Sounding Circle

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Movie: The Whale Rider 0 comments

12 Jul 2003 @ 14:21 Here is the site to watch the trailer and see what the film looks like The Whale Rider Here is the synopsis: In a small New Zealand coastal village, Maori claim descent from Paikea, the Whale Rider. In every generation for more than 1000 years, a male heir born to the Chief succeeds to the title. The time is now. The Chief's eldest son, Porourangi, fathers twins - a boy and a girl. But the boy and his mother die in childbirth. The surviving girl is named Pai. Grief-stricken, her father leaves her to be raised by her grandparents. Koro, her grandfather who is the Chief, refuses to acknowledge Pai as the inheritor of the tradition and claims she is of no use to him. But her grandmother, Flowers, sees more than a broken line, she sees a child in desperate need of love. And Koro learns to love the child. When Pai's father, Porourangi, now a feted international artist, returns home after twelve years, Koro hopes everything is resolved and Porourangi will to accept destiny and become his successor. But Porourangi has no intention of becoming Chief. He has moved away from his people both physically and emotionally. After a bitter argument with Koro he leaves, suggesting to Pai that she come with him. She starts the journey but quickly returns, claiming her grandfather needs her. Koro is blinded by prejudice and even Flowers cannot convince him that Pai is the natural heir. The old Chief is convinced that the tribe's misfortunes began at Pai's birth and calls for his people to bring their 12-year-old boys to him for training. He is certain that through a gruelling process of teaching the ancient chants, tribal lore and warrior techniques, the future leader of their tribe will be revealed to him. Meanwhile, deep within the ocean, a massive herd of whales is responding, drawn towards Pai and their twin destinies. When the whales become stranded on the beach, Koro is sure this signals an apocalyptic end to his tribe. Until one person prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the people. --------------------------------------------------- Whale Rider, the South Pacific Pictures-produced feature film, has won the AGF People's Choice Award at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival 345 films screened over the 10-day festival and Whale Rider, which had its world debut in Toronto, was voted the favorite of the festival audiences, known worldwide for their enthusiasm and love of cinema. Whale Rider joins an exclusive list of influential films - the last four winners of the People's Choice Award were Amelie; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; American Beauty and Life Is Beautiful . Runners-up for this year's People's Choice Award were Bend It Like Beckham and Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine. Producer John Barnett says the Toronto audiences were captivated by the film, its young star Keisha Castle-Hughes and director Niki Caro. "We are so thrilled to win this award - it is voted by audiences, so it has real validity and the Toronto audience were the first anywhere to see the film," says Barnett. Directed by Niki Caro (Memory and Desire), Whale Rider is based on the novel by acclaimed New Zealand writer Witi Ihimaera (The Matriarch, Tangi). It stars newcomer Keisha Castle-Hughes, Rawiri Paratene, Vicky Haughton, and Cliff Curtis (Training Day, Blow and Once Were Warriors). Whale Rider is represented internationally by London-based sales agent, The Works, and represented in New Zealand and Australia by Buena Vista International. BVI will release Whale Rider in New Zealand next year. Whale Rider is produced for South Pacific Pictures, ApolloMedia and Pandora Film by Tim Sanders; John Barnett; and Frank Hübner of ApolloMedia. Executive Producers are Bill Gavin and Linda Goldstein Knowlton. Author Witi Ihimaera is also Associate Producer. The film tells the story of a young girl's fight to prove her love, her leadership and her destiny, and is shot on location in Whangara, on the East Coast. Whale Rider is the first film to receive funding from the New Zealand Government's new Film Production Fund. Other investors in the film are ApolloMedia in Germany, Filmstiftung NRW, The New Zealand Film Commission and NZ on Air.

The Four Reasons 2 comments

12 Jul 2003 @ 13:54 The Four Reasons why "We The People" must remove the current administration of The United States of America 0. Operation Iraqi Freedom is illegal within the framework of the laws of the United States Constitution and the United Nations Charter. 1. The war on Iraq has been planned for many years by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC),an organization founded by a small group of right wing political visionaries and corporate elite dedicated to promoting American global leadership. The PNAC signatories hold the most powerful positions in the current administration and other highly influential political offices. Read their Statement of Principles and note the signatories. Read the PNAC's “Rebuilding America's Defenses” for a detail of their strategy for American hegemony. 2. Many members of the Bush Administration are convicted criminals. In 1992, the International War Crimes Tribunal found the senior officers in the first Bush administration guilty on 19 counts of Crimes Against Peace, War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and other criminal acts in Violation of the Charter of the United Nations, International Law, The Constitution of the United States and Laws made in Pursuance thereof, for crimes committed during “Operation Desert Storm”. View a list of our `elected' officials, their appointees, and their criminal offenses. 3. There is no longer a separation between our elected officials and industry leaders. The means of production, the means of communication, the energy industry, and the military are owned by the current administration. These psychopaths and their associates will benefit unfathomably from this and many future wars already planned by the PNAC. View information on who is making the money from our “War on Terrorism”. 4. “We the People” pay for “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, the staging of “multiple theatre wars”, and the killing of the innocent peoples of foreign lands in the name of Freedom and Democracy, while 'elected' officials pass radical legislation taking away our rights and controlling the flow of information.  More >

