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Victor Sharpe Reviews “The Copper Scroll Project” By Shelley Neese

By on October 4th, 2018

https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-copper-scroll-project-by-shelley-neese

“Within two full years will I bring back into this place all the vessels of Hashem‘s house, that Nebuchadnezar king of Bavel took away from this place, and carried them to Bavel;” Jeremiah 28:3 (The Israel Bible™)

The author of the Copper Scroll Project, Shelley Neese, has created a riveting and true story of one man’s epic search for the lost treasures from the First Jewish Temple, which stood on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

In this first book by Ms. Neese we meet Jim Barfield whose motivation, since he began his quest in 2006 to find the treasure, marks him as a deeply religious man who wants only to “return the Temple artifacts to the Jewish People.” As he says, “It’s time.”

Jim Barfield fervently believes the Biblical artifacts and treasures lie deep under the desert soil close to Qumran and the Dead Sea; a mere 18 miles from Jerusalem, Israel.
The copper scroll was first discovered in 1952 and although found near the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written on papyrus, the copper scrolls were inscribed in Hebrew letters from the Roman period and engraved upon thin copper plates. Archaeologists and historians remain conflicted as to the origin of the treasure listed in the 64 locations as shown in the copper scroll map.

Could the treasure, if found, be of greater significance to Israel and the world than even the Dead Sea Scrolls? That is the hope that fills the pages of this most remarkable and fascinating book.

As Jim Barfield himself asks: “Is there a scholar, a rabbi, an antiquities authority, or an interested reader with the influence strong enough to loosen the stranglehold that prevents the project from completing our excavation?”

And as Jim Barfield writes in his foreword to Shelley Neese’s compelling book, “I am confident that once a massive recovery operation takes place in the Judean desert it may well reveal to the world messages, instructions and valuable wisdom from the heart of Israel’s past leading to a much deeper understanding of the Bible and an unrevealed history.”

It is this looming question that makes the book’s story so tantalizing. Why, after Jim Barfield’s scan of the soil with a sophisticated scanning device, which revealed the likelihood of highly possible artifacts lying some eight feet deep was an Israeli archaeologist, who had begun to dig shallow test pits, told to shut down the dig after receiving a mysterious phone call?

Vendyl Jones, a Texas preacher turned Biblical archaeologist who may have been the inspiration for the Harrison Ford cinematic character, Indiana Jones, believed Qumran to be the hiding place for the Temple vessels. He spent 30 years searching while using the Copper Scroll as a guide. Jim Barfield, a retired firefighter and arson investigator from Oklahoma, met with Jones, now deceased, and was deeply inspired to continue the challenge of locating the lost Biblical artifacts.

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Common Reading for Common Activism By David Randall

By on October 3rd, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/03/common-

A few weeks ago my wife and I were walking through the Brooklyn Book Festival and we saw a booth saying something about Harry Potter. My son is a fan of the books—my wife and I like them, too—so we looked at the booth. It was for an organization that wants to use Harry Potter to inspire social justice activism. They think the point of reading Harry Potter is to learn that “Through reflection and awareness, we can draw lessons on how oppression operates and use those lessons to help develop an anti-racist, feminist, disability justice, queer and transgender liberationist, working class-based anti-capitalist movement”—that is, the Left.

My wife and I don’t want our son educated by Slytherins who fancy themselves Gryffindors, so we walked on. I’m afraid a lot of parents and kids didn’t.

College common reading programs think about reading the same way—that the point of reading is to draw you in to left-wing activism. And it isn’t just the college common reading programs—there are city reading programs and county reading programs, and earnest activists at book fairs around the county. It’s important to know that this isn’t just happening on campus.

A college common reading is usually one book, which students read over the summer so they can discuss it during orientation. Common readings are supposed to set academic expectations for incoming students—but they’re also usually run by co-curricular bureaucrats, who use them as a tool in their broader campaign to turn higher education into social justice activism.

The National Association of Scholars has been publishing an annual report on college common readings since 2010. This year we’ve added a lot more data to our report. We’ve gathered and collated information on college common reading assignments for the last 11 years, from 2007 through 2017. We now have information on 732 individual colleges and universities, 4,754 separate assignments, and 1,655 individual texts. Our analysis now draws upon the choices made by tens of thousands of bureaucrats and professors at hundreds of colleges, over the course of half a generation.

