Samson.

Archeologists uncover mosaic depicting biblical Samson at ancient Israeli synagogue.

By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter. 

A depiction of a dead Philistine soldier within a large mosaic of Samson carrying the gate of Gaza rests inside an ancient synagogue in the Israeli village of Huqoq. The mosiac was uncovered during an archeological dig led by Prof. Jodi Magness from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. | Jim Haberman

A mosaic panel depicting biblical stories uncovered at an ancient synagogue was discovered by archeologists seeking answers about the impact of early Christian rule on Jewish people.

Jodi Magness, an archaeologist and professor of early Judaism at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, has been excavating the synagogue in the ancient Jewish village of Huqoq since 2011. The village is located in Israel's Lower Galilee. 

Magness and her team discovered the first set of mosaics in 2012 after their excavation progressed to the floor of the building. 

The mosaic panels on the synagogue floor depict biblical stories, including Samson and the foxes from Judges 15:4 and Samson carrying the gates of Gaza as in Judges 16:3. This summer, additional sections of those mosaic panels were exposed.  

A newly discovered mosaic on the floor just inside the main entrance consists of a large panel with a Hebrew inscription contained inside a wreath. An Aramaic inscription lists the names of what appear to be the donors who funded the mosaic or the artists who created them. Other panels depict a tiger hunting an ibex, while another features a Philistine horseman and a dead Philistine soldier.

Satan Is Real!

'American Idol' alum says industry showed him 'Satan is real,' left occult to follow Jesus.

By Jeannie Ortega Law, Christian Post Reporter

Singer Jimmy Levy, who was a contestant on "American Idol" in 2020, revealed how being exposed to the occult in the entertainment industry ultimately led him to faith in Jesus Christ. 

The Israeli-born singer hadn't realized the "spiritual war" for his soul until after he caught his big break on the televised national singing competition. 

"When I was in the industry, I became very lonely, depressed, and I realized how dark it is," Levy told Fox News Digital. 

The entertainer admitted to playing with darkness and the devil and even surrounded himself with musicians who consider themselves “worshipers of the devil.” 

"I would put a stupid tattoo on my hand of the devil," Levy continued. "I started hanging out around people that would proclaim themselves as worshipers of the devil. And I just didn't understand what I was getting myself into."

After facing spiritual attacks, he realized the devil was real and so was Jesus.

"That's when I started getting tormented at night by demons. There were times because I was smoking — I was doing a lot of things that were affecting my voice. And I couldn't even sing at some point. I started really getting attacked constantly. And I realized that Satan was real," Levy declared.

At his lowest point, a Christian preacher and friend of Levy named Nick reached out to him and prayed.

"He would always call me in the beginning and then through my career, all the times he saw me post some dark images or satanist-looking things and he'd be like, ‘Jimmy, I want to tell you about Jesus.’ And I'd be like, 'I don't want to hear this. I'm Jewish. Goodbye,'" Levy explained.

Levy eventually turned to Jesus Christ and began reading the Bible and got baptized in July 2021.

“There's some point where God gives you the eyes to see and you have a chance to turn from the past of the agendas that you're promoting … if you're given the eyes to see it, you have to deny that money. You have to deny that world. You have to deny the fame, everything, and just do what's right for God, for freedom, for America," he added concerning some of his past music.

Levy has since released more conservative-leaning songs played at anti-mandate rallies during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and most recently an anti-Target LGBT pride song. 

Levy is now focusing his talents on Christian worship songs. His single "Amen" is now available and will be followed by a full worship album.

"So that was all cool and it inspired people at that time. But now it's time for God," he concluded. “We fought it and you know, at the end, God prevailed through it and an awakening happened. … But now it's time for the spiritual realm."

Jeannie Ortega Law is a reporter for The Christian Post. Reach her at: jeannie.law@christianpost.com She's also the author of the book, What Is Happening to Me? How to Defeat Your Unseen Enemy Follow her on Twitter: @jlawcp Facebook: JeannieOMusic

Super.

Country music star Walker Hayes shares journey from alcoholic atheist to faith: 'The answer is Christ'.

By Jeannie Ortega Law, Christian Post Reporter.

Country music star Walker Hayes is crediting his friendship with a pastor for helping him reform his life from an alcoholic atheist to a sober follower of Jesus Christ. 

