Eastern Promises Quotes

I don’t understand you, Pigeon. I thought I knew women, but you’re so fucking confusing I don’t know which way is up.” “I don’t understand you, either. You’re supposed to be Eastern’s ladies’ man. I’m not getting the full freshmen experience they promised in the brochure,” I teased.

You’re important to me, you know,” I said, squeezing him. “I don’t understand you, Pigeon. I thought I knew women, but you’re so fucking confusing I don’t know which way is up.” “I don’t understand you, either. You’re supposed to be Eastern’s ladies’ man. I’m not getting the full freshmen experience they promised in the brochure,” I teased. “Well, that’s a first. I’ve never had a girl sleep with me to get me to leave her alone,” he said, keeping his back to me.

I’d learned so much from traveling to familiar places that I figured I’d learn twice as much by going to a place I knew nothing about.

You're supposed to be Easterns' ladies man. I'm not getting the full freshman experience they promised in the brochure.

Westward on the high-hilled plains Where for me the world began, Still, I think, in newer veins Frets the changeless blood of man. ... There, when hueless is the west And the darkness hushes wide, Where the lad lies down to rest Stands the troubled dream beside. There, on thoughts that once were mine, Day looks down the eastern steep, And the youth at morning shine Makes the vow he will not keep.

In March 1947, he publicly condemned the abolition of religion in all schools, warning that, “promising freedom of religion while creating institutions of irreligiousness is the height of hypocrisy.

He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.

My Eyes Are Open But I'm Hardly Looking In The Front.... Everything's Passing Me, Some Are Staring But My Eyes Are Blank, I'm Seeing But Not Seeing As My Mind Is Not Sending The Message To My Brains To Produce Images.... I'm Walking Alone Yet Full of People Around Me.... I'm Walking Forward.... There's No Feeling As I'm Numb.... Only Thing I Know, I Have To Finish My Ride Before My Time Expires.... So I'm Walking With Blank Emotion In My Eyes.... (* Excerpt From My Novel "Eastern Promise")

Uncertainty and failure might look like the end of the road to you. But uncertainty is a part of life. Facing uncertainty and failure doesn’t always make people weaker and weaker until they give up. Sometimes it wakes them up, and it’s like they can see the beauty around them for the first time. Sometimes losing everything makes you realize how little you actually need. Sometimes losing everything sends you out into the world to breathe in the air, to pick some flowery weeds, to take in a new day. Because this life is full of promise, always. It’s full of beads and dolls and chipped plates; it’s full of twinklings and twinges. It is possible to admit that life is a struggle and also embrace the fact that small things—like sons who call you and beloved dogs in framed pictures and birds that tell you to drink your fucking tea—matter. They matter a lot. Stop trying to make sense of things. You can’t think your way through this. Open your heart and drink in this glorious day. You are young, and you will find little things that will make you grateful to be alive. Believe in what you love now, with all of your heart, and you will love more and more until everything around you is love. Love yourself now, exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you’ll know exactly how big that is. Let’s celebrate this moment together. There are twinklings and twinges, right here, in this moment. It is enough. Let’s find the eastern towhee.

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.

Each morning I gaze at the eastern horizon, and if the sun keeps its promise, I keep mine. :)

Wolf’s answers rarely praised communism outright, and he didn’t use Marxist language. But almost all of them praised the Red Army or the Soviet system, both of which were favorably compared to their German counterparts. And all of them explicitly contained the promise that life, which had become unbearable under the Nazis and during the final days of the war, would now quickly improve.

The image of the Serpent, because of its association with life, rejuvenation, fertility, and regeneration, was a symbol of immortality. The coiled Serpent with its tail in its mouth was a circle of infinitude indicating omnipotence and omniscience. The Serpent, depicted in several successive rings, represented cyclical evolution and reincarnation. In ancient philosophy or mythological systems, creation and wisdom were closely bound together, and the Serpent was a potent symbol of both. It is in this capacity that the Serpent appears in the Babylonian and Sumerian mythologies, which contain elements akin to the Genesis story. The Serpent has the power to bestow immortality but also has the power to cheat humankind. In many of the ancient Near Eastern stories—for instance, the Gilgamesh Epic and myth of Adapa—the Serpent holds out the promise of immortality but then cheats man at the last minute.

He had heard especially promising things about Philadelphia--the lively capital of that young nation. It was said to be a city with a good-enough shipping port, central to the eastern coast of the country, filled with pragmatic Quakers, pharmacists, and hardworking farmers. It was rumored to be a place without haughty aristocrats (unlike Boston), and without pleasure-fearing puritans (unlike Connecticut), and without troublesome self-minted feudal princes (unlike Virginia). The city had been founded on the sound principles of religious tolerance, a free press, and good landscaping, by William Penn--a man who grew tree saplings in bathtubs, and who had imagined his metropolis as a great nursery of both plants and ideas. Everyone was welcome in Philadelphia, absolutely everyone--except, of course, the Jews. Hearing all this, Henry suspected Philadelphia to be a vast landscape of unrealized profits, and he aimed to turn the place to his advantage.

To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare’s startlingly original insights into Elizabethan England are what allow his work to speak to us today. Reading Shakespeare, we know what it is like, in any age, to be alive. So it is with Moby-Dick, a novel about a whaling voyage to the Pacific that is also about America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War and so much more. Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country’s ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it’s the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy.

Winnie woke early next morning. The sun was only just opening its own eye on the eastern horizon and the cottage was full of silence. But she realized that sometime during the night she had made up her mind: she would not run away today. “Where would I go, anyway?” she asked herself. “There’s nowhere else I really want to be.” But in another part of her head, the dark part where her oldest fears were housed, she knew there was another sort of reason for staying at home: she was afraid to go away alone. It was one thing to talk about being by yourself, doing important things, but quite another when the opportunity arose. The characters in the stories she read always seemed to go off without a thought or care, but in real life--well, the world was a dangerous place. People were always telling her so. And she would not be able to manage without protection. They were always telling her that, too. No one ever said precisely what it was that she would not be able to manage. But she did not need to ask. Her own imagination supplied the horrors. Still, it was galling, this having to admit she was afraid. And when she remembered the toad, she felt even more disheartened. What if the toad should be out by the fence again today? What if he should laugh at her secretly and think she was a coward? Well, anyway, she could at least slip out, right now, she decided, and go into the wood. To see if she could discover what had really made the music the night before. That would be something, anyway. She did not allow herself to consider the idea that making a difference in the world might require a bolder venture. She merely told herself consolingly, “Of course, while I’m in the wood, if I decide never to come back, well then, that will be that.” She was able to believe in this because she needed to; and, believing, was her own true, promising friend once more.