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Book: ‘Girl Power’ Emphasis Making Young Men Feel ‘Unwanted’ By Toni Airaksinen

By on October 1st, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/book-girl-power-emphasis-making-young-men-feel-unwanted/

A newly published book warns that the cult-like worship of diversity, social justice, and multiculturalism at universities is eroding our nation’s values on free speech, meritocracy, and the classical pursuits of open inquiry and expression.

But that’s not all.

In a Sunday interview with PJ Media, Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald — author of the new book “The Diversity Delusion” — warned that this diversity obesssion is hurting some of the students least likely to graduate: young men.

“The disappearance of men from higher education is in large measure driven by the incessant message coming from every level of the education system that males are the source of nothing but injustice,” worried Mac Donald.

“College after college inundates male students with workshops on toxic masculinity and rhetoric about rape culture,” she explained, adding that men would have to be a “glutton for punishment… to put up with the incessant ideological harangue.”

So, young men aren’t putting up with it.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 30 percent of men drop out of college during freshman year, and only about 38 percent graduate with a B.A. in four years. Women — on the other hand — have been more likely to graduate since 1981.

“Young men are discouraged from participating in school life by the constant incessant emphasis on ‘girl power’ and ‘you go girl’ messages,” said Mac Donald. “The impression is unavoidable that males are at best an afterthought and at worst unwanted.”

Further, Mac Donald also worries about the impact of what she calls “the diversity delusion” on young men’s psychological state. Men in university are “taught that race, sex, and sexual orientation are the most important aspects of the self.”

And if you’re a cis-white heterosexual male? “You are hopelessly doomed.”

Mac Donald’s new book, “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture” was published this month by St. Martin’s Press. She previously authored “The War on Cops,” now a New York Times bestseller. CONTINUE AT SITE

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DAVID GOLDMAN REVIEWS “IN GOOD FAITH” BY SCOTT SHAY

By on September 26th, 2018

http://www.atimes.com/article/not-by-bread-or-rice-alone/

Book review: In Good Faith, by Scott Shay. Post Hill Press; New York 2018. Hardbound; 528 pages with index.

Scott Shay’s ably written book fills an important gap in the literature on religion available to a nonspecialist audience. It will be an important resource for many Asians who are struggling with the Western monotheistic religions. One would hope to see it soon in Asian-language editions.

Today, materialism is ubiquitous. But no one can blame Asians for following the trend. The death of perhaps 30 million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s is a living memory. Today’s is the first generation of Chinese that does not live in the shadow of hunger. Up to one-third of Indian children suffer to some degree from malnutrition.

Asia’s enormous economic advances of the past 30 years have lifted most of its people out of dire poverty, and that has taken up their undivided attention.

At some point, though, many of the Asians who today think mainly about material advancement will look for a greater purpose in life. The celebrated Asian virtues of family, education and work discipline have proven the robustness of Asian culture beyond doubt.

But there appears to be something missing in Asian life: a sense of a greater purpose, perhaps. And that is bound up with a yearning for justice, for the dignity of every individual.

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Strangers and Citizens By Reihan Salam

By on September 25th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/immigration-debate-melting-pot-or-civil-war-reihan-salam/Immigration will only benefit our country if we’re committed to assimilating new arrivals.

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Reihan Salam’s new book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case against Open Borders. It appears here with permission.

‘Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger,” said President Barack Obama, “for we know the heart of a stranger — for we were strangers once too. . . . And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal — that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.

One of Obama’s great talents was his unsurpassed ability to stack the rhetorical deck. Here he was announcing his executive order for deportation relief in 2014. To disagree with him was not just to reject his take on the costs and benefits of a particular policy, it was to oppress a stranger, which no less an authority than Scripture tells us is a very bad thing to do. Yet there was a small wrinkle in the former president’s remarks. While calling on his fellow citizens to welcome the millions of strangers who make their way to our country to better their lives, he also insisted that his executive action would shield only those who’d been in the country unlawfully for five years or more. Moreover, it did not extend to those who might settle in the United States unlawfully in the future.

