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James’ post The long view of a blog is a terrific first read of the day for me today. New month. New week. New day. New UTC time offset. And it’s about one of my favorite questions, “what does my website mean to me?” The modality and presentation of content is part of the long view of...

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In 2016 the morning after the election I went to work early. Looking back at my camera roll from that day, here’s Batman, with a reminder. DON’T BELIEVE THOSE CRACKPOT LIES ABOUT PEOPLE WHO WORSHIP DIFFERENTLY, OR WHOSE SKIN IS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR, OR WHOSE PARENTS COME FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY. REMEMBER OUR AMERICAN HERITAGE...

My father James Crawford was interviewed about his experiences in the service particularly during Vietnam and around the Battle of Firebase Ripcord. I am so proud of him sharing his oral history with the GVSU Veterans History Project. The video go his oral history is on YouTube and will be stored in the archives of...

If history is going to rhyme, then I’m going to remember the prior verses. One of them was http://neveragain.tech which I signed as a matter of conscience 8 years ago. I am still in strong agreement with the aims of that pledge I signed. And it is my duty to spread the word to my...

What do Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Harry Styles, Alicia Keys, Sting, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Ice-T, Queen Latifah, and Taylor Swift all have in common?

(C’mon, actually think about the question for a bit, don’t immediately jump to the answer. While there is a tendency for people to want immediate gratification, in fact, that whole quick shot of info, be it trivial, made-up, useful, or even critical, is predicated on things like websites, there is something to be said for the satisfaction that can be derived from figuring things out, whether this is solving Wordle or answering the question above.)

(At this point I figure that there may have been a sufficient amount of physical distance on this page between the question and the answer, and certainly if you’ve read through this parenthetical material you’ve had a time gap which, as we are at words right now, that’s about 30 seconds of silent reading time or just under a minute if you’re annunciating it, so. . . .)

They are all members of SAG-AFTRA, the trade union for actors.

As such, they are all potentially affected by a recent agreement between SAG-AFTRA and Narrativ, which describes itself as “A Marketplace for Advertisers to Buy Talent Likeness.”

Note, not “Talent.” But a similitude of talent.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

Video: The Hives – “Rigor Mortis Radio”

Directed by Filip Nilsson. From The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, out now.

Remember when CGI was just CGI and not A.I.?

Or maybe the Hives are just really good dancers. It’s possible. Things are very groovy in Sweden and the people are very healthy and nimble. So you never know.

(Journalistic integrity spoiler: You, in fact, do know. The actual dancers — Alex Brown, Tom Hardiman, Connor Pearson, Reece Woodier, and Jacob Whawell — are credited in the video.)

I’ve seen the Hives in concert several times and their natural moves are impressive enough. Do they really need to employ deepfake technology to impress us even more? Maybe they do, because this video is fun and hilarious. And of course the song is great too.

But, like with all computer generated imagery, you find yourself looking for the glitches and cruising down the uncanny valley. It’s real looking enough, but not totally convincing, which makes it a little creepy. And, unsurprisingly, that creepiness factor works with the song’s lyrics.

You’ve never seen me look so good before
This silver lining and this golden glow
This shine, all mine
Looking like I’m fresh off an assembly line.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

One of the most famous paintings of Catalonian surrealist Salvador Dali is The Persistence of Memory, the work that prominently features melted clocks. Dali produced the painting when he was 26. He was to live until age 84 (d: 1989) and over his career was to produce more than 1,500 paintings with his “paranoiac-critical” method that is highly distinctive, combining the bizarre with hyper-realistic detail. (What is also somewhat bizarre is that The Salvador Dail Museum, which holds a massive amount of Dali’s work (in addition to paintings and drawings, he produced sculptures, photos, jewelry, and more), is located in St. Petersburg—not the one where The Hermitage is located, but the one where the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team plays.)

The Persistence of Memory has not only gotten a tribute from such popular shows as “Doctor Who” and “The Simpsons,” but there are countless posters of it that have adorned the walls of college dorms since the late 1960s, when various popular drugs caused the perception of things that resembled what Dali rendered. (One interesting aspect of these posters is that while they are typically the common 24 x 36 inches size, The Persistence of Memory measures just 9.5 x 13 inches (which is almost the size of an album cover: 12.4 x 12.4 inches).)

