Potluck and Propaganda

Copyright laws made inspiring!

From the people who brought you The Story of Stuff comes another illustrated short covering the basics of "Cap & Trade".

I decided to start posting more stuff on the blog and share items that are not necessarily new but have important and useful information. This one is a classic:

Wow, last night’s gathering was so much fun! When I first thought about throwing these events this is exactly what I had in mind - everybody contributing and participating in the program. Thank you all for coming and sharing these wonderful videos. Special thanks to Alisa and Sarai who stayed behind and helped clean the mess. We are definitely going to do another "open decks" event in the near future so if you encounter anything especially cool remember to bookmark it.

Here are some of the videos we saw, more or less in the order we watched them. Drop me a line if I forgot anything and I’ll add it to the list. See you next time!

The Fucking Moon





Drinking Out of Cups





TED Talk by Elizabeth Gilbert: A new way to think about creativity


Link to this talk on the TED website here.



Grandma vs. Mercedes





Spirit World 2 (part 1)





Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale


The full discussion "Notes & Neurons" from the World Science Festival 2009 in high quality can be found here.


The 30-Second Bunnies Theater Library





Intro to Participatory Economics





Schwa





Bill Moyers Discusses The Washington Post's Pay-to-play Scandal





The Truth About Codex Alimentarius





The Yes Men





Validation





Bill O'Reilly Lies About Amsterdam





Qigong Master Boils Water With His Hands





Amazing Chinese Man With Extreme Healing Powers Of Chi





Malay Eagle Owl





Svetlana - Pilot Episode





White Box





EepyBird's Sticky Note Experiment





Balancing Point

As always I am thankful to everyone who came and took part in the event. Your active participation is what makes it so great! I for one was pleasantly surprised by the movie and understand now why it was highly rated. I especially liked the guy who "hacks" into people's reptilian brain for market research, and the bit about political advertising and the kind of data collected on us unsuspecting folks for marketing purpose. In case you want to watch it again, The Persuaders website has the full length movie along with other interesting information.

Other topics that we covered:

Jake's awesome find about sexual subliminal messages in ads can be found here.

The clip from the Derren Brown show about using subliminal messages on advertising executives can be found here. It turns out that there is also an "American" version of the same stunt, which can be seen here.

Leon mentioned the funny movie "Crazy People" in which an advertising executive decides to tell the truth in his ads, which lands him in a mental hospital... Here is an awesome clip:




We concluded the evening with a short clip where Douglas Rushkoff discusses some of the ideas presented in his book "Life Inc."




Take care, and hope to see you at our next gathering.

Greetings,
Time flies when you’re having fun, and all of a sudden we are nearly due for another P&P. We live in very interesting times as we witness the collapse of our debt-based financial system, and learn to adopt sustainable, community-oriented mode of commerce. To better understand our existing condition, this month we will examine some features of the American consumer culture.

Our feature film will be "The Persuaders" (by PBS's long-running television series "Frontline") which examines the inner workings of advertising and public relations and the men and women -- dubbed "persuaders" -- whose job it is to influence the buying habits of today's consumers. See how they research the preferences of shoppers, pique their interest, entice them to part with their hard-earned money, and get their own messages across in an increasingly complicated and tech-savvy world. (90 minutes).



Before the movie we’ll have about 30 minutes for open decks. Contact me if you wish to present anything on the general topic of advertising or commerce. Clips under 10 minutes are best. I already have an interesting 7 minute video in mind about subliminal advertising that I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Anybody knows a good TED talk on this topic?

And what would an evening about commerce be without acknowledging our Chinese counterparts across the ocean? This month’s potluck theme will be Chinese and Oriental food. Face it, they are the rising power so you might as well start getting used to it. Besides, I’m actually flying to China in 6 weeks, so this will get me even more psyched! (right…)

Our evening schedule will be:
07:30 - 08:30 Gathering
08:30 - 09:30 Community potluck dinner. Theme: Chinese/Oriental food.
09:30 - 10:00 Open decks (check this page for updates)
10:00 - 11:30 Feature film: "Frontline: The Persuaders".
Please try to be on time, I beg you!

Potluck and Propaganda is aimed to present information and encourage critical thinking. Let go of your belief systems (BS) and investigate different reality tunnels. The opinions expressed in the movies shown do not necessarily reflect the ones of P&P or its organizers.

Thanks to all who came to SeraPhi this weekend. It was truly a joy to share ideas and get informed together. All the material we played is available for free on the web. Here are the movies in the order they were shown:

We started the evening with a talk titled "Open Source Democracy" by Douglas Rushkoff (55 min), author of a book by the same name.





We then accidentally played a piece by Keith Olbermann called "8 years in 8 minute" (9 min).





We continued with the clip that we originally wanted to show, "Great Moments In Presidential Speeches Compilation" (5 min).





The feature movie for the evening was "The Pharmacratic Inquisition" by Jan Irvin & Andrew Rutajit of gnosticmedia.com (111 min). Here is part 1 of 12:



YouTube playlist with all 12 parts: here.



We finished the evening with the awesome TED talk "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor (20 min).




Hope to see many of you at the next P&P!