The Nephilim

From Ancient Origins:

The traditional definition of Nephilim is giant. Some dictionaries describe the nephilim as being giants who also possess super human strength. The Greek Septuagint, an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible , refers to them as gigantes, which actually means "earth-born," a concept we will be coming back to as we continue.

It is believed that the word Nephilim comes from the root word "Naphal" which means to fall. In biblical circles this definition has quickly put the Nephilim into the role of the children of the fallen angels . The word Naphal, however, is never directly associated with the concept of fallen angels. Its meaning in context is more closely associated with the idea of lying prostrate or of prostrating oneself. There are also ties in this word to the concept of failure, falling short, or being cast down. (Read more.)

Another article on giants, HERE. Share

The Spirit of Hollywood Versus the Spirit of the Cross

From Return to Order:

After his suicide, the facts slowly started to come out. For years he had been an alcoholic and had even taken hard drugs such as cocaine. He suffered from depression. We do not know all the factors that led to his drug abuse, depression, and suicide. But we do know that drugs, gross sexual immorality, depression, alcohol abuse, and suicide are so common in Hollywood that they are the norm, not the exception. 

By no means is this spirit and its tragic effects exclusive to Hollywood. The culture of Silicon Valley, for example, shares this utopian philosophy. They believe that every human problem, and therefore every source of suffering, can be solved. One just needs to found the right startup, develop the right technology, and write the proper algorithm. We can even escape the ultimate suffering: death. 

Tragically, the spirit of Hollywood has become the default mentality of the nation, with results that are as disastrous as they are predictable. The generation of Americans living in the first decades of the twenty-first century is arguably the unhappiest, dysfunctional, and suicidal generation in history. According to The New York Times, one-third of American adults and adolescents suffer from anxiety.2 Drug overdoses now kill more people than both firearms and car accidents.3 More than 60% percent of firearms deaths are not murders, but suicides.4 In 2011, suicide passed homicide as the second leading cause of death among teenagers.5 (Read more.)

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Soviet Soda Pop Machines

From Russia Beyond:

Vending machines will always remain one of the symbols of the Soviet era. They could be found in airports, train stations, hotels, movie theaters, shopping malls and often in the street. Many, to this day, remember the price, as well as the taste. Their popularity was phenomenal. But they had something that would look completely out of place today: they offered only one or two drinking glasses.

It’s believed that the first ‘vending machine’ in the Soviet Union was used in 1932: “A Leningrad-based ‘Vena’ factory worker, Agroshkin, has invented an interesting machine. Using it, every store can now carry out its own production of carbonated water,” read a story from ‘Vechernyaya Moskva’ (“Evening Moscow”). By the start of the 1960s, more than 10,000 of these had machines sprouted up all over Moscow.

The first machines gave out soda pop with syrup for 3 kopecks, or without for 1 kopeck. Your choice of syrup was ‘pear’, ‘barberry’, ‘tarkhun’ (tarragon), ‘cream-soda’, ‘kolokolchik’ (“bellflower”) and other flavors that either pointed to the original ingredient, or hid it behind a pretty name. In later years, Pepsi and Fanta joined the party, but were several times the price. (Read more.)

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History of Mapperton House

From the Mapperton website:

Mapperton was entered in the Domesday Book 1086 as Malperetone. It was then the property of William de Moion, Sheriff of Somerset, who earned 70 shillings from arable land for four ploughs, twenty acres of meadow and pasture, woodlands and a mill. 

From then on Mapperton belonged to only four families linked by descent in the female line – the Bretts, Morgans, Brodrepps and Comptons – until it was bought in 1919 by Mrs Ethel Labouchere. Since her death in 1955 it has been the home of the Montagus, currently the Earl and Countess of Sandwich. 

The gabled north wing with its twisted chimneys and finials is all that remains of Robert Morgan’s Tudor manor of the 1540s. In the 1660s, the owner, Richard Brodrepp, rebuilt the hall and west front and also erected the two stable blocks and the dovecote. The balustrade was added in the 18th century when a later Richard Brodrepp created the Georgian staircase and north front. As for the village, after the plague of 1666, according to Hutchins, “the tenements fell into the lord’s hand, and have all been pulled down”. The numbers in the village have remained almost unchanged since the 17th century. (Read more.)

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An End To Orwellian Tactics

From Sara Carter:

Something had to be done and it was only a matter of time before the White House made the move to fight back. It happened this week and it couldn’t have been soon enough. The actions taken by the administration may not be perfect but they were absolutely necessary to put these tech giants in check. 

