other term of imprisonment; the two counts charging violations of the Espionage Act each carry a maximum term of 10 years in prison; and making false statements carries a maximum prison term of five years. Each count carries a maximum fine of $250,000.

Source: Examiner

Editor’s Note: Kiriakou leaked classified information to reporters as part of his book writing and news analysis job at ABC News. Credits: Newsbusters

Jim Kouri, CPP, formerly Fifth Vice-President, is currently a Board Member of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, an editor for ConservativeBase.com, and he’s a columnist for Examiner.com. 

In addition, he’s a blogger for the Cheyenne, Wyoming Fox News Radio affiliate KGAB (http://www.kgab.com/). Kouri also serves as political advisor for Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Michael Moriarty. 

He’s former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed “Crack City” by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s.

In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations.  He’s also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country.  

Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, the Narc Officer and others. He’s a news writer and columnist for AmericanDaily.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he’s syndicated by AXcessNews.Com.  

Kouri appears regularly as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Fox News Channel, Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, etc. You can reach him at Copmagazine@aol.com. 

We welcome your comments. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Dr. Avi Perry

People keep asking. “What drove you to write 72 Virgins?” Why—after a long career as a professor in the academia, followed by a hi-tech stint as a technology chief—suddenly an author—a fiction writer. What happened?

My latest novel, 72 Virgins, carries a message, a prediction. Islamic terror is about to explode in the US.  It’s a fact. Imagine. Attacks were thwarted even on the day the book was released.

The real question is not whether Jihad terrorists’ plots will ever cease to emerge—there is no chance of that. The question the book seeks to answer is whether the next one will be stopped before it’s too late.

I was born in Israel. I served in the Israeli military during, before and after the Six-Day-War in 1967. I lived and breathed war violence, military intelligence, spy-craft designed for terror deterrence.

I understand wars, military conflicts, and faith-based hate—an Islamic trait, since I grew up in that kind of a hostile neighborhood.

I have been frustrated by the naiveté of my American friends and colleagues who keep asking, whenever I take a trip to my birthplace, “aren’t you worried? Isn’t it dangerous over there?

I keep thinking to myself. “Aren’t you worried as well?” Did you forget 9/11?

Did you forget the following terror and potential terror attacks on US and Western interests all over and around the world?

America needs a constant reminder. Americans must be more alert and more aware. The economy is important. The healthcare system must be fixed. But security should not be sacrificed in the process.

Without security – freedom, the economy and healthcare are meaningless. And if you don’t get it, try living in Afghanistan for a week.  

There has been no serious terror attack in the US since 9/11. Americans have become complacent. The political left is on the attack—their aim is distorted. They go after the CIA, the law enforcement agency in charge of protecting us.

They do not ask themselves the question that I am trying to answer in 72 Virgins—how is it that there has been no terror attack on US soil since 9/11?

We all know (or at least those who read or watch the news), that there have been attempts; they failed; perpetrators were caught; we are safe. No!

I grew up in Israel, and I have seen it. You can’t fight a religion driven, faith-based hate by being nice, by making sure you don’t violate rules of war, by making concessions.

These are means that apply to rational opponents—not ones steered by a holy book, but rather, by a selfish interest. I was trying to clarify that concept in 72 Virgins.

I was trying to craft characters, through which the reader can grasp the new reality behind the type of terror we have been witnessing in the past twenty years.

I wrote 72 Virgins because I care about America, because I have grown distressed when witnessing the mounting naiveté among those who lack the understanding of history; those who are unable to learn from it and avoid repeating past mistakes.

I was trying to explain that suicide bombers are not desperate people. They are the most selfish animals in existence. They kill innocents, believing that that criminal act is martyrdom, qualifying them for an express ticket to heaven, next to Allah’s throne, where 72 Virgins would attend to their needs.

Source: Dr. Avi Perry

Editor’s Note: We at the Chronicle welcome Dr. Perry to our staff. We hope that you will enjoy his work. We also hope that you will enjoy in the discussion and let us know what you think.

Dr. Avi Perry, a talk show host at Paltalk News Network (PNN), is the author of “Fundamentals of Voice Quality Engineering in Wireless Networks,” and more recently, “72 Virgins,” a thriller about the covert war on Islamic terror.

He was a VP at NMS Communications, a Bell Laboratories – distinguished staff member and manager, as well as a delegate of the US and Lucent Technologies to the ITU—the UN International Standards body in Geneva, a professor at Northwestern University, as well as an Intelligence officer at the IDF and the Israeli Government.

We would like to know what you think. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Alan Caruba

In 1942 my parents purchased a home in a picture-postcard suburban New Jersey community and the first improvement they made was to have bookshelves installed on the rear wall of the living room along with more in one corner.

They had brought a lot of books with them and anticipated reading many more.

The living room was a library. An indelible memory of mine was of both parents reading. My father was a graduate of New York University, having worked his way through while attending night school.

Mother occasionally lamented not having attended college, but Mother also taught in the adult school of the community for three decades and authored two books in addition to many magazine columns.

