Plot
"The Most Dangerous Man in America" is the story of what happens when a former Pentagon insider, armed only with his conscience, steadfast determination, and a file cabinet full of classified documents, decides to challenge an "Imperial" Presidency-answerable to neither Congress, the press, nor the people-in order to help end the Vietnam War. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg shook America to its foundations when he smuggled a top-secret Pentagon study to the New York Times that showed how five Presidents consistently lied to the American people about the Vietnam War that was killing millions and tearing America apart. President Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America," who "had to be stopped at all costs." But Ellsberg wasn't stopped. Facing 115 years in prison on espionage and conspiracy charges, he fought back. Ensuing events surrounding the so-called Pentagon Papers led directly to Watergate and the downfall of President Nixon, and hastened the end of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg's relentless telling of truth to power, which exposed the secret deeds of an "Imperial Presidency," inspired Americans of all walks of life to forever question the previously-unchallenged pronouncements of its leaders. "The Most Dangerous Man in America" tells the inside story, for the first time on film, of this pivotal event that changed history and transformed our nation's political discourse. It is told largely by the players of that dramatic episode-Ellsberg, his colleagues, family and critics; Pentagon Papers authors and government officials; Vietnam veterans and anti-war activists; Watergate principals, attorneys and the journalists who both covered the story and were an integral part of it; and finally-through White House audiotapes-President Nixon and his inner circle of advisors.
Keywords: 1960s, 1970s, character-name-in-title, claim-in-title, cold-war, cold-war-era, country-name-in-title, cover-up, espionage-act, foreign-politics
Plot
A look at man's relationship with Dirt. Dirt and humans couldn't be closer. We started our journey together as stardust, swirled by cosmic forces into our galaxy, solar system, and planet. We are made of the same stuff. Four billion years of evolution created dirt as the living source of all life on Earth including humans. Dirt has given us food, shelter, fuel, medicine, ceramics, flowers, cosmetics and color --everything needed for our survival. For most of the last ten thousand years we humans understood our intimate bond with dirt and the rest of nature. We took care of the soils that took care of us. But, over time, we lost that connection. Our species became greedy and careless. We still depend on dirt, but now we abuse and ignore it. We are destroying our last natural resource with our agriculture, our mining, and our paving over the planet for cities. We turned dirt into something "dirty." In doing so, we transform the skin of the earth into a hellish and dangerous landscape for all life on earth. A millennial shift in consciousness about the environment offers a beacon of hope - and practical solutions. Around the globe, pioneers are coming together to save earth's last natural resource. Tiny villages rise up to battle giant corporations slaughtering their land. Scientists discover connections with soil that can balance global warming. Generation X brands organic farming as trendy and children begin to eat from edible school yards. Inmates find inner peace and job skills in a prison horticulture program. Medical researchers explore dirt's capacity to provide solutions to such devastating health crises as AIDS. Major religions are rediscovering the reverence for the natural world that unites them all. Uses animation, vignettes, personal accounts and story telling.
Keywords: civilization, deep-ecology, destruction-of-planet, ecological-footprint, ecosystem-interrelationships, environment, environmental-crime, environmental-destruction, environmental-issue, global-ecology
A story with heart and soil.
Founder - The Wine Library: With the amount of species that live in a teaspoon of dirt, I think it's very obvious dirt might be more alive than we are.
Johnny Carson: How long would that take to, to grow with proper care to a fairly good size, 4 or 5 feet?::Founder - Tree People: Two, three years.::Johnny Carson: And this is gonna be a redwood?::Founder - Tree People: It's already a redwood.::Johnny Carson: Oh, excuse me.
Female Inmates: God made dirt, and dirt don't hurt. Put it in your mouth and let it work. Dirt!
Child: Yes, dirt you made my lunch. Yes, dirt you made my lunch.
The Nobel Prizes (Swedish: Nobelpriset, Norwegian: Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institute, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make outstanding contributions in the fields of chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. They were established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, which dictates that the awards should be administered by the Nobel Foundation. Another prize, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, was established in 1968 by the Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, for contributors to the field of economics.
Each prize is awarded by a separate committee; the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, and Economics, the Karolinska Institute awards the Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee awards the Prize in Peace. Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary award that has varied throughout the years. In 1901, the recipients of the first Nobel Prizes were given 150,782 SEK, which is equal to 7,731,004 SEK in December 2007. In 2008, the winners were awarded a prize amount of 10,000,000 SEK. The awards are presented in Stockholm in an annual ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death.
Alexander Gerst (born May 3, 1976 in Künzelsau, Baden-Württemberg) is a European Space Agency astronaut having been selected in 2009 to undergo training. He studied at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, where he received a university degree in physics. He also studied Earth Science at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where he was awarded a Master of Science. He has been working as a researcher since 2005 and received his Doctorate about volcanic eruption in 2010. In his spare time, he enjoys mountaineering, diving, climbing and skydiving.
He was selected as astronaut in 2009 by the European Space Agency.
Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, AC, FRS (born 26 November 1948 in Hobart, Tasmania) is an Australian-born American biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. Blackburn recalls: "Carol had done this experiment, and we sat down, just in the lab, and I remember sort of standing there, and she had this -- we call it a bum. It's an autoradiogram, because there was trace amounts of radioactivity that were used to develop an image of the separated DNA products of what turned out to be the telomerase enzyme reaction. I remember looking at it and just thinking, ‘Ah! This could be very big. This looks just right.’ It had a pattern to it. There was a regularity to it. There was something that was not just sort of garbage there, and that was really kind of coming through, even though we look back at it now, we'd say, technically, there was this, that and the other, but it was a pattern shining through, and it just had this sort of sense, ‘Ah! There's something real here.’ "For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak. She also worked in medical ethics, and was controversially dismissed from the President's Council on Bioethics.
David J. Wineland (born 1944) is an American physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) physics laboratory in Boulder. His work has included advances in optics, specifically laser cooling of ions in Paul traps and use of trapped ions to implement quantum computing operations.
Wineland received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and his PhD in 1970 working under Norman Ramsey at Harvard University. He then worked as a postdoc in Hans Dehmelt's group at the University of Washington before joining the National Bureau of Standards in 1975 where he started the ion storage group, now at NIST, Boulder.
Wineland is a fellow of the American Physical society, the American Optical society, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992.
He was the recipient of the 1990 Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics, the 1990 William F. Meggers Award of the Optical Society of America, the 1996 Einstein Medal for Laser Science of the Society of Optical and Quantum electronics, the 1998 Rabi Award from the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society, the 2001 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science, the 2007 National Medal of Science in the physical sciences, the 2008 Herbert Walther Award from the OSA., and The Franklin Institute's 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics with Juan Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller.
David John Haskins (born 24 April 1957, Northampton, England), better known as David J, is a British alternative rock musician. He was the bassist for the gothic rock band Bauhaus and Love and Rockets.
He is the older brother of Kevin Haskins, also a musician and member of Bauhaus.
David J wrote the lyrics of several Bauhaus songs (including their first single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead"). He sang backing vocals on many songs, and sang lead on "Who Killed Mr. Moonlight?". He began writing music for a solo career while still in the band, and continued after the band's breakup, releasing the dark Etiquette of Violence and Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh, and played bass on two Jazz Butcher albums (A Scandal in Bohemia and Sex and Travel). J was also a part of the very short-lived band The Sinister Ducks, which included saxophonist Alex Green and comics writer Alan Moore. He also released a collaborative single, "Armour" / "Nothing" with artist and poet Rene Halkett, of the original Weimar Bauhaus school of art and design.