When I worked as a respiratory therapist part of my responsibilities was to keep flowsheets for the mechanical ventilators I worked on. That’s a record of what the machine was doing with a time log. And when I gave a breathing treatment to an asthma patient I recorded the details of that treatment, the time,...

POLJUNK, the National Affairs desk of Glorious Noise

Here we are again. In the year of someone’s Lord 2024, we are back in time. We had a slight reprieve with four years of competent governing that resulted in record economic growth, withdrawal from historically disastrous military entanglements in the mideast (brought to you by the formerly worst president in US history), and at least some sense of normalcy, but I guess we are going back. This was after what many thought was an aberrant Trump presidency–surely that was a blip in the American experience, right? As it turns out, the aberrant is the accepted. It’s America’s true face, one we occasionally veil but never actually change.

I could list all the reasons Donald Trump is a terrible person and worse “leader,” but we all know them. And that’s the point: This isn’t some unknown or misunderstood element. This is Donald Trump. We know him and unfortunately, he knows us. Better than many of us know ourselves.

Trump isn’t some genius, he’s just a guy who is willing to do what others won’t because most of us live between imaginary lines of decency.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

DVDTalk.com staff writer and film critic Neil Lumbard has compiled a list of some of the best releases of...

In this article, Beldeu Singh highlights some of the gross inconsistencies in our current approach to what is called the "AIDS epidemic". There has never, to this date, been a proper isolation and purification of the human immunodeficiency virus, and one might be justified in saying that there is no AIDS epidemic, but rather an iatrogenic (doctor caused) epidemic of drug-induced deaths and a lot of unnecessary fear and suffering, all based on very wonky science... but it all seems to make excellent business sense, if you are a drug company shareholder or one of the thousands of researchers who work "to find a cure" for AIDS. by Beldeu Singh INTRODUCTION In the early days neutropenia was one of the key parameters of AIDS. The clinical course of severe neutropenia, as described in the basic pathology textbook, “Pathologic Basis of Disease” by Robbins (5th Ed.), which is used in most medical schools to study pathology, describes what happens to people with severe neutropenia. The symptoms and signs of neutropenias are those of bacterial infections... Robbins also states, in italics, that "the most severe forms of neutropenias are produced by drugs." In severe agranulocytosis with virtual absence of neutrophils, "these infections may become so overwhelming as to cause death within a few days," (Robbins, p 631). This sounds disturbingly similar to a description of AIDS. Dr. Michael Lange, associate chief of infectious diseases at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York and one of the doctors the FDA consulted when evaluating AZT in 1987, says even he sometimes had trouble differentiating between AZT's toxic effects and AIDS itself. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine describes the muscle wasting caused by AZT and compared it to muscle wasting, called "myopathy", presumed to be caused by HIV. Their comments in the abstract are shocking: "We conclude that long-term therapy with Zidovudine can cause a toxic mitochondrial myopathy, which... is indistinguishable from the myopathy associated with primary HIV infection..." So, there is drug-induced immune suppression and drug-induced AIDS, and AZT can cause AIDS. Yet 5000 scientists signed a declaration that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS. The AIDS industry is built on paradoxes and misguided beliefs....

More and more evidence is coming to light that Dr. Wakefield was on the right track when he researched the connection between the MMR vaccine and intestinal inflammation in the vaccinated children. Was Dr. Andrew Wakefield Right After All? Wakefield’s Lancet Paper Vindicated New Published Study Verifies Andrew Wakefield’s Research on Autism But how did Dr. Wakefield first get into the sights of the UK vaccine industry and how was the campaign against him mounted? Martin Walker, the author of "Dirty Medicine" and a number of other books on health, closely followed the case that eventually resulted in Dr. Wakefield's exile from the UK. He describes how it all happened and how the vaccine manufacturers were able to bring down the full weight of government and the courts against both Wakefield and the many parents who were suing for recognition of the damage vaccines had done to their children. "As a campaigner of 40 years, I think that what surprises me most about Dr Wakefield’s case, is how easily and how completely we were defeated by the pharmaceutical companies, how over a thousand parents and children were written out of history together with their adverse drug reactions. Part of this defeat for the parents, the children and the doctors concerned was grounded in an unfortunate understanding that pharmaceutical company executives were decent people and humanitarians. In fact the pharmaceutical companies, their corporate structure and their relentless pursuit of profit, their fraudulent practices represent one of the last remaining shibboleths, in our society which need to be completely reformed, democratised, divested of vested interests and made public from top to bottom." We do learn from experience. That is why we should pay attention to how this case went so wrong and why the campaign to ruin those researchers and to leave the damaged children by the wayside was mounted in the first place. So it won't happen again. Here is Martin Walker's essay....

