Occupy Catwoman

Batman is the 1%

She is one of Hollywood's highest paid actresses and lives a very privileged lifestyle that 99 per cent of people can only dream of.
Still, Anne Hathaway acted as an average Joe and accompanied hundreds of protestors as she joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan's Union Square.
The 29-year-old, who is worth a reported $58 million, was pictured marching with protesters and sticking it to the man yesterday in The Big Apple.

Star power: Anne Hathaway carries a sign reading 'Blackboards not Bullets' as she protests yesterday in New York

Anne, whose films have made approximately a total of $3,202,600,000, tried to blend in with the crowd by wearing a black hooded jacket, grey hat and sunglasses.
The Oscars hostess held up a sign in support of the campaign that read: 'Blackboards not bullets'.
Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing protest that began September 17 2011 in New York City's Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street financial district.

Perfect pout: Anne whistles as she shows her support for the cause

Quick change: Anne changes her sign for a smaller one with a new message

The protests have mainly focused on social and economic inequality, rising unemployment and corruption.
The demonstrators use the slogan: 'We are the 99 per cent', which refers to the growing difference in wealth between the wealthiest 1 per cent and the rest of the population.
Anne, from Brooklyn, New York, was paid a reported $5 million for her role in Bride Wars but despite the huge pay cheque she still campaigned for change in wealth.

Over protective: Adam Shulman attempts to stop pictures being taken of Anne Hathaway

Anarchy queen: Anne covers her face in her scarf as night falls on New York

As the day went on Hathaway transformed her appearance from peaceful protestor to more of an anarchist look.
She swapped her original sign for a smaller lighter one that was easier to carry.
The new sign read: 'Blackboards not bullets', which was a clear statement in support of students and education.

Is she lost? Anne is worth around $15million but still wants to protest

Reaching out: Anne and Adam try to go incognito at the demonstration

She covered her face with a red checked pattern scarf to hide her identity and the people with her became more agitated.
Her boyfriend, Adam Shulman, became annoyed when people started taking pictures of the The Devils Wears Prada actress.
Adam, who is also an actor, repeatedly stuck his hand out in front of his girlfriend's face as a passersby attempted to get a picture of her.

Made men: Russell Simmons and Kanye West joined the protest last month

The Dark Knight Rises star is not the first millionaire celebrity to join the protest.
British comedian and actor Russell Brand has previously taken part in the demonstration and so have Kanye West and Russell Simmons.

Back to business: Anne on the set of Batman earlier this year where she plays Catwoman

via dailymail.co.uk

Hollywood? kill me now. I don't think I need to say anything more. I hope Goldman Sachs fucks us all in the ass again. We fucking deserve it.

Egypt's Naked Blogger Is a Bomb Aimed at the Patriarchs in Our Minds

( Aliaa Mahdy h/t UKGuardian and Libra Bunda) Put on trial the artists' models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity, then undress and stand before a mirror and burn your bodies that you despise to forever rid yourselves of your sexual hangups before you direct your humiliation and chauvinism and dare to try to deny me my freedom of expression".

If they only knew at the Guardian what kind of reverse situation we have in the West. Men are denied their freedom to express themselves in the name of feminism... but BRAVO to those who understand proportion and moderation

It was in Egypt, after all, that the ruling military junta stripped women of both headscarves (detained female activists were made to strip) and hymens when it subjected them to "virginity tests" last March, by which a soldier inserted two fingers into their vaginal opening. What are the military's "virginity tests", but a cheap tactic to humiliate and silence? When sexual assault parades as a test of the "honour" of virginity, then posing in your parents' home in nothing but stockings, red shoes and a red hair clip is an attack towards all patriarchs out there.

I'm not drawing a pure direct parallel. Obviously the situation in the West is reactionary; intending to protect women,.. (though at times is downright racist and a means to further power when there are few male heirs in a culture because of low birth rate in the West).