Dali was one of those artists who became as business-savvy as he was aesthetically capable, something of a forerunner for artists including Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

On February 16, 2011, IBM’s Watson DeepQA computer won Jeopardy!, beating trivia maven Brad Rutter and current Jeopardy! host and no slouch when it comes to knowing things that it is strange that things that aren’t databases know, Ken Jennings.

According to IBM, to get the computer to where it needed to be the company assigned more than 24 scientists, engineers and programmers, including a guy who’d won $10,000 on Jeopardy!

IBM: “It took the team five years to prefect the question-answering system.”

And the system “was a room-size computer consisting of 10 racks holding 90 servers, with a total of 2,880 processor cores.”

Rutter and Jennings? Just a couple of guys.

The idea for developing the system followed IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeating chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997—although it should be noted that when the two first faced off in 1996 Kasparov beat the computer, 4-2.

And similarly, Watson didn’t win from the start, either.

There were two matches over three days.

In the first match, the clue for the question to be created for “Final Jeopardy” in the category “U.S.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

This is a reasoned argument by Joanna (Why I Don't Vaccinate My Children) posted on Erwin Alber's VINE facebook page which was started in 2009, to help parents make an informed choice on behalf of their children. Image credit topnews.ae Joanna responds (below) to a lady who published an article saying that unvaccinated children are the cause of recent increased pertussis (whooping cough) outbreaks in areas where vaccination is actively pursued......

This is another installment of research into the biochemistry of HIV and Aids by Cal Crilly, an Australian who finds himself fascinated with the intricacies of biology. Crilly analyzes the seemingly unconnected studies that show the biochemical changes that accompany the presence of numerous retroviruses - one of them called HIV - in humans. The mechanism that makes retroviruses appear is hypomethylation, and it is the same mechanism that accompanies pregnancy and inflammation. Those retroviruses are produced in the course of normal biological activity and they are not infectious. There are many different types (ever heard of HIV 'mutating'?). As an aside, we declare pregnant mothers to be "HIV positive" as pregnancy causes the presence of retroviruses in the course of normal biological activity, and those harmless endogenous retroviruses react with what's generally called an "HIV" test. Certain basic nutrients - Selenium, Folate, B12, B6, Choline are the most important - counteract hypomethylation of the cells and thereby calm the production of human endogenous retroviruses. The toxic Aids drug AZT causes hypermethylation but it is so destructive of normal cell processes that most patients die. The 'life prolonging' effect of HAART, the drug cocktail that is prescribed to Aids patients today is due to a sharp decrease in the dosage of deadly AZT in the cocktail. Cal demonstrates those facts and more with reference to studies you can find as well, if you're interested in the details. Meanwhile we continue to treat immune compromised people with drugs that further compromise the immune system and - in many cases - kill the patient. When is medicine going to start treating those people by insisting on better eating and supplementation supplying the correct nutrients? How long will it take until the toxic drugs are phased out in favor of real prevention?...

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....

We have previously published articles by the Australian AIDS-and-biology researcher Cal Crilly, and here is yet another installment. Cal is someone who digs into scientific studies. He does biological detective work and finds gems that hide in plain view, things we don't normally understand and that even the experts do not see as they are not trained to put discordant facts together and question basic assumptions. What this new article tells us is that retroviruses - the same kind that are thought to cause immune deficiency or AIDS - are useful and necessary for our immune system to function correctly. That of course tends to leave the hypothesis of a viral causation of AIDS in grave trouble. I say 'hypothesis' because no one has proven, or even come close to a coherent explanation for, the mechanism of AIDS causation by HIV. How does a retrovirus that is by nature a benign particle, cause devastation of the immune system? Here we have several scientific studies published in the world's finest journals, which attest to the fact that retroviruses are part and parcel of the human organism, that they are needed to provide certain defensive capabilities against invaders, and that they are not pathogenic. So we might ask ourselves why HIV tests (thought to indicate the presence of a retrovirus) are still performed, and why doctors are still recommending the use of toxic anti-retroviral drugs to kill what, rather than a foreign invader, appears to be part of normal human metabolic processes. Cal Crilly lays it out for you, citing and linking the sources......

Multiple sclerosis is curable if recognised as Lyme disease. The cause is a cyst-forming bacterium, Borrelia Burgdorferi, which causes lesions that degrade brain and spinal cord tissue.

