Saturday, December 27, 2014

Bradley Cooper sets high targets in new film 'American Sniper'

NEW YORK Wed Dec 24, 2014 9:09am EST


(Reuters) - Actor Bradley Cooper is quick to say that "American Sniper," his film about Navy Seal sharpshooter Chris Kyle, is not about the Iraq conflict but an intimate character study of the harrowing impact of war on a soldier and his family.
The dual Academy Award nominee, who is also a producer of the film, directed by Clint Eastwood, had planned to collaborate with Kyle to bring his story to the big screen.
But Kyle, a former rodeo rider, survivor of four tours in Iraq and the most lethal sniper in Navy history, was murdered near his Texas home by a disgruntled veteran before the two had a chance to meet.
 
 
"It is a movie about what someone like Chris, a soldier, has to go through and the dilemma and the horror of it and the battle internally and with the family," Cooper said about the film that opens on limited release on Christmas day and nationwide on Jan. 16.
Although Cooper never met Kyle, his wife gave the actor access to personal emails the couple had exchanged during his tours inIraq and family videos that he found invaluable in finding the essence of the man.
"She opened up her life. We didn't have to create anything with our imagination, literally nothing. All we had to do was soak in what she gave us," Cooper, a best actor nominee for "American Hustle" and "Silver Linings Playbook," told a news conference.
The film shifts between battle scenes in Iraq, flashbacks to his childhood, and difficult homecomings as the couple try to cope with the impact of Kyle's experiences on their family.
"It is important to show their relationship, to show the dilemma that Chris faced. It is his story," said Sienna Miller, who plays Kyle's wife in the comeback role.
Cooper, currently winning rave reviews on Broadway in a revival of "The Elephant Man," about the life of a disfigured 19th century Briton, bulked up for the role and trained with live ammunition to get into the mindset of Kyle.
He said he hopes the film will open viewers' eyes to the struggles soldiers face, in battle and when returning home.
"The takeaway will be, for those who can relate to him, will be healing, to relate to a vet who has gone through similar things that Chris has gone through, and maybe not feel so alone," he said.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Film Review: 'American Sniper'


'American Sniper' is the year's most extraordinary film

By Kyle Smith
http://nypost.com/
December 23, 2014




There is a class of men in whom is contained a distilled essence of the American spirit. Sturdy, taciturn and mysterious, these men tend to come from places like Virginia, Georgia, Texas. They have a devout attachment to guns, which are, to them, Old Testament swords of righteousness. Their seriousness of purpose seems archaic. They are our warrior class. Women find them irresistible; lesser men salute, if they are wise, or scoff, if they are not.

Chris Kyle was one such warrior. As embodied by Bradley Cooper in “American Sniper,” he is imposing, determined and lethal, a Navy SEAL who did four tours of duty in Iraq, killing by the score men who needed to be killed. In the film, Kyle calls the Islamist fanatics what they are: “savages,” and in such moments, director Clint Eastwood’s overpowering war film scintillates with clarity.
The film runs on three tracks: Kyle’s childhood, in which he absorbed his values; his Iraq tours, in which he shot and killed some 160 enemies and witnessed the agony of many comrades; and his off-duty life in Texas, where, in the company of his children and wife (a composed Sienna Miller), he continued to hear war’s echoes, sometimes so loud that they submerged his personality.
“American Sniper” portrays Kyle as something of an armed saint, if a troubled one, but though I ordinarily resist one-sided portrayals, I think that Cooper and Eastwood find in the man a template. After 40 years of Hollywood counterpropaganda telling us war is necessarily corrupting and malign, its ablest practitioners thugs, loons or victims, “American Sniper” nobly presents the case for the other side. It doesn’t say violence is beautiful, but that it is necessary, placing it closer to “Unforgiven” than to Eastwood’s dreadfully reductionist war pictures “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
Cooper is devastating, not straining to be fierce but letting his newly beefy presence and his attention to the details of long-range marksmanship convey the robust professionalism of the SEALs. Eastwood alternates between harrowing war imagery — a mesmerizing battle in a sandstorm recalls the vertiginous chaos of “Black Hawk Down” — and quieter moments of equal power. When young Chris learns that the world is divided among sheep, wolves and sheepdogs, and that his calling is to be one of the latter, it’s a parable with biblical weight.
The moral alertness of the film is of the level normally confined, in military pictures, to talky courtroom scenes, yet Eastwood skillfully works dilemmas into propulsive and suspenseful action. The depth is present from the beginning, when Kyle must decide whether to shoot an Iraqi woman who might be concealing an explosive. He processes the staggering consequences of making the wrong decision — even as he knows that should his suspicions prove correct, to take a life is an immense thing.
Mapping the interior landscape of a damaged soul is something books do better than movies, but in Cooper’s recoils from sudden noises, in his slumping at a hometown bar when his wife doesn’t even know he’s back in the country and in his staring at the floor when thanked for his prowess, we learn much about the price warriors pay. Cowboys, adventurers, joyriders — these are exactly what our best fighting men are not. They suffer merely to be alive, when so many brothers lie in boxes draped with flags. “American Sniper” does honor to them.

