Trooping the Color

 From the BBC:

The Queen's official birthday has been marked with the annual Trooping the Colour parade. She was joined by members of her family and thousands of spectators to watch the display in Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall. The Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex all attended. The Queen celebrated her 93rd birthday in April. The royal colonels - the Prince of Wales, colonel of the Welsh Guards, the Princess Royal, colonel of the Blues and Royals, the Duke of Cambridge, colonel of the Irish Guards and the Duke of York, colonel of the Grenadier Guards - all rode on horseback as part of the parade. (Read more.)

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Child Sex Trafficking Highlighted in State Department Report

From The Epoch Times:

Children in the social services system are the group with the highest prevalence of child sex trafficking, said Robert Lowery, vice president for the missing children division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit that serves as a clearinghouse for reports on missing children. Based on the incomplete data available, it appears traffickers seldom kidnap their victims. Instead, they often contact children on social media, groom them over time, and eventually lure them away. As a result, the children would be reported as runaways. They also target children that ran away for other reasons. They mainly target children from ages 12 to 14. In 2017, almost 25,000 runaways were reported to NCMEC. Nearly 3,600 of the runaways were likely victims of sex trafficking; of those, 88 percent came from the social services system. (Read more.)

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Berserker Norse Warriors

From Ancient Origins:

Today, the word ‘berserk’ is used to describe anyone in an irrational, agitated state of mind who cannot or does not control his or her actions. The meaning of the word originates with the Viking berserkers , the fierce warriors who were known for battling in an uncontrollable, trance-like fury, and were alleged to be able to perform seemingly impossible super-human feats of strength. They would howl and growl like beasts, froth at the mouth, and launch an attack in a fit of frenzy.

In medieval Norse and Germanic history and folklore, the berserkers were described as members of an unruly warrior gang that worshipped Odin, the supreme Norse deity, and were commissioned to royal and noble courts as bodyguards and ‘shock troops’, who would strike fear into all who encountered them. Adding to their ferocity, and in order to intimidate the enemy, they would wear bear and wolf pelts when they fought, giving them the name Berserker, meaning “bear coat” in Old Norse. It is proposed by some historians that by wearing the pelts, the warriors believed they could extract the power and strength from the animal. (Read more.)

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The Frenchman Who Helped Save America

The Marquis de Lafayette, who helped Louis XVI save America. From WND:

Born Sept. 6, 1757, his father died before he was two years old and his mother died when he was twelve, leaving him to inherit their fortune. At 14-years-old, he joined the French Military and, at age 16, became a captain. He married Marie Adrienne Francoise de Noailles, whose family was related to King Louis XVI. His name was Marquis de Lafayette. 

At age 19, against the king’s wishes, Lafayette purchased a ship and persuaded several French officers to accompany him to fight in the American Revolution, arriving June 13, 1777. Trained in the French Military, he was a descendant of one of the oldest French families, with ancestors who fought alongside of Joan of Arc, and previously fought in the Crusades against Muslim occupiers of what had been the Christian Middle East.
Commander-in-Chief George Washington appointed Lafayette a Major General in the Continental Army, though Lafayette paid all his own expenses. (Read more.)

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How Trump Will Win in 2020

From Charlie Kirk:

The side we defeated did not accept their defeat. The sequel to the Trump election victory, The Democrats Strike Back, went into production right after the election, with the Clinton campaign and its inside-the-swamp supporters making certain the Steele Dossier became public. From that moment forward, every ounce of energy the Democrats, media, and liberal activists possess has been directed at stopping the president and trying to make him the most hated figure in American politics.

As the president put it in his speech, “This election is a verdict on whether we want to live in a country where the people who lose an election refuse to concede and spend the next two years trying to shred our Constitution and rip your country apart.” That is not hyperbole. It is a statement that CNN doesn’t need to bother to fact check, because it is incontrovertibly true.

The president was also spot on in saying, “Instead of bringing us together as one America, Democrats want to splinter us into factions and tribes. They want us divided.” The Democrats have been using the very tactic that our Founding Fathers tried to guard against in creating the architecture of our nation. It’s been working.

You can make the argument that if the president wins in 2020 he will be securing not his second, but his first term in office. A 2020 election after all of the efforts to discredit and destroy him over four tumultuous years would be a clear sign that Americans are rejecting the personal assaults on Trump and reaffirming their support for his agenda. Perhaps he could then get the kind of support from the House and Senate that is needed to implement policy. (Read more.)