I may have bored everyone to death about this topic, but I have my last exam tomorrow, so here is my final thought about what distinguishes science. Most of the descriptions of science that I know of don’t really explain how science progresses without falling into a quaint mythology about approaching some metaphysical truth. Kuhn doesn’t, Popper doesn’t, Pierre Duhem doesn’t, and I myself have neglected to account for it to some extent.

I think the key is that science, at least experimental science, is essentially concerned with predicting the future. Every hypothesis, in essence, is a prediction about the future. What distinguishes science from other forms of prediction is the emphasis on verification, the insistence on framing predictions in such a way that when they are tested they can be decisively answered positively or negatively. In other, the goal is not to not be wrong but to achieve a definitive positive answer. Even a definite negative answer is preferable to none at all.

Some philosophers, like Duhem, claim that individual hypotheses can neither be verified nor falsified, because a whole body of theories and assumptions lies behind, and is implicated in, every hypothesis, and thus one can never be sure just what has been validated or failed. While that’s true, it is also nonetheless true that when the result of an experiment does not match a hypothetical prediction the hypothesis has been proven invalid as it stands. In other words, no matter what went wrong, the body of theories and assumptions that led to the hypothesis do not work as they now stand. Thus, things will have to be changed until they produce accurate predictions. Conversely, if a hypotheis is corroborated with a positive answer, the theories behind it stand validated until a hypothesis receives a negative answer.

In other words, experimentation does not serve to lead by induction to new theories, but rather theories serve to make possible specific predictions about the future which can be verified decisively. This at least is the goal. The goal is not a description which is true or corresponds to the truth, or at least that is not the immediate goal. When the facts or events are given, anyone can interpret them, and the fact that these events are known can mask the relative merits of the theory which interprets them. The idea that theories are validated by their correspondence to experimental results is tautological: the first condition of any theory is that it accounts for the experimental results that gave rise to it. But the only way to determine whether it is simply a theory to fit the facts or whether it is truly generalizable is to test it against unknown facts via prediction. Of course, predictions are almost always only approximately true, so the specific point of acceptability is not provided for by the general concept, but, at least in theory, decisive verification of predictions provides a simple, clear, and immensely useful criterion by which to evaluate theories. In my opinion, this explains much of the evolutionary capacity of science (I mean evolution in the more contemporary sense of diversification and selection rather than the old idea of teleological perfectibility).

If experimental prediction is the mark of science, this leaves the question of whether purely descriptive disciplines like zoology and areas like quantum theory where predictions are inherently statistical and ambiguous are scientific. Zoology and the like I think are, because hypothetical prediction inherently implies classification. In other words, by saying “under these conditions, such an event will happen,” one classifies, in other words sets parameters. The goal of zoology seems to be not simply to describe members of a group but to describe all the characteristics which define the group, set the parameters of the group, which is the first step towards making predictions about the group. So it is an element of science, but incomplete. As for quantum, I avow my profound ignorance of it, so let my opinion be taken in that light. As far as I understand, the stastical laws in that realm allow predictions in aggregate, so I am inclined to view it as still within the domain of science, at least in spirit, but of course the lack of decisiveness of statistical predictions gravely weakens the predictive power of science in this area, and I have already suggested that the rise of relativity and quantum in my view are intimately tied to the waning of the scientific age. Finally, it should be noted that while making correct predictions is the goal of science, that should be qualified by saying that the predictions are intended to answer general questions concerning the nature of things and establish specific knowledge. Optics or engineering, for example, are not science, although they once were, because all the major questions have been answered, and they no longer concern gaining further knowledge of the future and the universe, but rather in applying that knowledge to constructing specific objects.

So the goal and value of science is in predicting, and thus establishing knowledge of, the future, and the scientific method is the means of arriving at correct predictions. This is not to discard my earlier contention about the ideological basis of science, because the efficacy of prediction is based on the relative value of induction, and successful induction relies on the essential regularity and stability of the universe. In other words, in order to draw a general theory from a specific experimental result and vice versa, the universe must be considered as basically the same everywhere and at every time, which in turn implies that it be material, matter being defined as that which cannot change itself and is therefore static. It seems to me that if in quantum theory, for example, phenomena become genuinely dependent on the observeer in ways that are neither generalizable nor predicatable, it cannot continue to remain truly a science. It would seem to me that the branches of physics which are entirely theoretical are for practical purposes basically metaphysics.