Friday, December 26, 2014

The Nutritional Junk Science of Our Government Nannies


Posted By Rand Simberg On December 25, 2014 @ 11:15 pm In Education,Food and Drink,Health,Politics,Science,Science & Technology,US News | 4 Comments

Do you think you know how to eat healthy? Your friendly neighborhood federal government doesn’t think you do. And they’re here to help.

Buried deep in the ObamaCare law, the gift from the Democrats to the nation that keeps on giving, chain restaurants are required to start labeling calories on all of their menu items. The law applies to vending-machine items as well. It’s proven to be a nightmare [1] for small business and franchises, adding cost (which will have to be passed on to the diner, if they choose to pay it). In the case of things like “order your own” sandwiches or pizza, it is almost impossible to implement. As with much of the poorly written misbegotten law, it is unclear whether it applies to things like food trucks, or what the penalty is for non-compliance. Despite the uncertainty, overall cost has been estimated to be half a billion dollars, which will be “eaten” by consumers.

Meanwhile, over in the public-school cafeterias, food is being wasted, and money is being lost by the school districts [2], because kids refuse to purchase or eat what Michelle Obama thinks is good for them. The goal of her Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, passed in 2010, was to wage war on childhood obesity. But unsurprisingly, the children, obese and otherwise, find the high-fiber, low-fat, low-salt fare unappetizing, and when they don’t brown bag to avoid having to buy it, they throw much of it away. Worse, and particularly insanely, the law makes no distinction between different kids’ dietary needs, and completely fails to take into account physical activity — the football player gets as many (or few) calories as the chess champ.

Leaving aside the legitimate issue of whether or not such one-size-fits-none policies are actually in the purview of the federal government, the worst thing about them is that they’re based on junk science.

The calorie counts are based on the flawed theory, per basic thermodynamics, that a calorie is a calorie, in terms of weight gain or loss, regardless of whether it comes from fat, protein or carbohydrates. The reduction in sodium is mandated on the notion that salt is bad for everyone.
The low-fat and reduced-cholesterol items are based on the primitive thinking that “you are what you eat.” In short, the FDA and USDA food “pyramid” (which the first lady recently replaced with a “plate” [3]) upon which these laws and regulations are based is (like the scene from Woody Allen’s movie Sleeperalmost exactly the opposite [4] of what we now know to be nutritionally healthy.

In fact, what kind of calories you consume is much more important than how many — protein and fat are actually beneficial in weight reduction, because they are more satiating and increase metabolism, while grains (a key part of the “plate”) and other high-glycemic carbohydrates, such as potatoes, actually promote weight gain (which is why cattle are fattened on corn, not on lard). Calorie counters have trouble keeping weight lost off because the diet is so unsatisfying and counterproductive metabolically. So the labels are actually worse than useless.

Unless one has elevated blood pressure, there is no scientific evidence that sodium is bad for most people, particularly young people. It might help to use sea salt rather than table, which provides additional elements such as magnesium and potassium, but for kids, reducing salt per se only reduces willingness to choke down the unappealing food.

With regard to fat and cholesterol, you are not what you eat. All of the recommendations for reducing fat in diet are based on flawed decades-old “studies,” and the actual science (as revealed by Nina Teichholz’s recent best seller, The Big Fat Surprise) indicates that saturated fat is healthy [5], and that elevated bad cholesterol and triglycerides, and weight gain, come from eating grains [6] and other bad carbohydrates, not the consumption of fat. In the case of children, they need fat to promote the growth of not just their bodies, but particularly their young brains. Giving them low-fat milk is not just distasteful to them, but dietary child abuse.