But surely those who’ve been in the country for, say, four years are strangers who deserve our compassion, too. Having praised unauthorized immigrants who work hard in low-paying jobs and who worship in our churches, the president must understand that there are tens of millions of people around the world who would gladly do the same, even if it meant risking their lives. According to one survey, there are roughly 700 million people around the world who would like to move permanently to another country, and 165 million of them say that their first choice would be to move to the United States. My guess is that the vast majority of these aspiring immigrants are decent people who mean us no harm. If the Biblical injunction against oppressing a stranger is to serve as the lodestar of our immigration policy, why on Earth would we set any limits at all?

Obama’s expansive language gave succor to open-borders romantics— and to the most demagogic voices on the other side of the debate, up to and including the man who succeeded him in the White House. Together, these forces are making it all but impossible to craft a durable immigration compromise. The irony is that Obama had a different and more potent argument at his disposal, namely, that the young people to whom he was offering deportation relief weren’t strangers at all. Because of our decades-long failure to enforce our immigration laws, an arrangement that suited unscrupulous low-wage employers just fine, they had become part of our communities. There was a perfectly good case for doing right by them while also embracing resolute enforcement, a case Obama gestured toward early in his presidency, yet which open-borders activists came to angrily reject in its waning days. The result is that immigration polices championed by liberals and centrists as recently as the 2000s are now routinely denounced as unacceptably extreme.

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The Breakup of Australia: the Real Agenda Behind Aboriginal Recognition Keith Windschuttle

By on September 23rd, 2018

Australian voters are not being told the truth about the proposal for constitutional recognition of indigenous people. The goal of Aboriginal political activists today is to gain ‘sovereignty’ and create a black state, equivalent to the existing states. Its territory, com­prising all land defined as native title, will soon amount to more than 60 per cent of the whole Australian continent. Constitutional recognition, if passed, would be its ‘launching pad’. Recognition will not make our nation com­plete; it will divide us permanently.

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‘Rush’ and ‘Dr. Benjamin Rush’ Review: American Hippocrates Early America’s greatest surgeon was also its leading social reformer. By Stephen Brumwell

By on September 22nd, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rush-and-dr-benjamin-rush-review-american-hippocrates-1537493843

During the spring of 1813, former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were united in grief at the death of a mutual friend who had recently persuaded them to forget their bitter rivalries. Like the two celebrated statesmen, the eminent physician and social reformer Benjamin Rush had been a Founding Father, one of 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

But Adams and Jefferson believed that Rush deserved to be remembered for much more than his conspicuous enthusiasm for the cause of American liberty. Jefferson wrote that “a better man, than Rush, could not have left us,” extolling his benevolence, learning, genius and honesty. Adams replied with equal praise: He knew of no one, “living or dead,” who had “done more real good in America.” Writing to Rush’s son, Richard, Adams maintained that as a “benefactor” to his country, the doctor deserved greater recognition than even the celebrated polymath Benjamin Franklin.

Rush: Revolution, Madness, and the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father

By Stephen Fried
Crown, 597 pages, $30
Dr. Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation

By Harlow Giles Unger
Da Capo, 300 pages, $28

Today, while Franklin remains an undisputed giant of the Revolutionary generation, the other Benjamin eulogized by Adams and Jefferson is largely forgotten outside the ranks of historians and medical specialists. Now two authors—award-winning journalist Stephen Fried and seasoned historical biographer Harlow Giles Unger—have produced sympathetic and readable reassessments of Rush’s remarkable career, intended to secure what they consider to be his rightful place as a leading Founding Father.

Given their shared objective, Mr. Fried and Mr. Unger inevitably cover similar ground and draw upon common sources. Both rely heavily upon Rush’s prodigious output of publications and his lively and wide-ranging personal correspondence. Their books reveal a dedicated humanitarian with an enduring influence upon American medicine, not least through the estimated 3,000 doctors that he trained. Yet neither author ignores the contradictions in Rush’s character, flaws that mired him in controversy and that help to explain why he still requires rehabilitation.

