Video: Caroline Says – “Faded and Golden”

From The Lucky One, out October 11 on Western Vinyl.

Caroline Says is Caroline Sallee and she’s moved around a lot. She was raised in Alabama. She moved to Austin. Then back to Alabama. And now she’s based in Brooklyn. That much moving, more than anything, reveals that you can’t go home again.

The house where you don’t live no more
When I drive by I still call it yours.

Nothing’s ever the same as how you left it.

When I said goodbye and said I’d see you soon
And how I keep you in my head just dies when I see you.

Sallee says, “Relationships are, first and foremost, ideas. That’s what allows relationships to persist even when we’re apart. We may yearn for an old friend or lover, especially one from our teenage years and our hometown. But there is a bittersweetness to any reunion. They may shatter the memory we’ve made of them.”

Shatter? Come on. What kind of fragile-ass memories do you have? People change.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

Many thanks g to Cristina in Greece for her report on this - originally published on her justiceforgreece blog as A seed For Change a documentary project by Alex Ikonomidis and the declaration on seed freedom Alex Ikonomidis is a Greek film maker who lived, studied and worked in Lebanon. After returning to his native Greece and serving his time in the military, he took up his profession there and was happily going along, producing in the world of media and advertising when, suddenly, the economic crisis hit. Through the crisis, Ikonomidis recognized that when money becomes more and more scarce, it is important to be where food is grown. This brought him to embark on a documentary project. A Seed for Change is his soon-to-be-released feature length film documenting why agriculture must start with seed freedom. Chemical inputs are often toxic and are disruptive to human health and the environment. "Standardized" seeds, as imposed by the agro-chemical conglomerates through legislation pushed through in much of the civilized world, are destroying our heritage of biological diversity, created by nature and harnessed by farmers for producing our food over thousands of years....

Inclined Bed Therapy or IBT is the brain child of Andrew Fletcher, who discovered in the 1990's that gravity actually helps to drive circulation of the sap in trees. From there, it was a short step to ask whether this was also true for animals and humans. This posed the question "why on Earth do people sleep flat?" So Andrew suggested that people slightly raise the head end of their bed and see if any changes in their health are noticeable. This is one of the numerous anecdotes ... stories of personal success people have reported after raising the head end of their bed by just five or six inches. "Over two years ago I sat in the armchair reading a small advert which asked people to raise their bed by six inches at the head and to reply and tell what benefits had been noted. (No explanation was given) At the time I could not move my neck to my left or right side and it ached continuously. I was unable to sleep at night as i could not get comfortable. I was only able to turn by gently easing myself. It took about three to four turns. Getting out of bed was a major obstacle. I needed help to dress and undress. I spent most of my nights in the chair with the result that I was always tired and had no energy. My problem is osteoporosis of the upper and lower spine. I had tried hormone replacement therapy and wasted a small fortune with bone specialists and osteopaths. I was resigned to living my days out as best I could, having been told that there was nothing more that could be done for me. I expected nothing but had nothing to lose, so Harry raised the bed by six inches. We did not take it very seriously but were happy to try anything. On the fourth night I had the first full nights sleep since I don't remember when. By the end of the week I was sleeping naturally and turning over with ease. My dressing was a problem no longer, each day it became easier. I was able to turn my head without pain, right or left, to see the clock without getting up from my chair. There have been many other benefits too. I have worn glasses from the age of seven years and I am now sixty eight years. Last year was the first time I was told that there was a small improvement. My hair appears thicker, my hair brush needs cleaning less often. Harry had a large suppurating scar since he was six years old. He has had to continually dress it all of his life. But now it has healed up. His ear which constantly gave him trouble with a discharge has now cleared up completely. We both feel that the clock has been put back for us!" Ruby, 2nd April 1998 Other such stories can be found on the Inclined Bed Therapy website and on the facebook page with the same name...

