A RED BELT IN QUOITING

A Toast Across (or Doon?) the Watter

A Red Belt in Quoiting

The following arose from a discussion between my brother Stuart and me about the puff he had penned for me to put on the back cover of my paperback SOCIALISM: My Part in its Downfall, in which is briefly mentioned the time Stuart took my dad (Stuart sen.) to visit Jimmy Reid[1] at his home on the Isle of Bute some twenty years ago. Jimmy (and Stuart jun.) worked for The Herald.

Stuart McKinlay sen., Denny's Shipyard?

Jimmy Reid: Last week a colleague from The Herald came to visit and brought his dad along, which was a delight for me. He made my day: had worked in Denny’s shipyard that was located at the foot of Dumbarton rock. A yard that has a well-earned place in the annals of history as an innovator of both the steamship and the hovercraft.

He was born and bred in the nearby and beautiful Vale of Leven. A place I know and cherish. In French parlance, it was an area that could have qualified for the title of Red Belt. It had many radical, socialist, and communist councillors. All great characters, with divergent personalities. Some were heavy drinkers; others militant abstainers. Some militant Christians; others aggressive atheists. All united in common cause against poverty. Mind you, they argued like hell on just about everything else.

My new, auld acquaintance and I blethered about them, and others, and about the character and characters of the Vale. Renton were the first footballing champions way back in 1877 or thereabouts. Eat your hearts our Celtic and Rangers. Renton, known as the Rantin to the locals, was proclaimed capital of the world by general and global acclamation, according to self-taught, local historians. A few years later I met while visiting Renton, the quoiting champion of the world. He seemed a very decent chap and wore his fame modestly. Yes, you’re right. I can’t remember his first name.

Jimmy Reid, The Herald, July 17, 2000.

Then my auld freen and I talked about quoiting. Was it still being played? I know it was still being played in the Hardgate, a village slightly east of Clydebank, 25 years ago, and in the Vale. At a guess, I would think it would be a sport played in Scotland’s mining villages. Quoiting has some similarity with the North American game of tossing horseshoes at a pin stuck in the ground, only more skilful.

My friends left to meander back home through Argyll and I left convinced that quoiting had a wider pedigree than we had acknowledged. But where was the evidence? Then it came. It’s in Homer’s Iliad. Quoiting is mentioned, along with javelin throwing, as one of the events at the Olympos games. Was the Vale of Leven, in fact, an outpost of ancient Greece? It is my belief that Socrates would have been more at home in Renton than in Athens, with dunderheids like Plato, who believed in a class-divided society. In ancient Greece two-thirds of the population were slaves, and it was unlikely ever to be the genuine cradle of democracy.[2]

Stuart McKinlay: We were driving over Bute and as Jimmy had invited us up for “a wee dram”, we settled into his lounge overlooking Rothesay Bay.

“For folk like me, coming from Govan,” Jimmy said, giving dad the best chair (though they all looked best), “this is like the Riviera...” It wasn't (initially) Glenfiddich they were drinking as I imagined it would be, dad’s favourite though it was -- as here they settled into common reminiscences of Red Clydeside, and the yards, and people they knew, talking as though continuing an interrupted conversation. It could well have been that of course, or maybe Glenmorangie, but then Jimmy had a large selection to tempt any connoisseur to hesitation, racked for choice, and he welcomed us again and reached into his drinks cupboard and pulled out a bottle from the rear (while Mrs Reid gave me, the driver, a lot of attention and an orange juice).

He said to Stuart sen: “Listen, I've got something special here. It was given to me by a friend...” He seemed a little mysterious, reluctant to say. He held it up to the soft island light at a window, a straightforward bottle, no special shape, modest at least in any visual note of pedigree, but Irish, no less. Bejabbers. It was Midleton Very Rare. With one ‘d’, from East Cork. He gave it a critical look of restrained satisfaction, then a quick glance of respectful reluctance over his shoulder as if fearing some expert objection... but, as there was none ... he pronounced this his “favourite, this one was given to me by a freen, aye, you'll like this Stuart, ye’ll hae a wee sip...” With the idiom and etiquette observed, he poured with exquisite caution. This would take some time.