An authority on haute cuisine and wine, she garnered honors from the British and French Sommelier Societies, as well as from Germany. She was profiled in The New York Times. The word for a person like Mother is autodidact a fancy way of saying self-taught.

Earlier and well into the 1930s through the 1950s Americans devoured books and often spent precious dollars to purchase sets of the Harvard Classics—we had them—and either the Encyclopedia Britannica or Americana—we had the latter.

The Book of the Month Club was very successful as was a magazine called Reader’s Digest.

I was reminded of this by a very entertaining new book, “Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America”, authored by Daniel J. Flynn. The introduction begins with a reflection on popular culture, “Stupid is the new smart.”

This isn’t, however, just another lament about the sad state of present-day education or popular culture. Instead, it is a look back at America in the pre-World War Two era up to and beyond when television began to occupy the time many used to devote to reading books.

Ironically, Flynn notes that television played a powerful role in popularizing several of the people he identifies as intellectual icons.

“For much of the twentieth century,” wrote Flynn, “there was a concerted effort among intellectuals to spread knowledge and wisdom far and wide. Correspondingly, many regular people took full advantage of the great educational effort.

The idea was that America depended on having a well-rounded, educated citizenry.” This was not a new idea because from its earliest years Americans valued knowledge for its own sake.

“Twentieth-century America witnessed a democratization of education, unparalleled in human history,”says Flynn. I mentioned that my Mother taught gourmet cooking in adult schools. This was a phenomenon that began after World War Two.

In addition to the GI bill that encouraged returning servicemen, mostly still young, to attend college, adult schools sprang up in communities as a way to quench the thirst for knowledge among the parents of those in college who, because of the Depression and the war, had not had the opportunity to acquire a higher level of education.

Common among the intellectual icons that Flynn identifies as having made learning popular was that all of them came from humble, often hardscrabble beginnings.

They were not the children of wealth and privilege. They were people who knew what it meant to work for meager wages, but yearn for great achievement.

All were denizens of local libraries and veracious readers. Of those who became members of the faculties of distinguished institutions, their roots gave them a unique advantage whether the topic was history, economics, or literature. They had lived in the real world.

The “blue collar intellectuals” included Will and Ariel Durant, co-authors of “The Story of Civilization” that included eleven-volumes by the time they were completed.

Another was Mortimer Adler who authored “The Story of Philosophy” and, in 1940, “How to Read a Book” which became the second best-selling book of that year.

Milton Friedman transformed economics while teaching at the University of Chicago for thirty years starting in 1946. He would win a Nobel Prize. “Friedman understood that economics wasn’t merely about numbers. It was about people.”

His book, “Capitalism and Freedom”, challenged many of the New Deal liberal policies when published in 1962. As Flynn put it, the book “highlighted the disconnect between the intentions of do-gooders and the atrocious results of their deeds.”

I can still recall reading Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” some years after it was first published in 1951. Working as a longshoreman, a strike in 1946 gave Hoffer the time to begin writing the book and another in 1948 gave him the time to finish it.

It has never gone out of print and it took the reclusive Hoffer from a modest life he greatly preferred to meeting with presidents. The book was about mass movements and was his response to the two worst of the last century, Communism and Nazism. His own lifetime of reading is reflected in this and other books he subsequently wrote.

Flynn ends with a look at Ray Bradbury, best remembered as a science-fiction writer, but like the others of a humble origin, beginning in Waukegan, Illinois in 1920. His books, “Fahrenheit 451”, “Something Wicked Comes This Way”, and “The Martian Chronicles” cemented his reputation.

Flynn says that “the threat to the life of the mind comes not as much from people who burn books as from people who don’t read them.”

So, when you’re commuting to work, on a lunch break, or when a hundred or more television channels offer you nothing worth watching keep a book at hand. Some of them will become lifelong companions.

Source: Alan Caruba (C)

Editor’s Note: We welcome your comments. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Alan Caruba

By far the most important event in the entire rise of Christianity was the meeting in Jerusalem in around the year 50, when Paul was granted the authority to convert Gentiles without them also becoming observant Jews.”

So wrote Rodney Stark, the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. His most recent book is “The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion” ($27.99, HarperCollins).

For Christians in particular, I recommend it if only because so many have a tenuous grasp of Christianity’s real history, as opposed the versions that too often are casually accepted as truth.

The truth is that the rise of Christianity is one of the most extraordinary stories of the past two millennia. Stark not only has the knowledge of his vast subject, but he writes with such felicity that it is hard to put the 500-page book aside for both its revelations and its devotion to the facts.

Despite the fact we live in a society that has at most only 4% who self-describe themselves as atheists, the more active among them have the audacity to demand that Christmas be banished to the privacy of homes or the pews and pulpits of churches.

They rebuke religion in general as the source of conflict and wars, but ignore the spiritual support and ethical lessons that Christianity provides along with its promise of salvation.

