Joseph Nye was at the Graduate institute to address the question Are we Seeing the End of the American Liberal Order? He did not want to give a yes or no answer but rather to introduce ideas with which to frame and understand the context of the question looking back in history but also looking at contemporary issues. In so doing he spoke about why the aftermaths of the First World War led to war and why the Aftermath and attitudes after the Second World War led to 75 years of peace.
This yodelling video is currently the number one trending video on youtube. I am unclear on whether it is for Switzerland or a bigger region. A small tractor is driving up a Swiss Alpine road with a group of yodelers sitting in a trailer. A car with Ma Cherie playing on the radio overtakes and the yodelers start to yodel the song. This video is on the Canton de Valais Youtube account.
Yesterday D-Day Film Archives were shared on Facebook. These film archives were of landing crafts landing troops on the beaches, of battleships firing rocket salvos at the coast, of gliders being pulled by planes, of paratroopers getting and more. Over the years films have been preserved by transferring the footage from one film stock to another and then transferred from film to tapes. The problem with film and tape is that they are stored in a physical location that only archivists have access to.
A Plastic Ocean is an excellent documentary detailing the problems and threats caused by plastics entering water systems and eventually reaching the seas and oceans. This documentary starts with a team trying to film whales. When they finally do find the whales off the coast of Sri Lanka they notice that there is a film of oil and plastic build up miles from the shore. They say that this bit of ocean should be clean as the beaches had been unused for years.
K2 with a Drone is a documentary following Petr Jan Juracka, a scientific photographer’s trip to K2 with Klara Kolouchova with two drones. He performed extensive testing before setting off on the trip. He flew the drone in a hyperbaric chamber to see how it would react. He flew it in freezing conditions to check that the batteries would cope and then he flew in other places. He had already flown his drone in a multitude of countries and Pakistan was the latest challenge.
I love sports and I love the outdoors. I really like snowboarding when the conditions are good and when there are few people. I love to climb, to hike and to do via ferrata. Last year during a film festival I was invited to try Paragliding for free and the flight lasted 45 minutes. In light of this you can see why the Gopro Hero 5+ karma above is so fun for me to watch.
The Tiny House Movement and travel combine well together. In this video a Czech couple bought a fan and transformed it into a self contained home to live in for a year. They chose it because they wanted room for the surfboards, wet suits and more. It has space for cooking lamb shanks, socialising and sleeping. You can enter the van both from the front and the back. I really like the idea of this van.
The Golden Dream, known in Spanish as The Golden Cage is an observational film that follows three teenagers as they travel to Guatemala along railroad tracks north towards the United States. During the journey they need to work to make money, face attacks from the police, immigration police and gangs. When one of the characters finally arrives in the US he works cleaning a slaughterhouse after the workers have finished their shift.
Winter is coming and snow has fallen on the local peaks and then melted again. The temptation to go snowboarding in real life is back. While waiting to go and do sports in the real world Ubisoft give us the opportunity to simulate the experiences of snowboarding, skiing, base jumping and paragldiding. I know three of these sports. I ski, I snowboard and I recently tasted my first paragliding flight.As I watched the trailer above and Jack Septiceye’s video of the game it reminded me of so many of the extreme sports videos I have watched.
Negotiating overhangs is physical, fun and sometimes scary. It is for this reason that the Via Ferrata de Thônes via ferrata section is such fun. It gets your adrenaline pumping as you fight to keep hold and clip and unclip in the relevant sections. It forces you to overcome your fear of being over the void. The third section of the Via Ferrata de Saillon is a challenge for the very same reason.