There are many examples of the two-tiered monitoring system used by the Silicon Valley platforms. This isn’t just about shadow banning complaints from conservatives or for that matter targeting conservative stories on Facebook as #FakeNews through third party arbiters that they hire to regulate the platform information process. It’s what they’ve failed to do when communist governments, like China, or the cult like Iranian regime target their own populations with lies and spread hate throughout the globe. 

For example, the Chinese Communist Party promoted a conspiracy theory Tweet on Thursday saying that that the U.S. military was responsible for the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan: ‘It might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,’ said Zhao Lijian, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman.” 

In another instance, Google actually worked on a search engine for the Chinese Communist Party so it could surveil its people. The Intercept published an incredible story showing how Google assisted the CCP in blacklisting people and aided in gross ‘human rights’ violations. (Read more.)

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The Legend of Hannibal

From Smithsonian:

Due to mismatched accounts by classical historians Polybius and Livy, as well as scant archaeological evidence, historians have debated the battle’s exact location for more than 200 years. Previously proposed sites include Toledo, Talavera de la Reina, Aranjuez, Colmenar de Oreja and Fuentidueña, reports Vicente G. Olaya for Spanish newspaper El País.

The new study arrived at its suggested location by combining battle accounts from antiquity with modern analysis of the shape and flow of the Tagus River and its surrounding landscape. Per the paper, the researchers suggest the site of the Battle of the Tagus is between the cities of Driebes and Illana in Spain’s Guadalajara province. Hannibal mounted his infamous invasion of Italy during the Second Punic War against Rome, which spanned 218 B.C. to 201 B.C. But two years before he took on Rome, the Carthaginian general fought a pivotal battle closer to home.

Polybius and Livy tell of the 27-year-old Hannibal’s army being ambushed as it returned to its base in Qart Hadasht, located in modern-day Cartagena, after defeating the Vettones tribe and conquering Helmática, near the modern city of Salamanca in northwest Spain. As Isambard Wilkinson notes for the Times, the general’s 25,000 soldiers and 40 war elephants are said to have faced a force of 100,000 Iberians from the Carpetani, Vettone and Olcade tribes near the Tagus River. (Read more.)

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The Glory of St. Joan of Arc

 From The Catholic World Report:

Despite this travesty we should be like Joan and never lose faith in the Divine Mandate held by the Church. “About Jesus Christ and the Church,” she said, “I simply know they’re just one thing.” Appeals were made for a formal re-examination of the case made against her. Pope Callistus III was quick to favor these petitions and appointed a commission to study the matter. Their verdict was accepted by the pope in 1456 who declared the sham trial against Joan to be null and void. This long proceeding collected the evidence of witnesses and the opinions of theologians, which laid the foundation for her cause of canonization. Devotion to Joan continued to grow, especially among soldiers, and over the years plays reenacting her life and victories on the battlefield became a staple of certain French festivals. Finally, on this day in 1920, Pope Benedict XV raised her to the heights of the altar as a saint.

This anniversary is a good occasion to renew our interest in Joan of Arc and the important lessons we can learn from her short but impactful life. When Joan was born in 1412, the Hundred Years’ War between England and France had been raging for 75 years. The conflict began in 1337, when King Edward III of England, whose mother was a French princess, declared himself the rightful ruler of France. However, there was already a French king on the throne. Battles over rival claims to the throne of France would continue on and off until 1453. In Joan’s early childhood England took a decisive advantage in the conflict.

In the midst of its war with England, France was immersed in its own civil war as well. Remembered by history with the moniker “Charles the Mad,” King Charles VI was weak and suffered from bouts of insanity throughout his tumultuous reign. He was unable to maintain peace between two rival branches of the royal family, the Houses of Orléans (known as the Armagnac faction) and Burgundy; thus, war between them broke out. Eager to capitalize on the divisions within France, King Henry V of England launched a massive invasion of the country. England’s new period of dominance in the long war came with their victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Joan was three years old at this point and rival England controlled all of Normandy. Five years later, traitorous to their nation’s cause, the House of Burgundy entered into an alliance with England. An exhausted and demoralized King Charles then signed the Treaty of Troyes. His son, the Dauphin Charles VII, was disinherited from the French crown and according to the treaty upon his death, King Henry V of England and his heirs would become the kings of France.