“Perhaps you’re familiar with “the tragedy of the commons,” a social dilemma outlined by the late biologist Garrett Hardin in a famous 1968 essay of the same name. The dilemma is that when individuals pursue personal gain, the net result for society as a whole may be impoverishment. (Pollution is the most familiar example.) Such thinking has fallen out of fashion amid President Bush’s talk of an “ownership society,” but its logic is unassailable.”

That response seems like a pretty damn obtuse interpretation of the essay, simply because the essay is nothing if not a plea for the creation of property rights. Furthermore, while it is true that Hardin claims that pursuing individual gain leads to group catastrophe, the word “when” in the paragraph above implies that there are times when the individual doesn’t, whereas Hardin claims that individuals basically always pursue their own interest, which is the problem in high-density situations where some amout of coordination is necessary. However, upon re-reading it, I realize that for Hardin property rights only forms a part of a wished-for imposition of coercive measures which will prevent individuals from pursuing personal gain at the expense of their environment. Which makes sense, because property rights, for all this may get lost in the ceaseless ideological wrangling today, are themselves forms of state-imposed coercion. Dismiss the semi-metaphysical nonsense in Locke and Kant about gaining “just propriety” over an object by making a visible mark on it. Think about it: animals control exactly as much “property” as they can defend; cheetahs peeing on trees only works because they will fight to defend what they have claimed. By contrast, think about who adjudicates the (in theory) incontestable property rights: the authorities, i.e. in our society, the State. The corollary of this, of course, is that nationalized or federal property is not “public property,” in the sense of property owned by the public—quite the contrary. The dichotomy between it and “private property” is spurious. “Public property” is simply property owned by the government. This no doubt seems obvious and intuitive, but based on the foolishness I cited above, it bears repeating that property rights, whether granted to others by the government or to itself, are not opposed to coercive state power but are in fact the very essence of it. That fact is perhaps more apparent in regards to so-called “intellectual property.”

As a marginal note, Hardin’s essay, despite the pithiness of its central analogy, is rather dispiriting insofar as it takes Hegel’s statement that “Freedom lies in the recognition of necessity” as its motto and guiding spirit. That formulation is, as I believe I have said before, perfectly monstruous. Freedom means nothing if it is not the absence of restriction, and it is perhaps a sign of the evasive confusion of priorities in Western culture that one would pretend to celebrate this value in such a way while in fact describing its opposite. Freedom is not an act or a thought, but rather a set of conditions under which action and thought occur. This is the same idealistic debasement of the language that has turned love into a deed: making love.

“Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.” —John von Neumann¹

This, in a sense, is at the heart of why mathematics is so hard. Math is all about abstraction, about generalizing the stuff you can get a sense of to apply to crazy situations about which you otherwise have no insight whatsoever. Take, for example, one way of understanding the manifold structure on SO(3), the special orthogonal group on 3-space. In order to explain what I’m talking about, I’ll have to give several definitions and explanations and each, to a greater or lesser extent, illustrates both my point about abstraction and von Neumann’s point about getting used to things.

First off, SO(3) has a purely algebraic definition as the set of all real (that is to say, the entries are real numbers) 3 × 3 matrices A with the property A^TA = I and the determinant of A is 1. That is, if you take A and flip rows and columns, you get the transpose of A, denoted A^T; if you then multiply this transpose by A, you get the identity matrix I. The determinant has its own complicated algebraic definition (the unique alternating, multilinear functional…), but it’s easy to compute for small matrices and can be intuitively understood as a measure of how much the matrix “stretches” vectors. Now, as with all algebraic definitions, this is a bit abstruse; also, as is unfortunately all too common in mathematics, I’ve presented all the material slightly backwards.

This is natural, because it seems obvious that the first thing to do in any explication is to define what you’re talking about, but, in reality, the best thing to do in almost every case is to first explain what the things you’re talking about (in this case, special orthogonal matrices) really are and why we should care about them, and only then give the technical definition. In this case, special orthogonal matrices are “really” the set of all rotations of plain ol’ 3 dimensional space that leave the origin fixed (another way to think of this is as the set of linear transformations that preserve length and orientation; if I apply a special orthogonal transformation to you, you’ll still be the same height and width and you won’t have been flipped into a “mirror image”). Obviously, this is a handy thing to have a grasp on and this is why we care about special orthogonal matrices. In order to deal with such things rigorously it’s important to have the algebraic definition, but as far as understanding goes, you need to have the picture of rotations of 3 space in your head.

