The President and The Freedom Fighter

Abraham Lincoln has long been my favorite president. I love his humble frontier upbringing. His self-taught erudition. His humility and humor. Above all, I love his evolution from apologist to abolitionist.

A big factor influencing that elevation was Lincoln’s relationship with former slave and fervent abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

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A Witness and a Warning

PictureAlger Hiss. Whittaker Chambers. No longer household names, but in the decade following the conclusion of the Second World War, there may not have been two Americans more famous — or infamous — than they were.

On January 21, 1950, Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, was convicted by a jury of two counts of perjury. The culmination of hundreds of hours of testimony before Congressional committees and two courts of law, Hiss’s conviction was also a public exoneration of Whittaker Chambers, the man who had exposed Hiss as a Communist agent….

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Unbroken

The poet Robert Burns could have been predicting the plight of American prisoners of war in Japan when he penned the famous words “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!” [ref]

And one POW who could take the stand as a leading witness for the prosecution in the case of man (Allied POWs) vs. man (Japanese prison guards)  is Louis Zamperini, former Olympian and U.S. Air Corps bombardier.

Zamperini was on the verge of becoming the first man to break the four minute mile, and looking forward to the 1940 Olympics, when World War II dashed his dreams. He ended up in the Army Air Corps, stationed in the Pacific. He and two crewmates were lost at sea when their B-24 crashed during a search and rescue mission.

The Book Thief

“I have hated the words and I have loved them….”

But the words were made right.

I just finished reading The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. When you read it — and perhaps you already have — you’ll probably understand what my introductory words mean, and perhaps you’ll even feel the way I do, a mixture of anger and joy, sadness and hope.

Books like this are why for me reading is a cherished pastime, a form of enlightenment and entertainment that far excels the feeble, shallow attempts of most modern media.

Set in a small town in World War II Nazi Germany, The Book Thief is possibly the most unique book I have ever read. The story’s narrator is, to say the least, highly unusual — yet absolutely appropriate, and the narrator’s manner of speech is extraordinary.

“… like a slice of cold cement.”
“… the falling chunks of rain….”
“… the young man’s voice was scraped out and handed across the dark like it was all that remained of him.”
“Her words were quiet, close to motionless.”
“The rubble just climbed higher. Concrete hills with caps of red.”

But more moving than how the story was told, is the story that was told.
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Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns

You’ve heard some or all of these arguments before: “Gun control works in other countries”, or “More guns mean more murder”, or “The Second Amendment is about muskets”, or “Mass shootings are becoming more common.”

The anti-gun crowd will say anything, ignore facts and stretch or totally disregard the truth in order to push their disarmament agenda. UnfortunPictureately, the average American is ill-prepared to counter their rhetoric.

 Fortunately, Glenn Beck’s book Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns, is a great way to arm yourself with data, facts and logic to counter leftist anti-gun propaganda.

Book Review of The Forsaken

PictureTwenty-eight chapters. Three hundred and sixty four pages. Seven hundred bibliography entries. One thousand one hundred and nineteen footnotes.

These numbers are significant. They are the result of hard work. They are proof of scholarship. Above all, they are evidence of atrocity. Of brutality, despotism, torture, and mass murder the likes of which the world had never known until the twentieth century and its ghastly embrace of Marxism.
Nine thousand. Forty thousand. One hundred and fifty thousand. Two hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand. These are the estimated body counts in just a few of the hundreds of mass graves dug by Lenin, Stalin, and their equally soulless henchmen. Millions of innocent human beings suffered and died miserably, of starvation, exposure, torture and execution, beneath the bloody iron fist of a movement that pretended to “liberate” but instead vigorously fostered widespread brutality, slavery and death behind an iron curtain of lies and deceit.