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National and World News
What the Bleep conference
SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- This year's Prophets Conference on February 4-6 brings together
the film's scientists, visionaries, filmmakers and actors for the first conference
related to one of the most talked-about films of 2004: What the Bleep Do We Know?
The conference provides a catalyst to explore and to carry forward the conversation
about the film's main theme: That we each affectively create our world through the
power of our own consciousness.
The conference will further the conversations initiated by the experts in the film.
Participants from the film who are coming together at the Santa Monica Bleep Conference
are David Albert, Ph.D., Joseph Dispenza, D.C., Dr. Masaru Emoto, John Hagelin, Ph.D.,
Stuart Hameroff, M.D., JZ Knight, Miceal Ledwith, Ph.D., Candace Pert, Ph.D., Jeffrey
Satinover, M.D., William Tiller, Ph.D., Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D., filmmakers William
Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente and Academy Award winner Marlee Matlin.
For more information, visit www.greatmystery.org, e-mail prophets@greatmystery.org
or call toll-free 1 (888) 777-5981.
Conversations with God film
OJAI, Calif. -- The Spiritual Cinema Circle, America's fastest growing DVD club,
just announced plans to produce its first feature film, Conversations with God, based
on the international bestseller by Neale Donald Walsch. The film will premiere exclusively
for Circle subscribers in 2006.
The "Conversations with God" (CWG) book series, the first of which spent
nearly three years on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold approximately
seven million copies in 34 languages and launched thousands of discussion groups
around the world. During the past 10 years, Walsch has received multiple offers from
producers (and one major studio) to turn his book and life story into a film. He
turned them all down.
"Just five years before I wrote about my experience," Walsch says, "I
was homeless, with a broken neck, living in a park. I spent my days collecting cans
to sell for five cents each just to have enough money to eat. It was important to
me that this story not become Hollywood-ized."
Last year Stephen Simon, co-founder of Spiritual Cinema Circle and veteran Hollywood
producer of Somewhere in Time, What Dreams May Come and 23 other features, directed
Neale in the film Indigo. While working on that film, Walsch observed that Simon
has "an extraordinarily high level of artistic integrity, vision, and willingness
to collaborate" and he finally agreed to have the CWG story told on the big
screen.
"For the past 10 years I have dreamed of making this movie," says Simon,
who will produce and direct the film. "Conversations with God will be a powerful,
mystical, and surprising film."
The Spiritual Cinema Circle will finance the $1.5 million dollar project. Gay Hendricks,
who co-founded The Circle with his wife Kathlyn and Simon, will be executive producer.
Eric DelaBarre is writing the script. DelaBarre, who won "Filmmaker of the Future"
at the Newport Beach International Film Festival for writing,
producing and directing his first feature, Kate's Addiction, also wrote the book
Why Not (Start Living Your Life Today) and spent six years as a writer/director/producer
on NBC's "Law & Order."
Production of the film Conversations with God begins November 7 in Southern Oregon,
where Walsch and Simon both live. Details on cast and crew openings can be found
at www.spiritualcinemacircle.com/Public/cwg/index.cfm
The Spiritual Cinema Circle, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cinema Circle, Inc., is
the pioneer in subscription-based home entertainment distribution for the niche market
of Spiritual Cinema, with an audience waiting to see spiritually themed films that
until now have gone virtually unappreciated and unseen. Each month, subscribers receive
four uplifting and inspiring films (a combination of shorts, documentaries and features
found at film festivals around the world) on DVD, which they get to keep. Nearly
13,000 people in 60 countries have already subscribed.
For more information on The Circle, or to join, visit www.SpiritualCinemaCircle.com
Unlimited New Energy
SYDNEY, Australia -- A revolutionary new way of harnessing the power of the sun to
extract almost unlimited energy from water will be a reality within seven years.
"It would be the cheapest, cleanest and most abundant energy source ever developed,"
say scientists from Australia's University of New South Wales. "The main by-products
would be oxygen and water."