While Judaism was the bedrock of morality and faith that gave it birth, Christianity made it more accessible and significantly includes the Torah as part of its liturgy.

To ignore the rise of Christianity is to be ignorant of an essential element of Western history. Likewise, to ignore the threat of Islam whose beginning is usually dated around 622 CE and which exploded following Mohammad’s death in 632 CE is to ignore the greatest threat to civilization, past and present. Less a religion than a battle plan for world conquest, Islam preaches death to all “unbelievers.” Take heed!

Stark provides a summation to his book and, even so, I shall select only parts of it in the interest of brevity.

“The first generation of the Jesus Movement consisted of a tiny and fearful minority” of a religion, Judaism, that had already been around for a thousand years or more before the assertion was made that the messiah had come and was a crucified Galilean rabbi who mainly and briefly preached in that area of Israel.

“The mission to the Jews was quite successful: large numbers of Jews in the Diasporan communities outside of Palestine did convert to Christianity.”

The Diaspora were the Jewish communities in the Middle East and throughout the Mediterranean nations, including Rome, living in places where pagan faiths were dominant.

“Christianity was not a religion based on the slaves and lowest classes of Romans, but was particularly attractive to the privileged.” Moreover, in its earliest years, women often played important roles.

Contrary to popular belief, however, “Paganism was not quickly stamped out, but disappeared very slowly.” Paganism involved the worship of multiple gods as well as a belief in magic.

Despite impressive cathedrals, in medieval times church worship among Christians was largely ignored and, as often as not, the clergy were ill-informed about the faith and sometimes not even baptized.

Despite what is said of the Crusades, they were a campaign to reclaim the holy land from Muslims who had conquered it and they were led by men who knowingly bankrupted themselves and often died in this cause.

Though Christianity had been widely observed in the East, the armies of Islam destroyed all but remnants, thus shifting its survival to Europe in the West.

“Science arose only in the West because efforts to formulate and discover laws of nature only made sense if one believed in a rational creator.” Even the misnamed “Dark Ages” were actually times of technological development.

Likewise historians have determined that the Spanish Inquisition was “a quite temperate body that was responsible for very few deaths and saved a great many lives by opposing the witch hunts that swept through the rest of Europe.”

Perhaps the greatest surprise was the damage done by Constantine who, having made it the religion of his empire, gave rise to an indolent and hypocritical Church hierarchy initially composed of Roman aristocracy.

It fostered a clergy who were ignorant of the faith and indifferent to its mission. Not until the Reformation was competition introduced, forcing the Church to return to piety, as various Protestant sects emerged, and energized Christianity in the process.

Stark concludes that “The claim that religion must soon disappear as the world becomes more modern is nothing but wishful thinking on the part of academic atheists.

Religion is thriving, perhaps as never before. More than forty percent of the people on Earth today are Christians and their number is growing more rapidly than that of any other major faith.”

And that, as they say, is the good news.

Source: Alan Caruba (C)

Editor’s Note: We welcome your comments. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Alan Caruba

The most formidable couple in the world during the 1980s was Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher, a conservative and a woman of iron will, must be looking across the Channel with some amusement to see how her German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, is literally the only person keeping the European economy from collapsing and, it must be said, taking England and America with it.

The cover article of this week’s Business Week noted that “Merkel is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. She won a PhD for a thesis on quantum chemistry…though childless, she is known as Mutti, for Mother.”

Born in the post-war years, “Merkel’s worldview reflects the German desire for stability. Chaos plagued the German-speaking people long before there was a German nation…Later the hyperinflation of the 1920s and Depression of the 1930s, both of which undermined the middle-class, gave rise to Nazism.”

Plainly said, Angela Merkel is showing the rest of the world why Keynesian economics doesn’t work; that governments with huge “entitlement” programs and a tendency to throw vast amounts of money at their problems invite disaster. If Europe does not plunge into chaos, it will be because she refused to bail it out with the deutschmark.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is moving billions to Europe to ease its lending crisis.

If you read just one book this year, I recommend James Rickards’ “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis” ($26.95, Portfolio Penguin).

An advisor to the Department of Defense, the U.S. Intelligence community, and major hedge funds on global finance, he brings more than thirty years’ experience to a book that explains what has gone so terribly wrong and why.

Rickards spells out how the U.S. economic system has been gamed over the years to ensure that “elites captured most of that growth in income and profits.”

It is the reason we are just learning that many members of Congress have grown wealthy using insider information, an act that would land anyone else in jail.

“Over time and with increasing complexity, returns on investment in society begin to level off and turn negative…Bureaucracies that started out as efficient organizations turn into inefficient obstacles to improvement more concerned with their own perpetuation than with service to society.”

This is a definition of the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Health, and Energy, along with the quintessential monster, the Environmental Protection Agency. For good measure, include Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage loan agencies.

In a chapter titled “Endgame—Paper, Gold or Chaos?” Rickards looks at the weakness of the U.S. dollar, pointing out that “As the dollar and sterling were trading places in the 1920s and 1930s, there was never a time when at least one was not anchored to gold.”