Okay, so I’ve explained part of the sentence in the first paragraph where I started throwing around arcane terminology, but there’s a bit more to clear up; specifically, what the hell is a “manifold”, anyway? Well, in this case I’m talking about differentiable (as opposed to topological) manifolds, but I don’t imagine that explanation helps. In order to understand what a manifold is, it’s very important to have the right picture in your head, because the technical definition is about ten times worse than the special orthogonal definition, but the basic idea is probably even simpler. The intuitive picture is that of a smooth surface. For example, the surface of a sphere is a nice 2-dimensional manifold. So is the surface of a donut, or a saddle, or an idealized version of the rolling hills of your favorite pastoral scene. Slightly more abstractly, think of a rubber sheet stretched and twisted into any configuration you like so long as there are no holes, tears, creases, black holes or sharp corners.

In order to rigorize this idea, the important thing to notice about all these surfaces is that, if you’re a small enough ant living on one of these surfaces, it looks indistinguishable from a flat plane. This is something we can all immediately understand, given that we live on an oblate spheroid that, because it’s so much bigger than we are, looks flat to us. In fact, this is very nearly the precise definition of a manifold, which basically says that a manifold is a topological space (read: set of points with some important, but largely technical, properties) where, at any point in the space, there is some neighborhood that looks identical to “flat” euclidean space; a 2-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like a plane, a 3-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like normal 3-dimensional space, a 4-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like normal 4-dimensional space, and so on.

In fact, these spaces look so much like normal space that we can do calculus on them, which is why the subject concerned with manifolds is called “differential geometry”. Again, the reason why we would want to do calculus on spaces that look a lot like normal space but aren’t is obvious: if we live on a sphere (as we basically do), we’d like to be able to figure out how to, e.g., minimize our distance travelled (and, thereby, fuel consumed and time spent in transit) when flying from Denver to London, which is the sort of thing for which calculus is an excellent tool that gives good answers; unfortunately, since the Earth isn’t flat, we can’t use regular old freshman calculus.² As it turns out, there are all kinds of applications of this stuff, from relatively simple engineering to theoretical physics.

So, anyway, the point is that manifolds look, at least locally, like plain vanilla euclidean space. Of course, even the notion of “plain vanilla euclidean space” is an abstraction beyond what we can really visualize for dimensions higher than three, but this is exactly the sort of thing von Neumann was talking about: you can’t really visualize 10 dimensional space, but you “know” that it looks pretty much like regular 3 dimensional space with 7 more axes thrown in at, to quote Douglas Adams, “right angles to reality”.

Okay, so the claim is that SO(3), our set of special orthogonal matrices, is a 3-dimensional manifold. On the face of it, it might be surprising that the set of rotations of three space should itself look anything like three space. On the other hand, this sort of makes sense: consider a single vector (say of unit length, though it doesn’t really matter) based at the origin and then apply every possible rotation to it. This will give us a set of vectors based at the origin, all of length 1 and pointing any which way you please. In fact, if you look just at the heads of all the vectors, you’re just talking about a sphere of radius 1 centered at the origin. So, in a sense, the special orthognal matrices look like a sphere. This is both right and wrong; the special orthogonal matrices do look a lot like a sphere, but like a 3-sphere (that is, a sphere living in four dimensions), not a 2-sphere (i.e., what we usually call a “sphere”).