This model depends on a linear notion of time. It might seem the opposite, that if the physical laws are eternal and universal time is actually opposed to this insofar as it represents dynamism, change. But in reality the sameness of the universe upon which science is predicated is not a a sameness at any particular moment, but rather a sameness of behavior. In other words, a view of the universe from a materialist perspective at any given moment shows that everything in the univese is different in the sense of being distinct. However, the idea is that under the same conditions all matter (or whatever you call the fundamental substances) will act in the same way. Without the steady march of time, this unity of behavior disappears, and there are simply a million disparate entities. Thus, space (and time) as properties of the universe are essential to science.

As for what the value of science is, I’m afraid I can’t generalize about that. From reading my recent posts one can most likely guess at my views, but I will simply say that one’s view of the efficacy of science in making the universe understandable will probably depend on entirely on whether one a) believes that linear time is a real property of the universe and b) if so, whether true induction is possible.

p.s. I should note that Henri Poincaré anticipates me in seeing the epistemological value of science as consisting mainly of its ability to make predictions rather than its descriptive correspondence to reality. However, he also thinks that theories are conventions and definitions of concepts, not true descriptions of physical phenomena based necessarily on experimental results. He thinks the conjunction of these two make theories relatively independent of their experimental bases, which he regards as a good thing because it creates a body of stable principles in which we can trust. I think that that is neither true nor a good value. The emphasis is on predicting correctly, not creating stable beliefs (if you want unchanging beliefs, what not join the Church?), and if generating true predictions is the goal, theories should be more rather than less sensitive to their experimental roots.

p.p.s. Since my exam was about scientific laws and causality, I should add that while scientific activity depends on a belief in time, not all scientific theories do: the law of conservation of energy, for example, I believe is essentially atemporal.

I might deduce one final consequence of a skepticism in regards to temporality and causality. If our only experience of the world is of an existent reality, such that something uncreated or destroyed is literally unimaginable, the superfluity of religion becomes very evident. Since it is on the basis of a parallel between finite objects, which are presumed to be necessarily created, and the universe in its totality, which in turn therefore needs its Creator, that modern religions ultimately justify themselves, if creation, rather than lack of creation, is taken to be the phenomenon unjustified by experience then the concept of God is unwarranted.

Just some cheerful words to chew on while our politicians wear their enamels off congratulating themselves about the Iraqi election:

“The collapse of the rival giant [the Soviet Union] has exaggerated America’s apparent strength because it has so much more economic muscle than any single rival. But for many decades America’s share of the world’s economic output has been in decline. Think of a see-saw. America at one end is now easily outweighed by any substantial grouping at the other, and most of those powers are on friendly terms with each other. America’s modesty in 1945 understated its muscle, just as Bushite vanity overstates it today. He has over-reached. His country is overstretched, losing economic momentum, losing world leadership, and losing the philosophical plot. America is running into the sand.”

Maybe I’ve been hanging out in France, where declinism (both French and American) never goes out of fashion, for too long, but that assessment seems more convincing than this disappointing “We are so great—right now” rebuttal by Victor Hanson. And the CIA seems to concur (though admittedly in more neutral language):

“The likely emergence of China and India … as new major global players—similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.”

At the conjunction of this critique of reductionism in physics and this interview with Benoit Mandelbrot I think one sees the same basic dynamic at work: a devaluation of simplicity and generalization in math and science, what I suppose Mandelbrot might call “smoothness,” and a preference for the complex and the multifarious. To some extent this seems to cut against the basic scientific impulse to simplify, to generalize, which is what a law or an equation generally does. In Laughlin I think there is even a certain disillusionment with realism perhaps not totally dissimilar from that in the analysis of language by dear friend Wittgenstein. Although, by encouraging investigation of the specifics and intricacies of phenomena which seem to be superficially covered by the most general and basic laws and to give up idle speculation about the far nether regions of the universe in space and time which cannot in any way be corroborated, he seems to be trying to bring physics back into the solid world of relative certainties and reasonable evidence, it seems to me that this is a tacit admission that the theories which seem to cover and explain adequately all phenomena except for those extreme edges are in actuality insufficient to represent the richness of even the most mundane levels of reality.

