In honor of the veterans this Veteran’s Day, Mental Floss has compiled a number of videos of dogs excitedly greeting their owners back from war. It is quite possibly the most wholesome and tear-jerking list of videos I’ve ever come across. Mental Floss hit gold with this entry and I’m going to go ahead and call it their best yet.
Athlete just released their brand-new music video for the song “Black Swan Song” off of the album Black Swan. Watch the music video above, it’s beautiful. :)
I’ve seen this photo plenty of times before, but for those of you who might not be familiar with it, it’s a photograph taken by AP photographer Nick Ut on June 8, 1972 of a group of children fleeing the South Vietnamese village of Trang Bang after an accidental napalm bomb was dropped there by South Vietnamese planes. The photo’s obvious centerpoint is then-9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who is the girl shown completely naked and running. The photo went on to serve as one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War, used by some as the ultimate proof that the war it Vietnam was a bad idea.
Anyway, the reason why I’m writing about this is because I just came across actual video footage of the bombing. I don’t know whether or not this is common knowledge among the generations older than me, but I certainly haven’t seen this video before. And now that I have, I’m incredibly saddened and unable to shake the image of the hanging skin from these burned children. I imagine that the children are so stunned by what just happened that they aren’t even feeling any immediate pain.
I warn you however, that the video is shocking and very graphic. So if you want to see it, it’s embedded inside.
I’ve seen a slow-motion video of a ballistic round being fired from a tank, but nothing compares to this photograph of a tank firing a projectile from the Israel-Gaza border on January 4, 2009. Look at those flames coming out from the end of that gun. Scary! [via]
The good thing about having a Netflix account is that there are more than enough documentaries to go through via their online streaming movie service. Whenever I’m bored, I log in to Netflix and choose one of the recommended documentaries to watch and the most recent one was one called Cocaine Cowboys.
Cocaine Cowboys is about the drug trafficking that went on in Miami during the early days of the city and how the drug money from that era went on to literally build and sustain the city itself into the hugely popular tourist destination it is today. The film goes quite in depth into the violence that occurred and took over Miami in the 70’s and 80’s and highlights some of the important figures in the drug trade that ruled the area like a mafia family (a Columbian and Cuban mafia family).
The film does progress kinda quickly, especially with the numerous interviews of fast-talking criminals behind a sometimes-annoying (and continuously playing) film soundtrack. However, that doesn’t affect the way that this movie delivers its message and that has definitely made me more curious about the city in which I grew up in.
GOOD has released a fantastic graphical video detailing the rising costs of war and military spending by the United States. The video starts off by saying that in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that a war with Iraq would cost $60 billion and that 5 years later the actual cost has been roughly 10 times that figure.
