Origins: The Masterless Sword Book 1

The Constitutionally defined role of the Executive Branch of our government is to execute the laws of the land. The Executive is not to make laws. Nor is the Executive to determine if law. Tom Clancy and Tom Sheppard. Tom Clancy had a vivid imagination. I read and enjoyed his books. He often wove intricate plots which involved governments or quasi-governments engaging in elaborate schemes to hide their hands in world events until they were ready to make their dramatic, public moves.

To be very blunt, recent headlines from the Pacific read like plot points in a Tom Clancy novel. In the past year, we have had dramatically escalating conflicts with both China and North Korea. Antifa and the Alt-Right. In the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville President Trump noted that both sides were to blame for the violence.

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His remarks set off a firestorm of righteous indignation in both major political parties. Most of those excoriating him failed to perform even the most rudimentary examination of the facts to determine if, perhaps he was speaking from a well-informed position, instead of assuming he was shooting from the lip. The reality of the violence in Charlottesville is that i. Trump is a Danger to Our Well Being. Consider that no less an authority on life and death than the first person to ever resurrect, Jesus of Nazareth confirmed that the dead walk among us.

In The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 9 verses 57 through 62 there is the account of two would-be followers of Jesus. Skipping over the story of the first one, to the second he said,. In Defense of Inequality. Currently, there is an escalating discussion about equality in the US. The Equal Rights Amendment is getting resurrected and there is a lot of talk about equality between the sexes. I for one, am not in favor of equality. To be clear, I am totally in favor of women getting equal pay for an equal job. So, my umbrage with the equality movement is not about pay checks.

Rather, my problem with equality is with two things: One, is the fact that people, and genders are no. Left vs Right Politics and Libertarians. I am sure you won't be shocked to know that recently I have been exchanging some ideas online about politics with a variety of people. During one of these exchanges, while we were discussing what is politically left and right, I found and posted the chart above showing politics as a spectrum from left to right with the axis reflecting the degree of power given to government versus individuals.

A friend countered with a diagram created by the founder of Libertarianism showing p. From gravity and calculus to the workings of the human mind and heart.

I have learned many things in my life, from how a flower on a tree becomes an apple to how energy is transformed into matter and back again into energy as the apple tree takes in the energy of the sun, turns some of it into apples which I eat and my body transforms back into energy to power m. Bullies v the Silent Majority. As TrumpTrauma continues to fascinate the nation, the following true story, posted today by a friend of mine shows what is wrong in the US today and why Trump won this election. It is a sad story. The day after the election my oldest son, Baker, asked my wife if a friend of his, a Muslim girl, would have to be deported now that Trump was elected.

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Lauren explained to him that we should always stand up and protect others, especially those in the minority, and that she would not be deported. Are you one of those feeling Trump Trauma in the aftermath of the Presidential election of ? If you are, then read on TrumpTrauma has been sweeping the country in the aftermath of the election.

Many of those who backed Hilary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, or one of the many other candidates whose aspirations were dashed in this election cycle, are taking to the streets to voice their discontent with their new president. Humanity in general and the people of the US and Western Europe in particular have been steadily replacing their faith in God with faith in Government. This worship of government I call Godvernment.

I believe I first coined the phrase in a post about a year ago when I rolled out this blog. Since then, several sites have sprung up under the heading of Godvernment. Feel free to take a moment to fire up Google and check it out. Or just use this link Tim Kaine and Mike Pence both claim to be devout Christians.

Both were brought up Catholic. However, I have not let my concerns for my loved ones blind me to the bigger picture here. I wanted to know, has anyone else noticed that the Black Lives Matter n. Dems Sit-in to Bully for Gun Control. So today, the Wall Street Journal has a front page picture of Democrats staging a sit-in on the floor of Congress in order to force a vote on gun control legislation. Ostensibly, their agenda is to pass legislation that will prevent suspected terrorists from buying guns.

While that sounds like a noble idea, as I pointed out the other day in my Pulse Frame Up article, the noble title of their effort is actually simply a way to frame a discussion that is, in reality, a ve. In the wake of the Orlando Pulse Club shooting, the hottest debate in Washington these days is about keeping guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists. Like so many of the moves by the anti-constitutional elements of the left, a bad idea is put inside a pretty inarguably "good" wrapper.

The left is consistently more adept at framing really bad ideas in good frames, and this is another example of just that. After all, who wants to be labeled as someon. The Prosperity Gospel Trap. The first time I ever heard the term "Prosperity Gospel" was from former supermodel and business successful woman Kathy Ireland. She was telling us about how she had managed to leverage her successful modeling career into establishing several thriving businesses. She expressed her thanks to God for these blessings, and then threw out a word of caution.

