Culture

Rivers provide the essentials of life: fresh food and water. They often provide natural highways and enable us to live in just about every environment on Earth. But rivers can also flood, freeze or disappear altogether!Cities - Surviving the Urban Jungle Human Planet joins Sam Niang, a Laotian fisherman, as he walks a high wire strung above the raging Mekong River rapids on an extraordinary commute to work. There's also a look at the remarkable partnership between Samburu tribesmen and wild elephants in their search for water in the dried-out river beds of Northern Kenya. Plus, a father who must take his two children on a six-day trek down a frozen river - the most dangerous school run on Earth, and the ice dam busters of Ottowa with their dynamite solution to a city centre hold-up.

We live our lives pursuing happiness 'out there' as if it is a commodity. We have become slaves to our own desires and craving. Happiness isn't something that can be pursued or purchased like a cheap suit. This is Maya, illusion, the endless play of form. In the Buddhist tradition, Samsara, or the endless cycle of suffering is perpetuated by the craving of pleasure and aversion to pain. Freud referred to this as the "pleasure principle." Everything we do is an attempt to create pleasure, to gain something that we want, or to push away something that is undesirable that we don't want. Even a simple organism like the paramecium does this. It is called response to stimulus. Unlike a paramecium, humans have more choice. We are free to think, and that is the heart of the problem. It is the thinking about what we want that has gotten out of control. The dilemma of modern society is that we seek to understand the world, not in terms of archaic inner consciousness, but by quantifying and qualifying what we perceive to be the external world by using scientific means and thought. Thinking has only led to more thinking and more questions. We seek to know the innermost forces which create the world and guide its course. But we conceive of this essence as outside of ourselves, not as a living thing, intrinsic to our own nature. It was the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung who said, "one who looks outside dreams, one who looks inside awakes." It is not wrong to desire to be awake, to be happy. What is wrong is to look for happiness outside when it can only be found inside.

A Personal Journey Into The Uncharted Depths Of Nerd Culture, A Realm Full Of Dangers, Creatures And More Or Less Precarious Working Conditions.
Artist and life-long nerd Johannes Grenzfurthner is taking us on a personal road trip from the West Coast to the East Coast of the USA, to introduce us to places and people that shaped and inspired his art and politics. Traceroute wants to chase and question the ghosts of nerddom's past, present and future. An exhilarating tour de farce into the guts of trauma, obsession and cognitive capitalism.

Jeremy Clarkson decides to get a flock of sheep. He thinks It's a genius business plan: Instead every year mowing the 300 acres without cropping, the sheep will do, keeping everything nice and tidy and fertilizing the soil. Moreover, he can sell their babies for profit. But he doesn't count with the added complications these high-maintenance animals will bring.

In this second episode, a woman recounts her journey to becoming a mouthpiece for white nationalist hate speech, work that culminates in high-profile violence and murder. Samantha confesses how she became a spokesperson on the Internet for the hate speech of one of the many white nationalist groups that swarm the United States. And this fact ended in racist violence and death during an event.
'I had to start to realize what I was supporting. Was I the victim or was I also a villain?' says Samantha, looking into the camera. Hand in hand with xenophobia, digital true crime seems to have no respite, and so it will be shown how those supremacists work with good Wi-Fi.

In the third episode of the series, Morgan Freeman examines different faiths' concepts of God, discovering how monotheism began in Egypt and Israel and allowing a neuroscientist to examine his own brain.