In fact, locally SO(3) looks almost exactly like a 3-sphere; globally, however, it’s a different story. In fact, SO(3) looks globally like , which requires one more excursion into the realm of abstraction. , or real projective 3-space, is an abstract space where we’ve taken regular 3-space and added a “plane at infinity”. This sounds slightly wacky, but it’s a generalization of what’s called the projective plane, which is basically the same thing but in a lower dimension. To get the projective plane, we add a “line at infinity” rather than a plane, and the space has this funny property that if you walk through the line at infinity, you get flipped into your mirror image; if you were right-handed, you come out the other side left-handed (and on the “other end” of the plane). But not to worry, if you walk across the infinity line again, you get flipped back to normal.

Okay, sounds interesting, but how do we visualize such a thing? Well, the “line at infinity” thing is good, but infinity is pretty hard to visualize, too. Instead we think about twisting the sphere in a funny way:

You can construct the projective plane as follows: take a sphere. Imagine taking a point on the sphere, and its antipodal point, and pulling them together to meet somewhere inside the sphere. Now do it with another pair of points, but make sure they meet somewhere else. Do this with every single point on the sphere, each point and its antipodal point meeting each other but meeting no other points. It’s a weird, collapsed sphere that can’t properly live in three dimensions, but I imagine it as looking a bit like a seashell, all curled up on itself. And pink.

This gives you the real projective plane, . If you do the same thing, but with a 3-sphere (again, remember that this is the sphere living in four dimensions), you get . Of course, you can’t even really visualize or, for that matter, a 3-sphere, so really visualizing is going to be out of the question, but we have a pretty good idea, at least by analogy, of what it is. This is, as von Neumann indicates, one of those things you “just get used to”.

Now, as it turns out, if you do the math, SO(3) and look the same in a very precise sense (specifically, they’re diffeomorphic). On the face of it, of course, this is patently absurd, but if you have the right picture in mind, this is the sort of thing you might have guessed. The basic idea behind the proof linked above is that we can visualize 3-space as living inside 4-space (where it makes sense to talk about multiplication); here, a rotation (remember, that’s all the special orthogonal matrices/transformations really are) is just like conjugating by a point on the sphere. And certainly conjugating by a point is the same as conjugating by its antipodal point, since the minus signs will cancel eachother in the latter case. But this is exactly how we visualized , as the points on the sphere with antipodal points identified!

I’m guessing that most of the above doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I would urge you to heed von Neumann’s advice: don’t necessarily try to “understand” it so much as just to “get used to it”; the understanding can only come after you’ve gotten used to the concepts and, most importantly, the pictures. Which was really, I suspect, von Neumann’s point, anyway: of course we can understand things in mathematics, but we can only understand them after we suspend our disbelief and allow ourselves to get used to them. And, of course, make good pictures.

² As a side note, calculus itself is a prime example of mathematical abstraction. The problem with the world is that most of the stuff in it isn’t straight. If it were, we could have basically stopped after the Greeks figured out a fair amount of geometry. And, even worse, not only is non-straight stuff (like, for example, a graph of the position of a falling rock plotted against time) all over the place, but it’s hard to get a handle on. So, instead of just giving up and going home, we approximate the curvy stuff in the world with straight lines, which we have a good grasp of. As long as we’re dealing with stuff that’s curvy (rather than, say, broken into pieces) this actually works out pretty well and, once you get used to it all, it’s easy to forget what the whole point was, anyway (this, I suspect, is the main reason calculus instruction is so uniformly bad; approximating curvy stuff with straight lines works so well that those who who are supposed to teach the process lose sight of what’s really going on).

It’s almost comforting that such invidious fluffy-minded sludge as this is floating around, as it seems, like religion, to keep the middle-brows hypnotized by “beautiful sentiments” which are so vague as to keep them from actually getting together and doing anything. It’s sort of weird to hear this weakly Marxist social-democratic pap which used to be shouted from the rooftops now being whispered in a low monotonous whine. The author avows his fealty to Jeremy Bentham, not Marx, and calls it utilitarianism not Marxism, but there are many illegitimate fathers along this line of thought.

