The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World


W. Cleon Skousen - 1981
    The truth is that the solutions have been available for a long time -- in the writings of our Founding Fathers -- carefully set forth in this timely book.In The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, Discover the 28 Principles of Freedom our Founding Fathers said must be understood and perpetuated by every people who desire peace, prosperity, and freedom. Learn how adherence to these beliefs during the past 200 years has brought about more progress than was made in the previous 5000 years. These 28 Principles include The Genius of Natural Law, Virtuous and Moral Leaders, Equal Rights--Not Equal Things, and Avoiding the Burden of Debt. Published by the National Center for Constitut

The Necessity of Atheism


David Marshall Brooks - 1933
    And all religious beliefs are "crutches" hindering the free locomotive efforts of an advancing humanity. There are no problems related to human progress and happiness in this age which any theology can solve, and which the teachings of freethought cannot do better and without the aid of encumbrances.

Principia Discordia ● Or ● How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger


Gregory Hill - 1965
    This legendary underground classic contains absolutely everything worth knowing about absolutely anything. Discordianism is the religion for these screwed-up times, and Principia Discordia reveals it here for your enlightenment, confusion and entertainment.

Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 & the United States Government's UFO Cover-up


Stanton T. Friedman - 1996
    Friedman's twenty-one year search for the truth about the mysterious Operation Majestic 12, President Truman's top-secret UFO investigation team. In this updated edition of his landmark book, he tells the incredible tale of the July, 1947 recovery of a crashed flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico, and the establishment by President Truman of a truly all-star cast to deal with the saucer and its non-human inhabitants. The first four Directors of Central Intelligence, the first Secretary of Defense, and several outstanding scientists and military leaders were part of the team. Through painstaking research and startling evidence—including documents that have never before been published—Friedman effectively exposes the U.S. government's biggest-kept secret: a fifty-eight year UFO cover-up.

Behind the Green Mask


Rosa Koire - 2011
    She is a forensic commercial real estate appraiser specializing in eminent domain valuation. Her nearly 30 years of experience analyzing land use and property value enabled her to recognize the planning revolution sweeping the country. While fighting to stop a huge redevelopment project in her city she researched the corporate, political, and financial interests behind it and found UN Agenda 21. Impacting every aspect of our lives, UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is a corporate manipulation using the Green Mask of environmental concern to forward a globalist plan.

A Short History of Russia


Mary Platt Parmele - 1900
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream


Patrick Radden Keefe - 2009
    Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown.The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business-a business that earned an estimated $40 million-was smuggling people. As a “snakehead,” she built a complex—and often vicious—global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community—where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone—and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her. Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the criminal network and home in on its unusual mastermind.THE SNAKEHEAD is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America’s twelve million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream. The Snakehead offers an intimate tour of life on the mean streets of Chinatown, a vivid blueprint of organized crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects us all.www.doubleday.com

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher


Julian Baggini - 2005
    Taking examples from sources as diverse as Plato and Steven Spielberg, author Julian Baggini presents abstract philosophical issues in concrete terms, suggesting possible solutions while encouraging readers to draw their own conclusions: Lively, clever, and thought-provoking, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten is a portable feast for the mind that is sure to satisfy any intellectual appetite.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety


Eric Schlosser - 2013
    A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved—and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind. While the harms of global warming increasingly dominate the news, the equally dangerous yet more immediate threat of nuclear weapons has been largely forgotten.Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America’s nuclear age.