GE Filed 57,000-Page Tax Return, Paid No Taxes on $14 Billion in Profits | The Weekly Standard

(Weekly Standard) General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn't pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.
The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. "GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions--it's legal," Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE's profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn't taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.
"I asked the GE tax officer, 'How long was your tax form?'" Ryan said. "He said, 'Well, we file electronically, we don't measure in pages.'" Ryan asked for an estimate, which came back at a stunning 57,000 pages. When Ryan relayed the story at the townhall meeting in Janesville, there were audible gasps from the crowd.
Ken Kies, a tax lawyer who represents GE, confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD the tax return would have been 57,000 pages had it been filed on paper. The size of GE's tax return has more than doubled in the last five years.

Ryan used the data point to underscore the irrationality of the corporate income tax code. He also contrasted GE with UPS to make the point that the corporate income tax code doesn't make sense. "UPS paid a 34 percent effective tax rate," while its biggest foreign competitor, DHL, paid a 24 percent tax rate, Ryan said.

The problems with the corporate taxes occur because "Republicans and Democrats, both parties, sit in Congress and they're picking winners and losers," Ryan said. The solution, according to the Wisconsin congressman: "Get rid of those loopholes and lower tax rates by a corresponding amount. Don't lose revenue, but for every loophole you pull out, and deny a company from being able to get this little carveout, you can lower the rates so we can be more competitive with our competitors overseas. We want to stem the bleeding of jobs going overseas, of foreign companies buying U.S. companies and taking headquarters overseas."

Ryan is hopeful that President Obama will work with Republicans on corporate tax reform. "This is the one thing I think we've got some bipartisan agreement on," he said.

I wouldn't be so confident. It was GE who practically got Obama elected through MSNBC... but maybe he's ready to stab an ally in the back.

Christian Biblical ethicists claim God didn't promise Israel to Jews

(EOZ) In September, David P. Gushee and Glen H. Stassen, two Christian ethicists, wrote "An Open Letter to America's Christian Zionists." The main point of this letter was to dispute the biblical idea that God gave Israel to Jews alone:

Not to put too fine a point on it, we wish to claim here that the prevailing version of American Christian Zionism—that is, your belief system—underwrites theft of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinian people, helps create the conditions for an explosion of violence, and pushes US policy in a destructive direction that violates our nation’s commitment to universal human rights. In all of these, American Christian Zionism as it currently stands is sinful and produces sin. We write as evangelical Christians committed lifelong to Israel's security, and we are seriously worried about your support for policies that violate biblical warnings about injustice and may lead to the outcome you most fear—serious harm to or even destruction of Israel.
We write as evangelicals to you, our fellow evangelicals. On the shared basis of biblical authority, we ask you to reconsider your interpretation of Scripture, for the sake of God, humanity, the United States, and, yes, Israel itself, the Land and People we both love.
We acknowledge that your evangelical-fundamentalist American Christian Zionism (henceforth simply “Christian Zionism”) is a product of a Christian community that loves and reads the Bible. This is on its face a good thing--for there appear to be fewer and fewer American Christians whose love of the Bible and whose devotion to reading it can be taken for granted. We commend your love for the scriptures.
Both now and in the past, whenever Christian Zionism emerges its essential origin is simply Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament. Our love of the Bible takes Christians into the pages of the Old Testament; there we cannot help but discover the centrality of a Promised Land for the Jewish people. The trajectory of the canonical Old Testament moves inexorably toward and away from the Promised Land—the patriarchal narratives in which a people and land are promised despite humble origins; enslavement in Egypt; the miraculous Exodus and grim wilderness wanderings under Moses; the conquest of the Promised Land; the establishment, split, and eventual conquest of Israel as a political entity; the Babylonian exile and dispersion of the Jewish people; and a partial return to the land, at which point the OT historical narrative ends.
...
We suggest to you that contemporary Christian Zionism is well-intentioned but needs correction at some very important points. This requires some careful biblical and theological work—from within the basic framework of evangelical Christianity. This means that the relevant scriptural texts need to be studied in detail, and that Christian theology needs to do its proper work with those texts.
For example, we suggest that Christian Zionists who move from a generalized love of Israel to a specific claim that the contemporary state of Israel has divine title to the entire Holy Land, need to take more seriously the complexity of what the Bible actually says about God’s promises to Abraham.
Genesis 15:18 reads: “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” The next verse goes on to name the various peoples to whom the land belonged at the time.
The territory denoted by the space between these two rivers includes modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, half of Iraq, half of Egypt, parts of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the modern state of Israel, as well as the occupied Palestinian territories.
A literal reading of the text that assumes that the descendants of Abram are only the Jewish people faces a problem here. Either God is not very good at keeping his promises, or God’s plan is for contemporary Israel ultimately to conquer all of these other countries and occupy their land. That would result in an Israel ruled by its 90% majority Arabs, or an Israel attempting to subjugate that 90% by force.
But the promise looks very different if we take seriously all of the offspring of Abraham. Genesis 15:4-5 has God taking Abram outside and telling him that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the heavens. Genesis 17:4, probably the pivotal text, has God saying to Abraham: “This is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.” Many nations, a multitude of nations; many offspring, many kings—read Genesis 17 again and see the plural nouns here.
Close readers of Scripture will know that in fact Abraham did become the father of many nations. With Sarah he became the father of Isaac and the ancestor of all in his line, via Jacob and Esau. With Hagar he became the father of Ishmael and all in his line. And with the long-forgotten Keturah (Gen. 25:1) he became the father of Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. The Old Testament clearly positions Abraham as the father/ancestor of not only the Jewish people but of a vast number of other peoples, all scattered through the territories promised in Genesis 15. Abraham becomes the father of dozens of peoples, exactly as the Bible says! It is certainly true that the Old Testament primarily tells the story of the line of Isaac and therefore of what became the Jewish people, but that cannot cancel the significance of the promises to Abraham and the many peoples credited to him in Genesis.
...Perhaps you will respond by saying that God promises the land of Canaan specifically to the Jewish people. You might cite here Genesis 17:8: “I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding.” This interpretation would require restricting the “offspring” in question to Abraham’s offspring through Sarah via Isaac and then on to Jacob and excluding Esau. But the promise to possess the land includes the offspring of Isaac, and the offspring of Isaac includes Esau, with his five Edomite sons and their offspring, as Genesis 36 states, and that includes multitudes of Canaanites, not only Jews. It would also require the assumption that we know what Gen. 17 means territorially with the term “Canaan” and that it corresponds with the Zionist’s version of the proper boundaries of the modern state of Israel.

In a later letter, published November 12, the same two wrote:

The responses that disagreed did not discuss the biblical passages, but shifted the topic to the politics of the present government of Israel and the West Bank, and Hamas, and whether Israel forced Palestinians out of their homes or not.
These are important topics, but we are hoping for biblical discussion.
What we are asking is whether our readers see Genesis 15 and 17 saying that Abraham is the father of many nations, with descendants as many as the stars of the universe. And whether the territory includes all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates, which of course includes many nations, most all Arab. We believe ours is the plain, literal reading. No one has explained a different reading in response.

I have no idea why no Christian Zionist took it upon themselves to answer this letter within the worldview of Christian theology. Honestly, if it is true, it is a bit disappointing.
So, even though I am not a Christian nor a Jewish Biblical scholar by any means, I would like to make a point.
It seems strange that the authors' arguments that God's promises apply to all of Abraham's descendants do not take into account later declarations by God.
For example, God explicitly told Jacob in Genesis 28:13 that "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed."
This happened at Bet El (Bethel). One can argue about the size of the land promised by God at that point, but one cannot argue that the promise was made to anyone but the Jewish people. And Bet El is on the "wrong" side of the Green Line. Would the authors admit that, Biblically, this must remain a part of Israel?
More explicitly, in Exodus 23, God tells the Israelites:

But if thou shalt indeed hearken unto his voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. For Mine angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Canaanite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; and I will cut them off. ...And I will set thy border from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness unto the River; for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.