The politicians were in full bay, particularly those of his own party who had been urging, without success, his support of antislavery legislation which he feared would lose him the border states, held to the Union so far by his promise that no such laws would be passed. It also seemed to these Republicans that entirely too many Democrats were seated in high places, specifically in the cabinet and the army; and now their anger was increased by apprehension. About to open their campaigns for reëlection in November, they had counted on battlefield victories to increase their prospects for victory at the polls. Instead, the main eastern army, under the Democrat McClellan—“McNapoleon,” they called him—had held back, as if on purpose, and then retreated to the James, complaining within hearing of the voters that the Administration was to blame. Privately, many of the Jacobins agreed with the charge, though for different reasons, the main one being that Lincoln, irresolute by nature, had surrounded himself with weak-spined members of the opposition party. Fessenden of Maine put it plainest: “The simple truth is, there was never such a shambling half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government since the world began.

The United States and NATO took advantage of Russian weakness and, despite promises to the contrary, expanded NATO to Eastern Europe and even to some former Soviet republics. The West went on to ignore Russian interests in the Middle East, invaded Serbia and Iraq on doubtful pretexts, and generally made it very clear to Russia that it can count only on its own military power to protect its sphere of influence from Western incursions. From this perspective, recent Russian military moves can be blamed on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as much as on Vladimir Putin.

While Eastern meditation tries to get people to empty their minds, biblical meditation focuses on our filling our minds—and our mouths—with the truth. Joshua 1:8 says, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.” One of the definitions for the Hebrew word “meditate” is “to mutter.” Meditating involves repeating the words God has said out loud. As Joshua was told, this regular repetition of what God had said is the key to our ability to do the Word.

Reading a newspaper account of one young woman's fatal accident on a midsummer morning a few years ago got me thinking about how I would have liked to have departed before my time if that had been my destiny. If I'd had to die young, hers is the death I would have chosen. She was twenty-two, the story disclosed, bright, talented, beautiful, her future spread before her like a brilliant, textured tapestry. She'd just graduated from a prestigious eastern university, had accepted a communications position with a New York television network, and would depart the following day on a four-week holiday in Europe before embarking on her promising career and the rest of her exciting life. On that golden summer day, the young woman had just finished her morning run. She had sprinted the last half mile, then stopped abruptly to catch her breath. She was bent at the waist, hands on her knees, eyes on the ground, her mind a world away, perhaps in Barcelona or Tuscany or Rome, exulting in the enchanting sights she would soon see, the splendid life she would have. It was then that the train hit her. Unaware, unthinking, oblivious to everything but the beguiling visions in her head, she had ended her run on the railroad tracks that wound through the center of her small Oregon town, one moment in the fullest expectancy of her glorious youth, adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her body, sugarplum visions dancing in her head, the next moment gone, the transition instantaneous, irrevocable, complete.

wet. I’d much rather have God part the river, and then I’ll step into the miracle. That way I don’t get my feet wet, but if we aren’t willing to get our feet wet, we’ll never walk through parted rivers on dry ground. At flood tide, the Jordan River was approximately two hundred feet wide. That was all that separated the Israelites from their four-hundred-year-old promise. Their dream was practically a stone’s throw away. But if the priests hadn’t stepped into the river, they may well have spent the rest of their lives on the eastern banks of the Jordan River. And that’s where many of us spend our lives. We’re so close to the dream, so close to the promise, so close to the miracle. But we’re waiting for God to part the river, while God is waiting for us to get our feet wet.

The more I saw her, the more she enchanted me. She was exquisitely beautiful. Her slenderness was a charm. I was lost in contemplation. What was passing in my mind I should have some difficulty in explaining. I was full of indulgence for her life, full of admiration for her beauty. The proof of disinterestedness that she gave in not accepting a rich and fashionable young man, ready to waste all his money upon her, excused her in my eyes for all her faults in the past. There was a kind of candour in this woman. You could see she was still in the virginity of vice. Her firm walk, her supple figure, her rosy, open nostrils, her large eyes, slightly tinged with blue, indicated one of those ardent natures which shed around them a sort of voluptuous perfume, like Eastern vials, which, close them as tightly as you will, still let some of their perfume escape. Finally, whether it was simple nature or a breath of fever, there passed from time to time in the eyes of this woman a glimmer of desire, giving promise of a very heaven for one whom she should love. But those who had loved Marguerite were not to be counted, nor those whom she had loved.

Another way in which religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by the argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed unalterable laws that could then be passed on to those less favored. There are some very obvious objections to be made to this. In the first place, several such disclosures have been claimed to occur, at different times and places, to hugely discrepant prophets or mediums. In some cases - most notably the Christian - one revelation is apparently not sufficient, and needs to be reinforced by successive apparitions, with the promise of a further but ultimate one to come. In other cases, the opposite difficulty occurs and the divine instruction is delivered, only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose lightest word then becomes law. Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory. It could also follow that only one of them is authentic, but in the first place this seem dubious and in the second place it appears to necessitate religious war in order to decide whose revelation is the true one. A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to the unlettered dan quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.

Eventually the term ended and I was on the windy mountain road to camp, still slightly worried that I’d made a wrong turn in life. My doubt, however, was short-lived. The camp delivered on its promise, concentrating all the idylls of youth: beauty manifest in lakes, mountains, people; richness in experience, conversation, friendships. Nights during a full moon, the light flooded the wilderness, so it was possible to hike without a headlamp. We would hit the trail at two A.M., summiting the nearest peak, Mount Tallac, just before sunrise, the clear, starry night reflected in the flat, still lakes spread below us. Snuggled together in sleeping bags at the peak, nearly ten thousand feet up, we weathered frigid blasts of wind with coffee someone had been thoughtful enough to bring. And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered—pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.

There you are, princess!” he cried. “I thought you’d changed your mind and given up on our pact before it began.” “Do I look like I’ve changed my mind?” I grumbled. I rubbed my arms, sore and aching, and spat dust from my mouth. My legs were covered with bloody scrapes, and it would take me hours to work the tangles out of my hair. “Then why so long coming out here?” I liked Glaucus better when he was being stern; he had the most aggravating grin of any man alive. “Forget the path? Lose your way?” “I’m watched,” I said. “Ever since the day you promised to teach me how to fight, it’s been next to impossible to get away. Whenever I knew you were taking the boys down here, I’d try to follow, but Ione always seemed to come along with a task for me to do. I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t gotten up long before dawn, dressed, and hidden myself in one of the storerooms all morning. Even then, I had to drop from a window and climb down the eastern side of the palace hill to be sure that no one would see me.” “The eastern side…” Glaucus rubbed his chin. “That’s where the briars grow thickest, isn’t it?” And his grin got wider and wider, until suddenly I understood exactly what had been going on. “You did this!” I shouted. “I don’t know what you said to Ione, but you’re the reason why she hasn’t left me alone for a moment all these days!” “You look mad enough to throw a rock at my head,” Glaucus said calmly. “Did you think I was going to make this easy for you, princess? You say you want to learn a fighter’s skills. Well, patience is one of them, cunning’s another, and no one can give those to you but yourself. If you’d rather have gifts fall into your lap, go back to the palace and put on a skirt, but if you still want to learn from me, let’s see you throw something besides a rock.