The Sign


Raymond Khoury - 2009
    Like the first two, this new thriller combines gripping contemporary suspense with a high-concept mystery rooted in history, philosophy, religion, and science. And like those novels, it is bound for bestseller lists nationwide. In Antarctica, a scientific expedition drops anchor for a live news feed. As the CNN journalist begins her report, a massive, shimmering sphere of light suddenly appears in the sky, enveloping the ship in luminous white light before disappearing as mysteriously as it arrived, the entire event witnessed by an incredulous world audience.Meanwhile in a dusty bar in Egypt, a dozen men are lazily discussing the state of the world when the brilliant, glowing symbol on the television stops them cold. One man breaks out in a sweat, crosses himself repeatedly, and rushes out of the bar muttering the same phrase over and over again: It can't be.Across the Internet and around the globe, a stunning controversy threatens to consume the world: Has God finally decided to reveal himself? Or is something more sinister at hand? Raymond Khoury/Steve Berry interview STEVE BERRY: Your new thriller, THE SIGN. I'm gonna come right out and say it: I think it's your best one yet. What do you think?RAMOND KHOURY: Tough call. It's my new baby, and much as I adore its elder siblings, it does have that newborn magic to it.STEVE: Trust me, it is. It's also a bit of a departure from your first two books, in that it doesn't have the past-and-present storylines. Knowing how stories kind of take on a life of their own, that wasn't a conscious decision from the get-go, was it?RAYMOND KHOURY: No, it wasn't premeditated. It's just the way the story came out. The whole story happens in the present. It takes place over a few manic days, I think you're familiar with that pacing, right? And it deals with the present, it's about a what if situation that's very today and now, there's a mystery, something to figure out, but there's no throwback to the past, no long lost secret to uncover.STEVE BERRY: It's also very topical. Your editors must be pleased.RAYMOND: I guess it happened that way because the story came out of some very strong feelings I had, feelings about what was going on around the world, in the US and abroad.STEVE: Tell me about that process. Where the story came from.RAYMOND: It's where they all come from, isn't it? That kernel, that one thought or one observation you have that just sticks and triggers a book, the one that bugs you late at night and that you can't shake. This one came to me while watching the news one day, and every item, one after another, it was all bad news. Not just bad, but it was like a lot of people were behaving so insanely in so many places around the world, and, sadly, a lot of it was fuelled by the manipulation or distortion of religious faith.STEVE: By intolerance?RAYMOND: Exactly. Intolerance and closed minds. And it got me thinking. About how divided we are, about how so many people all over the world believe in the absolute infallibility of their faith and how it rules every aspect of their lives, you know what I mean, we're right, everyone else is wrong, that medieval mindset and wondering if anything could ever unite the planet under a single faith.STEVE: One global religion. RAYMOND: Well, imagine if something did happen that convinced everyone that what we had until now, all these different religions that have grown over the last few thousand years, what if something new came along that was so overwhelming that it was impossible to ignore? Would we listen? Would we drop our previous faiths and embrace it?STEVE: But your book's about much more than that. Without wanting to give too much away, it's really a political thriller, isn't it?RAYMOND: It's always so hard to talk about a book without giving too much away.STEVE: It's the fine line we walk.RAYMOND: True. But yes, you're right, it's really about the absolute power something like that would bring, and how it could be abused. Cause above all else, it's a thriller. There's got to be a brilliantly dastardly scheme, right?STEVE: Always. And this one certainly is dastardly. One thing I've noticed, though, in all three of your books so far, they're all, essentially, about the big questions that face us: why we believe, whether or not we have to die. Religion, longevity, life and death, science vs. faith ... Big questions. And in this one, you revisit, though in a completely different way, the power of religion, the good it can bring as well as the bad, something that was also central to The Last Templar. Will this always be your signature genre, books that have a big, central theme at their core?RAYMOND: You asked me earlier about where the story came from. For me, in order to get excited about a book, it has to have a big central theme about how we live at its heart, something I'm interested in exploring. It's got to be about something I care about deeply. That's what drives the story and the characters forward for me. That's what I hope makes the books stand out. That they're not just page-turners, which ain't easy in itself, but that they're also about something. I see it in your books too. A point of view about things, a passion for laying out interesting information about a topic that interests you. Michael Crichton used to do that very successfully. Dan Brown, of course, does it brilliantly. That's what makes the books worth writing, I think.STEVE: And in reading the book, it's clear you still had tons of research to do, even though there isn't a historic mystery to unravel?RAYMOND: Absolutely. Some of it was about history, the monasteries in Egypt, for one. Again, part of the story, organically. Had to be done, and we do love our history, don't we?STEVE: Guilty as charged.RAYMOND: But for this book, I didn't need to do that much of it's nothing like what you did for THE CHARLEMAGNE PURSUIT, for instance. Which I loved, by the way. Particularly since you beat me to using the Voynich Manuscript in a story!STEVE: We do seem to be spookily in sync with our writing as further evidenced by THE SIGN's opening in Antarctica?RAYMOND: I know!STEVE: So tell me, Matt and Gracie. Are we going to see them again?RAYMOND: I don't know. On the one hand, I envy your situation with Cotton Malone, you've got a solid anchor for your books, you're building this great world around him, his son and Stephanie and Henrik and Cassiopeia, who I hope we see again real soon, and it's meaty and it's epic and like the rest of your readers, I'm hooked and I want to know what they do next. You've got that, Lee Child has had it since day one with Reacher, Harlan Coben with Myron Bolitar, the list goes on. Great characters. I'd love to do that one day, but it has to feel right. I wasn't in that frame of mind in my first two books, certainly the world after the end of THE SANCTUARY would be a very different place from the world Mia started out in at the beginning of that book. Tess and Reilly, I could maybe bring back. A lot of fans have asked for that. But with THE SIGN, Iinitely think Matt and Gracie are characters that I could bring back. I'd like to put them through another wringer, and it feels like it would come naturally. But before I do that, I'm writing the next book which introduces a new lead character, so they'll be getting a bit of a breather.STEVE: They sure can use it. Good luck with the book.RAYMOND: Thank you.