It’s bad enough that flawed nutrition advice from the government agencies has in fact promoted obesity, diabetes and premature mortality from heart disease and stroke for decades. But it’s long past time to stop forcing Americans to follow it.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com


URLs in this post:


[2] food is being wasted, and money is being lost by the school districts: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389589/common-calorie-revolt-john-fund


[4] almost exactly the opposite: http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7654


The Cuban Archipelago


Posted By Jamie Glazov On December 26, 2014 @ 12:17 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 6 Comments

In this 11 September 1994 photo, three refugees cling to their overturned raft and life preservers as the US coast guard moves in to pick them up approximately 15 miles north of Cuba.

In this 11 September 1994 photo, three refugees cling to their overturned raft and life preservers as the US coast guard moves in to pick them up approximately 15 miles north of Cuba. Photograph: Alon Reininger/AP


Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.
—Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries

President Obama’s recent move to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially  important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing an economic lifeline to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag — and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro’s fascistic regime.

Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.

Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.

Half a million human beings have passed through Cuba’s Gulag. Since Cuba’s total population is only around eleven million, that gives Castro’s despotism the highest political incarceration rate per capita on earth. There have been more than fifteen thousand executions by firing squad. Torture has been institutionalized; myriad human-rights organizations have documented the regime’s use of electric shock, dark coffin-sized isolation cells, and beatings to punish “anti-socialist elements.” The Castro regime’s barbarity is best epitomized by the Camilo Cienfuegos plan, the program of horrors followed in the forced-labor camp on the Isle of Pines. Forced to work almost naked, prisoners were made to cut grass with their teeth and to sit in latrine trenches for long periods of time. Torture is routine.[i]

The horrifying experience of Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who endured twenty-two years of torture and imprisonment for merely raising the issue of freedom, is a testament to the regime’s barbarity. Valladares’s memoir, Against All Hope, serves as Cuba’s version of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Valladares recounts how prisoners were beaten with bayonets, electric cables, and truncheons. He tells how he and other prisoners were forced to take “baths” in human feces and urine.[ii]

Typical of the horror in Castro’s Gulag was the experience of Roberto López Chávez, one of Valladares’s prison friends. When López went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink. The guards then urinated in his mouth. He died the next day.[iii]

Since Castro’s death cult, like other leftist ideologies, believes that human blood purifies the earth—and since manifestations of grief affirm the reality of the individual, and thus are anathema to the totality—mourning for the departed became taboo. Thus, just like Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia,[iv] so too Castro’s Cuba warned family members of murdered dissidents not to cry at their funerals.[v]

The Castro regime also has a long, grotesque record of torturing and murdering Americans. During the Vietnam War, Castro sent some of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” Its primary objective was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror.[vi]

The ordeal of Lt. Col. Earl Cobeil, an F-105 pilot, illustrates the Nazi-like nature of the experiment. Among Fidel’s torture techniques were beatings and whippings over every part of his victim’s body, without remission.[vii] Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of fellow POW Col. Jack Bomar:
 The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . . He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . . Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . . His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs.[viii]
Earl Cobeil died as a result of Fidel’s torture.
Maj. James Kasler was another of Fidel’s victims, although he survived the treatment:
 He [Fidel] deprived Kasler of water, wired his thumbs together, and flogged him until his “buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds.” During one barbaric stretch he turned Cedric [another torturer] loose for three days with a rubber whip. . . . the PW [POW] was in a semi-coma and bleeding profusely with a ruptured eardrum, fractured rib, his face swollen and teeth broken so that he could not open his mouth, and his leg re-injured from attackers repeatedly kicking it.[ix]
The reign of terror against American POWs in Vietnam was just a reflection of Castro’s treatment of his own people. In addition to physical hardships even for those who don’t wind up in prison or labor camp, Cuba’s police state has denied Cubans any freedom at all. Cubans do not have the right to travel out of their country. They do not have the right of free association or the right to form political parties, independent unions, or religious or cultural organizations. The regime has outlawed free expression; it has consistently censored publications, radio, television, and film.
There is a Committee for the Defense of the Cuban Revolution (CDR) for every single city block and every agricultural production unit. The CDR’s purpose is to monitor the affairs of every family and to report anything suspicious. A Cuban’s entire life is spent under the surveillance of his CDR, which controls everything from his food rations to his employment to his use of free time. A vicious racism against blacks accompanies this repression. In pre-Castro Cuba, blacks enjoyed upward social mobility and served in many government positions. In Castro’s Cuba, the jail population is 80 percent black, while the government hierarchy is 100 percent white.[x]

Cuban Communism follows Lenin’s and Stalin’s idea of “equality,” wherein members of the nomenklatura live like millionaires while ordinary Cubans live in utter poverty. The shelves in the stores are empty, and food is tightly rationed for the average citizen. Teachers and doctors drive taxis or work as waiters to support their families. Under the system of tourist apartheid, ordinary Cubans are not allowed inside the hotels designated for tourists and party functionaries. There are, of course, police inside every such hotel to arrest any unauthorized Cuban citizen who dares to enter.

