Editorial Media

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[ Video ] - Paul Craig Roberts: China isn't to blame for a weak US economy

While the debates around the world keep on pouring in about the rise of China and deteriorating economic conditions of US , very less analysts happen to pin point the exact reasons.This video elaborates them in few minutes.

On Tuesday President Obama meet with the future leader of China. Xi Jinping was welcomed at the White House where the two discussed several issues. Obama said that a strong relationship between the US and China was "vital," but his actions have shown otherwise. In November of last year, President Obama made the announcement that the US will position 2,500 Marines in Australia, and in the past Obama has been outspoken towards China's influence and has declared this is a top priority. So why is Obama being two-faced with China? Doctor Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan Administration official, joins us to look into the bipolar relationship with China.

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Top 10 Bad Messages From Good Movies

Courtesy of Wired.com

Sometimes it can be hard to see the messages a movie teaches, especially if they’re unintentional. The best way to see a movie’s messages, the bad ones in particular, is to be a parent watching the movie with your kids. Suddenly you find yourself talking to your kids after you leave the theater or after the video finishes playing at home, just to see if they picked up on the bad messages. Then, if they did, you can try to do some damage control.

Quality doesn’t generally come into play when it comes to messages: There are plenty of bad movies whose messages are perfectly benign, and plenty of good movies that have messages you definitely wouldn’t want your kids to take to heart. It is this latter category with which this list is concerned. Here then is a countdown of the top 10 bad messages in good (and at least somewhat geeky) movies:

10. If you’re not born with special abilities, you’re never going to be any good at some things, no matter how hard you try (from the Harry Potter movies, and, of course, books). In the world of Harry Potter, there are those who are born with magical abilities, and those who aren’t. There’s even a word, “squib,” for people born to wizarding families who can’t do magic. It’s made very clear in the stories that, if you’re unlucky enough to be born without magical talent, you’re never going to amount to anything in that world and might as well not try.

9. No matter how appallingly bad conditions on Earth get, so long as there is one tiny plant on the planet, it can still be restored to its former beauty and sustainability (from WALL-E). In WALL-E, Earth is depicted as essentially one big desolate, deteriorated waste dump. Then WALL-E finds one tiny little green plant, and that is evidently enough to constitute proof that the planet can be reclaimed. That’s one small plant in the midst of millions of square miles of garbage and lifeless expanse. It kind of flies in the face of the desired message behind the film to imply that, no matter how badly we screw things up, one dinky little leafy green thing will constitute hope for all of humanity.

8. Technology is fundamentally evil (from lots of movies, including the The Lord of the Rings trilogy). This message comes pretty much unchanged from the books, but it’s much easier to see it in the movies. You see the orcs destroying trees, building fires and operating machinery both to produce more orcs and to assist them in combat. By contrast, the various forces of good rely on intellect, magic, swordsmanship, archery and a fair helping of luck. Can there be a doubt about the message there?

7. Arrogance, brash self-confidence and having had a heroic father are much more indicative of a competent leader than are experience and knowledge (from the 2009 Star Trek movie). Jim Kirk rises from a cadet with a disciplinary hearing hanging over his head to captain of the Enterprise in a matter of days, maybe even hours. This is due partly to his making an astonishingly unlikely connection between the report on the Romulan miner ship and what he remembers reading about the encounter when his father died. But it’s mostly due to Captain Pike’s experience working with Kirk’s father and the fact that Kirk acts like an arrogant jackass that he gets bumped up to First Officer so rapidly. Never mind the fact there have to be dozens, if not hundreds, of far more experienced officers (even if they’re not on the Enterprise) who would be better-suited to the captain’s chair than the alternate Kirk as presented in the film. So, even if Kirk did manage to become the ship’s captain towards the end of that adventure, how could he hope to keep the job (other than, of course, that it’s his destiny)?

6. Kissing sleeping women you don’t know will wake them up and lead to them falling in love with you (from Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). We don’t really need to explain this one further than that, do we? I mean, we all know the stories.

5. If you’re a really good person, but in a lousy situation, simply wait around and eventually good things will just happen to you (from Cinderella). Cinderella ends up living happily ever after, but not because of anything she did. If the Fairy Godmother (a deus ex machina if ever there was one) hadn’t appeared, it’s a sure thing Cinderella wouldn’t have done anything on her own to get out of the house. Yes, her stepmother and stepsisters treated her terribly, and one could argue that she deserves a Fairy Godmother. But — stop me if you’ve heard this before — life isn’t fair, so why should she get something just because karma says she deserves it?