“I’m eight years sober this October,” Hayes revealed in an interview on Fox News. “I woke up one day when I was working at Costco. I was working at Costco from 4 to 11 and then writing and then playing shows. And man, it caught up to me. And honestly, I had been drinking since I was probably like 13.”

His awakening came before all of his success. One weekend after feeling he was going to die, he quit cold turkey and never looked back.

“I woke up one Saturday, and I just felt like I was going to die,” he said. “I felt like physically if I did one more day, something was wrong. And so I stopped, and then one day turned into two, and then two turned into a week. And then a week turned into a month. And then I did the whole high on sobriety thing and got into working out and stuff. Kind of traded a bad addiction for some good ones.”

While still an alcoholic, Hayes revealed that he and his wife lost their seventh child, a daughter named Oakleigh Klover, who died shortly after her birth. Compounding the family's difficulties, Hayes lost a recording contract and the family minivan used to transport their six children was repossessed. 

An encounter with a pastor would change the course of his life and eventually convert him from atheism to being a believer in Jesus Christ.

Craig Allen Cooper, the founder of Glad You're Here Ministries, had committed himself to love on the country star and his family during their lowest point. Although skeptical at first, Hayes said he was shown the love of Christ by Cooper, who even gave the musician his own minivan. 

“I lost a kid, I have nothing going on musically, I’m an alcoholic. I’m great at pushing people away,” Hayes recalled. “So here comes this guy named Craig, who was drawn nearer to me. And it was quite confusing. There were a lot of times when I was like, ‘What’s this dude’s deal? Like, why does he love us so much? Like, why does he keep feeding us food? Why is he giving me a minivan? Why is he encouraging me? Why isn’t he like everybody else?'” 

Hayes added, “In the long run, I honestly found out he’s just as broken as me, but he just knows Jesus. He needs Jesus. Every morning he wakes up, he needs Jesus, and Jesus is a light through him.”

The awareness of Cooper’s love began to turn Hayes’ heart toward Cooper’s God. 

“The answer is Christ,” Hayes told Fox. 

Hayes wrote a song about their friendship before he became a believer and recently the unlikely pair wrote a book together titled, Glad You’re Here: Two Unlikely Friends Breaking Bread and Fences.

In a previous interview about the book, the Grammy-winning singer opened up about how surprised he was to be writing a book about Jesus. 

“Faith has taken me by surprise. But it is overwhelming. How well it just fits [with] what I do,” Hayes told 25 News Now at the time. 

“I don’t think there’s anything [more] worth sharing than what Jesus has done with me and the redemption I’ve experienced here on Earth and will continue to experience from knowing Him,” he added in a separate interview with Taste of Country. “That’s it. That’s why I wanna share my story.”

To learn more about Hayes and his music, click here.

Jeannie Ortega Law is a reporter for The Christian Post. 

Bidenism.

 Q: Have you heard about McDonald’s new Biden Value Meal?

A: Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for it.

Birdies.

 

A Verse That Means A Great Deal To Me.

 

Chinese Infiltration.

 https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1790884/Nigel-Farage-China-foreign-aid-bill-2022

Also Called 'Theft By Government'.

 Paying taxes on money you make; taxes on money you spend; taxes on things you own that you already paid taxes on with money already taxed.

The Wretched State of Our Army.

British Army reduced to using e-bikes as supplies of tanks and troops runs dry.

The e-bike demonstration comes as Britain faces not just a shortage of tanks, but a general shortage of men, raising questions about the country's combat readiness.

By CHRISTOPHER SHARP

06:39, Thu, Jul 20, 2023 

Outgoing Defence Secretary Ben Wallace (Image: PA)

The British Army is being reduced to using e-bikes as their supply of tanks and soldiers runs dry.

The army has begun training its soldiers on e-bikes in a bid to boost their mobility and effectiveness on the battlefield.

According to reports, British soldiers are practising firing their Carl Gustaf rifles from Stealth H-52 e-bikes.

The decision to move to e-bikes has been prompted by their effectiveness in Ukraine where soldiers have been using them to sneak up on Russian positions.

Express.

Climate Experts.