“Gold is not a commodity. Gold is not an investment. Gold is money par excellence. It is truly scarce—all the gold ever produced in history would fit in a cube of twenty meters (about sixty feet) on each side, approximately the size of a small suburban office building.”

“Today, under Bernanke’s guidance, the United States is trying to do what England did in 1931—devalue…What is happening instead is that all the major currencies are devaluing against gold at once. The result is global commodity inflation, so that beggar-thy-neighbor has been replaced with beggar-the-world.”

Rickards’ book is a warning against what we are witnessing. “Perhaps the most likely outcome of the currency wars and the debasement of the dollar is a chaotic, catastrophic collapse of investor confidence resulting in emergency measured by governments to maintain some semblance of a functioning system of money, trade and investment.”

The two currency wars of the last century led to two world wars. Rickards warns that “The path of the dollar is unsustainable and therefore the dollar will not be sustained.” A return to the gold standard “offers the best chance of stability.”

Rickards recommends that the big banks be required to become smaller and that derivatives be banned because “they serve banks and dealers through high fees and poorly understood terms.” Derivatives are contracts between two parties that define the value of underlying variables.

The “bundling” of mortgages that were then sold as assets is an example and, as the financial crisis revealed, their value was dubious at best, criminal at worst.

“The dollar,” says Rickards, “for all its faults and weaknesses, is the pivot of the entire global system of currencies, stocks, bonds, derivatives and investments of all kinds. It is the store of economic value in a nation whose moral values are historically exceptional and therefore a light to the world.

The debasement of the dollar cannot proceed without the debasement of those values and that exceptionalism.”

The coming national election will be a choice between a President who does not believe the United States of America is exceptional and whoever the Republican Party selects to help the nation return to its fundamental values. 

Source: Alan Caruba (C)

Editor’s Note: We welcome your comments. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Gadi Adelman
GCC/Staff
Nov. 21, 2011

Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” was written 65 years ago, but it predicted the chaos of today’s world. I had the  chance to interview the man who finally brought this book to the screen.

Who is John Galt? Anyone who has read Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” or has seen the movie by the same name understands the importance of that question.

Over the years we have all heard tag lines to movies such as “the most important movie of our time”, etc. This book and now an amazingly well done major motion picture, truly is just that.

As a writer on our national security and terrorism many may find this type of article to be unusual for me, but all one has to do is look at what is happening not only across this country, but throughout the world to see the impact any nation’s economy has on their security.

The long term ramifications of what is happening today, specifically that of the “anti-capitalists” is frighteningly right out of the Atlas Shrugged novel.

What Ayn Rand experienced while growing up in Russia molded her to see where we as a nation and a world would end up if government were to become too big and therefore uncontrollable.

As I sat and watched this movie I found myself like so many others with my mouth wide open in awe of the actual happenings today. 

Although the novel and movie use the steel industry and railroad as the main premise; one only has to look at the government trying to control every aspect of business from the sole proprietor, to Boeing and the unions to see the similarities.

The Ayn Rand Institute website explains,

She began her major novel Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951 she moved back to New York City and devoted herself full time to the completion of Atlas Shrugged.

Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement and last work of fiction. In this novel she dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex.

Although she considered herself primarily a fiction writer, she realized that in order to create heroic fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic principles which make such individuals possible.

Ayn Rand.

As explained in her bio,

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction writing her career.

During her high school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and—in 1917—the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In order to escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea, where she finished high school.

The final Communist victory brought the confiscation of her father’s pharmacy and periods of near-starvation. When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be.

As much as the novel was “an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex” imagine attempting to make it a major motion picture and keeping what Ayn Rand envisioned alive.

I was fortunate enough to see the movie ‘Atlas Shrugged Part One’ the evening it opened April 15, 2011, but I was even more fortunate to sit down and have a candid conversation with the motion picture’s producer, Harmon Kaslow.

Harmon is not what I expected to say the least. I guess I had it in my head that people from Hollywood would be… Let’s just say, I thought they would be stuck up, you know, the ‘Hollywood’ types we hear about.

Harmon is laid back, yet energetic and as open as a book, no pun intended. It was truly a pleasure to get to know this unique individual.

Speaking with him you can hear in his voice the importance of this movie to him on a personal level and the way he describes that it affected him rubs off on anyone who cares to listen.

So, jumping in with both feet as I usually do I started off with the obvious question, “Why is “Atlas Shrugged” so relevant today?”

Showing his humor right out of the gate Harmon stated, “Boy, I’ve never been asked that question!”

He continued,

“Atlas Shrugged was supposed to be a warning, not a newspaper and the themes in the book parallel what’s happening today and it’s frightening.

When Ayn Rand was writing the book in 1946 it was after Roosevelt’s third term in office and in many ways it’s a parody to Roosevelt’s “New deal” polices and was really a wakeup call to resist the growing power of government.

