Per usual Nova ....fascinating docu on Netflix now.

I'd already seen most of them but still a few I'd missed so I've been playing through all of Jonh Pilger's films.

Absolutely astonishing.....

really fascinating. He can remember 98% of what he read 2 hours later(and years later in most cases apparently), and I can't remember 25% of what I read 2 minutes later!

Just finished watching For the Bible Tells Me So, a documentary about gay people who grew up in Christian families. It's really heartbreaking at times, but also some positive stories. I still find myself wondering how these people can still believe in God and Christianity after they see and experience for themselves the hatefulness it breeds, but they do. Still, it's a really good documentary. I guess it's intended for a Christian audience. Baby steps.

4 episodes - fascinating

This could be interesting. From PBS.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3312100/

With the rapid emergence of digital devices, an unstoppable, invisible force is changing human lives in ways from the microscopic to the gargantuan: Big Data, a word that was barely used a few years ago but now governs the day for many of us from the moment we awaken to the extinguishing of the final late-evening light bulb. This massive gathering and analyzing of data in real time is allowing us to not only address some of humanity biggest challenges but is also helping create a new kind of planetary nervous system. Yet as Edward Snowden and the release of the Prism documents have shown, the accessibility of all these data comes at a steep price. The Human Face of Big Data captures the promise and peril of this extraordinary knowledge revolution.

Watching a documentary called Burt's Buzz, about Burt Shavitz, the founder of Burt's Bees. It's of interest to me because he's a Mainer (transplant like me) and Roxanne Quimby who sold the company for millions and bought mile after mile of pristine woodlands for preservation in my region that I like to go "play" in.
It wouldn't have been possible without Burt Shavitz.

The Story of Houlton (Maine).
N ext up it's Penobscot:The People and their River. (Maine State Library card )

I finally watched the Paradise Lost trilogy - about the West Memphis Three. Plenty of heartbreak to go around there. Three little boys horribly murdered and mutilated. Three slightly older boys wrongfully convicted and spending the best part of their lives in prison, even on death row in one case. And we still don't really know who killed the boys.

Dope Sick Love, on HBO. Two junkie couples on the streets of New York. No narration, music, plot, or anything, just them, filmed over the course of 18 months. Jesus fucking Christ these people are fucked up. I mean, totally fucked. They were picking up goddamned needles off the street and using toilet water in the syringes. At first I felt sorry for them, thinking Jesus what a way to live, can't we do something about it? But by the end of the movie I was just hoping they'd hurry the fuck up and die. What utter wastes of oxygen. They use everyone, their families, their "friends", the system, their kids (yeah both women had kids). Anything to get another bag of meth or heroin, anything. Any degrading sex act, burglary, any con, the only thing I didn't see was armed robbery or murder, but otherwise it was anything goes.

One woman had what I thought was a bit of insight into her condition, and was trying to get into a free detox center. Free as in taxpayer supported, of course. What a colossal clusterfuck. What should have been as simple as walking through a door ended up taking two days of constant drama, because she had to take a train 2 hours away to get her ID. That's it, a 2 hour train ride, but even that was too much to do without falling down a rathole full of methamphetamine. She did get into the detox center, but checked herself out in one day because she had "things she had to do", meaning "buy dope and sleep in an alleyway".

Sorry but I've no sympathy, the best thing that could happen to these people is a massive overdose. Once a junkie, always a junkie.

That's really sad to see such a complete waste of a life like that. I recall seeing an episode of Cops years ago, where the crew went to a home where three teenagers (18-20 years old, maybe) stayed in an outdoor shed sniffing paint all day long. That's all they did. All day. Everyday. WTF? How do you get to that point? I don't understand it. And not unexpectedly, the credits included a note that at least one of the teens had died after filming was complete.

Mrs. Lak sometimes watches that show Intervention, but I can't sit through an episode. They just piss me off so much that I can't summon up any sympathy at all. Probably stems from 20 years of marriage to a junkie, that burned out a lot of my sympathy circuits. The kindest thing for them and most certainly their families is a quick, massive, overdose, preferably early on in the process.

Only the Dead See the End of War

It'll destroy your soul so view carefully.

The_Piper wrote:

irreligionist wrote: they round up, kill and eat whole pods of them

(the inuit so far think the arrival of the orcas is a good thing as it makes the narwhal easier for them to catch, but when they wipe them out that far south...)

Bummer, I didn't know inuit ate narwhals. I wonder if they'll eat the killer whales?

Nope. Bowhead and beluga are the staples. Narwhal is fairly unusual dietarily but the Inuit are pretty versatile, eating what's available and, far as eating goes, narwhal is just like beluga. Orca are just big dolphins. They're not as fatty as the whales whose meat the Inuit eat. Very dangerous to hunt too.

a life long snorkeler all over the world and Ihave yet to go to the Great Barrier Reef on our doorstep in Aus. sigh

This is a very good series of 3 not only for the reef but for Attenborough himself.

This is very informative