4. Unconventional creative play is very, very wrong (from Toy Story). Sid, the kid next door, is portrayed as basically evil. The movie makes him out this way because he pulls toys apart and reassembles them in strange ways, and likes to blow things up. In other words, he’s a geek. If the toys weren’t alive — and Sid can probably be forgiven for not realizing that they were — his behavior would be perhaps a little extreme, but not in any way wrong, especially for a boy his age.

3. Even tough women who aren’t afraid to fight aren’t as important as the men they fight alongside (from the Star Wars movies). - Princess Leia, despite being very comfortable giving orders and shooting at stormtroopers, always hands off the really important jobs to men. Luke tells her that she’s his sister and Darth Vader is their father, and by the way he’s going off to confront daddy to try to turn him back to being a good guy, and she doesn’t insist on coming with him or joining him later. On Hoth, Luke and Han are out scouting on Tauntauns, but she’s back at the base where it’s nice and warm. And then there’s Padme, who kicks a fair bit of butt, but only until she and Anakin get secretly married, at which point she essentially vanishes except to talk about her pregnancy and her worries about her husband. As we know, of course, pregnant women are incapable of doing anything except sitting around worrying, right?

2. It’s OK to completely change your physical appearance and way of life for the person you love, even if he makes no sacrifices at all (from The Little Mermaid). This movie has the single most appalling ending of any Disney movie ever made, which is a shame because, apart from that, it’s a great film. I just cannot comprehend how anyone could make a movie in the late 1980s with this message, which is not exactly subtle: Ariel gives up her home, her family, and BEING A MERMAID because she loves Eric so. And he gives up … nothing. Yeah, that marriage is off to a great start.

1. If you’re not a member of the elite, you’re basically inconsequential, even if you die heroically trying to save your people and your way of life (from the Star Wars movies). This crops up time and time again in the series, but nowhere is it more clearly demonstrated in the assault on the first Death Star. We mentioned it a few months ago, but here it is again: There are somewhere between 20 and 30 one-man fighters in the assault, right? And of all of those guys, only Luke, Wedge and some guy in a Y-wing make it back (and Han and Chewie, of course, but they weren’t part of the original team). So that means that in this fight, despite its amazing success, the rebels lost somewhere between 17 and 27 of their very best, bravest pilots. Yet all they can do is cheer as Luke descends the ladder of his X-wing. Luke cheers, too, hugs Leia, and is absolutely ecstatic … until he realizes that R2-D2 got badly damaged in the fight, at which point he is nearly distraught. Losing fellow human beings, including a good friend of his, that doesn’t matter; possibly losing a cute but replaceable machine, now that’s sad. And of course then there’s the whole matter of Vader being redeemed because he saved his own son’s life, never mind the thousands of people whose deaths he was responsible for.

Any other good (bad) ones? Please leave a comment

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Difference Between Feelings and Emotions