And now, more than 50 years later, the story really resonates with people because we can see and fill the effect of what happens when our individual liberties are taken away and we move away from having a policy of limited government intervention.”

Gadi Adelman:  “It amazed me when I sat in the theater watching the movie and I could hear comments, you could tell those that hadn’t read the book, didn’t know it was a book and thought they were watching a movie of where we are headed given the circumstances going on today.”

Harmon Kaslow:  “Exactly.”

GA: “How did you get involved in this movie; did you know John [Aglialoro] before this?”

HK: “It was through tremendous great fortune. I was doing work, not directly, but indirectly with Harold Baldwin and when John asked him who out in Hollywood he would recommend, I got the nod.

So John gave me a call in early April 2010 and after a few conversations we decided that we would go forward together in making the film and so I was just really brought on because of the experience that I have had in independent film production.

But through the process I’ve been able to meet some of the most incredible minds on the planet who really have embraced us, who understand it, who have been inspired by it, who have been influenced by it and a lot of that has rubbed off on me and really has in a sense changed my life, not to mention established an incredible and meaningful friendship with John Aglialoro.”

GA: “What exactly does a movie producer do?”

HK: “It’s sort of like being the CEO of a corporation. We had a lot of incredibly talented and experienced people, the producer wears a CEO hat and at the same time has the ability to put his or her finger prints on the creative vision, they’re working with the creative forces of the picture which is generally the director of the picture, so they have a chance to oversee the creative and business aspect of getting the movie produced.”

GA: “How much creative flow is involved there with someone like yourself when you have all these people from ‘casting director’ to ‘set director’ and you have all these various people doing all these specific jobs?”

HK: “At the end of the day they are working for the producer, they are accountable to the producer and there is an ethic within the motion picture production community about how ultimate decisions are actually made and that generally falls on to the shoulders of the producer. There is an enormous number of moving parts that go in to a movie, but the buck always does stop with the producer of the picture.”

GA: “I’m sure you learned a lot from working on this movie, is there anything that you learned that you want to share?”

HK: “First off, Hollywood spends millions of dollars marketing movies and for the most part these movies do not have a message nearly as compelling or as important as the message of Atlas Shrugged.

We spent less than 1 percent of what Hollywood normally spends on marketing and we really relied on community level support and we got a lot of support from groups.

Especially those that have a connection with the philosophy of the book, for example, Tea Partiers integrated going and watching Atlas Shrugged in to their tax day rallies and we ended up opening it on about 300 screens, we averaged more than five thousand dollars a screen which relatively speaking was a homerun.

When John Aglialoro embarked on this in 1992, he really expected that a Hollywood studio would jump at the opportunity to produce and distribute a movie based on such a wide selling popular American novel and that really didn’t happen.

When he decided to fund the movie himself, which really follows the theme of the book, which is about individualism, as opposed to collectivism, we knew that the likelihood of a studio wanting to distribute the movie would be small.  

So, not only did we find ourselves having to produce it ourselves, we ended up having to distribute it ourselves and I think that Hollywood was surprised as to how well the movie did considering the amount of marketing we did and the way we went about marketing the movie.

So we’ve learned a lot from the process and in doing it ourselves we now have, for lack of a better term, an army of people on a community level who embrace what we’ve done, celebrated the fact that Atlas has been made in to a movie and we believe we can tap in to that to help support us in part two and we’ll have greater success in Part Two.

But we’ll also end up making a better movie and that will have a greater word of mouth and more success for us.”

GA: “Where are you at this point with Part Two?”

HK: “Part Two is scheduled to go into production in early 2012. The book is 1100 pages and was structured in to 3 parts and rather than trying to condense the entire book in to one 2 hour or 3 hour motion picture, we chose to follow the structure of the book. So the movie that is on DVD today goes through the end of part one and what we plan on presenting in October of 2012 will be what’s in the book as part two.”

GA: “So you plan on the release date of Part Two to be October 2012?”

HK: “Yes, our aspiration is to have the movie in theaters about a month before the Presidential election. As you experienced when you went and saw the movie, this is a movie that is a magnet for likeminded people who are thirsty for this type of entertainment and we can only expect that they will be incredibly interested in who will be the leader of this country starting in 2013, making the 2012 elections have an enormous amount of visibility and so we’re going to ride on that political interest by making the movie available for people about a month prior.”

GA: “Understanding what little I know about the production of a major motion picture, how in the heck do you plan on doing something as integral as part two, getting it done and ready for release inside of 10 months?”

HK: “That’s a great question and we believe that we can get it done because a lot of the process, having gone through part one, we understand a lot of the process and what we need to go through to accomplish our task.

The team of people we intend on putting on to the production will have an understanding of material and understand the level of collaboration that I think is necessary for this to be a success and by simply just working together and everyone just doing their job to the best of their ability we should be able to achieve that goal. But you are right, it is very ambitious but we’re optimistic we can get it done.”