Well, they spent maybe two-and-a-half to three hours sampling the contents of Jimmy’s cabinet. If they didn't “demolish” the Glenfiddich and the Glenmorangie too, they weren’t the incorrigible ironclad Clydesiders we took them to be. I was in the Press Bar often enough sitting between Jimmy and Willie McIlvanney to see malt whiskies treated with copious respect by those two; and dad you know about.

It took me an age to conjure the initial potation from the chimerical mists of memory. It came to me gradually by elimination in brief messages between us about the Socialism outline. I kept thinking of Jameson’s and Middleton’s, a distraction, until it came... Midleton. Mind you, I’m not certain I’m not fooling myself through the brilliance of enforced imagination. Frankly, they would’ve swigged rotgut in a tumbledown shebeen if they had to (I think), but they didn’t have to, and had the best. The puff stands.

Neil McKinlay: You’ve given me a hankering to try some Midleton Whiskey! I think it needs to be Midleton Very Rare! I’ll toast faither with my first slug of it.

I have tried Jameson Irish whiskey, and Dubliner, and maybe others. However, unlike the Scots, for some reason the Irish give their whisky an extra run through the Coffey Kettle or something. It all makes it too smooth for my liking, “waattery” in other words, like when good whisky is diluted.

Neil, Stuart sen., & Stuart jun.
Many moons ago at Arrochar?

Anyway, it must have been enthralling being a fly on that Bute wall, watching the interactions and listening to the interlocutions of these two disillusioned Commies drowning their sorrows, discussing their evanishing utopia as it drifted down the Clyde, nay, as it was sinking into its watery grave. Aye, also toasting the immortal memory of the Vale’s Red Belt with a belt of whisky.

And how could you stand sitting idly by? You know that one cannot enter into the inner sanctum of whisky blethers with a mere orange juice in one’s hand. Nay, you remain as you are, banished to the outer courts! Your self-controlled self-disciplined self-restraint is to be greatly commended! Avoiding the hypnotic allure of the golden elixir, and, resisting the whispered in your ear temptations of John Barleycorn, is wordy o’ a grace as lang’s my airm.

Thanks for being there.

---

[1] James Reid was a Scottish trade union activist, orator, politician and journalist born in Govan, Glasgow. His role as spokesman and one of the leaders in the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in between June 1971 and October 1972 attracted international recognition. He later served as Rector of the University of Glasgow and subsequently became a journalist and broadcaster. Formerly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Reid was later a Labour Party member. After supporting the Scottish Socialist Party in the late 1990s, he joined the Scottish National Party in 2005 and fully supported Scottish independence. He died in 2010 after a long illness. Wikipedia

[2] Excerpted from Memories of the Red Belt, by Jimmy Reid, Monday July 17, 2000 The Herald.

STRESS & RELAXATION

Stress & Relaxation

I may be a bit of an expert on stress, but a dunce on relaxation! I’m the man who once asked if there was such a thing as a waterproof laptop, so that I could work on it in my hot tub! Part of my job as an army chaplain was to be a calming influence for the many soldiers who would come to me with their problems. However, I would arrive at work after being stuck in rush hour traffic every morning. Stress! Hypertension! Once, I jokingly asked an army psychologist if my blood pressure was high because the other road users were idiots. Or were they idiots because I had high blood pressure!

Neil & Juno, Isle of Skye

Every hot water tank has a relief valve to release excess pressure and thus prevent rupture. Relaxation is stress’s relief valve. What is relaxation? Well, relaxation is not one of my gifts, but I think God has finally shown me. If you’re like me, you ask God for the gift of patience, then expect Him to zap you with the gift, and not instead send you to the same school Job went to. It’s the same with relaxation. It is learned through experience. It’s all, ‘Stop and smell the roses’, with the emphasis on the word stop. But isn’t this just basic 4th Commandment stuff?

‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it’ Exodus 20:8-11. Warning: ignore this Commandment at your own peril!

Sabbath means rest. We are not to work 24/7. We are to rest for one day out of every seven. That is how God the Creator designed us in the beginning.