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Medieval Hospitals

From A Writer's Perspective:

Hospitals were religious institutions. Monasteries and convents had always had infirmaries where sick and elderly members of the community were cared for. From the twelfth century that care was extended formally to the community beyond the walls of the abbeys. Hospitals were usually staffed by monks and nuns, but sometimes a physician was employed as well. 

Medieval hospitals took many forms. They could be hostels for pilgrims, hospices for the dying, almshouses for the aged poor, or a hospital for the sick poor. They were founded as acts of charity. The hospital set up in Jerusalem after the First Crusade in 1113 was a model for later hospitals. It had room for 1,000 to 2,000 beds with 150 staff. It cared mostly for poor people who were sick and for wounded Crusaders. It provided the ideal of what a hospital should be for many centuries. In the hospital the poor, the wounded and the sick were considered lords and those who looked after them their servants. 

Hospitals were mainly for providing hospitality, which is where the name comes from. They were often called a Maison Dieu or Domus Dei. In English they were called God’s House. The hospital was a house because it was always part of a religious community, a household with God at the head. There are the remains of one near where I live dating back to the twelfth century. A God’s House was essentially a large hall where people could lie along the walls in beds. It had a chapel for prayers and mass. (Read more.)

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Artist Justin Gerard on Tolkien

Beren and Lúthien by Justin Gerard

From TOR:

There is so much wonderful detail here. Beren’s ghostly hand (since his real one is gone) and the representation of the Silmaril that he’d held there—which I see you rendered here in the same visible symbolic fashion of your “Hunting of Carcharoth” painting. I love the saintly nimbus behind Lúthien’s head and the winglike sweep of her robes (a nod to her erstwhile Thuringwethil bat-costume). And the fact that Beren still looks like he carries the griefs and wisdom of his experiences. He’s being restored but he’s not forgetting everything nor is he given a fresh new or younger body. This just feels…right. 

What can you tell me about this piece? Are those swirls on Beren’s arm a tattoo? The embodiment of the wolf’s poison? Tell me more!

Justin: The swirls were definitely meant to be the wolf’s poison. Working on the images from Beren and Lúthien, I was not trying to show specific moments exactly, but instead trying to collapse a series of events and moments into one scene that could kind of make sense of them all and convey the ideas, more than a literal event per se. This image does have a lot of those small symbols in it. I wanted to treat this one a bit more like iconography than photography if that makes sense. It is meant to be after Beren and Lúthien’s escape, after Beren has had his hand bitten off by Carcharoth and his life still hangs in the balance, but it is also meant to foreshadow Lúthien later singing to bring Beren back from death as well.

(Read more.)

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Money Won’t Fix the Poverty Problem

From Unherd:

The social scientist Robert Putnam defines social capital as the conditions under which a person enjoys access to face-to-face networks of people. These include access to nurseries, youth clubs, libraries and village halls; places where relationships among local people are forged. Yet this access really starts at home, with family.

Of course, family isn’t a universal state of affairs. The experience of family breakdown is highly unequal in our society. Many families break apart, and there are thousands of children in care, not to mention an even larger proportion of isolated adults, especially the elderly. Polling from the Centre of Social Justice shows that a significantly greater proportion of adults from blue-collar and semi-skilled labour (27%) say they have experienced family breakdown when compared to other social grades. The poll found 87% of mothers with children under the age of five from higher income groups were married, compared to just 24% of those in lower income groups.

When intact, the home is a self-replenishing fund of social capital. It invites people to come together and exchange goods and favours, the value of which is set by relationships rather than by price or labour costs. Family is the font of all relationships – both the most essential and most formative to the relationships we form in communities later on. The famous Grant Study – a longitudinal study of almost 300 healthy Harvard students – has over several decades produced tens of thousands of pages of data. It concludes:

‘The lessons aren’t about wealth or fame or working harder and harder.  The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this:  Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.’

But beyond family, relationships depend on strong local networks. The key to allowing these to flourish is creating the space for them to develop – from inclusive youth clubs to thriving high streets. Unfortunately, this connective tissue is being eroded as well. In the UK since the 1970s, there have been 28,000 pub closures, and 121 libraries shut in 2016 alone, with further foreclosures of 600 youth centers between 2012 and 2016. And of course, this depletion of social capital is most visible in the country’s most deprived towns. (Read more.)

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