 GA: “I know that there are a lot of people in Hollywood who are conservative but they keep their mouths shut because they are afraid of not getting any more work, with all the people that were in part one, have any of the actors backed out from part two due to any kind of repercussions that they may have received in Hollywood?”

HK: “No, no. First off in part one; we had 41 speaking roles which is an enormous number of speaking roles.

We don’t have an expectation that we are going to be able to get any or all of those people back due to just the planning logistics. If somebody is not in part two it is not because the Hollywood machinery is ostracizing them or that they are afraid of being in the movie, it is simply going to be their schedule precluded them from doing it or it just made sense to go in another direction from a casting point of view.”

GA: “There was a lot of rumors before this movie even hit the theaters that John [Aglialoro] didn’t have the money for part two and he wasn’t going to do a part two; I even read in some places that he was quoted as saying he would never do a part two because of the BS he had to go through for part one. Now you are looking towards part two. What was the real story behind the scenes as far as him wanting to do Part Two?”

HK: “When John began this journey it was incredibly humbling to have the responsibility. Certainly when part one came out there was a lot of noise on both sides, the success and failure of part one is entirely on us and I think at the end of the day John and I are extremely proud of what we did on Part One.

We knew that we would never be able to please everyone but one thing we know for sure is that we did what a lot of people said wasn’t possible and we made Atlas Shrugged in to a movie.

I think at this point we are committed to finishing the journey that we started and to do the best that we can and to have learned from the things that we did in part one that we could have improved on and hopefully make an even better part two and follow that with an even better Part Three.”

GA: “I saw that there was more than one version of the DVD available at the Atlas Shrugged movie website, what’s the difference in the versions and what can we find on the DVD’s?”

HK: “A number of groups have a connection to the book, the message of the book. Freedom Works for example, if you go in to their lobby in Washington D.C. they have a picture of Ayn Rand on the wall.

The message of the book is about preserving your individual liberties and that the role of the government should be very limited. So, groups that embrace that message, we wanted them to embrace the movie and we have three special edition versions of the DVD.

One that is co-branded with Freedom Works that contains unique content that Freedom Works created specifically for the DVD and for an audience that follows what they are doing and the message of their movement.

The same is true for the Reason Foundation and the same is true for the Atlas Society and so, where a lot of people are very protective of their brand, we felt that there were a number of groups out there that what they do is complimentary to the brand Atlas Shrugged and unlike any film that’s been released on DVD before, as far as I know, this is the first time that we’ve allowed these groups in the inaugural release of the DVD to play such a major and important role in its release.”  

GA: “When can we expect Atlas to be on television, is someone looking into to buying for TV?”

HK:  “Like all major films Atlas is available on line and through cable systems ‘video on demand’, Netflix has started its own paid television service, so if you’re a member of Netflix it will be available on their network in March of 2012 and Atlas will work its way on ‘free’ television in about 20 months.”

GA: “What impact, not on a personal level, but on the country as a whole, what kind of impact do you think it had?”

HK: “From the perspective of what did this do to the brand Atlas Shrugged, we know that while the movie was in the theater that the book moved up to the number 3 purchased book on Amazon, we know that Barnes and Noble sold out copies of the book after the opening weekend, so what we were hoping to accomplish was to inspire people to want to read the book and we think we accomplished that and I think there will be a bump in the number of books sold this year that can be directly attributed to the fact that there’s a motion picture. On the quantitative side we have all of those.

On the qualitative side, for a lot of people this has been an enormous celebration of something that they didn’t think they’d have seen during their lifetime.

The fact that something inspired them when they read it is now accessible to an audience that consumes so much of their lives through audio-visual means; we’ve provided something that people now can consume in an easier assessable fashion.

It’s going to have a great impact because we are going to finish Parts Two and Three and people will then be able to acquaint themselves with Atlas Shrugged and want to talk about what it is and what it means. They’ll be able to have an idea of what the message of the book really is, without necessarily having to have read it.”

GA:  “I didn’t know this until I started researching Ayn Rand, she actually moved to Hollywood to be a screen writer.”

HK: “That’s right.”

GA: “She worked in Hollywood for quite some time and that was her passion from when she was a child in Russia, my question is, there is a screen play for Atlas Shrugged written by Ayn Rand, was that used in any way for your movie?”

HK: “No and I haven’t even seen it yet and part of me wants to postpone that until we’re done. It would be incredibly influential on us to see it and one of the things we’re trying to do is really follow the book and I think that she probably would bring a different angle to it.

One of the things you have to think about is when you go about adapting a book in to a movie and you come to Hollywood which is really a creative place, the last thing someone creative is going to do is plagiarize a book.

What they’re going to do is they’re going to reimagine it; they’re going to try to improve it, try to make it cinematic, they’re going to try to fit it in to a 3 act structure as opposed to whatever the plot line and structure of the book is and they’re really going to change what it is.

And, many times, people who are passionate about the book find that the movie loses the magic that they experienced with the book and rarely do you find that movie turns out to be better than the book.”   