My mum once told me that the bravest sailors weren’t the ones who sailed through the storm, but the ones who remained in port whilst it raged out at sea. I never really understood what she meant by that, until now. For seventeen years I succeeded in standing back and watching that storm wreak havoc, never once venturing into the expanse of the ocean like a large proportion of kids on my estate had done. Unlike me, they were drawn into the glamour and the notoriety of joining a gang. Some did it for the promise of a family unit that they didn’t have at home. Some did it because they were too weak or too vulnerable to say no, while others did it because they were bored. And some, like Eastern, joined out of sheer desperation. I chose to stay away. It’s true, I might’ve been the delinquent kid that everyone saw when they looked at me. I might’ve gotten into trouble with the law, but I refused to set sail into a storm that wasn’t of my own making. I refused to join a gang. The way I saw it, whatever trouble I got into was on my terms and not for some self-proclaimed gang leader with a skewed view of the world and their own set of rules. I never wanted to be beholden to anyone but myself, and above all else, I always wanted more out of life than the hand I’ve been dealt. Maybe it was my mother’s fault for filling my head with far-fetched stories, but I wanted what was on the other side of the storm. I wanted what lay far, far beyond the horizon. Deep down I’d craved the life my mum used to tell me about in her stories. It gave me something to focus on, to dream about, even if it wasn’t real. Ironic then, that I’m now a part of the life I worked so hard to avoid, trying to protect the people I love from falling victim to it. And all because my love for a makeshift family meant I couldn’t stand back and watch the storm anymore. I must set sail right into the heart of it because I love Eastern, Tracy and Braydon enough to do something about their situation. They might not be my blood, but they are my family and I won’t abandon them in a time of need. Pity the same couldn’t be said for my own parents.

ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.

There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.

As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn’t even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.

My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking.

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!

I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself.

The failure of the West fully to take advantage of the opportunity offered by a reformist president in Iran already looks like a bad mistake. One such opportunity came after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States when members of the Iranian leadership (not just Khatami, but also Khamenei) condemned the terrorist action in forthright terms, and ordinary Iranians showed their sympathies with candlelit vigils in the streets of Tehran—more evidence of the marked difference of attitude between Iranians and other Middle Eastern peoples. Another opportunity came after Iran gave significant help to the coalition forces against the Taliban later in 2001, helping to persuade the Northern Alliance to accept democratic arrangements for post-Taliban Afghanistan.2 In 2002 Iranians were rewarded with President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, which lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea. Finally, the Bush administration ignored an Iranian offer in the spring of 2003 (shortly after the fall of Baghdad), via the Swiss, for bilateral talks toward a Grand Bargain that appeared to promise a possible resolution of the nuclear issue and de facto Iranian recognition of Israel. The purpose of all this is not to reinforce the cringing sense of guilt that bedevils many Western observers who look at the Middle East. It is not All Our Fault, and no doubt if the Iranians had been in the position of strength that Britain was between 1815 and 1950, or that the United States has been in since then, they would have behaved as badly, and quite possibly worse. The Iranians also missed opportunities for rapprochement in the Khatami years. But too often we have gotten things wrong, and that has had a cost. It is important to see events from an Iranian perspective, to see how we got things wrong, and to see what needs to be done in order to get them right. The most important thing is this: if we make commitments and assert certain principles, we must be more careful to mean what we say and to uphold those principles.

After contacting the Zionist Organization, he was granted first priority to board a small boat of illegal immigrants of their way to Palestine, from the Romanian port Constantza. The ill-fated boat Mefkure, on which he was travelling, was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean Sea and none of the passengers survived. A few weeks later, when Yuda reached Bucharest, the fate of the boat was already known. Thus the three young people about whom I wrote initially - Selma, Leiser, Abrasha - were all gone by 1944. A the age of twenty-one, Abrasha was lost in the frozen wastes of Siberia; Selma, at eighteen, perished in the steppes of the Ukraine and Leiser, at twenty, in the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean. All three young Zionists, idealists, never saw the land that they were yearning for, never lived to reach Palestine. Abrasha's father remarked in great sorrow that his son, like Moses tried to lead his people to the Promised Land, however, he did not live to see it.

From the period of development to the present, Reformed theologians have debated the finer points (particularly the relation of the Sinai covenant to the covenant of grace). Nevertheless, a consensus emerged (evident, for example, in the Westminster Confession) affirming the three covenants I have mentioned: the eternal covenant of redemption; the covenant of works; and the covenant of grace. With these last two covenants, Reformed theology affirmed (with Lutheranism) the crucial distinction between law and gospel, but within a more concrete biblical-historical framework...Ironically, just at the moment when so much Protestant biblical scholarship is rejecting a sharp distinction between law and gospel, Ancient Near Eastern scholars from Jewish and Roman Catholic traditions have demonstrated the accuracy of that seminal distinction between covenant of law and covenants of promise. P.13

When the Soviet army liberated war-ravaged Eastern Europe, they had promised the people free elections with Hitler gone. At first, Stalin kept his promise. But when communist parties in Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Austria lost in the free elections of ’45 and ’46, Stalin set his secret police, the NKVD, in motion. The secret police reopened former Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz to imprison Poles and Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen to imprison East Germans. The communists built sixteen new camps to hold Hungarians.

The Russian government has promised to help build infrastructure in North Korea and increased shipments of coal, oil, and timber to the country. A new RussiaNorth Korea business council is promoting Russian investment. Both sides have proclaimed 2015 as Russia-North Korea Friendship Year. Undergirding the emerging MoscowPyongyang axis is shared hostility toward Washington. Putin needs friends following the annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine. “Russia in its isolation has clearly been using

The belief in magic trickery for conceiving sons is also illustrated by the legend of the rainbow in Afghanistan. The rainbow, a favorite element in every mythology from the Norse to the Navajo people, often symbolizes wish fulfillment. In Afghanistan, finding a rainbow promises a very special reward: It holds magical powers to turn an unborn child into a boy when a pregnant woman walks under it. Afghan girls are also told that they can become boys by walking under a rainbow, and many little girls have tried. As a child, Setareh did it too, she confesses when I probe her on it. All her girlfriends tried to find the rainbow so they could become boys. The name for the rainbow, Kaman-e-Rostam, is a reference to the mythical hero Rostam from the Persian epic Shahnameh, which tells the history of greater Persia from that time when Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion and Afghanistan was part of the empire. The Persian epic even has its own bacha posh: the warrior woman Gordafarid, an Amazon who disguises herself as a man to intervene in battle and defend her land. Interestingly, the same rainbow myth of gender-changing is told in parts of Eastern Europe, including Albania and Montenegro.

there was yet another reason for Moctezuma’s apparent confusion. It was because of the legend of the Aztecs’ great god Quetzalcoatl, who was supposed to return one day to revisit his people. Quetzalcoatl, according to legend, was a hero who had been the human leader of the ancient Toltecs as well as an immortal deity. He was fair and bearded, and he taught his obedient people many things - how to plant, how to work metal, and how to construct beautiful buildings. But Quetzalcoatl was driven out by a rival, a king and deity named Tezcatlipoca. And after a long period of wandering, Quetzalcoatl disappeared across the eastern sea, promising to return in the year ce acatl (one reed) - which in the Aztec calendar is the name of a certain year that recurs every fifty-two years.