Born in January 1746, Rush was 5 when his father, a Pennsylvanian farmer and gunsmith, died. Detecting signs of precocious intelligence, his mother sent the youngster to boarding school, where he progressed so swiftly that at age 13 he gained admittance to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). He graduated in a year and was apprenticed in medicine to Philadelphia’s foremost physician, John Redman. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Future of the Nation A historical description—and intellectual defense—of nationalism Daniel P. Schmidt Michael E. Hartmann

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/intellectual-defense-of-nationalism-16187.html

“Nationalism was not always understood to be the evil that current public discourse suggests,” philosopher Yoram Hazony notes in the introduction to his new book, The Virtue of Nationalism. Hazony is president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and director of the John Templeton Foundation’s Jewish Philosophical Theology project. His previous books include The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul and The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.

In The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony defines nationalism principally by distinguishing it from imperialism. He begins by offering an overarching historical framework, describing how English, Dutch, and American Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revived the Old Testament’s strong affinity for individual liberty, thereby freeing large parts of the world from the system of universal empire promoted by Holy Roman Emperors under the aegis of the Catholic Church. This individual-centered vision gave birth to an intellectual current against empire-building after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, according to Hazony, resulting in the rise of independent nation-states worldwide.

Since the middle of the last century the tide has turned against nationalism. “Globalists” argued that nationalism brought about two world wars and the Holocaust. Their primary solution has been the promotion of the idea of world governance, either to a limited or more total extent, ordered by a set of liberal democratic values devised by experts, and run by professional administrators. Hazony persuasively argues that this internationalist approach represents a return of the imperial, totalizing vision of the world, which, rather than initiating a golden age of peace and humanism, has aroused old sectarian hatreds, and sown chaos and revolt across the globe. We will soon be forced, Hazony predicts, to make a stark choice between a world in which people, upholding their natural and inalienable rights, are able to choose their destiny within the framework of nation-states; or a renewal of universal empire—probably in the form of the European Union, or the hegemony of America or China. “The debate between nationalism and imperialism is upon us,” he writes.

In this debate, the defense of a centralized global order based on the familiar rationales of either economic efficiency or security is “too narrow to provide an adequate answer to the question of the best political order. In reality, much of what takes place in political life is motivated by concerns arising from our membership in collectives such as families, tribes, and nations.” In this alternate vision of human collectivity, religion, culture, and tradition are primary motivating influences and provide the major sources of value, rather than strictly economic or security factors. This implicit acknowledgement of the importance of national identity—though Hazony never uses that term—is a virtue of The Virtue of Nationalism. In large part because of that recognition, he quite cogently argues in the book that anyone who values his freedom should reject universalism and fight for a future of nations.

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How Bitter Political Disputes Made America Great In Jay Cost’s latest book, ‘The Price of Greatness,’ the scholar and journalist lays out a compelling analysis of the feud between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison showing that their disagreements resulted in a synthesis of differing opinions that allowed our early republic to thrive. Kyle Sammin

By on September 21st, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/21/bitter-political-disputes-made-america-great/

Historical reputations are fickle things. Most national figures vanish into the misty past not long after their deaths. For those who are truly influential, the way they come to be remembered can flit back and forth according to the whims of historians, politicians, and the people at large. That fluctuation often tells us as much about us as it does about them.

Alexander Hamilton is a case in point. It was not long ago that he was derided as an elitist and quasi-monarchist, despite his own humble beginnings and meritocratic rise to prominence. His one-time friend James Madison, on the other hand, was seen as a tribune of the people, a leveler and wise statesman, notwithstanding his great wealth and ownership of scores of black slaves.

Trends in historical scholarship have begun to cast aspersions on slave-owning Founding Fathers, pushing Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other great Virginians further down the scale of opinion in the academy, if not elsewhere. Meanwhile, a popular musical poured fresh enthusiasm into the old Federalist wineskin and made Hamilton great again, just as his fellow northern Federalist John Adams gained in popular renown following David McCullough’s biography of him and the subsequent HBO miniseries based on it.

The fashions of scholarship can make us lose sight of the men behind the myths. In The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy, Jay Cost returns to the beginning and analyzes the political theories that brought Hamilton and Madison together and, later, drove them apart. Concentrating on ideas rather than personalities, he lays out the conflict at the heart of the early republic’s politics and the compromises that led to its resolution. Along the way, the reader may gain a true appreciation for the ideological conflict of the United States’ first decades and may come to understand how that conflict, in various forms, is still debated today.

