Reflections of An Uncommon Common Man

JOHN 8:32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  Merriam -Webster dictionary defines the word conspiracy as follows. The act of conspiring together. Another definition is a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. For most of my life I have been skeptical of conspiracy theories. I have changed my mind about many of them over the years, especially over the last 20 years. Since the year 2000 I am convinced that the government is capable of any kind of evil. The government was something I trusted as a young person but that trust is long gone. When Kennedy was killed I was 13 and like many Americans I bought the Warren Commission's version of the assassination hook, line and sinker. After years of study I am convinced that the Mafia and C.I.A. were behind it. Oswald was a shooter in my view but he can be heard telling a reporter, "I was a patsy". The deaths of John Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy...

General Richard Stoddert Ewell   Lizinka Brown Campbell Ewell  Lizinka Campbell was born in St, Petersburg Russia on February 24, 1820. Her mother was a close friend of a Russian Czarina named Lizinka and her father was the U.S. ambassador to Russia appointed by president James Monroe. Lizinka's father had been a powerful politician from Tennessee named George Washington Campbell. He served in both houses of Congress, was U.S. ambassador to Russia, a U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and a Tennessee State Supreme Court justice before his death in 1848. Richard Stoddard Ewell was born on February 8, 1817 in Washington D.C. He would attend West Point and become a career army officer serving not only in the U.S. Army but the Confederate Army under General's Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Ewell was Lizinka Campbell's 1st cousin and he would fall madly in love with her as a teenager. Lizinka would grow into a beautiful woman but apparently her attraction for Richard was not a...

An East German border guard escaping the Communist East Berlin As a child growing up in the Cold War 1950's and 60's everyone that I knew was aware of the Communist threat. We lived with the daily fear of nuclear annihilation. I remember neighbors building fallout shelters in their basements or backyards. Designated large brick buildings were clearly marked with the yellow and black placards as fallout shelters by the Civil Defense if you were in or near an urban area and there were the routine tests of air raid sirens or the EBS, EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM on our radios. The Soviet Union and Communism was a frequent topic of discussion by our parents, our teachers and friends. We were shown newsreels of people escaping across the wall from East Germany and East Berlin into West Germany and freedom. Or we saw refugees from Castro's Cuba landing on our shores in Florida. Every school child was aware of the contrast between the darkness of Communism and the shining light of f...