The root of the idea is that, now that neuroscience has supposedly made it possible to actually identify what makes us happy, the idea of happiness has become quantifiable, and hence a program of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people has become objectively possible. However, the author does not make the slightest effort to apply these wonders of modern science to actually determining what the alleged sources of human happiness are. The neuroscience tack is really just a defensive ploy to ward off the eternal charges that utilitarinism is simply a euphemism for an authoritarian imposition of values. As for espousing his positive program for what constitutes human happiness, it is simply the usual liberal middle-class canards, with not surprisingly a socialist edge: more time to spend with family, a decent wage for everyone, blah blah blah. But he seems to make two pretty criminally unsubstantiated assumptions: one is these sources are essentially the same for everyone, or at least could be under certain conditions, and the other is that they do not inherently conflict with anyone else’s.

I say under certain conditions could be, because in evaluating our current society he seems to privilege envy of other’s material well-being as the principal determinant of happiness. His theory is that above a certain level of material subsistence people are motivated primarily by status-seeking and the desire for a high rank within their social group. Therefore, the increasing wealth of the society will not increase happiness because people measure their well-being relative to the group, not by their absolute prosperity. This is always been a flaw in the concept of the “war against poverty”; I’m not sure it’s much of an argument for socialist economic redistribution. But actually if you read his section on the value of income taxes carefully, he doesn’t even seem to be arguing that they are useful insofar as they can be redirected to the less prosperous, although he does evidently believe that a certain amount of money contributes more to the happiness of a poor person than to a rich one’s. Rather, he seems to think that taking money away from the properous is valuable in and of itself, because it will supposedly make them less focused on the “rat race,” more family-oriented, etc., etc. In short he seems to be advocating a net impoverishment of society.

All of which may be consistent with the program of a good little socialist, but does not necessarily accord marvelously with his own evidence about the supposedly quantified happiness of humanity. The research that he cites non-specifically supposedly indicates that people’s feeling of happiness has not risen in the last half-century, but he does not cite anything which indicates that it has necessarily declined. He cites rising rates of depression and crime as presumably implicit indicators of greater unhappiness, but he does not seem to acknowledge the possibility that in our hyper-medicated and surveillance-based society perhaps people simply report depression and crime more. In any event, if roughly similar numbers of people today as in the ‘50’s report themselves happy (and we believe them), despite the increase in prosperity, that might perhaps indicate that happiness is not fixed to material well-being. Which may be consistent with his general point, but not with his idea of increasing happiness by manipulating income levels.

And even if it did, it seems rather difficult to countenance any social program predicated upon appealing to one of humanity’s most depraved instincts, namely envy. The author acknowledges that his ideal of taxation is mainly motivated by the desire to pander to people’s envy, but he seems to think that their envy will be sated by the loss of prosperity of those around them and that after that point there will be no more. So the envy of the less prosperous will be satisfied by the losses accrued by the more prosperous, which will somehow not be counter-balanced by the chagrin of the more prosperous at the prospect of seeing their status diminished. Very logical.

One of the more egregious presumptions of utilitarians is that non-utilitarian social systems somehow aren’t concerned with seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. On the contrary, that’s the defining problem of practically every social and political theory I can think of, and they all either seek or claim to have found the answer—whether such a solution exists, I have my doubts, but that’s why I’m a skeptic about politics. This is a handy trick by utilitarians: they say “I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Which is practically begging the question: “As opposed to whom?” It’s useful because it tends to conceal the fact that their real agenda is generally somewhat more specific, and tends to consist in the autocratic notion that one or two measures of social living can be authoritatively determined to be the sources of happiness, and then divided up in a centralized fashion. Those that are the most insistent on the idea of liberty are generally those that are the most skeptical about the possibility of the notion of happiness being either quantitatively defined or generalizable. In other words, only indviduals can determine their own sources of happiness.