About a month ago I wrote this entry which was, I think, somewhat misunderstood, at least by the one confirmed reader of it. In it I tried to argue that there are some fundamental problems involved in conceptualizing time which, in my mind, appear intractable, and hence its existence as a concept contradictory, impossible. To which it was replied that of course time has an existence, as a social convention, a mental framework. Of that I have no doubt-it would be impossible for me to refute even if I wanted to. My point was about metaphysics, not sociology, and in that regard I don’t think it was that much different from that expressed by St. Augustine regarding time: “if no one asks me what it is I know what it is, but if someone asks me I don’t know.” Or, even more notably, Kant, who regarded time, in addition to space, not as an entity, process, or property of the physical world, but as a filter of percpetion, the mental framework which orders our experience of the world.

Which brings me back to science. I just finished reading The Evolution of Physics, by Einstein and Leopold Infeld. Of course Einstein is justly famed for, among many other things, pioneering the idea of space-time. However, I was quite intrigued to discover, while perusing the science section at the National Library in Paris, that Gödel claimed that his late work on relativity and physics, upon which I touched in my earlier post, was inspired by an intense study of Kant. Now, assuming such a dour man as Gödel was not simply being facetious, the implications of this are immediate. In the (apparent) somewhat paradoxical act of tearing down the structure of Einstein’s work while bringing some of its deepest tendencies to fruition, he was working under the influence of a theory which denies the type of external, property-based existence which Einstein implicitly ascribes to time (and space)! As I understand special relativity (always a dubious premise, I grant you), it holds that space and time, as properties of the universe, are perceived differently at every point of view, or coordinate system, as he calls them. But for me it seems a question of the simplest explanation: if everyone is in a relative frame of reference with respect to space and time, is it simpler and more likely that time and space are real properties which are different at every point in the universe, or simply that they are perceived differently by each observer? It seems to me that if one takes Kant’s idea of space and time as elements perception and not of external reality, none of these problems come up, although there may of course be others. Again, it’s hard for me to say what Gödel’s interpretation of all of this is, since no one seems to have engaged and propogated his work on this subject much, but if he was following in the line of Kant’s thinking as well as the tradition of relativity, it would be interesting to see the resuscitation, by “a commodius vicus of recirculation,” of a very powerful and cogent point of view which has nonetheless been largely dismissed by scientists as non-pertinently metaphysical. Perhaps interesting also to note that, in dealing with Kant last year, I protested against his classification of space as a perceptual framework, and even managed to convince my philosophy professor that it is rather the fundamental visual property, before reversing myself and concluding that light is actually the fundamental visible property. Light is also in some ways the fundamental property in Einstein’s system, or at least the one constant in all of the warping of space-time, which somehow doesn’t seem so surprising now…

p.s. For all of those intersted in Spanish literature (which at this point probably composes nearly 100% of our readership), I also came across this article with the following sub-headline: “It is the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote, a more important work than all of Einstein’s theories.” To the extent that the article follows up on this point, I think the claim about the inevitability of scientific discovery is at the very least highly disputable (and even if Cervantes’ work is more inimitable, that does not in itself mean that it is more “important”), but nonetheless a provocative idea, and gratifying to my humanities-leaning heart.

