Hey everybody! As always, we’ve been busy crawling the web to present you the best lectures and documentary films available online.
As a result, week 46 on getDocued brought you a whole bunch of talking bacteria, memories of a Nazi Germany resistance fighter, as well as a Vietnam veteran turned street artist.
See you guys around!
Just in case you missed it:
This week on getDocued, Henry Markram built a brain in a supercomputer, we took a look at the post-revolution Chinese movie industry, the ‘Travelling Neutrinos’ found a way to save the rent, and Larry Lessig is still not a fan of Congress.
I didn’t know about this until I happened to zap into Christiane Amanpour’s interview format on CNN the other night, but there is a fairly new and pretty highly acclaimed documentary about the end of the Liberian civil war, called “Pray the Devil back to Hell“. It was directed by Virginia Reticker.
The show featured the film’s protagonist, Leymah Gbowee, as well as Beninoise musician Angélique Kidjo, both known for their efforts in the field of human rights and peace promotion. A transcript of the interview can be found here.
GBOWEE: [...] when we started at first, you know we got a lot of fun — people made fun of us, toothless bulldogs, they’re just out for recognition, they’re out for cash from Taylor. And even the men in some communities who were supposed to be at least sympathetic of kind of in line with our cause were making fun. And some of the women were like, “We really need to take this to another level. Let’s have a sex strike.”
Brief clips from the film were strewn in between interview parts, some of them really quite remarkable – including, for example, a direct confrontation with Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former president (currently on trial in The Hague).
We ask the honorable pro tem of the senate, being a woman and being in line with our cause, to kindly present this statement to His Excellency Dr. Charles Taylor with this message: that the women of Liberia, including the IDPs, we are tired of war. We are tired of running. We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of our children being raped.
Has anybody seen the whole thing?
“Pray the Devil back to Hell” Official Site
Leymah Gbowee – Biography @ huntalternatives.org
Imagine you’re Tom Morello, guitarist of well-known rock troupe Rage Against The Machine. Suppose you’ve spent almost your entire artistic career rallying against suppressive politics, militarism and war – and all of a sudden you realize some guy in your own government has been using your music to torture people! Wouldn’t you be p*ssed?
Well, according to this article on the Huffington Post, Morello obviously is:
“Guantanamo may be Dick Cheney’s idea of America, but it’s not mine. The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me — we need to end torture and close Guantanamo now.”
And he’s not the only one: Among the group now addressing an FOIA request at the National Security Archives are such illustrious names as Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails), R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Jackson Browne, and the Roots.
“We have spent the past 30 years supporting causes related to peace and justice,” read a statement from REM, “to now learn that some of our friends’ music may have been used as part of the torture tactics without their consent or knowledge, is horrific. It’s anti-American, period.”
Music Stars Demand Records On Bush Administration’s Use Of Music For Torture @ The Huffington Post
Whether you like it or not, Twitter is pretty much out there, and it’s hard to deny it has even managed to achieve a certain degree of relevance in today’s ever-changing media landscape (think, for example, Iran’s 2009 revolution).
This comprehensive analysis however, provided by social media expert Brian Solis, focuses on the lighter side of Web2.0’s recent shooting star. If you’ve always wanted to know which celebrity has the most followers, is most mentioned in Tweets, follows the most other people, this is the place!
You’re in for a couple of surprises, too (Britney Spears follows 430,000 people w00t!).
