for whatever reason, the BBC doesn't want it to be viewed in the States for now.
otherwise i would have just watched it there.
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by IanEye » Mon Jan 26, 2015 1:30 pm
by 8bitagent » Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:10 pm
by Nordic » Tue Jan 27, 2015 5:53 am
semper occultus » Tue Jan 06, 2015 8:37 am wrote: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.
by 82_28 » Tue Jan 27, 2015 6:05 am
Nordic » Tue Jan 27, 2015 1:53 am wrote:semper occultus » Tue Jan 06, 2015 8:37 am wrote: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.
Sad to say, but it sucked. It had all the Adam Curtis talent behind it. Amazing found footage, brilliant editing. But it was the reinforcement of everything we know as the "Official Story".
Terribly disappointing.
by American Dream » Tue Jan 27, 2015 11:51 am
The BEL scatters ["hippie mafia" aka the Brotherhood of Eternal Love]
Following a series of raids on the BEL in America, by early 1973 the authorities estimated that some 20 members were in hiding or in exile - including Stark. Timothy Leary ended up in Afghanistan, after fleeing the US, but the US Embassy evidently knew he was coming and got the Afghan authorities to deport him back to the USA. Ron Stark visited Afghanistan at least once with a plan to set up BEL facilities for making hallucinogenic THC [analogue] from Afghan hash oil. Thanks to Kemp's efforts, Stark had worked out the first eight of the fourteen stages of the THC synthesis. Stark had a minister of the Afghan regime in his pocket to set up a penicillin factory as a front, and a 'contact' with the US embassy: the BEL's chief hash supplier in Kabul, Aman Tokhi, worked there as a 'maintenance supervisor'.
Ronald Stark
[Psychedelic chemist "Sasha"] Shulgin wrote the foreward to [retired U.S. Army colonel Dr. James S.] Ketchum’s self-published memoir, Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten (http://www.forgottensecrets.net), which lifts the veil on the Army’s little known drug experiments and illuminates a hidden chapter of marijuana history. A graduate of Cornell University Medical School, Ketchum describes how he was assigned as a staff psychiatrist to Edgewood Arsenal, located 25 miles northeast of Baltimore, in 1961. “There was no doubt in my mind that working in this strange atmosphere was just the sort of thing that would satisfy my appetite for novelty,” wrote Ketchum. Soon he became Chief of Clinical Research at the Army’s hub for chemical warfare studies. Although the Geneva Convention had banned the use of chemical weapons, Washington never agreed to this provision, and the U.S. government poured money into the search for a non-lethal incapacitant.
Nurses preparing drug dosage and recording data
The U.S. Army Chemical Corp’s marijuana research began several years before Ketchum joined the team at Edgewood. In 1952, the Shell Development Corporation was contracted by the Army to examine “synthetic cannabis derivatives” for their incapacitating properties. Additional studies into possible military uses of marijuana began two years later at the University of Michigan medical school, where a group of scientists led by Dr. Edward F. Domino, professor of pharmacology, tested a drug called “EA 1476” – otherwise known as “Red Oil” – on dogs and monkeys at the behest of the U.S. Army. Made through a process of chemical extraction and distillation, Red Oil (akin to hash oil) packed a mightier punch than the natural plant.
Army scientists found that this concentrated cannabis derivative produced effects unlike anything they had previously seen. “The dog gets a peculiar reaction. He crawls under the table, stays away from the dark, leaps out at imaginary objects, and as far as one can interpret, may be having hallucinations. It would appear even to the untrained observer that this dog is not normal. He suddenly jumps out, even without any stimulus, and barks, and then crawls back under the table.” With a larger dose of Red Oil, the reaction was even more pronounced. “These animals lie on their side; you could step on their feet without any response; it is an amazing effect, and a reversible phenomenon. It has greatly increased our interest in this compound from the standpoint of future chemical possibilities.”
In the late 1950s, the Army started testing Red Oil on U.S. soldiers at Edgewood. Some GIs smirked for hours while they were under the influence of EA 1476. When asked to perform routine numbers and spatial reasoning tests, the stoned volunteers couldn’t stop laughing. But Red Oil was not an ideal chemical warfare candidate. For starters, it was a “crude” preparation that contained many components of cannabis besides psychoactive THC. Army scientists surmised that pure THC would weigh much less than Red Oil and would therefore be better suited as a chemical weapon. They were intrigued by the possibility of amplifying the active ingredient of marijuana, tweaking the mother molecule, as it were, to enhance its psychogenic effects. So the Chemical Corps set its sights on developing a synthetic variant of THC that could clobber people without killing them.
Clinical Research testing area (1961)
Enter Harry Pars, a scientist working with Arthur D. Little, Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of several pharmaceutical companies that conducted chemical warfare research for the Army. (Two Army contracts for marijuana-related research were awarded to this firm, covering a ten-year period beginning in 1963.) A frequent visitor to Edgewood, Pars synthesized a new cannabinoid compound, dubbed “EA 2233,” which was significantly stronger than Red Oil.
At the outset of this project, Pars had sought the advice of Dr. Alexander Shulgin, then a brilliant young chemist employed by Dow Chemical. Shulgin was a veritable fount of information regarding how to reshape psychoactive molecules to create novel mind-altering drugs. Eager to share his arcane expertise, it was Shulgin who first gave Pars the idea to tinker with nitrogen analogs of tetrahydrocannabinol: THC. Pars never told Sasha that he was an Army contract employee. A declassified version of Pars’ research was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (August 1966), wherein he thanked Shulgin for “drawing our attention to the synthesis of these nitrogen analogs.”
The U.S. Army Chemical Corps began clinical testing of EA 2233 on GI volunteers in 1961, the year Ketchum arrived at Edgewood Arsenal. When ingested at dosage levels ranging from 10 to 60 micrograms per kilogram of body weight, EA 2233 lasted up to thirty hours, far longer than the typical marijuana buzz.
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