He’ll be in a day camp for the first three weeks, then nothing. My mind keeps returning to the Middle East. It’s almost two months since I promised to send printed catalogues. I’ve done nothing. Every time I think about it, my will to invest in those relationships vanishes. My confidence that I can manage a long-term, expensive project has disappeared. And if I devote a lot of hours to designing and printing a catalogue, I’ll be ignoring other, more promising work. I don’t want to waste money on brochures that won’t produce income until some point far in the future. And with what I’ve learned from Bob Waks, I have even more reason to give up. I can’t see how we could interact with Middle Eastern clients in the manner that Bob suggests. It’s going to be very difficult to avoid sending complete proposals, and it will be almost impossible to do Glance sessions. The time difference is too much. I decide to drop the whole thing. I talk myself into this by arguing that I don’t think anyone in Kuwait or Dubai will be terribly upset. They weren’t pining for my presence, and they won’t miss me. In the back of my mind, though, I have nagging doubts. It’s hard for me to walk away from the potential for business, no matter how unpromising.

Moderate Republicans like Rockefeller supported the national consensus toward advancing civil rights by promoting national legislation to protect the vote, employment, housing and other elements of the American promise denied to blacks. They sought to contain Communism, not eradicate it, and they had faith that the government could be a force for good if it were circumscribed and run efficiently. They believed in experts and belittled the Goldwater approach, which held that complex problems could be solved merely by the application of common sense. It was not a plus to the Rockefeller camp that Goldwater had publicly admitted, “You know, I haven’t got a really first-class brain.”174 Politically, moderates believed that these positions would also preserve the Republican Party in a changing America. Conservatives wanted to restrict government from meddling in private enterprise and the free exercise of liberty. They thought bipartisanship and compromise were leading to collectivism and fiscal irresponsibility. On national security, Goldwater and his allies felt Eisenhower had been barely fighting the communists, and that the Soviets were gobbling up territory across the globe. At one point, Goldwater appeared to muse about dropping a low-yield nuclear bomb on the Chinese supply lines in Vietnam, though it may have been more a press misunderstanding than his actual view.175 Conservatives believed that by promoting these ideas, they were not just saving a party, they were rescuing the American experiment. Politically, they saw in Goldwater a chance to break the stranglehold of the Eastern moneyed interests. If a candidate could raise money and build an organization without being beholden to the Eastern power brokers, then such a candidate could finally represent the interests of authentic Americans, the silent majority that made the country an exceptional one. Goldwater looked like the leader of a party that was moving west. His head seemed fashioned from sandstone. An Air Force pilot, his skin was taut, as though he’d always left the window open on his plane. He would not be mistaken for an East Coast banker. The likely nominee disagreed most violently with moderates over the issue of federal protections for the rights of black Americans. In June, a month before the convention, the Senate had voted on the Civil Rights Act. Twenty-seven of thirty-three Republicans voted for the legislation. Goldwater was one of the six who did not, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. “The structure of the federal system, with its fifty separate state units, has long permitted this nation to nourish local differences, even local cultures,” said Goldwater. Though Goldwater had voted for previous civil rights legislation and had founded the Arizona Air National Guard as a racially integrated unit, moderates rejected his reasoning. They said it was a disguise to cover his political appeal to anxious white voters whom he needed to win the primaries. He was courting not just Southern whites but whites in the North and the Midwest who were worried about the speed of change in America and competition from newly empowered blacks.

salvation.18 In fact, salvation is possible because God is righteous. Nehemiah plainly states why God rescues his people: “You have kept your promise, for you are righteous” (Nehemiah 9:8).

God of unrighteousness (compare Romans 9:14). Therefore, Paul clarifies collective identity in Romans 9 just as he does in Romans 2–4. To defend God’s honor, Paul rebuffs Jewish presumption. God’s election of Israel doesn’t imply that he is partial to Jews based on ancestral birth. The Pentateuch itself undermines that assumption. Although Abraham already had Ishmael, God chose Isaac (Romans 9:7). Likewise, God elects the younger Jacob over Esau despite social convention (Romans 9:12). To clarify who are God’s people, Paul engages in what appears to be doublespeak. He previously argued that both Jews and Gentiles are reckoned as “Abraham’s offspring.” Similarly, Paul challenges typical notions of the term Israel in Romans 9:6-8. Christ redefines Paul’s understanding of Israel. What’s at stake? In Romans 9:14, Paul asks, “What shall we say then? Is there injustice [adikia] on God’s part?” He replies, “By no means!” Verses 15-18 offer support: For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then [ara oun] he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. God’s covenant promises depend on grace, not nationality or social position. This is Paul’s point in Romans 4:16 when speaking of justification: “That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.” God is not bound by external measures of justice/righteousness. Cultural norms do not constrain God either to save or condemn. Nor should we think God is only concerned for one expression of righteousness, whether “punitive,” “restorative,” or “covenantal” righteousness. The Creator does all things for his name’s sake. This includes raising up oppressive rulers like Pharaoh (Romans 9:17). Paul reinforces the point in Romans 9:22-24: What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for

by the 1890s, this model of manly restraint had begun to falter. A new corporate, consumer economy meant that more men were earning a living by punching the clock, and self-discipline no longer promised the same payoff. As men moved to cities, the work they did changed significantly. For men whose strength had become superfluous, who no longer identified as producers, their very manhood seemed in question. There were other disruptions, too. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe began arriving at the nation’s shores, and “new women” started going to college, entering the professions, riding bicycles, wearing bloomers, and having fewer babies. In response to all of these changes, old ideas of manhood seemed insufficient. In their place, white native-born Protestant men began to assert a new kind of masculinity—a rougher, tougher masculinity. Nothing less than the fate of the nation, even the future of white Christian “civilization” appeared to be at stake.