The $5-billion-a-year Soviet subsidy that just barely kept the Cuban economy afloat during the Cold War is long gone. And notwithstanding the $110 billion that the Soviets pumped in over the decades, Cuba has become one of the poorest nations in the world. Its sugar, tobacco, and cattle industries were all major sources of exports in the pre-Castro era. Castro destroyed them all.[xi] Because of his belief in “socialism or death,” Cuba is now a beggar nation. Even Haitian refugees avoid Cuba.

Denied the right to vote under Castro, Cubans have voted with their feet. Pre-Castro Cuba had the highest per-capita immigration rate in the Western hemisphere. Under Castro, approximately two million Cuban citizens (out of eleven million) have escaped their country. Many have done so by floating on rafts or inner tubes in shark-infested waters. An estimated fifty thousand to eighty-seven thousand have lost their lives.[xii]

Not content to trust the sharks, Castro has sent helicopters to drop sandbags onto the rafts of would-be escapees, or just to gun them all down. Epitomizing this barbarity was the Tugboat Massacre of July 13, 1994, in which Castro ordered Cuban patrol boats to kill forty-one unarmed Cuban civilians—ten of them children—who were using an old wooden tugboat in their attempt to flee Cuba.[xiii]

These are the heart-breaking stories, and only a few among many, of the Cuban people who have suffered excruciating pain and agony under an evil tyranny that now, as it stands on its last legs, is having its life extended by an American president.

It is food for thought.

Notes:

[i] For one of the best accounts of the brutality of the Castro regime, see Pascal Fontaine, “Cuba: Interminable Totalitarianism in the Tropics,” in Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, pp. 647–665.

[ii] Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag, trans. Andrew Hurley (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), p. 137.

[iii] Ibid., p. 379.

[iv] For China’s case, see chapter 7 of my book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror; for Cambodia’s, see John Perazzo, “Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot,” FrontPageMag.com, August 8, 2005.

[v] Valladares, Against All Hope, p. 378.

[vi] Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley, chapter 19, “The Zoo, 1967–1969: The Cuban Program and Other Atrocities,” in Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961–1973 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999).

[vii] Humberto Fontova, Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, (Regnery, 2005). pp. 141–142.

[viii] Rochester and Kiley, Honor Bound, p. 400.

[ix] Ibid., p. 404.

[x] Fontova, Fidel, p. 88.

[xi] Ibid., pp. 14–15 and 49.

[xii] Ibid., pp. 8 and 56–57.

[xiii] Ibid., pp. 157–163.
*
To get the whole story on why leftists venerate Castro’s tyranny, order Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror:


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Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God


The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone?


By 

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Christmas 1941: Churchill Rallies a Deflated America


