Potluck and Propaganda

Happy spring greetings everybody! The days are getting longer and warmer here on the northern hemisphere so let us get together once again for P&P #18 to celebrate the wonderful rejuvenation of nature all around us!

After watching "mainstream" Hollywood movies for the last 3 events it's time to revisit our original format and watch some "real" documentaries again. The one we have this month is the excellent and thought-provoking PBS program The Botany of Desire. Featuring Michael Pollan and based on his best-selling book, this show takes viewers on an eye-opening exploration of the human relationship with the plant world - seen from the plants' point of view. The program shows how four familiar species (the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato) evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. Here is a 6 minute preview of the show to give you a sense of what's it about:



The potluck theme this month is of course SPRING - anything that's fresh or reminds you of new beginnings. Feel free to post your intended dish on the Facebook event wall.

Tentative schedule for the evening:
07:30 - 08:30 Gathering.
08:30 - 09:30 Community potluck dinner. Theme: Spring.
09:30 - 11:30 Feature presentation: The Botany of Desire (121 minutes)

Hope to see 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 participants.

An excellent talk which ties together cellular biology, genetics, and the mind-body connection. If you are not familiar with Bruce Lipton's work this is a great intro.

Part 1:



Part 2:

How would you behave under similar conditions?



There used to be a much better video online, focusing about the experiment itself and explaining the conditions, but looks like it was pulled for copyright reasons. Read more about the experiment here.

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

In light of the recent Harvard medical students rebel against big pharma ties, I thought the following video is appropriate:


More Entheogens and Psychedelic Drug Information

(5/3/09) More recent developments on this topic - "The Scientist" magazine has reported that the drug manufacturer Merck has created a real sounding but phony peer reviewed journal to publish favorable data for its products:

"Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship..."

(8/6/09) Just one more report and then I'll stop. The New York Times reports today on newly released court documents that show how pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid a medical communications firm to use ghost writers in drafting and publishing 26 papers between 1998 and 2005 backing the usage of hormone replacement therapy in women. The papers 'emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia'. On the other hand, a federal study done in 2002 'found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke'.

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!