A car manufacturer may issue a recall if its product is faulty and susceptible to blowing a head gasket. Likewise, God has recalled humanity. However, it is not because what He made is defective. Rather it is because we use His product for something it was not designed for. We do not follow the Manufacturer’s instructions, i.e., His Ten Commandments. Therefore, either He can destroy His product. Or He can recall it for the necessary repairs and refit. We are to put down our tools and gather in His presence at least one day every week. What for? To rest. To hear the Good News that Jesus has done all the hard work for us. That He perfectly kept the Ten Commandments. That there’s no need to blow a head gasket trying to keep them in striving to be good enough for Heaven. That we can relax in Christ our Sabbath. That God has taken away all our defects, all our sins, all our Commandment breaking, including our Sabbath breaking.

God’s mass recall is every Sunday. Together we hear the Manufacturer’s instructions, the Decalogue, i.e., how we ought to live, and what He has done because we don’t live that way, i.e., the Gospel. At the cross, Christ’s perfect obedience became ours, because at the cross the Father imputed our sins to His Son, and His Son’s righteousness to us.

So, stress not. Relax. Simply find a church in which the Law and the Gospel is preached. And stop and ponder what the new humanity is like, i.e., the resurrected Jesus. Rest in Him and you will rest in peace.

GETTING TO THE POINT

GETTING TO THE POINT

Winnipeg, Manitoba might be described as a point at the centre of a circle on account of its being in “big sky country.” My wife and I began raising our family there. The summers were as beautiful and brief as the winters harsh and lingering. Snow, like scouring powder, came annually to scrub the prairies from October to April.

In fall the big sky was a noisy freeway of honking horns as convoys of Canada goose headed south. Their mass evacuation above brought chills of foreboding to my soul. Time to make ready for a long cold winter! Come winter the big blue-yonder was bird-less. A sky-jet would on occasion pierce the minus forty-degree air to the tune of newspaper slowly torn. Ice-dust hanging in the air would cause the horizon-hugging sun to walk with a friend on either side. The natives called these reflected images “sun dogs.” Me? The threesome was the Santa Maria with the Nina and Pinta about to dock in the New World. But for all that, at least for me, the point got lost every winter; buried with me under the snowdrift.

Our forebears had been settling this point of the compass since the Highland Clearances. Dorothy and I had merely been delayed. In the course of our time there, we naturally made many friends among the many Scots who dwell there. Why Winnipeg? Why not? When God created us He told us to “fill the earth and subdue it” Genesis 1:28. Sure, the pin was stuck in the map for a while at Babel, where humanity massed in a concerted attempt to jab the blue with a high tower. But the LORD came down and confused their language, that they might not understand one another’s speech, and scattered them abroad from there, over the face of all the earth (Gen. 11). God, therefore, would have the point include the whole planet.

To fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish, birds, cattle, creeping things etc., is a major cultural endeavour: the Cultural Mandate (Gen. 1:26-28). Therefore God has commissioned us to settle the entire planet by making wise use of, and carefully utilizing and managing, its resources. We are to be ever mindful of the earth’s Owner. For the LORD says, “Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool…” Isaiah 66:1a; Acts 7:49a.

Isaiah also says the LORD “…sits above the circle of the earth.” Isaiah 40:22. And Job says the LORD “…hangs the earth on nothing” Job 26:7b. Therefore the earth itself is the point at the centre of the circle. Like a ballpoint pen on paper God is using the spinning-earth to write in the blue: Skywriting on a grand scale!

As we go about the God-ordained business of filling the earth and subduing it let’s do so with the bigger picture and the greater glory of the Triune God in mind.

The Nexus - Out in Paperback

The Nexus: The True Nature of Nature now out also in paperback.

This book is a tale of two worldviews. It’s about a fight between Darwinism and Calvinism. It is about the survival of the fittest. Will the bespectacled John Calvin be able to go the distance with the all red in tooth and claw Charles Darwin? Choose your side. Goats to the left. Sheep to the right.

Calvin views his opponent through the lens of Scripture. His sponsor is the Triune God. Jesus Christ is in his corner. He has a strategy. He knows his opponent. Darwin has no plan. He makes it up as he goes along, trusting the blind forces of nature to give him that knockout punch.