 

Jul 19, 2023 WEDNESDAY WAKEUP www.climatediscussionnexus.comView newsletter in browser

UPDATED CDN VIDEO In an updated version of our Crystal Ball video “Canada’s 2001 Climate Predictions Revisited”, we say if the Canadian government was this dogmatically wrong about climate change science more than two decades ago, the burden of proof is on it when it says it now has everything figured out and then makes the same kind of daffy predictions based on the same kind of overheated computer models. NEWS ROUNDUP A HOT TIME UNDER THE OLD TOWN To a person with a hammer, everything proverbially looks like a nail. So the New York Times warns us of “underground climate change” which at least is underground but which has nothing to do with climate change despite the name. The ground under Chicago, apparently, is warming because of human activity. No, not the dreaded global warming. The fact that buildings are heated and some of the heat escapes into the ground underneath. The Times of course tries to blame fossil fuels, but only monomania can explain their failure to realize that if cities are local hotspots, it doesn’t prove atmospheric CO2 caused thermometers to read hotter there, but it does prove once again that urban areas are not good places to measure global climate. READ MORE SO ABOUT THOSE FIRES... The alarmists are almost as excited about Canadian wildfires as they were a few years back when the lungs of the world were ablaze. Heatmap Daily emailed us “Smoke Until October” on June 30, unlike Canada itself where the smoke dissipated (and dialed it back to “The East Coast’s Smoke Could Last Until October” in the actual story). The Atlantic asked “How Long Will Canada Burn?” though we are in Canada and had the author asked we could have told her “Canada” is not on fire, just a few bits of our vast forest. As for the subsequent “One thing is certain: More extreme smoke days are coming” we could have told her they promptly ended. But here’s the big question: If “global” warming is causing Canada’s record wildfire season, why (h/t Judith Curry) is the American one “setting up to historically be one of the slowest years on record”? Is America on a different planet? Or at least a different continent? Um no. READ MORE TIDBITS In case you were nostalgic for, say, 8 years to save the planet as announced by then-Prince Charles in, oops, 2009, now-King Charles and the mayor of London launched a “Climate Clock” that will count down the years, days, hours, minutes and yes seconds to 2030 in case your calendar, watch and computer are all broken. (There are 150 of them around the UK in case the problem is widespread.) The idea is that it’s how long we have to limit warming to an arbitrary 1.5°C because if we don’t nothing will happen. Except someone will start another countdown. In the UK it’s cloudy with a chance of controversy, as a chart of temperature there since 1933 (a decade old, but just brought to our attention) shows that it correlates almost exactly with… what’s this?... cloud cover not CO2. Wonder why people aren’t rushing to research this exciting possibility? Oh right. Government funding. (Which also went into changing past temperatures there because they weren’t conforming to the narrative.) For fans of statistical analysis (hey, where’d everybody go?) we want to share with you a website “Spurious correlations“ that shows, for instance, how tightly swimming pool drownings correlate with Nicolas Cage movies, or the divorce rate in Maine with margarine consumption. Not because real correlations don’t matter, but because you have to be careful about assuming that, say, not serving your partner margarine will improve your marriage. Hey, wait a minute. From the complete lack of fun file, by contrast, Statista warns us of “The Hidden Carbon Footprint of the Fashion Industry”. Though to be fair the main complaint is all the people flying around to endless fashion shows, and since most of them are probably trendily alarmist on climate it does hit its target. When we read that “Owning tropical fish ‘as bad for the climate as riding a motorbike’” we have a strong impulse to ride a motorcycle to a pet store and buy a goldfish. Must they spoil everything? If it were gasoline cars there’d be complaints. But while The Atlantic’s “Weekly Planet” concedes that “E-bikes Are Going to Keep Exploding” and that “For the foreseeable future, more e-bikes will explode, and more people may die”, especially in crowded New York City but in many other places as well, the problem will probably get better within about 50 years. And presumably we’re doing it for the children… or would be if they weren’t often the ones performing slave labour in faraway countries to produce these carbon-saving, life-taking vehicles. We have a winner. We quoted real weather forecaster Joe Bastardi on June 19 that it should take about 15 days for media to switch from calling rain relief from drought to blaming flooding on climate especially in the eastern U.S. where he predicted a rainy second half to summer. And on July 12 David Leonhardt of the New York Times’s “The Morning” wrote, particularly of Vermont, that “As climate change has intensified rainstorms, more parts of the U.S. are vulnerable to flooding.” OP ED WATCH THIS TIME WE FIX EARTH FOR REAL If you have a packet of Tums or Rolaids or something and you are at the seashore, it seems you should unwrap the tablets and toss them in. At least so “Nature