GA: “Well, the technology difference between when she was a screen play writer and today; I mean there are so many things that you can put on screen that she never would have even imagined.”

HK: “Exactly! And even when she was writing the book, you could tell that even if she had envisioned in her mind that this one day would be converted into a movie, she wrote the book in a fashion so that it is very contained and achievable.

A lot of it is very intellectual, a lot of the visuals are occurring through the dialogue of the characters and now with the power of visual effects and the low cost of getting persuasive visual effects, you know longer have to do that, you really can take the audience to places that were difficult to create a few years ago.

That’s why reading her screenplay, while it’s something that I look forward to it’s something that I don’t want to do until we’re finished. I don’t want it to influence what we’re doing because I think that we have today the tools to better depict the story as long as we do it faithfully and truthfully to what she’s written that she had at her disposal when she was coming up with the screenplay.”

I cannot stress enough the importance, especially with all that is happening today, that you get a copy of this fantastic movie. The movie itself is phenomenal even if it weren’t mimicking today’s headlines.

It is done in a way that the viewer is transported to each and every location and you find yourself connecting with the characters and won’t want it to end.

When the movie does end it will make you angry because it has really just begun and like me, Part Two won’t be out quick enough. What’s worse is that you’ll have to wait to get the answer to the question; “who is John Galt?”

Source: Gadi Adelman

Editor’s Note: We at the Chronicle are glad to have Gadi Adelman on our Staff.

Mr. Adelman is a freelance writer and lecturer on the history of terrorism and counterterrorism.

He grew up in Israel, studying terrorism and Islam for 35 years after surviving a terrorist bomb in Jerusalem in which 7 children were killed.

Since returning to the U. S., Gadi teaches and lectures to law enforcement agencies as well as high schools and colleges.

He can be heard every Thursday night at 8PM est. on his own radio show “America Akbar” on Blog Talk Radio . He can be reached through his website.

We would like to know what you think. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Wall Builders

This coming Spring, Thomas Nelson Publishers will release a new book by David Barton: The Jefferson Lies.

This book exposes many of the modern lies about Jefferson that have been concocted, promoted, and perpetuated by the Secular and Academic Left.

The need for this book was recently made evident by an atheist group’s California billboard allegedly quoting Jefferson condemning Christianity.

(See article for more information.)
 

This quote used on the billboard first surfaced in 1906, when anti-religionist John E. Remsburg authored Six Historic Americans, attempting to show that six notable national leaders were anti-Christian Freethinkers (i.e., atheists, of whom he claimed that Jefferson was one). [1] According to Remsburg, Jefferson had declared:

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythology. [2]

The only problem with this quote is that it doesn’t exist. It has never been found in any Jefferson writing; [3] yet it remains one of the many lies about Jefferson told by the Secular and Academic Left over the past century.

(Remsburg also attributed other bogus quotes to Jefferson, but even though they are easily disproved, they are still used today.)
 
Strikingly, Jefferson’s position on religion is actually the opposite of what is often claimed today. To see the authoritative documentation of this fact, look for The Jefferson Lies (to be released in the Spring), and discover from Jefferson’s own writings not only the truth about this particular lie but also many other Jefferson myths and lies that we were steadily fed throughout the twentieth century.
 

[2] John E. Remsburg, Six Historic Americans (New York: The Truth Seeker, 1906), p. 74 (at: (accessed on May 27, 2011). See also Achayar S [the nom de plume of D. M. Murdock], Suns of God, Krishna, Budda and Christ Unveiled (Kempton, IL: Unlimited Adventures Press, 2004), p. 372; Bridger Daquan, American Serfdom vs. Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty (Victoria, Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2009), p.101; E Christopher Reyes, In His Name (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2010), p. 233.

[3] See, for example, “Superstition of Christianity (Quotation),” Monticello (accessed on May 27, 2011).

Source: Wall Builders

Editor’s Note: We welcome your comments. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Alan Caruba

In troubled times it is human nature to cast a look backwards to recall “the good old days”, but anyone who lived through the latter half of the twentieth century has to look passed World War Two, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s.

There was a succession of recessions that followed. In other words, it takes an effort to squeeze out memories of “I Love Lucy”, “The Ed Sullivan Show”, rock’n roll, and Elvis.

Any number of really good things did occur, of course. The polio vaccine was introduced to end that too common scourge, followed by flu vaccines that ended formerly widespread illness and deaths.

All manner of technology was introduced, not the least of which was television, something that did not exist in American homes until around the 1950s. There actually was a time before cell phones, personal computers, and, of course, the Internet.

Mostly earlier times are not taught in schools except in the most perfunctory way; those who have passed through the U.S. educational system since the 1960s are often blissfully unaware of the way people used to live before electricity, trains, planes, cars, and everything else we take for granted.

An interesting book—well, at least to me— is “The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century” by Ian Mortimer.

Let me share some snippets from it and, when I am through, as awful as our present times may seem to you, you may thank a merciful God that you born into these, not former times.