Clive determined to add a final political flourish of his own. He decided that a small portion of Shuja’s former dominions around Allahabad and Kora would be turned over to support Shah Alam as an imperial demesne. Vague promises would be made about supporting the Emperor’s long-dreamed-of return to Delhi, while taking in return the offer of financially managing the three rich eastern provinces of the Emperor dominions – Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This was the granting of what in Mughal legalese was known as the Diwani – the office of economic management of Mughal provinces.

Flights to Santiago de Cuba Santiago de Cuba has the Antonio Maceo Airport (MUCU/SCU), which was home to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. The airport is essentially a turboprop hub, however it can also accommodate mid-sized jet aircraft. There are about twenty international flights each week, but most arrivals are by domestic airlines. The eastern location and the international status of MUCU/SCU has spurred the interest of foreign airlines as a promising future destination. All in all, Cuba now has ten international airports, capable of serving long range flights. “Santiago de Cuba has the Antonio Maceo Airport (MUCU/SCU), which was home to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. The airport is essentially a turboprop hub, however it can also accommodate mid-sized jet aircraft. There are about twenty international flights each week, but most arrivals are by domestic airlines. The eastern location and the international status of MUCU/SCU has spurred the interest of foreign airlines as a promising future destination. All in all, Cuba now has ten international airports, capable of serving long range flights.

Santiago de Cuba has the Antonio Maceo Airport (MUCU/SCU), which was home to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. Shown in the photo is a Cuban Mig 21 inside the VT-45 hanger. Santiago de Cuba had 12 of these Russian built fighters situated at the San Antonio de los Baños Airfield in Cuba. Now the airport is essentially a turboprop hub, however it can also accommodate mid-sized jet aircraft. There are about twenty international flights each week, but most arrivals are by domestic airlines. The eastern location and the international status of MUCU/SCU has spurred the interest of foreign airlines as a promising future destination. All in all, Cuba now has ten international airports, capable of serving long-range commercial flights. Follow the daily blogs by Captain Hank Bracker posted exclusively on Facebook, Goodreads & Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage. He also has frequent Tweets and weekend commentaries headed “From the Bridge.” His dual award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba” is available from Amazon.com and other leading book vendors. Soon to come are his books “Seawater One” & “Surpressed I Rise (Revised Edition).

But we’ll get to the bottom of it,” Tsunami promised. “We’ll find the dragon who set that bomb, and then I will tear off his wings and hang him from the eastern peak of Jade Mountain

one like a son of man. In Aramaic and Hebrew the phrase “son of man” is simply a common expression to describe someone or something as human or humanlike. In Ezekiel, God often addresses the prophet as “son of man” to emphasize his humanness (e.g., Eze 2:6). coming with the clouds of heaven. In ancient Near Eastern literature clouds are often associated with the appearances of deities. In the OT it is Yahweh, the God of Israel, who rides on the clouds as his chariot (Ps 104:3; Isa 19:1). In Canaanite mythology Baal, the son of El, is described as “rider/charioteer of the clouds.” After doing battle with, and defeating, Yamm/Sea, Baal is promised an everlasting kingdom and eternal dominion. Some scholars see echoes of this story in Da 7:9–14. Others argue for a background in Mesopotamian cosmic conflict myths (such as the creation epic Enuma Elish and the Myth of Anzu), which depict a deity (Marduk and Ninurta, respectively) defeating the representative of chaos (Tiamat and Anzu, respectively) and regaining authority and dominion for the gods and for himself. Daniel’s vision has no conflict between the “one like a son of man” and the beasts. The interpretation in vv. 17–27, however, makes it clear that the “one like a son of man” in some way represents “the holy people of the Most High” (vv. 18, 22), who are in conflict with the “little horn” that arises out of the fourth beast (v. 8).

He was up and on his feet before dawn, walking the stiffness out of his legs, paying a visit to the recovering McGuire, and finding a drop-line so he could catch her the promised fish. As the sun’s golden glow began to peep above the eastern horizon, he ordered the ship hove to. He had spent his earliest years as a fisherman. It didn’t take him long to catch her a fish and true to his word, he quietly carried it down to the galley, filleted it, and throwing some butter into a cast iron frying pan, cooked it for her himself. He didn’t know why he was going to such effort. He told himself that no gently bred woman would go hungry on an American ship, but he wondered if it was more than that. More than feeling a bit sorry for her. More than feeling guilty that his own actions had indeed ruined her life. Maybe it had nothing to do with any of that, and everything to do with his own damned pride. He was still thinking about that kiss he’d claimed. He’d been unable to stop thinking about it. Truth be told, his reaction to it had rattled him a bit… and not much rattled Ruaidri O’ Devir. She was English, Anglican, aristocracy, part of a hated race, and the fact that his body had responded to her with lust and longing confused the living hell out of him. No good could come of even allowing himself to think past that kiss. She was his hostage. His bargaining tool for the explosive he’d crossed the Atlantic to get, and he could not let himself be sidetracked by any thoughts of a romantic entanglement.

It was a hugely significant moment: with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million,* and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire’, the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India. Henceforth, 250 East India Company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys would now run the finances of India’s three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its main raison d’être, this was a transformative, revolutionary moment.

One Eastern Shore man recalled that his grandfather owned an African slave by the name of Suck and that his grandfather had purchased her from a “slave ship which had come up the Chesapeake Bay.” When he was a young boy, Suck told him that she had been a member of an African tribe that “was defeated in battle with another tribe and numbers of her people were captured” and sold to slave traders plying the African coast.

A PRAYER FOR RAIN Gracious Father you are the ruler of everything, right now we are desperately crying unto you Jehovah for the rain in the Eastern Cape and the entire land of South Africa. We ask you Lord to open the floodgates of heaven, ‘Now it happened in the meantime that the sky became black with clouds and wind and there was a heavy rain. So Arab rode away and went to Jezreel’(1King 18:45, NKJV). Thank you Lord for your promises, your promises are Yes and Amen in Jesus name.