Just as in the case of the over-heated discoveries of Wittgeinstein and Cambridge group, this sudden realization that the broad and universal physical laws established and the abstract shapes used to represent them don’t really reflect the full multiplicity of reality seems a little phony to me. I mean, isn’t that the entire point? Isn’t that abstractness and simplicity supposed to yoke all of that complexity within a reasonable level of comprehensibility sufficient to possibly predict other phenomena, or at least relate them to what we have already seen? Now maybe we see a revision in the valuation of these ideals, and in both Laughlin and Mandelbrot a movement away from final solutions, formulations and summations. Seemingly nothing out-of-the-ordinary about that, but if one ceases to regard oneself as capturing the essence of a phenomenon in an equation or image describing it, then that necessarily leads to a re-evaluation of the type of work one is doing and the standard by which it is judged. Let’s put it this way: although there are many rules which often govern both the form and content of a form (some, granted, quite idiosyncratic and individual), it would be quite ludicrous to suggest that a listing of those rules would be an adequate reflection or description of the poem, let alone itself be a poem, or equivalent to the poem.

Philosophically, I’m not troubled by this as many scientists seem to be. Despite the many declarations that Newton had discovered the very mechanism by which God controlled the universe, he himself complained famously that he felt like a dilettante on the shoreline picking up stones and shells that amused him while neglecting the vast ocean before him. This seems unnecessary if one regards theorems as essentially creations, not mirrors of nature, and hence judge the cathedral of scientific knowledge by its height above the ground rather than as an incomplete ladder to the heavens.

RIP, H.S.T.

(See also “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Regrettably necessary,” and “Don’t Vote!”)

So blöd, wie es auf den ersten Blick aussehen mag, war die Frau keineswegs, die am 19.9.2007 einen Ehescheidungsantrag beim Schleswig-Holsteinischen Verwaltungsgericht einreichte. Welches Ziel hatte sie wohl mit ihrer - laut OLG Schleswig rechtsmissbräuchlichen, im Ergebnis aber doch erfolgreichen - Aktion im Auge?

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.

Selbst für die Pflichtausgaben reicht das Geld nicht mehr, weitere Kreditaufnahme sieht die Aufsichtsbehörde aber auch nicht gern - Szenen, wie man sie sonst aus manchen Städten im Ruhrpott kennt, spielen sich jetzt auf den Kaiman-Inseln ab. Chris Bryant heißt der Staatsminister im britischen Außenministerium, der in der britischen Kolonie die unbeliebte Rolle des Sparkommissars spielt und dem Ländchen, das mit rund 50.000 Einwohnern eher kleiner ist als die Städte im Ruhrpott, die Genehmigung zur weiteren Kreditaufnahme verweigert.

In einer

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

ToDoList is an easy to use, yet complex to-do list manager that enables you to organize and track general or project related tasks. It supports multiple levels of sub-tasks along with notes (plain or....

Posted without comment for your consternation:

On Labor Day, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release whose title summarizes its contents all too neatly: Bush Declares Eco-Whistleblower Law Void for EPA Employees. Here's some of it:

Washington, DC - The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for federal workers under the Clean Water Act, according to legal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Attorney General, federal workers will have little protection from official retaliation for reporting water pollution enforcement breakdowns, manipulations of science or cleanup failures.

CITIStandard CharteredHSBCAmerican Express

HDFCICICIAXISINDUS INDKotak MahindraIDBI

SBICanara BankVijaya Bank

The list of short english words written in Devanagari.

egrep -x '.{1,2}' eng_words.txt

ऑनऑफऑलटीटूडेडॉदफीलॉसन

You can "discretize" or "bin" continuous features into categorical features.

from sklearn.preprocessing import KBinsDiscretizer

kb = KBinsDiscretizer(n_bins=3, strategy='quantile', encode='ordinal')

kb.fit_transform(df['Fare'])

It's true. Barak Obama is a terrorist and a muslim. That's what the faith healer told us. He also told us George Bush was ordained by God. With his credentials...read more...

Recommended

This review necessitates an unusually long premise, so bear with me. I'm a lifelong casual fan of the Star Trek franchise, from the original 1966-69 series through The Next Generation and, a bit less so, Deep Space Nine and all the feature films made up to that point. In the minority, I also regard Star Trek Voyager as the best, most daring of the "Next Generation" era shows, but didn't care for Star Trek: Enterprise, as its post 9/11-era teleplays seemed to swing the Star Trek universe hard to the right, in directions that seemed in stark opposition to the original intentions of the franchise's late creator, Gene Roddenberry.

