FILMS !

Films

+ American Beauty
+ Brazil
+ Blade Runner
+ Benny and Joon
+ But I'm a Cheerleader
+ Boys Don't Cry
+ Casablanca
+ Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
+ A Clockwork Orange
+ Eraserhead
+ Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
+ The Favour the Watch and the Very Big Fish
+ Firefly (Tv episode - with great symbolisms and connections to US history)
+ Fight Club
+ Garden State
+ Girl Interrupted
+ Gone with the Wind
+ The Graduate
+ The Kite Runner
+ The Matrix 1, 2, and 3
+ My Summer of Love
+ The Meaning of Life
+ Notorious
+ Psycho
+ Pulp Fiction
+ Requiem for a Dream
+ Rushmore
+ Slaughterhouse-five
+ Spun
+ The Sound of Music
+ Thirteen
+ The Virgin Suicides
+ Waking Life
+ Wings of Desire
+ The Yellow Submarine
+ Young Frankenstein

Foreign Films
+ Amelie - Fren.
+ Everything is Illuminated - Ukrainian
+ Mar Adentro - Span.
+ Machuca - Span.
+ Man Facing Southwest - Span.
+ Pan's Labyrinth - Span.
+ Life is Beautiful - Italian and German
+ Wild Strawberries - Swedish

Ghandi and collectivism

Why is he revered as so great?
"I claim to be a humble servant of India and humanity..."

I am just now attempting to learn of what this man did, I was always told that he was a "champion" of the poor- fighting to raise taxes of the few to close the gap between poor and wealthy, that life is about compromising, not your values or religion, but into submission for majority. Doesn't seem something that I revere.



"Lovers of peace at any price save that of Truth."

He deigns even the breath of man as a violence, honoring (?)ahmisa as truth as A is A. He honors non-violence as the path- are not taxes a violence, are not being self-sacrificers a violence of the self? What good are you as a lost entity - with only a purpose to serve your brother whom holds his only purpose to serve his brothers- you have lost the only thing there to save.

"Non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering...It does not mean meek submission of the will of the evildoer, but it means putting of ones whole soul against the will of a tyrant. ...[to]lay the foundation for the empires fall or regeneration."

"Before I can preach Universal non-violence, I must be wholly free from passion, I must be wholly incapable of sin."

His opinion of God is that we are all representations of God - so he serves God by serving Humanity.

"And is this Power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent. For I can see, that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good."


Yet he only holds that divinity when we are together as a whole:
"I am a part and parcel of the whole, and I cannot find Him apart from the rest of humanity."

Which makes me think of another such belief, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” Matthew 18:20. "We must guard our faith, and one of the keys to arming ourselves in the world is to remain in fellowship with others. A Christian is called ... to fellowship."Life as a Christian woman (Blog)

"We must ever fail to perceive Him through the senses, because He is beyond them. We can feel Him if we will but withdraw ourselves from the senses. The divine music is incessantly going on within ourselves, but the loud senses drown the delicate music, which is unlike and infinitely superior to anything we can perceive or hear with our senses." (H, 13-6-1936, pp140-1)

Is Ghandi presenting "the delicate music" as being whole and one with humanity and that you must drown ones own wants/needs in order to achieve such a feat?

Criticize by creating

Critique by creating or, criticize by creating.


Criticizing by creating is literally the creation of a standard for what you are attempting to change and how, in the context of the whole. In other words, when you create something new you imply, or expect, that what you have created has potential to satisfy a group of individuals more than what is already in existence. Example- Clayton (need last name) created a company in Austin, Texas called Sweet Leaf Tea on the claims that

“he and his friends couldn’t understand why bottled tea never tasted as good as homemade. Inspired by the homemade tea that Clayton’s grandmother used to make, he began tasting teas from all over the world and brewing countless batches in his kitchen. With all $10,000 of Clayton’s savings and an old delivery van, Sweet Leaf Tea was born. Soon after David Smith… joined him in their quest to create the best tasting, highest quality bottled tea on the planet.”

(sweet Leaf Tea “Our Story”). A business that has now been, according to the same source previously given, steadily increasing in its profits over the past few years. Though Clayton’s ends may not be to achieve better tea for himself, he has provided it for those whose wants are better tea in return for something he may value more highly. Clayton is a great example of criticizing by creating. When you branch out with your ideas and standards of quality for anything, you are making the assumption that because you have searched for something “better” than what was already around you, that you will succeed in fulfilling the social need. Thousands of entrepreneurs do this everyday (I hope!), creating market competition- it is how a society continues to grow upwards in quality and expectation. It is how the peoples of America achieved and live the change “luxuries into necessities”. The market, rather, the people making up the market of consumers will let you know if you have succeeded in creating something more valuable (“meets their [an individuals] myriad values best”: Dylan Miller) then what is already out there (even if it’s a niche just large enough to sustain you). I spoke with a local, Dylan Miller, in regards to his opinion on “Criticize by creating”:

“…a clever title for a method or process for meeting social needs as an alternative to non-profit…With the aid of the incentive and communication system of the market; you are able to create a sustainable, accountable, effective institution that can operate whether or not all the people involved share your values or goal….It’s more sustainable and has the ability to allow people with local knowledge regarding the problem to play a role in the solution…at this point, [those working in the institution] their social goal, and the (clerk’s) self-interest and knowledge and possibly his social goals as well, coincide to effect change. … Social entrepreneurship has an end goal in addition to, or other than profit; the social need is the reason for the institutions existence.” (Interview source)

“Profit won't cure those ills, but it's becoming a bigger part of more solutions.” (Social Entrepreneurship “The 2008 Social Capitalist Awards”).