A History of Zionism


Walter Laqueur - 1972
    s/t: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of IsraelDiscusses the European background, the prehistory of the movement, five decades of Zionist activities, and ends with the establishement of the state of Israel.

The Nosferatu Conspiracy: The Sleepwalker


Brian James Gage - 2020
    This contrasts suppressed documents citing the royal family mysteriously disappeared after fires ravaged Saint Petersburg in December 1916 (OS).Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was supposedly murdered by high-ranking Russian officials on December 16, 1916 (OS), for his unprecedented and perceived nefarious influence over the royal family. He was poisoned, shot twice, and clubbed into submission, yet remained alive. His attackers finally drowned him underneath the icy Neva River.Rasputin’s autopsy was reportedly performed three days later by Professor Kossorotov, a high-ranking Okhrana agent and future Kremlin operative. Cause of death: drowning. The document states Rasputin broke free of his bindings and his fingernails showed signs he’d tried to claw through the ice.The stories surrounding Rasputin’s death are gross falsifications. His body was never recovered for examination, and his status within the Russian intelligence community to this day remains: At Large.This is the true story of Rasputin’s paranormal coup d'etat and his conjuring of ancient vampires that destroyed Saint Petersburg, Russia, in December 1916.History is a lie. The truth will be exposed.

The Complete Books


Charles Fort - 1941
    His research appeared in four books: The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents.In these four volumes Fort organized and commented on a wild host of phenomena: flying saucers seen in the sky before the invention of aircraft, flying wheels, strange noises in the sky; correlations between volcanic activity and atmospheric phenomena; falls of red snow; falls of frogs, fishes, worms, shells, jellies; finding of "thunderbolts"; discrepancies in the schedules of comets, sightings on Mars and the moon; infra-Mercurian planets; inexplicable footprints in snowfields; flat earth phenomena, disruptions of gravity; poltergeist phenomena; stigmata; surviving fossil animals; the Jersey devil; Kaspar Hauser; spontaneous combustion; and similar weird effects.While Charles Ford never actually explained the phenomena, beyond making vague hints of an organic universe and neo-Hegelianism, through the years his following has grown. At first his work was picked up by literary men such as Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, Clarence Darrow, Havelock Ellis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Later, "Fortean themes" influenced the development of science fiction, and today his work remains the great predecessor to all extraterrestrial speculations.

The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained


Colin Dickey - 2020
    It seems the more our maps of the known world get filled in, the more we crave mysterious locations full of strange creatures.Enter Colin Dickey, Cultural Historian and Tour Guide of the Weird. With the same curiosity and insight that made Ghostland a hit with readers and critics, Colin looks at what all fringe beliefs have in common, explaining that today's Illuminati is yesterday's Flat Earth: the attempt to find meaning in a world stripped of wonder. Dickey visits the wacky sites of America's wildest fringe beliefs--from the famed Mount Shasta where the ancient race (or extra-terrestrials, or possibly both, depending on who you ask) called Lemurians are said to roam, to the museum containing the last remaining "evidence" of the great Kentucky Meat Shower--investigating how these theories come about, why they take hold, and why as Americans we keep inventing and re-inventing them decade after decade. The Unidentified is Colin Dickey at his best: curious, wry, brilliant in his analysis, yet eminently readable.

The Crystal Bible: A Definitive Guide to Crystals


Judy Hall - 2003
    Original.