Special titanium oxide ceramics will harvest sunlight and split water to produce
hydrogen fuel. The researchers say it will then be a simple engineering exercise
to make a device with no moving parts to harvest the energy; and it will give off
no greenhouse gases or pollutants.
"This is potentially huge, with a market the size of all the existing markets
for coal, oil and gas combined," says Professor Janusz Nowotny who, with Professor
Chris Sorrell, is leading a solar hydrogen research project at the University's Centre
for Materials and Energy Conversion. The team is thought to be the most advanced
in developing the cheap, light-sensitive materials that will be the basis of the
new technology.
Chris Sorrell says Australia is ideally placed to take advantage of the enormous
potential of this new technology: "We've abundant sunlight, huge re-serves of
titanium. But this technology could be used anywhere in the world. It's been the
dream of many people for a long time to develop it and it's exciting to know that
it is now within such close reach."
Although existing hydrogen fuel cell technology is more efficient than the internal
combustion engine and dramatically cuts down vehicle emissions, currently hydrogen
is produced from fossil fuel, so that it still gives off greenhouse gases. This new
process would cut out these emissions.
In Britain, a team of scientists at Leeds University have developed an-other process
that enables hydrogen to be produced from vegetable oils, so cars could in future
have a tank of sun-flower oil that would be converted into hydrogen to power the
fuel cell motor.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the world's first commercial-scale floating Wave Energy Converter,
The Pelamis, has successfully generated its first electricity for the UK grid.
In the U.S., more than 350 bankers and investors met to explore the state of financing
for renewable energy in America. The American Council on Renewable Energy and Euromoney
was completely oversubscribed. "It's great to see renewable energy entering
the mainstream," said the organizers.
Source: Positive News [www.positivenews.org.uk/index.php]
Plan B for the Future
Lester Brown, author of Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization
in Trouble, says a world economy can be built that does not destroy its natural support
systems -- a global community where the basic needs of all the earth's people are
satisfied and a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized.
The Plan includes a massive mobilization, a worldwide effort at wartime speed to
stabilize population and climate, and to raise water productivity.
"Restructuring the world economy to achieve these goals is an enormous undertaking,"
he says, "but the cost of not doing so is unacceptably high. The challenge is
not just to alleviate poverty, essential though this is, but to build an economy
that is compatible with the earth's natural systems -- an eco-economy that can sustain
progress."
Since the publication of Plan B, hundreds of enthusiastic readers have purchased
additional copies for distribution to friends, colleagues and opinion leaders. Reah
Janise Kauffman, vice president of the Earth Policy Institute, says: "We have
designated those who bought five or more copies members of our Plan B Team. Like
me, these readers sense that our modern civilization is in trouble and they want
to do something about it."
Leading the Plan B Team is Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, who has bought and distributed
more than 3,500 copies. Altogether, more than 400 individuals have purchased five
copies or more, distributing them to friends, colleagues and political representatives.
"This economic restructuring depends on tax restructuring, on getting the market
to be ecologically honest," Lester Brown says. "It is easy to spend hundreds
of billions in response to terrorist threats, but the reality is that the resources
needed to disrupt a modern economy are small, and a Department of Homeland Security,
however heavily funded, provides only minimal protection from suicidal terrorists.
The challenge is not just to provide a high tech military response to terrorism,
but also to build a global society that is environmentally sustainable, socially
equitable and democratically based -- one where there is hope for everyone. This
would more effectively undermine the spread of terrorism than a doubling of military
expenditures.
"Given the wealth that exists in the world today, we can satisfy the basic needs
of people everywhere. Indeed, we cannot afford not to do so. It isn't a hand-out,
it's an investment in our future."
Gianfranco Bologna of the World Wildlife Fund Italy said: "Plan B is a clear
and remarkable summation of a new plan for society."
For more information, visit www.earth-policy.org
Source: Positive News [www.positivenews.org.uk/index.php] |
| February 2005 |
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