A part war drama, part coming-of-age story, part spiritual pilgrimage, Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is the story of a young woman who experienced more hardships before graduating high school than most people do in a lifetime. Yet her heartaches are only half the story; the other half is a story of resilience, of leaving her lifelong home in Germany to find a new home, a new life, and a new love in America. Mildred Schindler Janzen has given us a time capsule of World War II and the years following it, filled with pristinely preserved memories of a bygone era. Ken Gire New York Times bestselling author of All the Gallant Men The memoir of Mildred Schindler Janzen will inform and inspire all who read it. This is a work that pays tribute to the power and resiliency of the human spirit to endure, survive, and overcome in pursuit of the freedom and liberty that all too many take for granted. Kirk Ford, Jr., Professor Emeritus, History Mississippi College Author of OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance, 1943-1945 A compelling first-person account of life in Germany during the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. A well written, true story of a young woman overcoming the odds and rising above the tragedies of loss of family and friends during a savage and brutal war, culminating in her triumph in life through sheer determination and will. A life lesson for us all. Col. Frank Janotta (Retired), Mississippi Army National Guard Mildred Schindler Janzen’s touching memoir is a testimony to God’s power to deliver us from the worst evil that men can devise. The vivid details of Janzen’s amazing life have been lovingly mined and beautifully wrought by Sherye Green into a tender story of love, gratitude, and immeasurable hope. Janzen’s rich, post-war life in Kansas serves as a powerful reminder of the great promise of America. Troy Matthew Carnes, Author of Rasputin’s Legacy and Dudgeons and Daggers World War II was horrific, and we must never forget. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is a must-read that sheds light on the pain the Nazis and then the Russians inflicted on the German Jews and the German people. Mildred Schindler Janzen’s story, of how she and her mother and brother survived the war and of the special document that allowed Mildred to come to America, is compelling. Mildred’s faith sustained her during the war's horrors and being away from her family, as her faith still sustains her today. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is a book worth buying for your library, so we never forget. Cynthia Akagi, Ph.D. Northcentral University I wish all in the world could read Mildred’s story about this loving steel magnolia of a woman who survived life under Hitler’s reign. Mildred never gave up, but with each suffering, grew stronger in God’s strength and eternal hope. Beautifully written, this life story will captivate, encourage, and empower its readers to stretch themselves in life, in love, and with God, regardless of their circumstances. I will certainly recommend this book. Renae Brame, Author of Daily Devotions with Our Beloved, God’s Peaceful Waters Flow, and Snow and the Eternal Hope How utterly inspiring to read the life story of a woman whose every season reflects God’s safe protection and unfailing love. When young Mildred Schindler escaped Nazi Germany, only to have her father taken by Russians and her mother and brother hidden behind Eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain, she courageously found a new life in America. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is her personal witness to God’s guidance and provision at every step of that perilous journey. How refreshing to view a full life from beginning to remarkable end – always validating that nothing is impossible with God. Read this book and you will discover the author’s secret to life: “My story is a declaration that choosing joy and thankfulness over bitterness and anger, even amid difficult circumsta

Our God and Lord taught us to Celebrate -Celebrate His Life in Us and live reminiscent of His Promise ,that we shall reign with Him forever. We live each day basking in that promise which is eternally everlasting to everlasting that whosoever believes in HIM ( Lord Jesus Christ, Yahshua Maschiach) shall never perish but gain eternal life. That is the 'Power' and 'Promise' of our God. As One in Him,we owe each other the debt of love.

I’D NEVER BEEN to India before, but the country had always held a special place in my imagination. Maybe it was its sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages spoken. Maybe it was because I’d spent a part of my childhood in Indonesia listening to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahābhārata, or because of my interest in Eastern religions, or because of a group of Pakistani and Indian college friends who’d taught to me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies.

Although the rise of Galicia was a clear indication of the growing importance of the borderlands, its union with Volhynia bore the promise of greater, even epochal consequences for all of Eastern Europe. The man who brought about this union was Roman Mstyslavych (1173-1205) of Volhynia. Immersed in political struggles from early youth, Roman was chosen as prince by the Novgorodians in 1168 to defend their city against Suzdal's aggressive designs in the north, while his father, Mstyslav of Volhynia, competed with Andrei Bogoliubsky of Suzdal for control of Kiev in the south. After his father's death in 1173, Roman took over and reconstituted the fragmented, neglected family holdings in Volhynia. In 1188, the Galician boyars invited him to rule their land, but princely rivals and unfriendly boyar factions prevented him from doing so. Only in 1199 was he able to return to Galicia and unite it with Volhynia, thus creating a new, imposing conglomerate on the political map of Eastern Europe with an energetic, forceful prince of great ability at its head. In his domestic policies Roman concentrated on expanding his princely power: that is, on undermining the boyars, many of whom he either exiled or executed. "You can't enjoy the honey without killing the bees" was one of his favorite sayings. As was often the case elsewhere in Europe, the prince's allies in the struggle with the oligarchy were the townsmen and minor boyars.

I should not be surprised. It was the Celestial Emperor who deceived me, sending me from my home with false promises and lies. Not this place, but my real home, in the Eastern Sea.

need the other great powers. Russian trade would keep Germany from launching an attack on his homeland and aid in the rebuilding of the Soviet state. When the two nations signed the secret pact, Stalin gained an even greater boost to his ego when Hitler effectively gave away much of eastern Europe to Russia in the form of “spheres of influence” along with the ten-year nonaggression pact. Moreover, Germany would now move against the British and the French, leaving Russia considerable time before becoming Hitler’s next target. Besides, no mere paperhanger could outwit Stalin! Well, it did sound good at the time … and those who might have objected would have wisely saved their nation the trouble of the interrogation, trial, and firing squad by blowing out their own brains. If anything, years of pogroms and purges had proved that Soviet premier Stalin did not tolerate pessimism. With the new buffer states, security, and the promised trade bonus, as far as the Russian leader could see, Hitler had effectively bought off Joseph Stalin at just the right price. Time was now on Stalin’s side … or so he thought. While feelings of suspicion and paranoia had served him well over the years, Stalin demonstrated confidence in the deal and his ability to handle prospective German aggression, failing miserably to

Yet in the aftermath of World War Two Communism had been much more popular in the region than is commonly admitted. Its doctrinal certainty, its promise to refashion society in favour of the common man, its collectivism, its stress on huge projects, its idealism, even the discipline which the Party represented, were all highly appealing. Nor should the clouds of dust arising from its collapse be allowed to obscure the old regime’s achievements any more than its evils and its failures; for the Communist order did succeed in overcoming some serious longstanding problems.

We see this “taboo-breaking” element in the French tale of Melusine, for instance. In this story, the progenitor of the French Lusignan noble house marries a fairy woman named Melusine. She marries him, but makes him promise not to ever watch her bathe on Saturday. When he violates this taboo, he sees that she turns into a serpent from the waist down during this time period. He later gives himself away by calling her an “odious serpent” in anger, and she leaves him.

Less than ten years earlier, the Russian President had successfully rolled his battalion tactical groups into eastern Ukraine and sliced off a nice chunk of the country. The rest of the world had done nothing. Worse still, the United States—a key signatory to the Budapest Memorandum, an agreement promising to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in the aftermath of the implosion of the USSR in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapon stockpiles—did little more than shrug.

Assuming TV really did rot their brains, how would they be in a position to know? Its intrinsic biases—toward flash over illumination, sound bites over substance, the methods of advertising over the methods of persuasion—have become their basic intuitions. When subjective evaluation fails, objective measures must be consulted, and the most glaring objective consequence of the boomers’ embrace of mass culture has been the death of both folk culture and high culture. … During the cold war, the Communist leaders of the Eastern bloc did their best to keep pop culture out of their countries, because they believed that Western entertainment would put their children in thrall to decadent bourgeois values—and they were right.