Wo Vorschriften als ebenso belastend wie sinnlos empfunden werden, neigen manche Normadressaten zu wenig kooperativem Verhalten, wie heute im

Lochen, Heften und Ablegen sind selbst für einen kleinen Beamten keine ernsthafte Herausforderung. Einen wahren Extremsport scheint hingegen das korrekte Inkraftsetzen eines Bebauungsplans darzustellen, zumindest in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Jedenfalls finde ich in der

Die Polizei in Irland ist einem geheimnisvollen polnischen Verkehrsrowdy auf die Spur gekommen, der landauf, landab die Straßen unsicher zu machen schien - denn gegen den seltsamen Herr Pravo Jazdy liefen Dutzende von Verfahren wegen Schnellfahrens und Parkverstößen. Und irgendwie schaffte es Pravo Jazdy immer, sich der Justiz zu entziehen, indem er eine falsche Adresse angab. Nun hat die Polizei dar Rätsel allerdings gelöst, wenn auch mit dem Ergebnis, dass sie die Bußgelder wohl in den Kamin schreiben kann. Zur Auflösung hier nur so viel: Es wäre nicht weiter verwunderlich, wenn auch ein französischer Adliger namens Permis de Conduire auf der Fahndungsliste stünde.

Das gibt es auch nicht alle Tage: In einer brandenburgischen Kleinstadt stand eine äußerlich ganz unauffällige Wohnstraße zur Zwangsversteigerung. Und statt der Gemeinde, die sie für einen Euro haben wollte, hat sie für 1000 Euro ein Privatmann ersteigert, der sich davon ein gutes Geschäft verspricht. Das

Gestern habe ich mich bei der

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You wouldn't be blamed for assuming Coralie Clément is a contemporary of Françoise Hardy or Jane Birkin's; her coquettish and sultry, whispered vocals, suave touches of bossa and samba, and splashy dabblings in yé-yé make her sound like Brigitte Fontaine buffing out her scratches and sanding down her bristly edges.

Her debut LP, Salle des pas perdus, is a collaboration with her brother Benjamin Biolay, who wrote and arranged it, only further reinforcing her throwback nature. For a time during the 90s, Momus did a lot of his own Serge Gainsbourg-styled team-ups with elegant yet wryly sassy chanteuses—the Kahimi Karie songs, the Poison Girl Friend songs, the Laila France songs—and this record plucks at the same heartstrings.

The subsequent albums are interesting and possessed with the same sort of low-key charisma, with Toystore perhaps being the most aggressively different: in place of gentle strings and unhurried horns are skippy ukuleles, tinny tambourines, frothy farfisas.

A record that has been on repeat as of late, perhaps in part because of my obsessive reimmersion into Shibuya-kei. (If you missed the big playlist I began, check it out.) Reconnecting with it deeply, thoughtfully, and from the perspective of me as I am today as opposed to through a desire to, frankly, wrap myself in warm, fuzzy nostalgia, has unlocked new respect and reverence. Its whimsical expressiveness and lightning-bolt vigor and costume-party playfulness come from, yes, overstimulated and itchy brains, fidgety crate-digger fingers, but, more importantly, from curious hearts that want to simply celebrate life. Thus, while it's artificially about a sort of cosplay, it's a sincere, pure body of work, and that's what makes it so remarkably special.

It's been a long while, and it will remain that way for at least a little while longer.

I did want to post the playlists I've been maintaining for this year, however. While I'm not writing about music at the moment, I am, as always, collecting, collating, curating these.

For 2023, I'm breaking things down a little more granularly, with two new playlists, "Clurb" and "Calm," being added to the regular offerings of "Classic" (at least ten-ish years old) and "Current (mostly from this calendar year, but maybe some 2022 material makes it past the censors).

A full archive of all these can be found on the Playlists subpage.

Nearly twelve months have passed without a peep from me, and I think—think!—that's going to change in short order.

I've new, albeit modest, things coming via Nilo soon (a sequel to the "Please Honk" bumper sticker), and I'm contemplating ways to more efficiently and quickly publish and distribute all the gobbledygook that is suffocating in my mind and crammed into my notebooks. I am certain some or all of it will live on or be connected to BBBD, though whether this twenty-year-old blog is a hub or spoke remains to be seen.