She stated that she does not believe in the Prosperity Gospel. And then she referenced books like ". Real Husbands Don't Make Sitcoms. Recently a divorced father I know posted a Facebook plea to the women in his life to consider the tremendous importance of their role as mothers and to devote their time to being full-time mothers to their children. While I wholeheartedly agree with this young man about the relative importance of being a mother over a whatever contributions could be made through a career, this man is overlooking a couple of very important ingredients that would enable a woman to make the life-changing for.

It is a wonderful Thanksgiving tradition which I hope to honor by sharing it here likewise. They pledged faith to each other, formed communities according to their own liking, and kept sacred above all else the principal of freedom. Choosing freedom is the pillar of their identity. Maroons are the people who escaped slavery; who braved the snakes and alligators and cats of jungle, swamp, and mountain; who had the courage to risk the retributive torture of pursuing whites — all for freedom.

To borrow a title from the naturalized American, Christian existentialist Paul Tillich, maroons display better than anyone the Courage to Be. Martin Luther King Jr. Suffering under the penal laws of Jim Crow, they valued freedom as the defining human identifier. Scholars are just beginning to catch on to how important maroons are to our conception of freedom. The first Englishman to meet a genuine maroon was a red-bearded corsair not yet thirty years old.

Cruising the coast of Spanish Panama, he hoped to loot the mule trains that hauled heavy bars of Peruvian silver over the isthmus for loading on the treasure ships. In this pirate was better known in Panama than in his native Plymouth.

His notorious enmity for the Spanish made these maroons or Symerons , as they were called in the narratives seek out the obscure sailor from Devonshire, the man known as Francis Drake. Drake lived with the Symerons for months. He admired their remarkable woodcraft as they stalked the Spanish convoys. He fought side by side with them till finally he got his silver and the maroons got their iron, a metal far more valuable to people carving a society out of the wilderness. Columbus established a permanent Spanish colony on Hispaniola in He first touched the coast of Panama on his fourth and last voyage in , seventy years before English ships sailed those waters.

By , Spaniards began their conquest of Panama. In , Balboa, crossing the isthmus, saw the Pacific Ocean. In , Magellan found a sea route into that ocean around the southern tip of the continent. Pizarro garroted the Incan emperor Atahualpa, in and immediately set about the business of fleecing Peru of gold and silver.

When the Incan riches were looted, Spain used American, then African, slaves to work the mines. They shipped the lucre of this foul industry up the Pacific coast to Panama. Trains of fifty to a hundred mules plunged into the jungle, carrying the treasure to Venta Cruz, a depot just over the continental divide, where the treasure was loaded onto river boats and floated down to Nombre de Dios, the Atlantic seaport where, finally, it was loaded onto great ships that carried the bars of silver and gold in convoys to Spain.

French pirates started raiding the Caribbean shipping almost right away, so by the time the English tried to get in on the action it took ingenuity as well as daring to pry this loot from the Spanish.

Francis Drake had plenty of both. The age suited him. Those historians of class conflict, Marx and Engels, thought that these oceanic explorers triggered the modernization of Europe. One does not need to be a Marxist to agree that these bold mariners had to come before factory owners. Before new commodities and new means of producing commodities could be invented, the explorers had to open markets. They were not peasants. They were yeoman farmers, prosperous by the standards of the day, gaining in each generation.

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Had Drake been born in instead of , the smell of soil and cows would have saturated his hair and clothes his entire life. But their fields were near Plymouth, and Francis could smell the salt air of the sea. Edmund Drake sent Francis to Plymouth to train in the house of a kinsman, William Hawkins, a prominent merchant in that seafaring town.

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Spain forbade its colonies from trading with the English, and so the proffering of slaves was highly irregular and purchases were often accompanied by violence. In Africa, they filled their holds with slaves, bargained for illegally or simply snatched from villages within raiding distance of the coast. They smuggled this human cargo into the Spanish West Indies, where they filled their ships once again with whatever loot they could procure or steal from Spanish colonists.



The small Pascha forty tons and the tiny Swan twenty-five tons menaced the Atlantic coast, making the ambivalent gestures regarding trade tin, pewter, and cloth that were necessary to pretend that any thieving they did was not piracy but a defense of open markets. The Spanish refused their commerce. He raided the main seaport, Nombre de Dios but found it was the wrong season for plucking treasure.

Sword of the Ronin

Even so, the locals defended it valiantly, and Drake lost several men and had to be carried himself, bleeding, back to the pinnaces. Neither short nor tall, he was somewhat stocky and fair-haired, altogether an average-looking Englishman. He had little ideology: His personal bravery was both a virtue and a defect. It proved his valor to his men, but it robbed him of discretion. Or not quite equal. Historic Queens County by Tom Sheppard 3. Acadia University by Tom Sheppard really liked it 4.

The Masterless Sword Boxed Set: Building Success and Self Confidence: The Haynes Land Rover Experience: Grand Pre and Countryside by Tom Sheppard 3. Origins by Tom Sheppard it was amazing 5. Three Sisters Beginning by Tom Sheppard it was amazing 5. Field Manual by Tom Sheppard it was amazing 5.