You’re visiting Exeter in the southwest of England, one of seventeen cathedral cities. “Arriving in every one of these places involves an assault on your senses…your nostrils will be invaded by the stench from the sewage-polluted watercourses and town ditches.”

“A major town is an intimidating place. Already you have seen the desiccated remains of thieves hanging on gallows at windswept crossroads. At the principal gates of a regional capital you will find the heads and limbs of traitors on display.

When you enter the city of York, the largest city of the north, you will see the blackened heads of criminals stuck on poles above the city gates, their eyes plucked out by birds. Legs and arms hang by ropes, each the relic of a treasonable plot, now riddled with maggots or covered with flies.”

“It is generally said that medieval men are in their prime in their twenties, mature in their thirties and growing old in their forties.”

What we call children are not children for long in the fourteenth century. They are out in the fields by age seven. In some towns, citizens as young as twelve can serve on juries.”

Today’s army won’t take you unless you are at least of voting age, but at age twenty, Edward III (13 November 1312 – 21 June 1377) declared war on the Scots and led an army into battle.

He was highly respected by nobles, knights, and man-at-arms because, at twenty, he was already an adult in every sense of the word in those times.

He was one of a handful of kings to rule England for fifty years or more. Today our generals and field officers are considerably older, but wars are still fought by young men.

In medieval times, a woman was in her prime at seventeen, mature at twenty-five, and growing old by her mid-thirties. Betrothals of boys and girls took place in infancy and marriage at the age of twelve was approved for girls although cohabitation usually began at fourteen.

Most are married by sixteen and produce five or six children by their mid-twenties, although two or three of those have died.”

In a time when everyone is either obsessed with their health or urged to be, the fourteenth century and those that followed well into the twentieth are not famous for hygiene or longevity.

Arriving in 1348, the Great Plague also called the Black Death, the toll—generally stated as one third of those living in Europe—was often as high as forty percent or more in the cities and towns of England.

The Great Plague was followed by other outbreaks. “By 1400 about half of all those born over the previous seventy years have died of the plague.”

Illness was frequently fatal and usually attributed to “spells” and other superstitious beliefs. Any injury was likely lethal as well. As often as not what passed for medical care or procedures would kill you.

Suffice to say that medieval England was for most of the population a place of inadequate diet, poor sanitation (which is putting it mildly), parasites, and cramped, shared living space. Famines were a common killer.

All things considered, in the modern world we are far better off despite its absurd wars, terrorism, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

That is perhaps cold comfort for most people, including myself, when I ponder the human capacity for hatred, superstition, greed, stupidity, and other timeless failings of our species.

Source: Alan Caruba (C)

Editor’s Note: We welcome your comments. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!

By Robert Niznik

The first eBook in the Shpoonkle collection was announced today.

“The Shpoonkle Model for Legal Services,” is an objective analysis of the legal services industry and the forces behind the development of the Shpoonkle reverse auction model.

The eBook discusses the history and psychology of the lawyer and client interaction and the rigid mind set of the profession in changing times.

Critical topics regarding the over saturation of law student graduates and the need for overall reform in the legal services arena are briefly and adeptly explored in the analysis.

As discussed by the ABA Journal in July 2011 “The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift—one that will leave it dramatically transformed in the coming years. “

The Shpoonkle Model reviews this shift and how they are accommodating the transformation. When the average person cannot afford an attorney it is a problem that the legal community has to take seriously.

The Shpoonkle Model acts on this growing problem and gives options to help both client and attorney.

Consumer and client orientated focus as a growing trend in marketing and legal perspective is reviewed as implemented by Shpoonkle.

The Shpoonkle Model for Legal Services openly addresses some criticism and dispels misnomers about Shpoonkle as a reverse auction service model, clarifying how the process works.

The book explores how quickly the company and site has grown and the expansive directions its moving.

The Shpoonkle Model for Legal Services now available on Amazon.com is an in depth analysis into the changing scope and issues confronting the Legal Services industry.

Shpoonkle’s CEO Robert Niznik describes the book as a “comprehensive review of the innovative reverse auction model called Shpoonkle.”

Niznik goes on to add that the ambitious goal behind the site is to revolutionize the legal industry and how lawyers and clients interact.

Shpoonkle attempts to achieve this goal with an eye towards the current economic downturn and the prospects facing current and graduating law students.

Winning over advocates and support from the American Bar Association Journal and many other reputable organizations on their ability to help find attorneys jobs and save consumers money.

With over 600 international publications to Shpoonkle’s credit in just four short months including: Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Harvard Law School Journal, Chicago Tribune, Wallet Pop, Denver Bar Association, and countless others as well as a recent feature on NBC Miami. 

The publication is aimed as an effort to heighten consumer awareness and promote advocacy into the current and changing legal climate.

Buy it on Amazon.com

Editor’s Note: For more information about the eBook and/or Shpoonkle.com please contact us at info@Shpoonkle.com

We welcome your comments. Please Login in or Register to post a comment on this article. Thank you and we appreciate your support!