At any rate, I'll start jottings things down here again, in more typical journal format. In the meantime, follow the four playlists I'll be maintaining as per usual (they're embedded below) and behold my latest "product," a song-a-day experiment. There's an RSS feed for it if that's your jam. (There's something intoxicating about rejiggering a Spotify playlist into, essentially, a microblogging platform, and I'm happy I finally hacked it. This is something I've been wanting to make for ages.)

Rent It

The Movie:

I think both in fictional movies and documentaries, when airplane trouble happens when a musical act is one of the passengers on the plane, the comedy to diffuse the tension is palpable, whether it is a tribute to "The Night the Music Died" when the Big Bopper, Richie Valens and Buddy Holly passed, or when members of Lynyrd Skynrd died in a 1977 plane crash. Neverthless, I'll Never Forget You attempts to put some emotion into the tragic event.

The film is based on the novel by Gene Odom, friend of singer Ronnie Van Zandt and who wrote the book that serves as the foundation for the film. In it, he, along with others that survived the crash (backup singer Leslie Hawkins and guitar roadie Craig Reed) as they share their thoughts on the crash and offer some thoughts on the days and hours leading up to the tragic events.

So when it comes to the film itself, the sto...Read the entire review

In this second part of his message 'Praise Time!', David looks at what praise does - the effects praise can have upon your life's circumstances and your own personal well-being. Learn some of the practical outcomes of what happens when you activate the power of praise! This sermon is available now from https://www.preachtheword.com in MP3 audio and on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord) in HD video...

Sometimes we don't understand what's happening in our world and in our lives. We wonder how God can allow certain things, let alone use bad things for our good! In Part 2 of 'Confident In The Chaos', learn how Habakkuk responds to God's 'Mysterious Ways' and how you also can posture yourself in faith. This encouraging message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

Just like the twelve 'disciples' in Ephesus, the original twelve in Jerusalem also had something missing. They had spent three years with Jesus, but still needed their Pentecost experience. Jesus warned His disciples that they needed more to accomplish His commission. Here in Part 2 of 'The Holy Spirit', we will find out 'What's Missing?', and learn of the utter necessity of living and ministering in the power of the Holy Spirit. This challenging message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

Part 7 of our series on 'The Holy Spirit' continues our look at 'The Work Of The Holy Spirit'. The Holy Spirit is the critical prime mover in the work of redemption. He established salvation for us but now He is also the One who applies salvation to us. We are learning how the Holy Spirit personally works in our lives to conform us to the image of Jesus. Last time we considered the Spirit's work of 'Conviction and Regeneration', in this episode we will look at the Spirit's work of 'Empowerment and Sanctification'. Why not share this message with others? It's available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

As we continue our series on 'The Holy Spirit' with a time of focus on the fruit of the Spirit, in Part 12 we discover that 'Love' is the fruit of the Spirit that all the other fruit stem from. In this episode David shows us how Christian love is meant to be the very love of God Himself - and love is how we are to be known as Christians. This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

Is 'Self-control' nothing more than merely exercising will-power? If not, what is it then? How is it different from just 'trying harder'? In this concluding message in our mini-series on 'The Fruit of the Spirit', find out how self-control is a key to effectively accessing the other fruit of the Spirit. Also find out what Paul meant when he said of the fruit of the Spirit, 'against such there is no law'. This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

So, are the gifts of the Holy Spirit for use in the Church today and in the lives of Christians in this present age? Can we know this for sure from the Bible? In this introduction to our sub-series on 'The Gifts of the Spirit', David seeks to answer the question: are these gifts for today? Why not share this very important message with others - it's available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

In this episode of our series on 'The Holy Spirit', looking at 'Grace Gifts', David talks about how all the gifts from God are because of His great grace in Christ; through the cross, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. He distinguishes Christ's gifts from the Holy Spirit's gifts. He also challenges us, that even though there may be misuses and abuses of the 'gifts of the Spirit' in the church, we should be asking the question: Where is the true? This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...