The "Big Bang" Is Just Religion Disguised As Science 4 comments

12 Jul 2003 @ 13:40 The "Big Bang" Is Just Religion Disguised As Science Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was this guy named Aristotle. Pretty sharp fella; he thought up a lot of good things. But, occasionally he made a mistake. One mistake he made was to toss an orange up in the air and watch it come straight back down to his hand. Aristotle reasoned that if he was moving, the orange would have flown off to one side as soon as it left his hand. Because the orange did not do so, Aristotle concluded he was not moving. On the basis of this one observed fact, and the assumption that there was no other explanation for what he observed, Aristotle concluded that the Earth does not move and that therefore the rest of the universe had to move around it. Aristotle was a very sharp guy, but the fact is that there was another explanation for why the orange fell back into his hand, and it would wait about another 2000 years before another smart man, Sir Isaac Newton, explained just what it was Aristotle had overlooked, set forth in Newton's laws of motion. But for the early church, Aristotle's conclusions fit in rather well with their theology, which had the Earth created as the center of the universe, unmoving, with the rest of the cosmos spinning about it. Of course, there was empirical evidence available to all that cast doubt on the church-approved version of the Cosmos. One could see during eclipses that the Earth was not flat. The curved shape of the Earth's shadow as it crossed the moon was the same no matter place in the sky the eclipse took place. A spherical Earth was the only shape that could produce such a result. Ships sailing over the horizon clearly vanished over a subtle curve ( an observation which eventually inspired Columbus' voyages). Nobody could explain the behavior of a Foucault's Pendulum other than by the Earth spinning beneath it. But by far the most troubling problem for the geocentric (earth centered) universe was the strange behavior of the planets. In an age before TV, or even books, the night sky was something every person was quite familiar with, even those who were not sailors or fortune tellers. Watching the night sky over time, the paths of the planets were easily seen to occasionally pause, move in reverse for a time, then proceed foreword. This behavior was called retrograde motion. Ah, but this was a problem. The church did not have an explanation for this behavior. Indeed in the King James Version of the Bible, the word "planet" appears only once, and the only as an object to be sacrificed to. There is a very simple explanation for retrograde motion. As the Earth, moving in its inner orbit, overtake an outer planet, it will appear to hesitate, reverse its path across the sky, then resume its normal path. But the idea that the Earth moved was contrary to Church Dogma and to Aristotle. What education was tolerated by the church was "encouraged" to find some way to explain retrograde motion in a way that did not conflict with the religious needs for a universe centered on an unmoving Earth. Rather than re-examine Aristotle's basic claim, the learned men of the day grabbed onto a suggestion made by Claudius Ptolemy called "epicycles". This theory explained retrograde motion around a motionless Earth by suggesting that the planets moved in large orbits called deferents, upon which were superimposed smaller orbits called epicycles which produced a "wobble" as seen from Earth. Epicycles was extremely popular with the church, and scholars at universities with religious affiliations were "encouraged" to refine this theory. And it needed refinement, badly, because the epicycle theory did not accurately predict what was being seen in the sky. Generations of effort was expended trying to figure out why the models did not predict the actual motions of the planets. At one point, it was even suggested that the epicycles had epicycles. No matter how many times the observed results did not match the predictions, the approved course of action was to refine the theory, but never to question the basic assumption. Those who dared point to the evidence suggesting that Aristotle (and by extension the church) were in error in postulating a geocentric universe were "discouraged". Galileo was tortured into recanting his conclusions that the Earth moved. Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake for suggesting that the sun was really just another star, only close up, and that the other stars had their own planets. In recent times, our expanding technology has confirmed that Galileo and Bruno were right, and Aristotle and the church were flat out wrong. The Earth does move. There are no deferents or epicycles, or even epicycles on the epicycles. he models of the universe which are based on a moving Earth are quite accurate and able to predict the behaviors of the planets as evidence by the fact that we send spacecraft to those planets on a regular basis. The theory of a geocentric universe and the theory of epicycles was not science. It was religious doctrine masked as science. Read On...  More >