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Clinton, Trump and Authoritarianism The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee pitches a new edition of her campaign memoir. By James Freeman

By on September 19th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-trump-and-authoritarianism-1537385882

Still holding on to ‘16 as long as she can, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is out with a new, expanded version of her campaign memoir, “What Happened.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reports that the book “has a big new caboose” with much additional verbiage about “what has happened in the past year.” The big new literary caboose features claims of a Trumpian assault on our constitutional norms, but is bound to raise new questions about Mrs. Clinton’s own commitment to such norms.

Last night the former Secretary of State appeared on Ms. Maddow’s program and seems to have made news by warning that our duly elected President might exercise his authority to fire some of his un-elected subordinates. Mrs. Clinton spoke about Trump supporters:

I don`t think that those people really fully appreciate what is potentially possible under this presidency. What I worry about, Rachel, is that after this election, this president`s going to wholesale fire people. That`s my prediction for tonight… if we don`t have one or both houses of Congress in place, he will be even more uncontrollable and unaccountable. He will fire people in the White House. He will fire people in his administration who he thinks are crossing him, questioning him, undermining him.

She may not be calling Trump voters “deplorables” any more—at least not publicly. Now she’s simply suggesting that they didn’t know what they were doing when they selected the President. Mrs. Clinton then elaborated on her view of the way presidential power is constrained:

… the president is close to being uncontrollable. There are people still in there who by their own admission are trying to hold on to prevent even worse things from happening, and at some point, the American public has to say, number one, I may disagree with Democrats, I may disagree with the direction of this administration, but one thing I believe in is we have to have checks and balances. That`s why we have to vote for Democrats in November.

The constitutional scholars in the crowd may by this point be thanking their lucky stars that America did not end up with a President operating under the belief that she is accountable to the authority of her staff. As a federal judge named Brett Kavanaugh has noted, the President does not enjoy some of the executive authority under our Constitution, but all of it. It’s also disturbing that Mrs. Clinton seems to hold the mistaken belief that constitutional checks and balances only exist when people vote for Democrats.

Regardless of her confusion about the structure of the American republic, she nonetheless writes confidently about what she casts as a constant attack on the U.S. political system. Ms. Maddow shared a passage from Mrs. Clinton’s revised memoir:

The corruption of the Trump administration is breathtaking. Our democratic institutions and traditions are under assault every day. There may not be tanks in the streets and the administration`s malevolence may be constrained by now by its incompetence, but make no mistake, our democracy is in crisis.

Mrs. Clinton shared more of the story in last night’s interview:

I do say in the afterword that I, like every other American, hope for the best, wanted to give our new President the benefit of the doubt. But the actions that we have seen coming from the White House and this Administration, in the nearly two years since the election, have raised all kinds of signal flares, alarm bells about what is happening to our democracy. And put aside partisanship and all of the ideological concerns, we have to defend the fundamental values and ideals of the American democracy.

It’s unclear at one point Mrs. Clinton wanted to give our new President the benefit of the doubt, given that she endorsed the protests against him that occurred on his first full day in office in January of 2017. As for the alleged assaults against American institutions, she said last night:

Well what I`m worried about is that these authoritarian tendencies that we have seen at work in this Administration with this President, left unchecked, could very well result in the erosion of our institutions to an extent that we`ve never imagined possible here.

That certainly sounds scary—greater destruction to our democratic institutions than we’ve even imagined! Given this commentary from the former secretary of State, Ms. Maddow naturally asked about impeachment:

MADDOW: Do you have thoughts on that about whether or not that`s something that Democrats should put on the table right away if they get control of Congress?

CLINTON: I think there should be a much broader agenda and I know it`s difficult to imagine having the Congress work on so many issues at the same time. Because it does require a level of organization and follow-through that is hard and I know that having been there. If there is evidence that comes up about high crimes and misdemeanors, yes, it should be followed through on but there are so many other things that need to be addressed.

If you look at what this Administration has done with respect to regulations on everything from asbestos to pesticides to labor concerns. This is going to begin to really have adverse consequences on many Americans. CONTINUE AT SITE

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