The video above is fairly mind-blowing. And here you can watch the elephant from another angle. The elephant apparently resides in a safe haven in Thailand, after having been abused in Burma. For more info, see The Elephant Art & Conservation Project. (Video has been added to our YouTube playlist.)
Elephant Painting
Dith Pran on Genocide
Dith Pran, a photojournalist and political activist who survived The Killing Fields in Cambodia, and whose experience was narrated in the 1984 film by the same name, has died at 65. You can revisit his photographic work here, and watch a talk he gave in 2006. Here, Pran recounts what happened in Cambodia — how The Vietnam War spread to Cambodia, empowering the murderous Khmer Rouge — and questions whether we’re generally getting closer to making genocide a thing of the past.
Nosferatu: The Silent Adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Released in 1922, the German Expressionist film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, offers a chilling adaption of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (get free audiobook of Stoker’s work here). The film was made by F. W. Murnau and stars Max Schreck. Watch it below, or find it in our collection of Free Movies Online.
80+ Free Courses from UCSD
Here’s a quick note for anyone looking for free online courses: The University of California – San Diego now gives you free access to more than 80 courses. (Access the full list here.) The courses, mostly rooted in the sciences, can be accessed via iTunes or rss feed. We’ve integrated some of these courses into our own meta list of Free Online Courses from Great Universities. It now includes about 215 courses, and we’d encourage you to bookmark the page and use it often.
Bush’s War
To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, PBS’s Frontline is airing “Bush’s War,” which offers “the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation’s history.” Drawing on an extensive archive, the program lays out the “entire narrative,” showing how “the war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the government.” If you can’t catch it on TV, you can watch it online. Click here and then click “Watch Online.”
The Real Cost of the Iraq War
During the run up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration estimated that the military mission would run around $50 billion, even though experts doubted those numbers at the time. (In 2002, Yale’s William Nordhaus guessed that the costs could reach $500 billion within five years.) Now, here we are in 2008, and new tallies suggest that the real costs could rise to somewhere between $1 trillion and $3 trillion. This award-winning piece — MP3 – iTunes – Feed — delineates the mounting costs and introduces you to some of thinking in Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes’ new book: The Three Trillion Dollar War.
The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
At The Berkman Center for Internet and Society (at Harvard Law School), Clay Shirky gave a talk on his highly touted new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. You can catch his talk here: video for computer or portable device – high res video – mp3 audio. And sample some of his other writing here.
Grateful Dead Free Concert Archive
A nice little find for Dead Heads: The Internet Archive hosts a large collection of the Grateful Dead’s live music. Some concerts (usually recorded by members of the audience) can be downloaded. Other audio (usually taken from the soundboard) can be streamed. You can access the overall collection here.
A few items worth sampling include: Live at the Boston Garden (May 7, 1977); Live at the Dane County Coliseum (February 15, 1973); or Live at Madison Square Garden (September 4, 1979).
Enjoy.
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