Scientists Discover Planetary Patriarch 0 comments

12 Jul 2003 @ 13:32 Scientists Discover Planetary Patriarch (It's interesting to note that although this article was written by a women, she chose to call teh planet a patriarch, rather than a matriarch. In choosing to genderize the planet as male she revealed how deep our cultural patriarchy runs.} Astronomers have detected a world many times older than any other known, a remarkable surviver formed in a violent, primordial setting where planets were not thought to exist. Above is an artist's interpretation of the the 13-billion-year-old planet as it orbits a helium white-dwarf star. By Kathy Sawyer Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, July 11, 2003; Page A01 Astronomers have detected the Methuselah of planets, a world many times older than any other known, a remarkable survivor formed in a violent, primordial setting where planets were not thought to exist. About 800 times more massive than Earth, the planet was born around a yellow, sun-like star about 13 billion years ago. That is about 9 billion years earlier than any planet previously detected and a mere billion years after the big bang that spawned all space and time -- a time, most astronomers believe, when the universe had yet to create the raw material needed to make planets, according to researchers who revealed their findings yesterday. The discovery could change theories about how easily nature makes planets from even the skimpiest of raw materials, and about the abundance of planets -- including some that might harbor life -- thriving unexpectedly in odd corners of the cosmos, astronomers said. "What we think we've found is an example of the first generation of planets formed in the universe," said Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University, a member of the observing team. "We think this planet formed with its star 12.713 billion years ago, when the [Milky Way] galaxy was . . . just in the process of forming." For a decade, the identity of this object had been an astronomical mystery. The observing team solved it by combining the sharp vision of the Hubble Space Telescope with other instruments and techniques, plus many years of inventive detective work. The results were announced at a NASA headquarters news conference yesterday and in today's issue of the journal Science. Confirmation that the object is a planet "is a stunning revelation," said Alan P. Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, an expert on the formation of planetary systems who is not a member of the observing team. "This means that 13 billion years ago, life could have arisen and then died out," he said. "This has immense implications." Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute, a specialist in pulsar studies not on the discovery team, said the evidence seems convincing but noted that it is only one example. "These are very early days in the study of extrasolar planets, and it probably is too early to rule them in or out just about anywhere," he said. Less than a decade ago, astronomers were still struggling to confirm the first planet detected beyond the family of the sun. Now, the population of known extrasolar planets exceeds 100. But the latest addition breaks the mold in several ways, Boss said. Today, the planet orbits an odd couple made up of a cold, collapsed star called a white dwarf and an even more bizarre companion known as a pulsar, which spins on its axis almost 100 times a second. The newfound planet is the only one known to orbit such a double star system. This eccentric trio resides at the core of the ancient globular star cluster M4, about 5,600 light-years from Earth in the direction of the summer constellation Scorpius. That cluster is visible in binoculars as a fuzzy white smudge very near the bright star Antares. The planet's habitat is as noteworthy as its longevity, astronomers said. The cluster was the site of a furious firestorm of star birth in its early history, and the young planet must have survived blistering ultraviolet radiation, the shockwaves of stellar cataclysms known as supernovas and other mayhem. Also, in what is possibly most significant for theories of planet formation, the setting has almost none of what Boss called "feedstock" for making planets. The globular cluster formed so early in cosmic history that it was deficient in heavy elements, such as carbon, silicon and oxygen -- the building blocks of planets such as those in our solar system. All the heavy elements that fill the modern universe were cooked up over time in the nuclear furnaces of successive generations of stars. But 13 billion years ago, the cluster was almost all hydrogen and helium gas, with only about 1/30th the heavy elements found in our own sun and planets, Boss said. With this deficit in the stuff of rocks, ice and other presumed essentials, some astronomers had argued that globular clusters could not spawn planets, and recent searches had seemed to confirm that. The new discovery "offers tantalizing evidence that formation processes are quite robust and efficient at making use of a small amount of heavier elements," said Sigurdsson, lead author of the Science paper. It also means that "the traditional way of making gas giant planets just isn't going to work in this case," Boss said, and that less widely accepted theories, such as one he has proposed that requires nothing more than gas, may get a boost. The planet is too dim to be directly observed, but the team ferreted out its existence and inferred its tortured history by sifting through generous clues provided by its weird present-day setting -- especially by the pulsar's peculiar properties. In the early 1990s, radio astronomers had timed the pulses the spinning pulsar emitted -- like beams from a lighthouse -- with exacting precision. They detected a complex wobble caused by the gravity of two unseen companions tugging at it. The first companion was determined to be a white dwarf in a tight, 191-day orbit around the pulsar. But the other object, orbiting about 2 billion miles from the central pair, remained a mystery. It was only when the Sigurdsson team used the Hubble Space Telescope to distinguish the movement of the white dwarf that it was able to determine the mass of the third body at 2.5 times the mass of Jupiter. "Several pieces of the puzzle were missing," Sigurdsson said. "The Hubble data snapped it all into place." Once it determined this unlikely trio's characteristics, the team inferred its adventuresome recent history, which included a plunge through the heart of the cluster, a hostile encounter there that bounced it back out toward the cluster's outskirts, and the transformation of the planet's parent star into the white dwarf.