What Would Jesus Buy?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1056487665981560376#

Religion aside for a moment, there’s a terrible addiction that has swept across this country, and it’s one of the nation’s best kept secrets. Mostly everyone will tell you that it’s a really bad thing, but nobody can seem to stop doing it. And it doesn’t come cheap, nearly sixty percent of us are in long term debt because of it. No, we’re not talking booze, drugs or overeating. It’s shopping. And over 15 million Americans may in fact be addicted to it.

Rob VanAlkemade’s ‘What Would Jesus Buy?’ is a rousing, irreverent and simultaneously sobering documentary about the year round destructive shopaholic obsession that spins into an out of control buying and spending orgy by the time Christmas rolls around. The movie follows performance activist Reverend Billy and his ragtag cross country caravan, The Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, to bring the voice of reason a few holiday seasons ago, to compulsive consumers everywhere. The intent of this countdown to Christmas is to save the holiday from what Reverend Billy has dubbed only slightly in jest, the Shopocalypse. Ironically, many of his group are injured when one of their buses collides on a highway with a truck rushing to deliver Christmas merchandise to stores. Meanwhile, the Reverend muses, ‘everyone in a car is driving to a television.

The What Would Jesus Buy? project is the brainchild of Morgan Spurlock, the same guy who in a less spiritual frame of mind, lost the junk food battle of the bulge against McDonald’s with his Academy Award nominated high calorie investigative doc, Super Size Me, and is now hitting the plexes with Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden. The concerns of What Would Jesus Buy are broader than digestion issues, as Reverend Billy and entourage put out a wakeup call to mall junkies everywhere, exorcising the demons from assorted cash registers and credit cards as he urges consumers to return to a more authentic relationship with Christmas.

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Zeitgeist: Addendum

 

 

The second documentary film, Zeitgeist: Addendum, attempts to locate the root causes of this pervasive social corruption, while offering a solution.

This solution is not based not on politics, morality, laws, or any other establishment notions of human affairs, but rather on a modern, non-superstitious based understanding of what we are and how we align with nature, to which we are a part.

The work advocates a new social system which is updated to present day knowledge, highly influenced by the life long work of Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project.

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Zeitgeist Movement Activist and Orientation Guide

 

 

The Zeitgeist Movement is not a political movement. It does not recognize nations, governments, races, religions, creeds or class. Our understandings conclude that these are false, outdated distinctions which are far from positive factors for true collective human growth and potential. Their basis is in power division and stratification, not unity and equality, which is our goal.

While it is important to understand that everything in life is a natural progression, we must also acknowledge the reality that the human species has the ability to drastically slow and paralyze progress, through social structures which are out of date, dogmatic, and hence out of line with nature itself. The world you see today, full of war, corruption, elitism, pollution, poverty, epidemic disease, human rights abuses, inequality and crime is the result of this paralysis.

This movement is about awareness, in avocation of a fluid evolutionary progress, both personal, social, technological and spiritual. It recognizes that the human species is on a natural path for unification, derived from a communal acknowledgment of fundamental and near empirical understandings of how nature works and how we as humans fit into/are a part of this universal unfolding we call life.

While this path does exist, it is unfortunately hindered and not recognized by the great majority of humans, who continue to perpetuate outdated and hence degenerative modes of conduct and association. It is this intellectual irrelevancy which the Zeitgeist Movement hopes to overcome through education and social action.

The movement itself is not a centralized construct. We are not here to lead, but to organize and educate.

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The Globalization Tapes

If we are united in our struggle against worker oppression, united in our search for truth amidst lies, united for a truly participatory democratic economic system, the possibilities are only limited by our courage, our determination, and our capacity to imagine. A collaboration between the Independent Plantation Workers’ Union of Sumatra (Indonesia), the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers (IUF) and Vision Machine Film Project.

The Globalization Tapes is a film made by workers for workers. The story isn’t told by experts, but by union members from palm oil plantations in Indonesia. Their experience is complemented by workers from both Colombia and Holland. The film powerfully documents their exploration of history, globalization, and how unions around the world can support each other and struggle together.

Using their own forbidden history as a case study, the Indonesian filmmakers trace the development of contemporary globalization from its roots in colonialism to the present. Through chilling first-hand accounts, The Globalization Tapes exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the “global economy”, and explores the relationships between trade, third-world debt, and international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. The film explains how these institutions shape and enforcing the corporate world order.

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Pandora’s Box

 

It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror. To do so, they would use the methods of science. Pandora’s Box was a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. Curtis’ later “The Century of the Self” had a similar theme. The title sequence made extensive use of clips from the short film Design for Dreaming, as well as other similar archive footage.

 

Part 1:  The Engineer’s Plot

The revolutionaries who toppled the Tsar in 1917 thought science held the key to their new world. In fact, it ended up creating a bewildering world for millions of Soviet people. In this light-hearted investigation, one industrial planner tells how she decided the people wanted platform shoes, only to discover that they had gone out of fashion by the time that the factory to manufacture them had been built.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639026381197734332#

 

Part 2:  To The Brink of Eternity

Focusing on the men of the Cold War on whom Dr Strangelove was based. These were people who believed that the world could be controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear – mathematical geniuses employed by the American Rand Corporation. In the end, their visions were the stuff of science fiction fantasy.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1341195904328574735#

 

Part 3:  The League of Gentlemen

Thirty years ago, a group of economists managed to convince British politicians that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain great again. Pandora’s Box tells the saga of how their experiments have led the country deeper into economic decline, and asks – is their game finally up?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6378502245261130859#

 