Interacting with creation is the most powerful tool of feedback in our nation. Your interactions: your dollar votes, over-coffee-conversations, your questions, are the tools that create the world you live in. You are the answer to question: "Why are things this way and how can they change?"

Life

Life most certainly does not suck, the fact that you can think and reason and pass judgments is as beautiful as you make it. Life is wow - life is more than the ability to reason, yet even the ability to reason is above the laws of physics- life is seeing the world through your subjective values and goals. Life is all the meaning that you give it and get from it. What you say, think, and do affects what life is to you. I utterly abhor the comment above mine and completely disagree with it. If you think about how cool it is that I can send words to you, representations of sounds and concepts, and that you read them and glean meaning from them. Not only that but! You are attempting to grasp the intentions behind the meanings. If I were to say I am a round square- I would be making a statement and attempting to imply that there is a linguistic rule that would back up that statement but infact! aha! it is nonsense that sentence actually means nothing, how cool right?

yeah.

to go on, :). Sensitive is a wonderful thing to be - it means you should listen. Listen to the way your heartbeats, the wind flows through the air and throats, listen to the pain, listen to the worship, listen to each voice attempting to create an existence that they can understand. The pain, the horror- it's an attempt to understand, it's how some rationalize. We are all so awful and flawed compared to our intentions and goals, and in someways it is, and it is beautiful. The sick and the perverse come from not understanding, from not being logical and loving. Love is simplest thing in the world, it is above even reason, which as I stated previously, is above all laws of physics, love is somehow above all things and yet is completely experiential and observable. Or is it? It's this vague and concrete concept all at once...

Love is the free trading that happens between two individuals, and somehow I don't mean to say love between two people that love each other- I mean selling toys to a mother that wants toys for her child. Love is in loving yourself and understanding the un-understandable it's in providing for your wants and needs and somehow in the exact process fulfilling others wants and needs- no one to tell you what to do, not stepping on anyone else's process.

yet, how can love be all things that fall into such a category? How can it not be?

If love is not freedom in all, then what is love? If love is not acting on peacefull understanding and forgiveness, then what is love? If love is not letting yourself feel and act, then what is love?

And if love is not living, then what is living?

p.s. I do think that people have the right to observe other people and judge others actions- "I can see sin in all the world. And I may well hate that sin, but never the sinner."- John Logan. Judgments are totally rational and reasonable they are how we as people understand and categorize information into usable pieces.

p.p.s oh and to be more analytically clear: The purpose to life is self-derived. I hope there is no purpose to life because that would imply fate and fate implies that there is predestination, and predestination implies that I am not a rational choosing person. It also implies that your friend is right in her conclusion that we have no right to pass judgment, because actions wouldn't be connected to the individual and then Ghandi and Hitler would be one in the same, and! then also those judgments I was passing really wouldn't be me at all because I would infact just be predestined to think those very thoughts and writing these very responses.

A sad cynical independent depriving life to live.

All Readers

You are few, if at all :).

I really apologise for only posting Ron Paul's work the past few postings, I wanted to get the message out and didn't have the time, or will, to do it myself.

So I will be back with my own intellect sometime soon, I am exhausted - after having a cold, not reading enough, and standing on a street corner for an hour with a large paper hand painted poster for Ron Paul (unfortunately I didn't take picture of it, seeing as I hand painted it.) I did get two yay! honks, it made standing for the other silent pavement pacers worth it. Oh and the rest comes later


goodnight

Interventionism? Isolationism? Actually, both. :Ron Paul

Interventionism? Isolationism? Actually, both.

A few months back, I wrote back-to-back weekly messages regarding globalism and isolationism. In writing those columns, I focused on the fact that our nation’s interventionist foreign policy was precisely what was isolating us from other countries.

Turkey’s recall of their U.S. ambassador in the wake of last week’s resolution, passed in the House Foreign Affairs Committee in condemnation of Turkey, is a perfect example of what I wrote in those columns, as well as what I have been saying for years.

The House has passed similar resolutions for years, praising some foreign countries or political groups while chastising others. It is my policy to vote against resolutions of this sort whenever they have the impact of placing our country in the middle of an internal political problem of some other nation, or involving us in some regional conflict. In fact, this is almost always the specific intent of resolutions of this sort. Often, I am the only Member of Congress to vote against these resolutions.

Some have questioned these votes, arguing that they are meaningless statements of opinion. However, I have always been more skeptical, and careful, about voting for these measures. Last week’s reaction by Turkey , a long term ally and NATO member, shows that Congress should be a lot more restrained in sticking our government’s nose into the affairs of other nations.

Even though I am no fan of the war in Iraq , keeping positive relations with Turkey is important to protecting our troops who have been sent to fight this war. We are likely to need cordial relations with Turkey so that we can get our troops out of Iraq as quickly and safely as possible, when the time comes.

As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, my office has been contacted both by the White House and the Turkish Embassy. They know I oppose these types of interventionist resolutions and they know I will not support the current resolution. They also know full well that this particular resolution will only serve to strain an important international relationship our country should be seeking to strengthen.

In this instance, the problem is that many of my colleagues in Congress are more interested in seeking to score political points and proclaim their moral superiority, instead of worrying about our nation’s best interests. Also, in most of these situations, those who oppose the resolution regarding Turkey all-too-often fail to realize that similar resolutions dealing with other nations have the exact same effect. Namely, they isolate our country from the rest of the world.

Even if other countries do not take the rather extreme step of recalling their ambassador, this kind of meddling by Congressional resolution almost always serves to offend governments and political leaders in other counties.

Last week’s events make clear that Congress, and our foreign policy establishment, must reconsider the entire policy of interventionism if we are to avoid further isolation of our nation.