rigorousintuition.ca

Joe Hillshoist wrote:
The Sufi's Shah is sposed to be in the lineage of ... those are the same mob Gurdjieff claimed to study with aren't they?

true, this

Another set...

http://www.businessinsider.com/astonish ... 013-2?op=1











(many more at link)

Also, this one:



While searching for this thread, also ran into this one with current pictures:

Stunning Pictures Of Afghanistan Like You've Never Seen
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... =8&t=35333

Thank you CIA, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for destroying what seemed like(least in the big cities) an ok place.

I see you have a new avatar.

"By the way, this automobile is privately owned."

A fascinating and very sad story.

This is a great book on the subject:

Crossing Zero
The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire

"No border," write Gould and Fitzgerald, "has been more contentious than the one today separating Pakistan from Afghanistan, known as the Durand line but referred to by the military and intelligence community as Zero line."

The war in Afghanistan has become the most complex foreign policy problem the United States has ever faced, spreading into Pakistan and involving the conflicting interests of Russia, India, China and Iran. Crossing Zero focuses on the nuances of the Obama administration's evolving military and political strategy, those who have been chosen to implement it, and the long-term consequences for the U.S. and the region. A clear, well-researched and easy-to-read analysis of the spiraling U.S. war in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100739330

Some of those photos are very odd, they seem posed. Several of the women appear western, not Afghani. My first thought was that some,of these "students" in the pix were foreigners, not locals.

And of course the real reasons why we're in Afgannystan is cuz of the minerals. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mineral deposits.

From our delightful friends at the Pentgon:
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=59635

From the DARPA PR rag:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06 ... otherlode/

From our most favorite establishment media whores:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world ... wanted=all

And what a crock when the Times fell for it and wrote that these deposits were previously unknown. Lazy assed reporter and editors.

Karmamatterz wrote:Some of those photos are very odd, they seem posed. Several of the women appear western, not Afghani. My first thought was that some,of these "students" in the pix were foreigners, not locals.

Yes of course they're posed and sometimes include Westerners. Many of them were taken by Western visitors in the 1960s, 1970s. Possibly by Russians, in a couple of cases. As is made clear at the links, if you follow them, where there are many more photos and full attributions.

I know the photo set, as political agitprop, is intended to make me mad about what 'Murica has done over there, but I'm actually in awe, for two different and probably equally offensive reasons.

First off, the level of civilization and infrastructure we're seeing in these photographs is British. I'm in love with Qatar and the ghost of Alexandria, and not trying to insinuate that civilization is inherently cracker-esque, but in this specific case? Pretty much a London production. The British Empire is a lot like the CIA: soaked in blood, fundamentally monstrous, but the scale and aesthetics are really something.

Second off, wow, nation-building is Ozymandias-type doomed. The United States is sending young men over there to die in the process of obliterating the core infrastructure of both sides of the conflict. They return to the ghost towns and sacrifice zones of the first world. Perhaps I need to re-read Evola's "Men Among the Ruins" in light of these thoughts.

Great photo set, though. I have seen the genre referred to elsewhere as ruin porn and I think that devalues both of those nouns. It's a shitty fucking term, in other words. The Soviet strains of infrastructure decay and vast abandonment is my personal favorite, although the Sathorn Unique should get a mention, too.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bang ... orn-unqiue

From Wombaticus:

The United States is sending young men over there to die in the process of obliterating the core infrastructure of both sides of the conflict. They return to the ghost towns and sacrifice zones of the first world.

Yes, EXACTLY.

Destroy what currently exists in order to rebuild. Only it's not the urban/rural renewal we would like to think it could be. It's about destroying what exists in order to have Halliburton and that whole cadre of whores come in and build anew to best extract minerals from the Earth. They rebuild,cities,and create new villages based on the mining model of destroying the local culture in order to keep mining operations safe.

"The spice must flow!"

War is usually either about power or wealth, or both working together.

It's conspicuous consumption and exploitation of the Earth for whatever their reasons, which could include wealth building, balance of power etc... Maybe add to the mix a few unknown figures who enjoy mass killing and hegemony in Asia.

Must respond in Pavlovian fashion now you've mentioned one o me favorite poems.

Traveled through Afghanistan to India in'69. Were a people who didn't care in the least about emulating the west. My ride, (junkie Andrei), asked the first cop inside the border where to score, but not a heavy scene.... the cops were stoned and funny actually. One of the great tragedies is how that unique country has been fucked up beyond all recognition. What is it about that country... even then, the western countries were competing to build sections of the east-west highway, replete with hotels that nobody used ( green slimy swimming pools ). A country fucked up beyond recognition by the powers, so sad.............

TRAILER TRASH

Tuesday 09 December 2014, 16:20
Adam Curtis
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/e ... 807434a38e

THE FILM'S LAUNCH DATE ON BBC iPLAYER IS NOW 25TH JANUARY 2015

Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events.

But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.

And journalism - that used to tell a grand, unfurling narrative - now also just relays disjointed and often wildly contradictory fragments of information.

Events come and go like waves of a fever. We - and the journalists - live in a state of continual delirium, constantly waiting for the next news event to loom out of the fog - and then disappear again, unexplained.

And the formats - in news and documentaries - have become so rigid and repetitive that the audiences never really look at them.

In the face of this people retreat from journalism and politics. They turn away into their own worlds, and the stories they and their friends tell each other.

I think this is wrong, sad, and bad for democracy - because it means the politicians become more and more unaccountable.

I have made a film that tries to respond to this in two ways.

It tells a big story about why the stories we are told today have stopped making sense.

But it is also an experiment in a new way of reporting the world. To do this I’ve used techniques that you wouldn’t normally associate with TV journalism. My aim is to make something more emotional and involving - so it reconnects and feels more real.

BBC iPlayer has given me the opportunity to do this - because it isn’t restrained by the rigid formats and schedules of network television. It's a place you can go to experiment and try out new ideas.

It is also liberating - both because things can be any length, and also because it allows the audience to watch the films in different ways.

The film is called Bitter Lake. It is a bit of an epic - it’s two hours twenty minutes long.

It tells a big historical narrative that interweaves America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia. It shows how politicians in the west lost confidence - and began to simplify the stories they told. It explains why this happened - because they increasingly gave their power away to other forces, above all global finance.

But there is one other country at the centre of the film.

Afghanistan.

This is because Afghanistan is the place that has repeatedly confronted politicians, as their power declines, with the terrible truth - that they cannot understand what is going on any longer. Let alone control it.

The film shows in detail how all the foreigners who went to Afghanistan created an almost totally fictional version of the country in their minds.

They couldn’t see the complex reality that was in front of them - because the stories they had been told about the world had become so simplified that they lacked the perceptual apparatus to see reality any longer.

And this blindness led to a terrible disaster - support for a blatantly undemocratic government, wholesale financial corruption and thousands of needless deaths.

A horrific scandal that we, in our disconnected bubble here in Britain, seem hardly aware of. And even if we are - it is dismissed as being just too complex to understand.

But it is important to try and understand what happened. And the way to do that is to try and tell a new kind of story. One that doesn’t deny the complexity and reduce it to a meaningless fable of good battling evil - but instead really tries to makes sense of it.

I have got hold of the unedited rushes of almost everything the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan. It is thousands of hours - some of it is very dull, but large parts of it are extraordinary. Shots that record amazing moments, but also others that are touching, funny and sometimes very odd.

These complicated, fragmentary and emotional images evoke the chaos of real experience. And out of them i have tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan.

A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.

this will probably get taken off youtube fairly soon...

I'm saving it now
and will watch it later today...thanks


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1bb2JakOmo

...cheers...forgotten about that...