Briefing” tells us, though you may not get much relief when you turn to the story saying “Start-ups are adding antacids to the ocean to slow global warming. Will it work?” (Plot spoiler: No. Of course not. The oceans are huge.) So that’s Plan B, if merely screening out the sun doesn’t cause some apocalyptic disaster or monstrous fizzle in the name of saving the Earth from clods like you and me. READ MORE ALL A-TWITTER The “denier” label now gets applied to anyone who questions not only whether climate change is a thing, but whether it is a crisis, a view that encompasses a large fraction of the world’s scientists and most of its economists. Meanwhile in a lament for bad manners online, a Guardian piece hurls that insult, saying “Climate crisis deniers target scientists for vicious abuse on Musk’s Twitter,” apparently in the belief that Michael Mann is the most mild-mannered, soft-spoken person ever to urge that Donald Trump be put “in prison for life” and also unaware that throwing a slur at people doesn’t put you in a position to complain when they throw it back. Instead, according to Anna Fazackerley, the problem is that Twitter is no longer censoring the wrong kinds of people. READ MORE GO JUMP IN THE LAKE The herd of independent minds seem especially keen to declare Crawford Lake, a small freshwater body near Milton, Ontario, just west of Toronto, the “global ground zero“ for the “Anthropocene”. But while we’re all for local-smalltown-kid-makes-good stories, and Crawford Lake definitely grew up in the boonies, the whole story is rubbish. Including that the hype centres on the “Anthropocene” having started in 1950 whereas the disastrous effects of man-made climate change supposedly already started at about 13 different points, and also loom in 2030. But none of those points was in 1950. READ MORE SAY WHAT? “As climate change continues to warm the planet, there may be yet another consequence heading our way: according to a new study, higher temperatures are associated with a higher likelihood of vision impairment.” – CTV News July 2, 2023 [we resisted the urge to use special large print for this item]. SCIENCE NOTES CLINTEL REPORT: MORE CONFIDENCE WE SHOULD HAVE LESS CONFIDENCE IN MODELS Chapter 8 of the Clintel Report on the IPCC’s AR6 presents a review by Guelph University’s Ross McKitrick of how well computer climate models compare to observations. The evidence that these models predict too much heating in the Earth’s atmosphere is pretty much indisputable (see our video on Trouble in the Tropical Troposphere for a quick overview). Every one of them exhibits too much warming, and the bias shows up even when programmers tweak their creations to try and reproduce the known sea surface warming trend (which the models also overstate). With so much evidence of model bias the IPCC has finally, reluctantly, bumped up their confidence that the models exaggerate warming. But only from low to medium. As McKitrick says “One wonders how much more evidence they need to claim high confidence, since in other areas they jump to that level with much less to go on.” READ MORE EXCESS HEAT KILLED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EUROPEANS THIS CENTURY Aha! shout the alarmists. Gotcha! Told you so! But they should let us finish the headline, because it continues that excess cold killed hundreds of thousands. Oh really? Yes. It’s our summary of a new study in The Lancet (h/t the Global Warming Policy Foundation) which presents a study of 854 urban areas in Europe over the years 2000 to 2019, and finds that after taking into account all the usual risk factors, the role of temperature swings on excess deaths in every age group was important, but by and large excess cold killed ten times more Europeans than excess heat. Of course there’s nothing global warming cannot do, including freeze people to death, so naturally the authors speculate that: “As climate change is expected to increase the burden of hot days and add unprecedented cold and heat events at high risks of causing deaths, these results allow for an accurate representation of the risks caused by changes in temperature.” But setting that verbiage aside, the bottom line is that any plausible amount of warming in the next century will eliminate a lot more deaths related to cold than it adds to those related to heat. READ MORE TEMPERATURE-RELATED MORTALITY RISK IN IRAN From the CO2Science Archive: Writing as background for their study, Sharafkhani et al. (2019) say that “the impact of Diurnal Temperature Range [DTR] on human health is not well understood.” And thus they set out to investigate the effect of DTR [the variation between the high and low air temperature during one day] on mortality in Tabriz, Iran, which is the capital of the East Azerbaijan Province and fifth largest Iranian city with a population of more than 1.6 million persons. READ MORE SUPPORT CDN If you like what you see, please forward this newsletter to friends and colleagues and encourage them to subscribe. Also join us on YouTube and now Rumble as well, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, send your comments and ideas via our blog (comment below individual items please) and to help us keep providing content, become a contributor. You can also now buy CDN merchandise in our online store. NOTEWORTHY LINKS For data on one important climate issue, and which one is obvious from the name, we recommend the Rutgers University Snow Lab.