This post is a continuity of topic "Emotions". Part 1 and 2 were discussed before. This is Part 3 of the same topic by Dr. Sana Durvesh. By the end a full Recap is given in order to catch up whole thing again. Enjoy reading... Feelings are more like sensations, when you touch something you get a feeling. Therefore feelings are faster than emotions and thought, because when you touch something there is a slight delay before you can think of something about it (thought), or feel something deeply about it (emotion).A feeling is like a conscious emotion because you can "feel" it better and easier but emotion is a deeper, more unconscious experience similar to unconscious thought Feelings can be described in more detail than emotions because you can have a specific feeling for anything, each feeling is unique and might not have a name. For instance, if you are upset by one person that might have its own feeling because that person upsets you in a certain way. That feeling doesn't have a defined name because it is your personal feeling. The feeling may also be an emotion, say anger. You can recognize any feeling, that is what makes it a feeling. If you are sad that is a feeling, but if you are depressed that isn’t a feeling it is more like an emotion. You can’t identify why you are depressed but you can usually identify why you are sad. Feelings are more immediate, if something happens or is happening, it is going to result in a feeling. However, if something happened a long time ago, you are going to think about it unconsciously and that is going to bring up unconscious feelings. Otherwise known as emotion. So emotions are unconscious feelings that are the result of unconscious thoughts. Feeling defined there as something you can identify. So you can’t identify the unconscious thought that caused the unconscious feeling, but you can identify the unconscious feeling (aka emotion). Another aspect of unconscious thought, emotion, or unconscious feeling (all three are the same) is that it tends to be mixed into the rest of your system because it is unconscious. If it was conscious then it remains as an individual feeling, but in its unconscious form you confuse it with the other emotions and feelings and it affects your entire system. So therefore most of what people are feeling is just a mix of feelings that your mind cannot separate out individually. That is the difference between sadness and a depression, a depression lowers your mood and affects all your feelings and emotions, but sadness is just that individual feeling. So the reason that the depression affects all your other feelings is because you can no longer recognize the individual sad emotions that caused it. The feelings become mixed. If someone can identify the reason they are sad then they become no longer depressed, just sad. Once they forget that that was the reason they are depressed however, they will become depressed again. That is why an initial event might make someone sad, and then that sadness would later lead into a depression, is because you forget why you originally got sad. You might not consciously forget, but unconsciously you do. That is, it feels like you forget, the desire to get revenge on whatever caused the sadness fades away. When that happens it is like you “forgetting” what caused it. You may also consciously forget but what matters is how much you care about that sadness. It might be that consciously understanding why you are depressed or sad changes how much you care about your sadness, however. That would therefore change the emotion/feeling of sadness. The more you care about the sadness/depression, the more like a feeling it becomes and less like an emotion. That is because the difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are easier to identify (because you can “feel” them easier). The following is a good example of the transition from caring about a feeling to not caring about a feeling. Anger as an emotion takes more energy to maintain, so if someone is punched or something, they are only likely to be mad for a brief period of time, but the sadness that it incurred might last for a much longer time. That sadness is only going to be recognizable to the person punched for a brief period of time as attributable to the person who did the punching, after that the sadness would sink into their system like a miniature depression. Affecting the other parts of their system like a depression. If you clearly enough understand what the sadness is then it is going to remain a sadness and not affect the rest of your system. That is because the feeling would get mixed in with the other feelings and start affecting them. The period of this more clear understanding of the sadness mostly occurs right after the event that caused the sadness. That is because it is clear to you what it is. Afterwards the sadness might emerge (or translate from a depression, to sadness) occasionally if you think about what caused it or just think about it in general. Think about the emotion of love. You feel attracted to some one and you can have reasons for it,but as that feeling of likeness grows into the emotion of love you don't care about the pros and cons of that relationship. If you like to read the whole series here is a recap: Emotions (Introduction) Classification of Emotions (Part 1) Classification of Emotions (Part 2)

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Language Learning is Fun

In my language corner I intend to give simple and easy Language Learning activities which any one can use to improve his/her language skills. These activities are for language learners of all age groups since the language competence varies in our country and it is not dependent on age. More over, all of us have our own weak area of language. However, for teaching purposes I ll mention the class level for which the activity is designed. When used for children they are really fun and a great and quick source of learning. This language learning activity is based on the text of the poem DAFFODILS by William Words Worth . You may use any text and change the activities accordingly. This is a good activity for the teachers of Grade 6th to 10th.

Poem

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced, but they Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee; A poet could not be but gay, In such a jocund company! I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. Now we'll go straight into activities...

Activity A - Brain Storming

Study the title of the poem. Write down the first words or thoughts that come to your mind after reading the title.

Activity B - Listening Skills

Listen to the poem and number the words in the correct sequence For Example Breeze Daffodils Glance Shine Mood Glee Lie Bay Brought Inward

Activity C - Reading Skills

Read the poem, put the text aside and fill in the blanks: Continuous as the __________ that shine And twinkle on the ____________ They _________ in never ending line Along the ___________ of a bay; Ten thousand I saw at a __________ Tossing their ___________ in sprightly dance

Activity D - Dictionary looking up and Reading skills

Use the Dictionary and write down a similar word in meaning as the one given in bracket. I wandered ____________ (lonely) as a cloud. That floats on high o’er _______ (vales) and hills, When all at once I saw a ____________ (crowd), A ____________(host) of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, __________(beneath) the trees, Fluttering and dancing with the ____________ (breeze) Activity E - Writing Skills Select a flower of your choice and write at least ten to fifteen lines about it and the feelings u have, when u see it. Discuss it in the class with each other either in pairs or in groups.