Who will win? Hint: “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible … All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist” Colossians 1:16 -17.

Purchase at Amazon:
https://tinyurl.com/y96ebokc

MIND OVER MATTER

Mind Over Matter

Today’s Darwinian Evolutionists, because they have taken Darwin’s Theory to its logical conclusion, have had to adopt an Atheist position. However, for Charles Darwin (1809-92), and his forerunner Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the problem of the origin of mind, though irreconcilable to their respective theories of Evolution, was somewhat mitigated by their belief in God as the First Cause. Regarding Lamarck and Darwin, wrote Charles Hodge in 1872:

Maid of the Loch, Loch Lomond

God, says Lamarck, created matter; God, says Darwin, created the unintelligent living cell; both say that, after that first step, all else follows by natural law, without purpose and without design. No man can believe this, who cannot also believe that all the works of art, literature, and science in the world are the products of carbonic acid, water, and ammonia.[29]

In the penultimate sentence of his following summary Hodge makes the further point that Darwin’s theory assumes an impossibility. Says Hodge:

Mr. Charles Darwin... accounts for the origin of all the varieties of plants and animals by the gradual operation of natural causes. In his work on the Origin of Species, he says... all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype....

Darwin refers the origin of species mainly to the laws of nature operating ab extra – killing off the weak or less perfect, and preserving the stronger or more perfect.... Darwin holds that they [new species] arise by a slow process of very minute changes....

It shocks the common sense of unsophisticated men to be told that the whale and the hummingbird, man and the mosquito, are derived from the same source... The theory in question cannot be true, because it is founded on the assumption of an impossibility. It assumes that matter does the work of mind....[30]

Thus, it is the opinion of Hodge that the Materialist confuses mind with matter. But, what is mind? Where is it from? First off, mind and brain must not be confused as synonymous terms (e.g., as does the Materialist). For the mind is more than a series of random thought-producing sequential electro-chemical-impulses firing off in the grey matter! Properly understood, the brain with its electrical impulses or chemical-exchanges only accommodates thought. It does not originate thinking. This is because production is not the same as origination. Whereas production simply describes a process of replication, origination points to its creator – it points to its originator.

In the final analysis, to replicate anything there first needs be an original to copy. Thus biological life is able to accommodate biological functions – such as human thinking – only because there exists beforehand a thinking being able to originate and then sustain that biological life. We refer to the eternal Triune God of the Bible as that original thinking Being who is able to originate. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) while doing scientific research said that he was ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him.’ Simply put: as creatures of His creation we are to think God’s thoughts after Him.

Since God thinks, and is Spirit (without a body or parts), a mind doesn’t necessarily need matter (such as a brain) to think. E.g., created angelic beings have no bodies, but are able to think rationally. The disembodied spirits of men in the present intermediate states of Heaven and Hell are also able to think. Thus at the back of all thinking is the great originator of thinking, the Triune God of Christianity. Thus rational man – in thinking God’s thoughts after Him – is merely replicating or (re)producing that which originated in the very mind of God.

We see something of God’s general upkeep of His creation expressed by the Psalmist who, thinking God’s thoughts after Him, says of God: ‘He causes the grass to grow for the cattle, and vegetation for the service of man, that he may bring forth food from the earth’ Psalm 104:14. Also thinking God’s thoughts after Him, the Prophet Isaiah writes, ‘As a beast goes down into the valley, and the Spirit of God causes him to rest, so You lead Your people to make Yourself a glorious name’ Isaiah 63:14. Therefore, God (who is Spirit) by His Spirit acts upon matter – causing grass to grow and animals to rest. Thus we are reflecting God on a creaturely level when we too act upon matter (i.e., when our immaterial minds work with and through our material bodies).