For the author, on the other hand, the fact that certain stimuli trigger certain areas of the brain at the times when test subjects profess pleasure has solved the problem of determining happiness. Of course, as mentioned, he never really bothers with the results that those studies have yielded. Somehow the fact that he considers envy to be a principal element of human happiness does not place very severe limits on the harmoniousness of individual happiness. Nor does it constitute a tyranny of the majority, because he claims that in an ideal utilitarian society the happiness of the most unhappy would be considered of pre-eminent importance. Of course, at the beginning of the article he cited the equal importance of each individual’s happiness as the fouding tenet of his theory, but I’m sure it all sorts out in the end.

Among social factors responsible for unhappiness, he cites divorce and unemployment as of pre-eminent importance. Of course, rates of both divorce and unemployment in the crassly materialistic and religious United States are much lower than in the much more overtly utilitarian-embracing Europe, but it would be a bit embarassing for him to admit this after avowing that all traditional value-systems outside of utilitarianism and “individualism” are dead.

Personally the question of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people doesn’t exactly compel me constantly, although the issue of personal happiness tends to impose itself intransigently. I would have thought that evolutionary biology would have provided an adequate explanation of this, as well as the recurrence of what we call altruism. But such an idea of course suggests that happiness, whatever that is, is not really the point of our little existences, and that the more imperious competitiveness of life will ultimately subvert all of these little trifles of pleasure and pain. But in the meantime, we have these debased statistical notions of happiness to amuse us in an idle hour.

It seems to me that if one’s “objective” measure of happiness is electrical stimulation in the cerebral cortex, the most efficient utilitarian solution to the problem of human happiness would be strap everyone onto hospital gurneys and stimulate the “happiness” part of their brain all day long. If one does not wish to be this deterministic about it, perhaps one should allow more latitute to individuals to discover their own conception of happiness. Personally, I have found happiness generally to be an idea for the unhappy and something rarely spoken of by the happiness; mention of practically guarantees that it is not present in the environment where it is uttered. I don’t deny that what you might call love is the real bridge between personal happiness and moral obligations, and the only true means by which the desires of oneself and of others are united, but such a sentiment can never be mandated; it is entirely resistant to intellectual compulsion. Utilitarianism, which sometimes does a decent job of faking morality, is nevertheless ultimately predicated on the pleasure principle, and hence is wholly inadequate to uniting the moral and the pleasurable except when love truly pertains. In that case, of course, political theory is entirely superfluous, which is why this is all a waste of time.

p.s. I don’t claim that people’s behavior necessarily reflects what really would make them happy, but presumably it does at least reflect what they consciously value. Hence, if I were the author I would have been a bit skeptical of using the results of “surveys” of what people claim to value when the results don’t correlate with their behavior, i.e. they claim that spending time with family is most important, but they spend a disproportiante amount of time working (at least according to him). So either people are not really being forthright (consciously or unconsciously) in responding to surveys, or there is not actually a problem of priorities. In either case, he’s way over-valuing surveys as a guide to what will make people happy.

For any of you that may be reading this via RSS, the change from Movable Type to WordPress means that the RSS feed for selling waves is now located at http://www.sellingwaves.com/feed/

If you’re interested, that is.

Auch im Regierungsbezirk Detmold ist der Kalte Krieg vorbei, so dass die Bezirksregierung die früher mit öffentlichen Zuschüssen geförderten Schutzräume in Privathäusern nicht mehr für notwendig hält. Das (teilweise) Verbot, solche Räume baulich zu verändern, hat sie daher neulich durch eine

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In Part 24 of 'The Holy Spirit' study series, we embark upon a study of each individual gift mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12, beginning with the spiritual gift of the 'Word of Knowledge'. What is it? How do we recognise it? How do we receive it? David uses many scriptures to show the biblical foundation of this gift and ways God can reveal knowledge to us today for the building up of faith in others. 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)...

The church very often cannot receive the message of revival because it is so bound. Like Lazarus, the church may be 'alive', but spiritually bound. Many Christians as individuals are in this position and need deliverance and freedom. In Part 4 of 'Revival Now', David talks about how we can be set free as individuals, and the incredible impact that one soul saved and set free can have, even on a whole community. We need to rediscover the message of freedom in the Gospel of the Kingdom. We need 'A New Freedom Movement'! This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format...