I bit my lip, ‘If you don't do it now, you'll change your mind.’ ‘No.’ She frowned- her expression unhappy. ‘I don't think I will. He'll be furious, but what will he be able to do about it?’ My heart beat faster. ‘Nothing at all.’ She laughed quietly and then sighed. ‘You have too much faith in me, Bell. I'm not sure that I can. I'll probably just end up killing you.’ ‘I'll take my chances.’ ‘You are so bizarre, even for a human.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘Oh well, this is purely hypothetical at this point, anyway. First, we have to live through tomorrow.’ ‘Good point.’ But at least I had something to hope for if we did. If Olivia made good on her promise-and if she didn't kill me-then Marcel could run after his distractions all he wanted, and I could follow. I wouldn't let him be distracted. When I was beautiful and strong, he wouldn't want distractions. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she encouraged me. ‘I'll wake you up when there's something new.’ ‘Right,’ I grumbled, certain that sleep was a lost cause now. Olivia pulled her legs up on the seat, wrapping her arms around them and leaning her forehead against her knees. She rocked back and forth as she concentrated. I rested my head against the seat, watching her, and the next thing I knew, she was snapping the shade closed against the faint brightening in the eastern sky. ‘What's happening?’ I mumbled. ‘They've told him no,’ she said quietly. I noticed at once that her enthusiasm was gone. My voice choked in my throat with panic. ‘What's he going to do?’ ‘It was chaotic at first. I was only getting flickers; he was changing plans so quickly.’ ‘What kinds of plans?’ I pressed. ‘There was a bad hour,’ she whispered. ‘He'd decided to go hunting.’ She looked at me, seeing the comprehension on my face. ‘In the city,’ she explained. ‘It got very close. He changed his mind at the last minute.’ ‘He wouldn't want to disappoint Chiaz,’ I mumbled. Not at the end. ‘Probably,’ she agreed. ‘Will there be enough time?’ As I spoke, there was a shift in the cabin pressure. I could feel the plane angling downward. ‘I'm hoping so-if he sticks to his latest decision, maybe.

The next morning came early at the Circle T Ranch.  The sun had begun its climb over the eastern hills, greeted by the clang of the breakfast bell mixed with the roosters’ crows and barking dogs.  Wade pushed back his blanket and, feeling the early September chill, wished someone had built a fire in the pot-bellied stove a few feet away. Looking half-asleep, Emmett sat up and stared out the window at the barn and corral, wishing he could crawl back under the covers.  He turned from the window, looked at Wade under his covers, and told him it was time to get up. Getting out of bed, he grabbed his pants from a peg on the wall next to his bunk and headed for the outhouse dressed in his faded red underwear. Wade tossed his covers back, greeted by the same chilly morning that greeted Emmett.  He put his feet on the cold wooden floor, stood, took his pants off the peg, and slipped into them.  Pulling his suspenders up, he followed Emmett and the others out back to take his turn. Wade

1943 the curfew was partially lifted and Jews could walk in the streets for longer hours. One day I met Yuda in the street and during the conversation I asked him to come to visit. He really came up and visited more and more often. We became quite friendly but he was summoned to a labor camp again. He promised to write. In the meantime, the situation on the Eastern front changed and he never returned to Czernovitz. After the Russians came back, a friend who worked at the post office found in a sack of mail a card from Yuda to me, where he expressed his deep affection for me. About two years later I found out that he was alive, in Palestine.

On the previous day, four Armenian witnesses told the Congressmen how the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Armenian First Republic in 1920. All of them were affiliated with the ARF, and two, Reuben Darbinian and General Dro Kanayan, had served in the government of the First Republic. The Armenian testimonies also appear to have been choreographed with the aim of throwing all possible blame on the Bolsheviks and suppressing the role of other culprits in the fate of the Armenians—in this case, the Turks. So Beglar Navassardian, executive secretary of the still-extant American Committee for the Independence of Armenia (and son of the ARF leader in Egypt), gave a brief excursion through the history of Armenia that surely would have caused apoplexy in his predecessors in that committee in the 1920s.     Navassardian barely mentioned the 1915 Genocide in his testimony. He managed only to say, “Finally during the First World War, the Armenian people made the final and supreme sacrifice. They firmly and squarely sided with the Allies, gave volunteer forces under the Allied Command in the Middle East, on the eastern front and elsewhere. For a people whose numbers had been decimated to less than 4 million, they gave a participation of 250,000, fighting against the Axis Powers.”34     General Dro spoke through an interpreter. The awkward issue of his wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany was not mentioned. The general reminisced about a luncheon in 1921 hosted for him by Stalin, whom he described as an old comrade from the revolution of 1905, at which promises were made and then broken. Dro, a veteran of the Russian-Ottoman war, also conspicuously failed to mention Turkey or 1915. He only spoke about atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks, who, he said, “took over Armenia with a brutality and persecution characteristic of the Middle Ages.”35     A certain kind of Armenia—one that had lost its independence, bravely fighting Soviet Russia—was required by the Cold War American political imagination. Concluding the hearings, the chairman, Representative Michael Feighan, praised General Dro, saying, “Our committee appreciates very much this first-hand testimony from you who have fought so vigorously for the freedom and independence of Armenia.”36

While we were absent from Rochester on this eastern tour the foreman of the Office was attacked with cholera. He was an unconverted young man. The lady of the house where he boarded died with the same disease, also her daughter. He was then brought down and no one ventured to take care of him, fearing the disease. The Office hands watched over him until the disease seemed checked, then took him to our house. He had a relapse and a physician attended him and exerted himself to the utmost to save him, but at length told him that his {296} case was hopeless, that he could not survive through the night. Those interested for him could not bear to see the young man die without hope. They prayed around his bedside while he was suffering great agony. He also prayed that the Lord would have mercy upon him, and forgive his sins. Yet he obtained no relief. He continued to cramp and toss in restless agony. The brethren continued in prayer all night that he might be spared to repent of his sins and keep the commandments of God. He at length seemed to consecrate himself to God, and promised the Lord he would keep the Sabbath and serve him. He soon felt relief. The next morning the physician came, and as he entered, said, ‘I told my wife about one o’clock this morning that in all probability the young man was out of his trouble.’ He was told that he was alive. The physician was surprised and immediately ascended the stairs to his room, and as he examined his pulse, said, ‘Young man, you are better, the crisis is past, but it is not my skill that saved you, but a higher power. With good nursing you may get about again.’ He gained rapidly, and soon took his place in the Office, a converted man. 

By the spring of 1918 when the German divisions had transferred from the Eastern Front to the Western Front, they were able to deploy some 192 divisions opposing only 156 Allied divisions. Numerically the situation had never been more promising for the Germans, but the American forces were gathering and casting a long shadow across German plans.