And in Deuteronomy chapter 1:

The LORD our God spoke unto us in Horeb, saying: 'Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain; turn you, and take your journey, and go to the hill-country of the Amorites and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in the Arabah, in the hill-country, and in the Lowland, and in the South, and by the sea-shore; the land of the Canaanites, and Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates. Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the LORD swore unto your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them.'

The straight translations of these passages are somewhat contradictory and without further study I imagine it is difficult for Christians to know how to reconcile them. But it is extraordinarily dishonest to interpret only one of God's promises to Abraham and his children in a vacuum without even considering the more explicit promises He made later to Jacob, Moses and the children of Israel. Is it not the same God who made all of these promises? Are not all of them of equal weight? If so, then the issue is not interpreting one of them, but reconciling and interpreting all of them together.
Beyond that, it seems to me that the entire Biblical narrative would be problematic if most of the peoples who were God's covenental partners simply disappeared from the story or played only bit parts. If the children of Israel were not the main intended recipients of God's promises, then why would the Bible spend so much time only dealing with them and all but ignoring the Ishmaelites and the Edomites?
The writers make other arguments about whether today's Jews should still be considered to be within the same covenant, but that is a much bigger topic. And before I spend time on that, I would love to know how they interpret and reconcile the many other Biblical verses tying the Land of Israel with, specifically, the Jews.

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(Parenthetically, I think it is not clear at all that you can consider Esau's progeny to be "Canaanites." While Gen. 38 says they lived in Canaan, the Canaanites were presumably the descendants of Canaan, Noah's grandson through Ham. Which means, ironically, that Canaanites are not Semites, but rather "Hamites." So don't accuse me of anti-Semitism :) )

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I am afraid that this might turn into a very big theological thread, and I am not really comfortable with that here; Christian theology is not a topic that belongs on this blog. Hopefully  it will spark discussion among Christians that will take place elsewhere.

Cultural Leftism

Theoretical leftism and class warfare was a lot less destructive then cultural leftism and class warfare. The Jews predominantly created Christianity and it was Christian culture that committed genocide on the Jews, likewise the Jews predominantly created leftism and class warfare and the end result is cultural leftism is trying to kill us now. Who were the National Socialists? Why are we not allowed to call them Socialists? ...why, because it would offend Stalin. But even though we own the logic, the cultural horde marches on.

Was Thomas Jefferson a Plagiarist?

( libertarianism.org) Probably no sentence—or, in this case, fragment of a sentence—in the history of political thought has received more attention from historians and elicited more controversy than this passage from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….

Here is how this passage was originally written, in what Thomas Jefferson called his “original Rough draught” of the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness….

On June 12, 1776, within a day of the time that Jefferson probably began writing the Declaration, George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette. This document reads, in part:

That all men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

The similarities between Mason’s document and Jefferson’s Rough Draft have led many historians to conclude that Jefferson drew from Mason while writing the Declaration. Jefferson’s biographer Dumas Malone (Jefferson the Virginian) speculates that there may have been a “direct influence,” while Pauline Maier (American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence) goes so far as to say that that Jefferson had Mason’s draft “in hand” while working on the Declaration of Independence.
Such efforts to trace to earlier sources both the ideas expressed in Jefferson’s Declaration and the particular wording he used are nothing new. Jefferson’s contemporaries engaged in the same exercise, sometimes going so far as to accuse him of plagiarism, in effect. For example, Richard Henry Lee, Jefferson’s fellow Virginian who made the original resolution for American Independence, claimed that Jefferson had copied from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.
On April 30, 1819, the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette published a document that has become known as the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.  This newspaper article begins:

It is probably not known to many of our readers, that the citizens of Mecklenburg county, in this state [North Carolina], made a declaration of independence a year before Congress made theirs.

