Ancient Engines

Biggest Duble Old Desi Diesel engine starting up amazing || Heavy engines starting
RAS Multan Vloger

This is just amazing. I am a little short on sleep, but that's the only word I can think of that adequately summarizes this video. Those engines look to be at least a hundred years old and they look to have been sitting on those masonry bases since they were new. I tried looking for information based on the nameplate but found nothing.

Kachhi Canal Project

Kachhi Canal Project
The Red Line is the Canal

I started watching a video about this project, but while it was entertaining it wasn't showing any maps, so I traced the canal out on Google Maps and here we are.

The canal was started in 2002 and is 500 kilometers long. It provides water to irrigate 100,000 acres of crop land.

Third World Industry

Most Incredible Manufacturing Process of Rebar Steel
Random Things

Probably very like what industry looked like in the west a hundred years ago -  a bunch of guys feeding some very large and very dangerous machines. Only difference is that the building and the machinery looks to be a hundred years old while in the west it would have been new. Shoot, they are probably the same machines, just uprooted from the midwest or Sheffield and shipped to southern Asia. One big difference is they might be using natural gas instead of coal for heating.

Located in Lahore Pakistan.

Death To Polio

Aljazeera reports:

The opposition to all forms of inoculation grew in Pakistan after the CIA organised a fake vaccination drive to help track down al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad.

Good job, spooks.

 

 

Afghanistan, Balochistan, Bananastan

Balochistan, Pakistan

That gadfly Pepe Escobar has a story up on The Cradle:

Terror from Balochistan: a menacing tool to disrupt Sino-Pakistani economics

Did you think we were done meddling in southwest Asia? Ha! Think again.

The Wedding Guest

The Wedding Guest Trailer #1 (2019) | Movieclips Trailers
Movieclips Trailers
My first instinct when I saw the blurb on Netflix was no. I don't need another movie about how Muslims oppress their women, but we watched it anyway. The forced marriage was in there, but it was just the trigger that set everything in motion. A rich Pakistani girl went to England, studied at the university and got a degree in pharmacology. While she was there she picked up a boyfriend. Now she's back in Pakistan and her family has arranged a wedding for her. She is opposed and her boyfriend, another rich kid, comes up with a plan to get her out. He hires a not-rich guy, Pakistani or Indian, who's living in the UK. He seems to be fully westernized. Anyway, he hires him to kidnap her and spirit her out of the country.

Our kidnapper-for-hire executes his plan and he and the girl get away, but he kills a guard at the family's compound and the three of them are splashed all over the news. Now the boyfriend reveals himself to be a complete flake. Things go downhill from there.

On the plus side we've got wonderful scenes from half a dozen cities. It's almost a travelogue. As a bonus for all you gun nuts, the movie opens with a visit to the Weapon Shops of Isher, er, the weapon shops of Darra Adam Khel.

There were a couple of glitches regarding money. The boyfriend has paid the kidnapper 35K, presumably US dollars or British pounds. If it was in Rupees it would only be like $500 which certainly wouldn't cover all the expenses he's racking up. But then they are strapped for money. The boyfriend got some jewels from his family and they try to sell one at local jewelry store. The owner tells them it is 'too rich for me'. He estimates it is worth $100,000. 100,000 Rupees maybe, it wasn't all that big.

Pakistani Truck Repair

How to make a rim plate from old MS sheets | Новый ром из старой корабельной тарелки
Pakistani truck

Don't know why but I always enjoy videos of guys working on machinery under primitive conditions. Perhaps because it reminds me of younger days when I was wrenching on machinery.

The floor may be dirt, but they employ some heavy duty machines to get the job done.

The second half of the subtitle is in Russian. Go figure.

Score!

Illuminated Salt Rock

Someone abandoned this nine pound rock at an apartment. The tennant didn't want it, so it fell into my greedy little paws. It is a chunk of Pink Himalayan Salt. I've run into before, but only in tiny overpriced containers of salt crystals for sprinkling on your food. I've seen big blocks of salt for animals, but they look like they are cast in a mold. This thing looks like it was dug out of the earth and it probably was.

Salt Rock

Khewra Salt Mine, Pakistan

Probably came from the Khewra Salt Mine in Pakistan. 

Previous salt mine post.

India-Pakistan Line Of Control

Following a link I found on a story about the India-Pakistan LOC (Line Of Control) on Military Photos dot net, I found this image on the Daily Mail's website. At first I thought the orange line was something someone had added to the image, but not so. A little poking around I found the same image on Wikipedia, along with this key bit of info:

• A striking feature is the line of lights, with a distinctly orange hue, snaking across the centre of the image. It appears to be more continuous and brighter than most highways in the view. This is the fenced and floodlit border zone between India and Pakistan. The fence is designed to discourage smuggling and arms trafficking.

Picture was taken from the ISS.

Zero Dark Thirty

Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad Pakistan
More pictures here

    A fine film. With all the spy books and movies I've consumed I think I'm beginning to get an idea how this surveillance business works. It's expensive, time consuming and horribly boring. It takes a certain kind of person to focus on so little for so long with so little to show for it. And then there's the logic you need in order to piece together what's happening from the most disparate of clues, or just as likely, the lack of clues.
    The movie makes a big deal of out how they used special "stealthy" helicopters for this mission. If they did, it's really a well kept secret. I suspect they were regular old Blackhawk helicopters. They may have had some special modifications, but they weren't completely different. The best description I found was on Shadow Spear dot com:

The SEALs flew into Pakistan from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), an airborne unit of the United States Army Special Operations Command sometimes called the "Nighthawks," provided two modified Black Hawk helicopters, and two Chinooks as backups. The 160th SOAR helicopters were supported by multiple other aircraft, including fixed-wing fighter jets and drones. According to CNN, "The Air Force also had a full team of combat search-and-rescue helicopters available."

Kathryn Bigelow directs. I've heard of her before.
The practice compound in North Carolina (one of the pictures in the linked photo album) isn't there anymore.

Update November 2019 replaced dead Picasa slideshow with single image and link to Google Photos album.

The World's Deadliest Arms Race

The World's Deadliest Arms Race
Tsar
This video is just over a year old. There is some good reporting being done, I'm just not in touch. Searching itv dot com website turns up lots of results for Exposure (the name of the show), but nothing for the name of the video. Likewise, National Geographic only has the last segment. Thank god for YouTube.

The prime ingredient in the bombs is ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Some people say it is coming from Pakistan, Pakistan says there are other countries around Afghanistan that could be the source. Doesn't really matter. It would only take 1% of Pakistan's production to supply the bomb makers with all they need. From an ABC news story from January of this year:

"It's like narcotics crossing the U.S. border," said the senior U.S. military intelligence official. "We don't know if we're getting 1 percent or 10 percent that's crossing." 

Update April 2016 replaced missing video. While it has the same title, I suspect it is not the same as the one I posted originally. That one produces this message:

This video has been removed for violating YouTube's policy on spam, deceptive practices, and scams.

Seems the makers of that video made a couple of errors.

Update March 2019 replaced missing video.

Update March 2021 replaced missing video.

Picture of the Day

Via Steve.

Update February 2017 replaced missing image.

The Gun Markets of Pakistan

Jack sent me a link to this video:

A New Breed Of Gunner

New to me anyway. The story and this picture are from November of 2003. I came across the picture while looking for pictures of gun shops in Peshawar. I found two web sites with some good pictures:

1. Darra Adam Khel
2. Guns From Afghanistan

This picture is all the more striking after you get done reading about how they are making guns in Peshawar, and then you think about the society that produced this photo op.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.