If the account in Judges 19 was made into a movie, it probably would have an R-18 rating or worse! It is a horrendous story of the Levite and his concubine, which displays the dire spiritual and moral state God’s people had fallen into at that time. But, what is often overlooked amid this carnage is the total and utter disregard for the humanity of the woman in the story. In this Topical message entitled 'Redeeming Eve', David looks at how Eve and womenhood has been redeemed in the New Covenant, and the place of honour that a woman - Mary - had in bearing God in flesh into our world. This radically speaks of the great value women have as God's daughters, irrespective of how culture, society or religion views them. This is a liberating message especially for women, but also carries a great challenge to men and the church in general regarding how they have treated women down through the centuries, and even to this very day. This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format...

Join us for 'Helping Others To Freedom', a series based on David Legge's book, 'Breaking Through Barriers to Blessing'. We will explore how we can be set free from bondages of Satan and healed from wounds of the heart. This study is for people who need set free themselves, or for those who want to be used to help others into freedom. In this introductory episode, David lays down some biblical foundations and considers how freedom ministry is something the church is commissioned by Jesus to engage in today. 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)...

In this series based on David Legge's book, 'Breaking Through Barriers to Blessing', we continue exploring how we can be set free from bondages of Satan and healed from wounds of the heart. This series is for people who need set free themselves, or for those who want to be used to help others into freedom. In this second session, 'The Necessity Of Confession And Repentance', David looks at the issues of sin and how confession and repentance is a necessary step toward freedom in Christ. We need to own our ungodly behaviours. If we are going to get help ourselves or help others we've got to be real with ourselves and see sin the way God sees it. 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)...

In the third instalment of 'Helping Others To Freedom', we explore together one of the major blockages to blessing and freedom – unforgiveness. Resentment, bitterness and offense are obstacles that prevent many moving into the liberty and healing God intends for their lives. In this session we will see how unforgiveness imprisons us and can give the enemy rights to torture and torment us. We will also learn what true 'Forgiveness' is and some of the common misconceptions. Most importantly we'll give some helpful steps to move into the freedom of God's forgiveness for ourselves and toward others. This episode is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

In the fourth episode of our video series on 'Helping Others To Freedom', we take time to consider 'Soul-Ties' - a term that describes a heart tie in any relationship, good or bad. When these ties are bad they can exert a negative influence upon our lives, hindering us moving forward to maturity in Christ. In this session we talk about what soul-ties look like in the positive and the negative, and how to break free from such spiritual bondage in order to experience release and any healing necessary. 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)...

In the fifth session of our 'Helping Others To Freedom' series, we explore 'Wounds And The Healing Of The Heart'. How do our hearts get hurt? How do these wounds set us up for both habitual sin and demonic bondage? We discuss the various sources of our woundedness and, most importantly, how we can get healing for these wounds. It is vital to distinguish wounds that need healed, from sins that need repented of, and demons that must be expelled. This session is 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 very practical session, we look at a fictional case study, which you can do as an individual or as a group if you are following this course with others. As 'Frank' comes to you to receive prayer for his problems, from his story, you must assess the underlying root causes of his issues and how he can receive healing and freedom. David will allow you to pause in this session and take time to consider some helpful questions which are provided for you. Then David will continue, giving some suggested answers to those questions. This exercise helps us contemplate how the principles we have been learning might be outworked in a hypothetical 'real-life' scenario. This session is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

In Part 7 of our 'Helping Others To Freedom' series, we come to the issue of 'Generational Iniquity and Curse'. Can the sins of our ancestors affect us today? Is this concept biblical? In this session, we consider what scripture teaches about the matter of generational iniquity and curse and how the death of Jesus Christ on the cross sets us free from these influences. This study is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