By Craig Shirley - December 24, 2014

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/

Churchill addressing both houses of Congress in 1941
Churchill addressing both houses of Congress in 1941
In late December of 1941, there was no way Americans could look into the future and foresee the blood, toll, tears, and sweat that would be required of them—nor the ultimate outcome of what few were then calling World War II. Yet in time, American children would be writing to Santa Claus and asking for war bonds.
On December 26, 1941, the United States was losing the new great world war. Nearly 3,000 Americans had died in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 19 days earlier, most of them servicemen in the Army and Navy. In the sunken USS Arizona, faint tapping through the hull had been heard for days, but there was no way to get to the doomed men.
One luckier sailor aboard the USS Oklahoma, which was also capsized, found himself trapped for nearly two days, hanging by a pipe in the blackness and cold water, the sounds of dying men all around him. Finally, he heard an acetylene torch cutting through the hull, all the time wondering if it was Americans there to save him -- or Japanese to kill him.
Hundreds more were in military hospitals, many with limbs gone, all badly wounded.
Even more Americans were dying at Wake Island and in the Philippines and on the high seas of the North Atlantic, being hunted on the orders of Hitler. Japan was killing Americans and Germany was killing Americans, but the United States was still just getting off the mat.
Congress would later expand its draft of able-bodied young men. Most cities, especially Washington, D.C., had adopted a war footing. Curfews and air raid drills were instituted.
Back during World War I, an island of munitions in New Jersey known as “Black Tom” had been blown up by German espionage agents. President Franklin Roosevelt vowed to not let this happen again, much to the detriment of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans who would be rounded up and incarcerated on the West Coast. Roosevelt was heard muttering, “Remember Black Tom.”
The news at Christmastime in 1941 was all bad for America. FDR, the master motivator, had done all he could, as had Eleanor Roosevelt, a first lady whom Americans felt they really knew via her avidly followed newspaper column, her radio talks, and her tireless speaking schedule. The media, including radio commentators and the Hollywood dream factories, were also doing what they could to buck up morale. But the daily drumbeat of bad news was battering the American psyche into the ground.
We needed to hear from a friend. We needed to hear from Winston Churchill, America’s greatest friend in December 1941. The Brits had borne the brunt of the war with the Axis powers for two years and had suffered severe military and civilian losses. The Battle of Britain -- the unending bombing of London and surrounding installations -- was winding down and was being chalked up as a win for England, but at a terrible cost.
Churchill was frightened for his nation, fears he never projected in public. He was the English Bulldog and The Last Lion rolled into one, a leader in whose veins British indomitability and American can-do spirit flowed naturally. (His mother, Jennie Jerome, was Brooklyn-born and –bred.) By train, plane and automobile, Churchill was secreted out of England and arrived, shockingly, in the United States two days before Christmas. The purpose of the trip was to meet with FDR and make war plans, but also to boost the morale of the American people.
It worked. Thousands of Washingtonians lined up along West Executive Avenue, patiently waiting to go onto the South Lawn of the White House for the lighting of the Christmas tree there, to sing carols, and to hear the remarks of the president of the United States and the prime minister of England. The irony was deep. The presidency, America, the White House would not have existed without the bloody American Revolution.
Thousands streamed onto the South Lawn, but only after being told by policemen to leave their packages and briefcases and umbrellas on the sidewalk along the newly installed fence outside the executive mansion. When they returned, their belongings were all there, unmolested.
Churchill was an honored guest in the House that his countrymen had once burned to the ground, and he feasted with the Roosevelt family on Christmas Day. FDR got more than he bargained for when he happened upon a naked Churchill, who often spent his private time in the buff. Still, they liked each other more than when they first met in 1918.
December 26, 1941 was proclaimed “Churchill Day” when the British leader addressed a joint session of Congress. It was held in the smaller Senate chamber because congressional leaders worried about the image of empty seats, given that Congress was in recess. It worked out, though: the acoustics were better, and the speech was broadcast to a grateful nation on all radio networks. Churchill did not disappoint. Indeed, he was “Churchillian.”
He opened by lightheartedly saying that if his mother been British and his father American, instead of the other way around, he might have made his appearance on the Washington political scene earlier, adding, “In that case, this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.” In that instance, he noted, his invitation no doubt would not have been “unanimous.”
He paid homage to the American system of government, which put its faith in people, as opposed to his own, which put it trust in institutions. He scorned “privilege and monopoly,” two hallmarks of British culture. Churchill spoke without a prepared text.
Then he hit the American people and Congress right between the eyes. Churchill said 1942 would be a very bad year and that good news may not arrive until 1943 -- or even later.
He said America had “drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the shadow.” Though he predicted difficult weather ahead, he did see a happy ending -- the result of American and British courage.
“Here in Washington, I have found an Olympian fortitude which, far from being based upon complacency, is only the mark of an inflexible purpose and the proof of a sure, well-grounded confidence in the final outcome,” he said.
Churchill concluded by invoking spirituality. He was a devoted member of the Church of England. FDR, typical of his social standing, was an Episcopalian, the very church created by those bolting the English state religion. No matter. “I will say,” he intoned in that growly and determined voice, “that he must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, for we have the honor to be the faithful servant.”
Then the Great British Lion sat down. 
Craig Shirley is the author of two best-selling books about Ronald Reagan, including “Rendezvous With Destiny” and “Reagan’s Revolution.” He is also the author of the best-selling “December 1941; 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World” and is the president of Shirley & Banister. He is now writing several more books about Reagan, including “Last Act.” He has lectured at the Reagan Library, is the Visiting Reagan Scholar at Eureka College, and is a member of the Board of Governors of the Reagan Ranch.