Paul Garbett is helpful in the area of mind and brain where he says,

Whilst our brains process information received from the world, it is the mind that chooses what to do with that information. Whilst the mind uses the brain as a processing unit, the mind is more than just a brain. This is, in fact, a provable hypothesis: Scientists have discovered that it is possible to electrically stimulate part of the brain to cause the involuntary movement of an arm, for example. When the patient was asked to control the arm, they struggle to hold it still using their other arm. This demonstrates that whilst one arm was under the control of the electrically stimulated brain, the other was under the control of the mind. Thus, this experiment demonstrates that the mind is something in addition to the physical brain. The best explanation for this, and a host of other human functions already mentioned, is that a person is an immaterial being that inhabits a physical body (including the brain) – as the Bible suggests. The interaction between material brain and this immaterial soul is what we understand the ‘mind’ to be. It is where our true self engages with the world we perceive through the senses.[31]

Though the reflection of God can be seen in the Biblical revelation of angels and, to a lesser extent, can be seen in animals, man alone is the image of God. And, since that image became distorted by the fall of man, our thinking also replicates or produces the corruption that originated with Adam disobeying God by eating the fruit forbidden him by God. God cursed the ground when Adam sinned against Him. Man is subject to futility and frustration due to his bondage to corruption and decay. Thus things go wrong. And as our thinking has, through our sin, become disconnected from God (who is Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of man, and, by extension, creation), so too our minds have become somewhat out of sync with our bodies. We have to train hard to get our bodies to perform to the peak of their ability. The peak of fitness is invariably frustrated through disease, injury and/or old age. 

The disconnection of mind and body is fully realised at the point of physical death. Before that we may experience anything from full paralysis of the body to the less severe loss of one or more of our senses. In both of these physical conditions the mind fails to receive from the body data required to function properly and in turn the body with its senses fails to execute the tasks ordered by the mind.

Says Dutch Calvinist Herman Bavinck (1854-1921),

Though human persons are not merely physical beings, all their activities are bound to the body and dependent on it, not just the vegetative and animal functions, but also the intellectual ones of thinking and willing. Although our brains are not the cause of our higher faculties of knowing and desiring, they are nevertheless the bearer and organ of these faculties. Every malfunction in the brain results in the abnormal functioning of the rational mind.[32]

Arguably the greatest of American theologians, the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards in the 18^th century made the following comment about the union of the mind with the body,

The mind is so united to the body, that an alteration is caused in the body, it is probable, by every action of the mind. By those acts that are very vigorous, a great alteration is very sensible; at some times, when the vigour of the body is impaired by disease, especially in the head, almost every action causes a sensible alteration of the body.[33]

In his fallen state man is prone also to all sorts of mental disorders. However, just as God causes the grass to grow and the beasts to rest in the valley, so God also can cause madness in human beings for His own purpose – as the mighty king Nebuchadnezzar learnt: ‘This is the decree of the Most High, which has come upon my lord the king, they shall drive you from men, your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall make you eat grass like oxen. They shall wet you with the dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over you, till you know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whoever He chooses’ Daniel 4:24&25.

We see that God, by His Spirit, is active in His creation, causing even the grass to grow, moving the beasts of the field, and directing the thoughts of fallen men – even in their madness. Of course, the Materialist would deny all of this! He would deny that the Most High, with His Supreme Mind, is behind all thought-processes of angel, man, and beast. Thus by denying the mind and by restricting his study only to matter the Materialist leaves himself unable to explain the origin of thought, whether that thought is rational or other.

Hodge again points at the heart of Materialism’s problem:

Materialism is that system which ignores the distinction between matter and mind, and refers all the phenomena of the world, whether physical, vital, or mental, to the functions of matter.[34]

              Materialism is extremist in that it denies spirit, and is the antithesis of Idealism. Says Francis Nigel Lee,

Materialistic philosophy presupposes that the universe is basically matter, and idealistic philosophy presupposes that the universe is basically spirit. Each of these philosophical isms or heresies precludes the other and attempts to give a complete account of the universe in terms of its own basic presuppositions.

                            It is obvious that the Bible is opposed to both materialism and idealism.[35]








Excerpted from my book The Nexus: The True Nature of Nature.
Available in eBook or paperback at Amazon:
https://tinyurl.com/y96ebokc

PRESIDENT LINCOLN

Excerpted from Jefferson's Tears: Liberia's Founding and Fall, One Man's Horror and Hope, Nordskog Publishing Inc.

President Lincoln

White House, Washington, D.C. Thursday, August 14, 1862.

