Transformers Are Fake, Right?

Transformers makes for a great movie to watch, but nothing like that is really possible, right?


Source: Those Crazy Japanese

What Is Truth?

PBS POV | Granito: How to Nail a Dictator

In a stunning milestone for justice in Central America, a Guatemalan court recently charged former dictator Efraín Rios Montt with genocide for his brutal war against the country's Mayan people in the 1980s — and Pamela Yates' 1983 documentary, "When the Mountains Tremble", provided key evidence for bringing the indictment.

Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, a documentary by Pamela Yates, Paco de Onís, and Peter Kinoy, tells the extraordinary story of how a film, aiding a new generation of human rights activists, became a granito — a tiny grain of sand — that helped tip the scales of justice. Here's the trailer -


Related Link: Guatemala: The Secret Files

The Bookeeper Of Death

If you're any type of humanities history buff like I am, or if recent history has already proven it to you, then you should know that the organizers and leaders of massive crimes against humanity or society rarely suffer any consequences from their horrific deeds.

Many of these criminal leaders eventually get off Scot-free or with minimal punishment once they're brought to "justice". And it's usually only the people who foolishly listened to them, then followed and carried-out the orders from these psychopaths, who ever get severely punished for these crimes.

But yet, to this day, many people continue to follow the orders of such psychopathic leaders and enable their crimes, no matter how horrific. Just how these psychopaths are still able to convince educated people of the world to blindly do what they say continues to amaze me.

People just do not have the ability to say "NO!" in these type of situations and will always place their own selfish interests above anything else, even if to the point of torture, murder, and even genocide.

If any of my previous posts haven't convinced you of that yet, then watch the story of Comrade Duch (Kaing Guek Eav) a Cambodian mathematician who served as the Khmer Rouge commandant at Tuol Sleng prison in the late 1970s and who oversaw the torture and murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. Out of an estimated 17,000 people imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, there were only seven known survivors.

In this documentary Comrade Duch is brought up on charges of crimes against humanity at a special UN tribunal, and three of the prison’s seven survivors describe what they endured at Tuol Sleng.

Watching wrenching footage of his own brutality and facing the distraught families of his victims, Duch apologizes—leaving many to question his sincerity and raising the issue of forgiveness in the name of reconciliation. The full documentary can be seen on Global Voices, through June 19th or on your local PBS station.

Frozen Souls | A Short Film

According to the film's director -

We wrote this short to get in touch with the audience beyond the wall of personal beliefs about war. The challenge was to find a core ethical value shared by the widest audience possible.

We found these universal value in the principle that a modern soldier goes to war to protect civilians (of all nationalities!) at his own risk, for a personal ethical choice. The fact that in modern war this principle is disregarded (civilian death as "collateral damage", no count for civilian casualties vs paranoid count for military casualties, etc.) is a dangerous attack to "common sense".

Soldier Greene's story explores the meaning of the existential mission of a soldier, slowly unveiling the ethics of warfare, often expressed on media but in fact disregarded in the field.

Dedication, courage and altruism shown by an Afghan mother struggling to save her son's life, will reveal to Greene his own deepest motivation when he chose to be a soldier, until the extreme sacrifice of death.

We wrote about an American soldier in Afghanistan because he well represent the paradox of a war projected daily in our homes, but shown in a cool and distant fashion. A war where all good values are "here" and all horrible facts are "there", breaking the ethical chain which always should connect moral values and action.

Frozen Souls from Guido Freddi on Vimeo.