That series ended in 2005. Four years later J.J. Abrams's Star Trek feature film attempted to "reboot" the Star Trek universe, with new actors playing characters from the original 60s show. I pretty much loathed everything about it, m...Read the entire review

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Tim Heidecker (Tim Heidecker) is running for office. He's working out of a hotel room with only one other campaign employee, Toni Newman (Terri Parks), trying to get himself on the ballot in the upcoming election for San Bernandino County's District Attorney. Specifically, Tim's looking to defeat incumbent District Attorney Vincent Peretti (Don Pecchia), a man he consistently describes as the city's "rat problem," with big, but "very doable" dreams of eliminating "100% of crime" in the area. He's even hired a filmmaker named Josh Lorton (Eric Notarnicola) to follow him around and document the journey. Unfortunately, for Tim, the media seems to have no interest in him, he's struggling to collect the right number of signatures to get on the ballot, and worst of all, his former associate Gregg Turkington (Gregg Turkington) is hellbent on calling him out about his horrific past.

Perhaps unfairly obscure...Read the entire review

Highly Recommended

The Movie:

Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and based on a novel by Josepeh Kessel, 1969's Army Of Shadows begins when a French man named Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) is hauled into an internment camp in the Nazi occupied France of 1942. Here he meets a few of his bunkmates and befriends a young communist who helps him plan an escape. Before that happens, however, he's released. He winds up back in Marseille where he reconnects with members of The French Resistance whose first order of the day is to execute a member of their own group who, under pressure from German forces, essentially squealed on them. As the walls in the building as paper thin' and there's no good knife around, the young man is strangled, his body left covered on a mattress in the corner of the room.

From here we get to know some of Gerbier's collaborators such as Le Masque (Claude Mann),...Read the entire review

Enjoy the first of our new format of messages from David Legge, also available to watch on our YouTube Channel! In this two-part message, David encourages us to choose to praise - no matter what our circumstances - in order to affect our mood. Join us for this first part, as we find out what praise is and what it looks like. 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...

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...

In 'Confident In The Chaos' Part 3, we learn to 'Stop, Look And Listen'. Habakkuk learned to get to grips with his questions and confusion by bringing them to God. He had to get quiet and listen for God’s voice. We need this discipline especially at this present moment in history. Only faith in what God speaks to our hearts will bring us through as overcomers! 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 Part 6 of 'Confident In The Chaos' Habakkuk has 'A Prayer And Vision For Revival'. In chapter 3, Habakkuk gives us an example of how to pray for revival in the darkest of days. He gives us hope to pray, believing that He wants to bring blessing in His goodness and mercy. Learn how to pray with confidence for a great awakening in these difficult last days. 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)...

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)...

Join us for Part 25 of 'The Holy Spirit' study series, as we consider the spiritual gift, the 'Word of Wisdom'. We find out how this relates to the 'Word of Knowledge', which we considered last time. What is it? How should it operate? How do we receive it? How should we be careful in the use of such a gift? David gives various biblical examples of the use of this gift and how we should operate in it with humility and godly wisdom. 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 Part 26 of our series on 'The Holy Spirit', we ask: what is the 'Discerning of Spirits'? What is it to discern and what are the different kinds of spirits we are to recognise? David seeks to answer these questions and also lead us in how we can cultivate this discernment in our lives. This, like all the other gifts of the Spirit, is so necessary for the health and growth of the Body of Christ. 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)...

Can we have a move of God that doesn't resemble Christ? Obviously not, but is Christ-likeness our emphasis in the church and as individuals? Do we look like Jesus? Do we sound like Jesus? In Part 7 of 'Revival Now', David Legge, using two fruit of the Spirit - Gentleness and Kindness - shows that what the church and the world most needs are Christians that look like Christ and exhibit His attributes to all, even our enemies. We will see real change in the church and society when people see Jesus in us through 'A New Christlike Movement'. This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format...

Along with preceding prayer, the next most common external feature of historic revivals is probably the preaching of the gospel. Renewal in the church may not necessarily feature many souls being saved but revival certainly does. In Part 8 of his 'Revival Now' series, David Legge emphasises the need for the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom in Holy Spirit power. We need to get back to preaching the good news of Jesus with passion and urgency. However, public preaching is only a part of what it means to spread the gospel; David also exhorts that we must be making disciples. He shares how simple disciple-making movements are spreading the flame of revival in some of the most persecuted countries on the planet and how this might well be a divine blueprint for us in the West to follow. This message is available at https://www.preachtheword.com now in MP3 audio format...