Thinking it would be impolite, ex-President Roberts tried not to screw up his face whenever he sipped his coffee. The towering figure of President Abraham Lincoln stood with his back to him, looking out of the White House window, as if half-expecting to be invaded by Confederate troops coming across the lawn. They had been in conversation. Joseph Jenkins Roberts could see that his great hands were clasped behind his back. President Lincoln spoke, “It is my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free. However, as the duly elected President of the United States of America, my first duty is to my nation, now very much embroiled in the vagaries and degradation of a civil war.”

“Mr President, sir, it is almost common knowledge that you will soon issue an emancipation proclamation.”

President Lincoln now turned and faced ex-President Roberts. “Go on,” he said.

“As a member of the Committee of Free Black Men I would like to endorse any such intentions on your part towards emancipating the Black Man. Moreover, the Republic of Liberia would welcome all the negroes you should wish to send us, should they wish to come.”

Abraham Lincoln sat down again. He brought his cup to his lips. Roberts noted that the cup looked small in his hand.

“It is in our Declaration of Independence, put there by Thomas Jefferson, that ‘all men are created equal.’ Yet, there are many thousands of men held in slavery in our nation, simply because of the color of their skin. I find this to be morally repugnant. The Creator created us equal, but the white man esteemed the black man, not to mention the Indian, less than equal, indeed far less than equal.”

“Mister President, as you may well know, President Thomas Jefferson was a patron of the American Colonization Society which founded Liberia. He would weep were he to see that the nation he established with the other founding fathers had so descended into civil war.”

“We fight to preserve the Union. All thirty-four of them must remain as the United States. Therefore, those eleven Southern States, the Confederacy, must not be allowed to secede. It would leave the Union as tattered as a battlefield flag, indeed the stars would fall from the sky and the stripes would be blown away with the wind. Joseph, it would mean that the freedom George Washington and our Founding Fathers fought for in the War of Independence would become as manna at midday. Vanished! E Pluribus Unum.   The war is about restoring the Union. It is about keeping all of the stars on our glorious flag.”

“Where, then, does the emancipation of the slaves come in?” said J.J. Roberts as he politely sipped his cup.

“Joseph, like Gideon’s lamps within the pitchers, it is a question of timing for maximum effect. We must blow the trumpet of emancipation to win over the public, whilst we break the pitchers to illuminate to the watching world the evils of slavery. No other country will support or be seen to support slave states. Timing, Joseph, timing! More coffee?”

Purchase book at:  https://www.nordskogpublishing.com/product/jeffersons-tears-liberias-founding-and-fall-one-mans-horror-and-hope/

https://tinyurl.com/yd3ofn2g

McKINLAYS OF DRUMIKILL

McKINLAYS OF DRUMIKILL

According to Ian Grimble Ph.D., F.R. Hist. S., (and I’d take his word for it), “...the principal stock of this name [McKinlay] belongs to the Lennox. According to the earliest account of them, given in 1723 by Buchanan of Auchmar, they sprang from a son of Buchanan of Drumikill of the name of Finlay.”

Stuart McKinlay at Drumikill

Pictured is Stuart McKinlay casting a proprietorial eye over the Drumikill estate near Drymen.

(Rob Roy attempted unsuccessfully to capture the government garrison at Drumikill.)

I owe much to the McKinlay family -

Stuart Senior was a man I admired greatly. He influenced me spiritually and politically (and any man who has rung the bell of Jamestown Parish Kirk is highly esteemed in my regard).

Fergie (Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh, the Gaelic poet), the eldest son, nursed me with encouragement, page by page, through my novel “Mightier than the Sword”.

Billy Scobie a.k.a. Alexander Tait

Stuart, I once described as the nearest person I have to a brother.

Neil (pastor and prolific author) taught me how to ride a bicycle, encouraged and promoted my various writings, and provides me with pastoral care on a regular basis.

It was through the McKinlay family that I first embraced a passion for Scottish Independence.

W. Scobie

William (Billy) Scobie writes under the pen name of Alexander Tait. His Mightier than the Sword paperback can be purchased at Neetah Books:

http://neetahbooks.com/neetahs-book-shop/4594670458/mightier-than-the-sword/11391092
https://tinyurl.com/yd5j9r7g