The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, which was supposedly issued by a convention held in Charlotte on May 20, 1775, contains phrases that are identical to those that Jefferson used over a year later. Shortly after John Adams read a reprint of the Mecklenburg Declaration in the Essex Register (June 5, 1819), he wrote to a friend:

A few weeks ago I received an Essex Register, containing resolutions of independence by a county in North Carolina…. I was struck with so much astonishment on reading this document, that I could not help inclosing it immediately to Mr. Jefferson, who must have seen it, in the time of it, for he has copied the spirit, the sense, and the expression of it verbatim, into his Declaration.

After Jefferson read the Mecklenburg Declaration, he wrote to Adams, “I believe it spurious.” Although Adams claimed to be “entirely convinced” by Jefferson’s reasons—some of which were sound and some of which were not—his longstanding jealously of the credit that Jefferson had received for the Declaration of Independence led him to write to another correspondent:
“I could as soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now before my Eyes were the work of chance, as that the Mecklenburg Resolutions and Mr. Jefferson’s declaration were not derived the one from the other.”
Although Jefferson was correct—the Mecklenburg Declaration is indeed spurious—the controversy raged throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.  In the New York Review of March, 1837, a defender of the Mecklenburg Declaration, one Dr. Hawks, expressly accused Jefferson of plagiarism—and this charge has been repeated, if only implicitly, by other defenders of the “Mec Dec,” especially North Carolinians.
In Why North Carolinians Believe in the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, the transcript of a speech delivered to the Mecklenburg Historical Society on October 11, 1894, Dr. George W. Graham stated:

There is no event of the American Revolution about which more has been written than the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of May 20th, 1775, and at the present time upwards of four score articles are in print concerning it. Some were prepared because the writers desired to see an account of this bold action recorded in the history of North Carolina; some because it was feared that, if the authenticity of this declaration was established, Thomas Jefferson would be proclaimed a plagiarist….

The most thorough analysis of the Mecklenburg Declaration was published in 1907 by William Henry Hoyt: The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: A Study of Evidence Showing that the Alleged Early Declaration of Independence by Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20, 1775, is Spurious. It is virtually impossible for any objective person to read this exhaustive refutation of the Mec Dec Myth and still believe that Thomas Jefferson was a plagiarist.
Lost causes die hard, as we see on the website for the Mecklenburg Historical Association (September 2011), which advertises a lecture by Judge Chase B. Saunders, a fifth-generation North Carolinian. His presentation, A Defense of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, is summarized as follows:

A motion for appropriate relief seeking the reexamination of the record of history by the academic community and exoneration of the drafters of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.

A motion seeking the trial of UNC Professor Charles Phillips for academic misconduct in his 1853 publication, defaming the drafters and declaring the episode a fraud, for wanton negligence in conducting his research and thereby failing to meet generally accepted standards of academic research and materially deviated from said standards.

What exactly was the academic crime of Professor Charles Phillips? Well, Phillips, having examined the original documents associated with the Mecklenburg Declaration, detected fraud and forgery, and he said so in an article published in the North Carolina University Magazine (May 1853). As Phillips explained in 1858, “[A]ll the story about the 20^th of May could not stand before cool and fair criticism…. To me, the assertion, or insinuation, that Jefferson ever borrowed from Mecklenburg is just ridiculous….”
(Whether overt fraud was involved in this complex story is problematic. For a useful summary of the explanation accepted by most historians today, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, pp. 172-74.)
In 1823, four years after the publication of the Mecklenburg Declaration, another controversy erupted — one that was precipitated by the embittered Federalist Timothy Pickering, a political enemy of Jefferson who had served as Secretary of State during the administration of John Adams. This controversy focused not on wording of the Declaration of Independence but on the originality of the ideas expressed therein.
In his Fourth of July Oration, Pickering argued that Jefferson had received too much credit for the Declaration, that many other Americans had expressed the same ideas before Jefferson wrote the document. There was nothing surprising in this effort to undermine Jefferson’s contribution, considering that it came from an ardent Federalist and old political enemy. More surprising was this passage that Pickering read from a letter he had received the previous year from John Adams:

As you justly observe, there is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance of it is contained the declaration of rights and the violation of those rights in the Journals of Congress in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and polished by Samuel Adams.