In the scripture, God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many nations. In the natural it was impossible. Abraham didn’t have one child. He was eighty years old. But God didn’t just give him the promise; God gave him a picture to look at. God said, “Abraham, go out and look at the stars--that’s how many descendants you will have.” I’ve read where there are six thousand stars in the Eastern sky where he was. It’s not a coincidence that there are six thousand promises in the scripture. God was saying, “Every promise that you can get a vision for, I will bring it to pass.” God told him also to look at the grains of sand at the seashore, because that was how many relatives he would have. Why did God give him a picture? God knew there would be times when it would look as if the promise would not come to pass, and Abraham would be discouraged and tempted to give up. In those times, Abraham would go out at night and look up at the sky. When he saw the stars, faith would rise in his heart. Something would tell him, “It’s going to happen, I can see it.” In the morning when his thoughts told him, “You’re too old, it’s too late, you heard God wrong,” he would go down to the beach and look at the grains of sand. His faith would be restored. Like Abraham, there will be times when it seems as if your dreams are not coming to pass. It’s taking so long. The medical report doesn’t look good. You don’t have the resources. Business is slow. You could easily give up. But like Abraham, you’ve got to go back to that picture. Keep that vision in front of you. When you see the key to your new house, the outfit for your baby, the tennis shoes for when you’re healthy, the picture frame for your spouse, the article inspiring you to build an orphanage, those pictures of what you’re dreaming about will keep you encouraged. God is saying to you what He said to Abraham: “If you can see it, then I can do it. If you have a vision for it, then I can make a way. I can open up new doors. I can bring the right people. I can give you the finances. I can break the chains holding you back.

Thucydides reflected that human beings are subject to certain behavioral patterns. Again and again they repeat the same actions, unable to stop themselves. Society is slowly built up, then wars come and put all to ruin. Those who promise a solution to this are charlatans, only adding to the destruction, because the only solution to man is the eradication of man. In the final analysis the philanthropist and the misanthrope are two sides of the same coin. While man exists he follows his nature. Thucydides taught this truth, and went to his grave. His history was written, as he said, "for all time." And it is a kind of law of history that the generations most like his own are bound to ignore the significance of what he wrote; for otherwise they would not re-enact the history of Thucydides. But as they become ignorant of his teaching, they fall into disaster spontaneously and without thinking. It is no use arguing with the fools who cannot see the game. Whatever the faults of the United States, the tragic decadence of American liberty is not to be compared with the genocidal machinery of the Eastern Bloc. Dip your sorry head, as you may, in the acid bath of anti-American half-truth and note (if you can) the sorry pips and squeaks of derangement that invariable bubble upward and outward. Major wars are between major powers. This preoccupation with the small, insignificant dictators, terrorists and mullahs will prove fatal. J.R.Nyquist

But it is also true to say that the conduct of those ‘democratic’ countries in the aftermath of the war was often far from perfect. In some instances it was demonstrably worse than the Communists’ – the treatment of peasants in the south of Italy, for example, who were denied the land reforms they had been promised by government, compares badly with the progressive attitude in eastern Europe during the early days of Communist rule. Neither side had a monopoly on virtue. In a continent as large and diverse as Europe, it is always unwise to generalize.

The guy with the wacky hair and the crazed look in his eyes did not appear out of nowhere. He was already known to them. Sometimes he said how great they were, and told them to go back to their roots; if need be, he threw in some highly unlikely but madly alluring conspiracy theory. Just to get them to listen. And to give them a fright. Because he'd noticed that if he scared them, they paid him more attention. They'd gotten used to him being there, and to the fact that now and then, with a totally straight face, he said something unintentionally hilarious. Sometimes he hovered on the fringes of political life, sometimes closer to the mainstream, but he was generally regarded as a mild eccentric. Until one fine day they rubbed their eyes in amazement. Because the guy with the wacky hair had entered the race for one of the highest offices in the land. And just as before, here he was, trying to scare them again - with talk of refugees, war, and unprecedent disaster. With anything at all. He was also trying to pump up the national ego. In the process - in the eyes of the so-called elite - he was making a bit of a fool of himself. But he was also making big promises. Above all, he promised to turn back time, and make things the way they used to be. In other words, better. And he won. You know where this happened? Yes, you're right. In our part of the world. In post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. In Regime-Change Land.

The guy with the wacky hair and the crazed look in his eyes did not appear out of nowhere. He was already known to them. Sometimes he said how great they were, and told them to go back to their roots; if need be, he threw in some highly unlikely but madly alluring conspiracy theory. Just to get them to listen. And to give them a fright. Because he'd noticed that if he scared them, they paid him more attention. They'd gotten used to him being there, and to the fact that now and then, with a totally straight face, he said something unintentionally hilarious. Sometimes he hovered on the fringes of political life, sometimes closer to the mainstream, but he was generally regarded as a mild eccentric. Until one fine day they rubbed their eyes in amazement. Because the guy with the wacky hair had entered the race for one of the highest offices in the land. And just as before, here he was, trying to scare them again - with talk of refugees, war, and unprecedent disaster. With anything at all. He was also trying to pump up the national ego. In the process - in the eyes of the so-called elite - he was making a bit of a fool of himself. But he was also making big promises. Above all, he promised to turn back time, and make things the way they used to be. In other words, better. And he won. You know where this happened? Yes, you're right. In our part of the world. In post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. In Regime-Change Land. "And he won." "....In post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. In Regime-Change Land.

Now when these storms arise, we simply have one decision and that is how we respond to those storms. And not just how, but when we respond to these storms. In Colorado, they are world famous for the Rocky Mountains that cover the western side and the plains that cover the eastern side. Because of this, Colorado is one of the only places in the world that houses both buffalo and cows. And there is a fantastic lesson for each of us to learn about how each of these animals responds to storms. When the storm rolls in from Colorado, it usually comes from the west and heads toward the east. Now the cows are fantastic creatures, and they usually sense the storm and as it slowly begins to approach them, they turn and begin to run from the storm. But because they can’t outrun the storm, they begin to run with the storm—maximizing the time spent in the storm. As people, we tend to do the same thing in life. We spend so much time trying to avoid the inevitable changes, and we put ourselves in more difficult situations that last much longer than they should. Now the buffalo do something quite different. As the storm rolls in from the west and begins to head toward the east, the buffalo sense the storm rolling over the mountains and instead of running from the storm, they begin to charge toward the storm. Because they run directly at the storm, they end up running straight through it—minimizing the overall time spent in that storm. This is a great lesson for all of us because I promise you that one thing in life is certain and it is that storms will come. Now we can’t control how often they come, how bad they are, or when they come, but one thing is certain: that each and every one of us can control how we respond to these storms. So instead of being the cow and trying to outrun the storm, increasing your pain and frustration, from this moment forward, I challenge you to charge the storm. I challenge you to be the buffalo.