Part 4:  Goodbye Mrs Ant

A modern fable about science and society, focusing on our attitude to nature. Should we let scientists be the prime movers of social or political change when, for instance, DDT made post-war heroes of American scientists only to be put on trial by other scientists in 1968? What kind of in-fighting goes on between rival camps before one scientific truth emerges, and when it does emerge, just how true is it?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8992996773895395024#

 

Part 5:  Black Power

A look at how former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah set Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial and scientific age. At the heart of his dream was to be the huge Volta dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an advanced utopia. But as his grand experiment took shape, it brought with it dangerous forces Nkrumah couldn’t control, and he slowly watched his metropolis of science sink into corruption and debt.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6271849785012587578#

 

Part 6:  A is For Atom

An insight into the history of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants. Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl which changed views on the safety of this new technology.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6904524736774008710#

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Who’s Got God’s Millions?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-218139941025970801

Robert Llewellyn attempts to discover which of the world’s top four monotheistic religions has the most money. His journey takes him from Canterbury Cathedral to Vatican City and Israel, as he bids to calculate the income and assets of the Anglican Commune, the Catholic Church, Judaism and Islam.

“As an atheist, I’ve always wondered how much money the faiths keep stuffed under the mattress,” says Robert Llewellyn. In this time of financial crisis, when billions of pounds are being coughed up to support struggling banks, Robert feels it is time to discover the financial interests of the world’s great monotheistic faiths – Anglicanism, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam.

Robert’s first stop is Canterbury Cathedral, where he is surprised to learn that financial figures for the Church of England are readily available. Robert then travels to Westminster Cathedral to learn about the Catholic Church’s status in England. Part of the Catholic Church’s income in the UK goes to fund the Vatican, so Rome is Robert’s next destination. It soon becomes apparent that Vatican City is a financial black hole, and no one wants to admit how much money the Pope actually has.

Next Robert travels to Jerusalem to scour the finances of Judaism, only to find the Israeli government cannot even put a figure on the number of synagogues in the country. “There’s one God – that’s the only figure I can think of,” says Ariel Catane of the National Authority of Religious Services.

Finally, Robert heads to the East London Mosque to get a handle on the wealth of Islam. Despite the plethora of statistics available, he finds that no one has ever conducted an audit of the UK’s 1,600 mosques. And his efforts to obtain the global income for Islam founder when none of the embassies of the world’s biggest Muslim countries agree to meet him. Undeterred, Robert eventually comes up with a total figure – but which of the top religions is the richest?

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A Brilliant Madness – John Nash

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4213085982809155469

A Brilliant Madness is the story of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by a descent into madness. At the age of 30, John Nash, a stunningly original and famously eccentric MIT mathematician, suddenly began claiming that aliens were communicating with him and that he was a special messenger.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Nash spent the next three decades in and out of mental hospitals, all but forgotten. During that time, a proof he had written at the age of 20 became a foundation of modern economic theory. In 1994, as Nash began to show signs of emerging from his delusions, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics. The program features interviews with John Nash, his wife Alicia, his friends and colleagues, and experts in game theory and mental illness.

Go beyond the Oscar-winning drama “A Beautiful Mind” and learn more about the life of troubled mathematician and Nobel Prize-winner John Nash and his struggle with mental illness in this PBS “American Experience” documentary. Exclusive interviews with Nash and wife Alicia are included.

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This Is What A Democracy Looks Like

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2007206186362541122

This film, shot by 100 amateur camera operators, tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organization summit being held there. Vowing to oppose, among other faults, the WTO’s power to arbitrarily overrule nations’ environmental, social and labor policies in favor of unbridled corporate greed, protesters from all around came out in force to make their views known and stop the summit.

Against them is a brutal police force and a hostile media as well as the stain of a minority of destructively overzealous comrades. Against all odds, the protesters bravely faced fierce opposition to take back the rightful democratic power that the political and corporate elite of the world is determined to deny the little people.

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The Miami Model

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7557174318773212602

The Miami model is a term used by political activists to describe the tactics employed by law enforcement agencies during demonstrations relating to the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) trade agreement. The meeting related protests took place in Miami, Florida in November 2003. The Miami Model is also the title of a documentary film, produced by Indymedia, about the FTAA, the police action in Miami, and political organizing led by people of color in the Miami area.

This term refers to the distinctive features of crowd control technique used in Miami, which included large scale pre-emptive arrests, heavily armed sometimes unidentifiable law enforcement, the collection of intelligence from protesters, and the “embedding” of corporate media with the police.

Miami Activist Defense and National Lawyers Guild filed a federal lawsuit against the City, the Mayor, Police Chief Timoney, Homeland Defense Secretary Ridge, and Attorney General Ashcroft for rampant abuse of the constitution.

Among the groups which organized against the FTAA were the Green Bloc, United for Peace and Justice, Root Cause, several AFL-CIO affiliated unions, Midwest Unrest, Pittsburgh Organizing Group, Food Not Bombs and many others.

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The Real Face of the European Union

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2699800300274168460

The EU has been sold to Britain as our best hope for the future. But behind the scenes, has another, more unsettling agenda been unfolding? The European Economic Community (EEC) began for Britain as a free-trade agreement in 1972.

Today’s European Union is well on its way to becoming a federal superstate, complete with one currency, one legal system, one military, one police force – even its own national anthem.

In this shocking new documentary featuring EU insiders and commentators, independent author Phillip Day covers the history and goals of the European Union, as well as the disturbing, irrevocable implications this new government has for every British citizen.

Whether the viewer is for or against Britain’s participation, this film asks the troubling questions the mainstream media has refused to confront.

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