Jefferson responded with remarkable grace to this slight by Adams, especially considering that the two men had resumed their old friendship a decade earlier, after years of political animosity. In an oft-quoted letter to James Madison (Aug. 30, 1823), Jefferson wrote:

Pickering’s observations, and Mr. Adams’ in addition, “that [the Declaration] contained no new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, its sentiments hacknied in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis’ pamphlet,’ may all be true. Of that I am not to be the judge…. Otis’pamphlet I never saw, and whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.

As Jefferson explained to a correspondent in 1825, just fourteen months before his death:

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.

After decades of studying the Declaration and the standard sources of Real (or Radical) Whig ideas, I have found no compelling reasons to doubt Jefferson’s claim that he “turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing” the Declaration, and that it was not “copied from any particular and previous writing.” My reasons will be presented in my next essay; but before concluding this essay, I wish to comment briefly on another theory of the Declaration that qualifies as a cult favorite.
In 1966, during my third year of high school, I read a book titled Thomas Paine, Author of the Declaration of Independence (1947). The author, American freethinker Joseph Lewis, presented what appeared to be an impressive array of facts and arguments to support the thesis that Thomas Paine, not Thomas Jefferson, was the real author of the Declaration (or at least most of it).
Puzzled by what I had read, I took the book to school, showed it to my American history teacher, and solicited his opinion. He showed considerable interest and asked to borrow the book.
I never saw the book again. According to my teacher, it mysteriously disappeared from the teachers’ lounge after he left it there overnight. I got five dollars for my loss, which was twice what I had originally paid, but I never quite believed his story. I suspected my teacher overpaid me out of guilt, because he wanted to keep the book for himself.
By the time I read Lewis’s book, I had been reading books by and about Thomas Paine for nearly two years. I knew that Paine had been denigrated because of his authorship of Age of Reason—Theodore Roosevelt, for example, called Paine “that filthy little atheist,” even though Paine, a deist, attacked atheism in Age of Reason  — and I shared the desire of many freethinkers to see Paine restored to his rightful place in American history.
But Lewis’s thesis, if true, would mean that Thomas Jefferson, who explicitly claimed authorship, and who, in his own epitaph, listed the Declaration as one of the three achievements for which he wished to be remembered, was one of the biggest liars in American history. It would also mean that Thomas Paine, who never so much as hinted at any connection with the Declaration, was one of the most modest figures in American history. It is difficult to say which assumption is more unbelievable.
Some years later I obtained another copy of Thomas Paine, Author of the Declaration of Independence and read it again. By that time I knew quite a bit about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration, so what had previously seemed like a plausible case now struck me as a string of incorrect assertions and unsubstantiated speculations.
I subsequently learned that most of the arguments by Lewis had been circulating for at least a century before his book was published in 1947. The claim that Paine wrote the Declaration goes back at least to the mid-nineteenth century; the standard arguments were repeated time and again in books published by Peter Eckler, The Truth Seeker, and other freethought publishers. It was even given some credibility, if in a scaled-down version, by Moncure Conway in his excellent two-volume Life of Thomas Paine (1892).
My early exposure to the Thomas Paine Thesis taught me a valuable lesson, namely, that historical quackery is more common than one might think, and that books on history should always be read with a critical eye.

A basic difference between a western and Islamic state

(h/t Vlad Tepes)

US Army testing weapon that can strike anywhere in the World within an hour

(Israel Matzav) On Thursday, the United States Army tested an advanced hypersonic weapon, which is capable of striking anywhere in the World within an hour.

The vehicle glided at least 4,000 kilometers to the Pacific atoll, with the goal of testing "navigation, guidance, and control" according to Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Melinda F. Morgan. It was powered by a three-stage hypersonic booster system.
Scientists classify hypersonic speeds as those at Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) or above.
The Pentagon developed AHW as part of the Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS) program, which the US said it would use to "precisely strike time-sensitive, high value targets," according to the US State Department. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted research on a similar hypersonic weapon, the HTV-2.

wingless