Charles VII, known as “the Dauphin,” and the House of Orléans rejected this treaty. They would continue to take up the fight and not sell out their country to the English. The odds, however, were against them. England and their ally the House of Burgundy controlled all of northern France including the most populous city of Paris. Even when Charles VII claimed the throne of France upon his father’s death in 1422, he was unable to be properly crowned as the city of Rheims, where the coronations of the new kings took place by tradition, was under English control. His makeshift court was assembled south of the Loire River in the city of Bourges. As this was one of the few areas left in French control, Charles VII was disparagingly referred to as the “King of Bourges.” (Read more.)

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Petty Tyranny

From The Z Man:

One of the stranger things about the current age is that very few people talk about the Cold War or the events that drove it. For people living from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, it was the central topic of politics. When the Soviet Empire collapsed, it was if everyone decided to forget about the whole thing. If it is mentioned at all it is usually a conservative trying to remind people that socialism does not produce high quality consumer goods or not enough choices in the cereal aisle. 

The great ideological battle between socialism and liberalism has been reduced to a battle between market economics versus command economics. The winner was the one that made better home electronics. Yet, right up to the end of the Cold War, the battle was not about economics. Sure, the lack of blue jeans and rock music was a popular way to mock the Soviet system, but even there it was not about the products, but the reason why they existed in the West and not the East. 

The West opposed communism not because of GDP numbers or cheap consumer goods, but because communism was not just immoral, but evil. Controlling the granular details of people’s lives was monstrous. Communist countries did not allow their people to voice their opinions or choose how they lived. They could not even choose where they lived, as the government assigned apartments. The image of the “iron curtain” was to compare the Soviet system to a penal colony. 

On the other side, the Soviets were fond of pointing out how blacks in America were treated poorly. There was also the urban squalor and poverty. Some Americans might enjoy blue jeans and rock music, but millions lived in squalor. Of course, the existence of super rich living in mansions was immoral on its face, given that so many people were living in poverty. The communist could privately concede that their system was not making equal consumer goods, but it was still morally superior. 

It’s strange how the great ideological struggle of the last century is largely forgotten or reduced to a contest over breakfast cereal selections at the market, while the short fight between liberalism and fascism is cast entirely in moral terms. The West won the fight with fascism on material grounds. America could make more planes, guns and tanks than the fascists. There was the normal wartime propaganda about the evilness of the fascist, but it was never an ideological struggle. 

The battle with communism, on the other hand, was always a about the basic moral difference between the two systems. There was never any doubt that the communist could match the west militarily. In fact, a frequent theme of American politics in the Cold War was how we had to rededicate ourselves to liberty in order to keep pace with the Soviets in missiles, the space race and technology. Again, the material aspect was just a part of the much larger moral argument against communism. (Read more.)

From Front Page Mag:

It can, and already has, led to incalculable pain and suffering. It is no stretch to call these evils. Consider all that has occurred over the last six or seven weeks or so, since the dawn of The Great UnReason: 

(1Thirty million Americans have been forced into the ranks of the unemployed by government fiat; 

(2)Hundreds of thousands of small business owners, upon being forced by the same governmental decrees to close their doors, have been divested of their livelihoods, robbed of the blood, sweat, and tears that they spent years investing in pursuit of their versions of the American Dream; 

(3)The Constitutional rights and liberties that define America as the unique nation that it is and for which generations of Americans have sacrificed their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” have been indefinitely revoked by politicians who pledged to protect them; 

(4)All of those associations, the myriad of communities that, comprising as they do the whole of civil society, constitute our very identities as the unique human beings that we are; those relationships that transfigure us from the atomistic individuals of liberal political theory and the two-legged animals of Darwinian biology into persons and citizens—these have been substantially eroded by “social distancing;” 

(5)People with serious, potentially terminal medical conditions in need of life-saving treatment have been either denied this treatment by hospitals that have cleared the way for COVID patients or they have been discouraged from seeking out that treatment by merchants of fear in positions of power; 

(6)Domestic violence has increased substantially; 

(7)Suicides are undoubtedly on the rise (though exact numbers are not yet forthcoming), but “news of suicide linked to the COVID-19 crisis have swept the globe” since late March “and sadly show no signs of abating.” 

(These suicides, incidentally, are caused both by the panic stoked by a fear-mongering media as well as by the dread of the isolation produced by what Drs. Fauci and Birx and their supporters euphemistically call “mitigation.”)

(8) Depression, anxiety, dejection, despondency, loneliness—all have been observed to have “spiked” in the UK, and in the US; (Read more.)  

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