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PANGEA PROGRESS

Dreams and anguish bring us together (The Band's Visit)

8/26/2013

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The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, consisting of eight men, arrive in Israel from Egypt. They have been booked by an Arab cultural center in Petah Tiqva, but through a miscommunication (Arabic has no "p" sound, and regularly replaces it with "b"), the band takes a bus to Bet Hatikva, a fictional town in the middle of the Negev Desert. There is no transportation out of the city that day, and there are no hotels for them to spend the night in. The band members dine at a small restaurant where the owner, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) invites them to stay the night at her apartment, at her friends' apartment, and in the restaurant. That night challenges all of the characters.
http://en.wikipedia.org

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together." - Eugene Ionesco

Art as a way to reach beyond alienation and boundaries and connect the common humanity. What David Foster Wallace stated in so many words art is what it means to be universally human.
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O Fortuna 

8/26/2013

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The film is a debate with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which Wilton is seen reading early on, identifying him with the anti-hero Raskolnikov.  That character is a brooding loner who kills an old woman to prove that he is a superior being, but is racked by guilt and eventually admits all to a dogged sleuth, and he is finally redeemed by punishment, the love of a poor girl, and the discovery of God. Wilton is a brooding loner who kills a poor girl who loves him because he considers his interests superior to those around him, knows little guilt, and avoids detection through luck. Allen signals his intentions with more superficial similarities: both killers attempt to cover their crime by faking a robbery, both are almost caught by a painter's unexpected appearance in the stairwell, and both sleuths play cat and mouse with the suspect. Allen argues, unlike Dostoevsky, that there is neither God, nor punishment, nor love to provide redemption.

Allen revisits some of the themes he had explored in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), such as the existence of justice in the universe. Both films feature a murder of an unwanted mistress "offer a depressing view on fate, fidelity, and the nature of man". That film’s protagonist, Judah Rosenthal, is an affluent member of the upper-middle class having an extramarital affair. After he threatens to break the affair off, his mistress blackmails him and threatens to go to his wife. Soon, Rosenthal decides to murder his mistress but is distressed at the evil of the killing. Philip French compared the two films' plots and themes in The Observer, and characterised Match Point's as a "clever twist on the themes of chance and fate".
http://en.wikipedia.org


Match Point 2005 – “People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.”
My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck, especially successful people. As they age and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There's a reason for this. The world doesn't want to acknowledge it either.
Don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that you have had success, you have also had luck. And with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky. I make this point because, along with this speech, it's something that you're very likely to forget.

And I think that -- you know, I think if you're sitting -- coming out of an Ivy League school today, you're encouraged to believe that you're very special, that you have passed through all these very fine filters our society has created, and you got this road ahead of you that's deserved and earned.

And I just -- I do think it's very easy for people sitting in those seats to forget that they're lucky, that there's a huge amount of chance in life, and accident plays a very big role in life. And they ought to dwell on that a minute. They ought to dwell on just how fortunate they are.


Michael Lewis on his Princeton Speech
"When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the power­lessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view?"
Ernest Becker
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Can We Know the Truth? 

8/26/2013

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"We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. But of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer."

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"

Ludwig Wittgenstein

He once argued that the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—one of the most terrifying thinkers who ever lived—was an artist because " he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."
(David Gates on David Foster Wallace)
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Mediterraneo 

8/26/2013

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Mediterraneo is an Italian film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1991. The film is set during World War II, and regards a group of Italian soldiers who become stranded on a Greek island and are left behind by the war.

The film is accompanied by quoting a phrase of Henri Laborit ("In times like these, escape is the only way to stay alive and continue dreaming") and closes with a caption significant and emblematic: "Dedicated to all those who are running away ".


"Fortune often amuses herself by thrusting people into situations in which they never expected to find themselves. Some are bewildered and perplexed, and lose their spirits; others take offense and rail against the cruel whims of destiny; others rise to the challenge and respond to the playfulness of the blindfolded goddess with games of their own, and rather than falling into a funk or knitting their brows, they enjoy the new turn of affairs and even manage to laugh at fate. When this happens, days that might easily have been filled with boredom and misery become memorable. Because the world is absurd, one must respond with even greater absurdities."

Maurizio Viroli, Professor of politics at Princeton University. from the book "Niccolo's Smile."
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Planet Earth from 900 million miles away 

8/7/2013

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Cassini Earth photos
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“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
Stephen Hawking

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    "Our lives begin to end the day we are silent about things that matter"
    Dr. Martin Luther King

    Author of Blog
     Born in  the United States of America. Spent my Childhood in Kenya, East Africa. Graduate of  George Mason University in Global Affairs with a concentration in Africa and the Middle East.
    What I desire is not total agreement but thoughtful people. To share ideas and expand knowledge in the era of globalization.