In Part 8 of 'Helping Others To Freedom', we learn that the demonic is an area that needs to be handled sensitively and cautiously. Yet we must also acknowledge that the demonic realm is very real and often an area of blockage to blessing in people's lives. Through this study on 'Occult, Idolatry And Freemasonry' we find out: how people can be affected by the demonic; whether or not Christians can be demonically influenced; how the enemy can get power in our lives; and how to get the freedom promised in the gospel of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. This session is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

In Session 9 of 'Helping Others To Freedom', David addresses many practical questions that often arise around healing and deliverance, also considering some of the mysterious matters that can confuse people. This episode on 'Practicalities And Mysteries Of Healing And Deliverance' should be extremely useful for anyone engaging in prayer ministry. This session is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

In the concluding session of 'Helping Others To Freedom', we look at how the principles of personal healing and deliverance apply to whole regions, and are essentially the same principles that can prepare a region for revival awakening. This is 'Revival And Deliverance - The Bigger Picture' - God sets individuals free in order to heal and deliver the world. This session is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format and in HD video on our YouTube Channel (https://youtube.com/PreachTheWord)...

In our second study in 'Overcoming Adversity', we learn 'What You Need To Know'. From the amazing Romans 8, David explains how God has given us the tools to overcome adversity. There is a special understanding that we have when we are 'in Christ' that causes us to triumph even in the worst afflictions. This comes from knowing who we are and what we have in Christ - knowing what is ahead of us in Christ; what God has purposed for us in Christ and how secure we are in Him. These keys to overcoming are available to all generations of believers whatever the current global challenges or personal trials we face. This is a message of encouragement that we all need in these days. This message is available now from https://www.preachtheword.com in MP3 audio format...

In this introductory message on 'The Glorious Presence Of God', we look at the different 'kinds' of God's presence and how at times, God manifests His presence to us, particularly in times of revival. Then David focuses on God's relationship with Adam and Eve before sin entered humanity and how our sin impacts the presence of God in our lives. This message is available now from https://www.preachtheword.com in MP3 audio format...

Whose message are we listening to? Whose report are we believing? The press, social media, medicine, or Gods Word? What voices are we allowing to influence us, and are those voices faith-inducing or faith-reducing? Isaiah 53 is such a well-known scripture about the death of Jesus and the salvation He has purchased for us. But many have neglected that this core prophetic scripture is explicit that healing has been purchased for us at the cross of Jesus. Learn what Isaiah 53 truly teaches and then ask, 'Do you believe this report?' or, whose report are you believing? This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format...

El próximo domingo 24 de noviembre, el reconocido grupo musical Candela & Son ofrecerá un concierto solidario en Toledo con el propósito de recaudar fondos para los afectados por la reciente DANA. El evento, que comenzará a las 19.00 horas en el pabellón del Colegio Nuestra Señora de los Infantes, tiene un costo de entrada […]

Artículo publicado en : Concierto Solidario De Candela&Son En Toledo Por La DANA: ¡Consigue Tus Entradas Ya!

The Gophers visit the Graveyard of Terror and get a little bit more for the price of admission than the other guests at the Haunt....

Enjoy this special October edition of Bedtime Stories My Kids Love.

No worries, the Adventures of the Man in the Can will continue in November.


MP3 File - Click Here to Download Podcast

The animals float past the dump and their arch enemies BYDYS the Snake Lord and Greystrike the Rat King. But they are watched in the darkness by the eyes of two predators, Crag the Crow and Baron the Wolf. What will happen next?

Find out in today's Adventures of the Man in the Can.




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The version was successful and Charlotte is now in the correct position. I checked into Labor and Delivery  at 6 and was discharged around 8:30. It was painful but quick. Now I feel like we are in countdown mode. Lord willing, we will be meeting Charlotte face to face in just a couple of weeks!!

I just returned home from seeing the doctor and sweet baby girl has flipped again. I guess she just likes being breech. So, we have decided it's best to have a csection. There were many factors I discussed with my doctor before making this decision. He delivered every single one of our kids and I'm so glad it appears that he will also be taking care of Miss Charlotte. We have our date and, Lord willing, she will be here end of next week. Hopefully, the next post will have a picture of our new little one!