I think they found you..

wut, no those elderberries ain't got a clue about my secret mountain base. hell its not even on a mountain its so secret. they can invade ireland all they want but they'll never find it.

i'll be sittin there munchin' tayto's while they invade the country, sendin my minions to suicide bomb them, chillin with some frasier, sendin' vhs messages to rte.

ha! This is why I love your posts.


I see you learned from the success of the Vietnamese and even the Eritreans, who used secret tunnels to win their defensive wars of attrition. While the Ethiopian Air Force was bombing away, the EPLF was hiding safe and secure in their elaborate tunnel systems, and after 50 years they won their war of independence. Too bad they have not done anything positive with it, and instead provoke war and conflict across East Africa :(

Yep, same thing that's happening to Iraq already happened to Northern Ireland. Army invaded, couldn't defeat the locals in an urban enviroment, people can just shoot and bomb you then run and hide. In NI they didn't use secret tunnels, just garden hopped or hid inside.

ahhh The Troubles.. good times for revolutionaries.

I wish my folks here in Los Angeles would see the new rising son looming in the horizon and join up the movement against the feudal landlords who run things ;)

hulum lehulum'sewoch yisten , l'enyan atyistenemu. (lit. All-things for all-peoples let them receive it, For ourselves, let us receive nothing!)

If you can, you should try and read this. Very interesting stuff:









This poses a massive question regarding what should and what can be done about such regimes. I'm convinced the Iraq war was a mistake because it's shifted things from Iraq being a once quantifiable, largely local (and in my view quite controlable) threat to an unquantifiable, potentially international (and in my view quite uncontrolable) one. Saddam was largely isolated within the middle east and so was limited in what he could actually achieve, at least compared with what a more fully integrated fundamentalist Iraq could achieve as part of a far greater network. War is never about altruism, it's about weighing up threats, and as such can never be deemed successful, or even just, if that threat only increases as a consequence of it.

The further problem of course is that because Iraq has been such a disaster, it'll make it far harder for the west to engage in more just and necessary interventions in the future.

You make a good point but I still wonder sort of effect the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had on the protest movement in Iran. I think it must have at least made them more aware of world outside that is ready to welcome them if only the government wasn't hostile and dictatorial. Especially with fundamentalist groups such as the Taleban. Any attempt at overthrowing Ahmadinejad's government wouldn't be possible because of of how this would weaken the country leaving it open to ideological driven outsiders such as the Taleban or even Saddam's Iraq. A revolution in a country is the best time to attack it if you want to increase your territory. I think the protest movement in Iraq is a serious threat to Ahmadinejad's government and I don't think this would have developed without a safer, more democratic middle east. The wars in Iran and Afghanistan have shown to them that this a time for change.


By the way Demonrail, I was going to rep you for this thread but I STILL can't rep you.

ARGH. THAT'S THE STUPIDEST POST YET.

the best thing about the revolutionary movement in Iran is that they DON'T WANT WESTERN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THEY ARE NOT RIOTING BECAUSE THAT EVIL OLD SUPREME LEADER WON'T LET THEM WEAR SHORT SKIRTS AND HAVE MCDONALDS AND IPODS. THEY WANT SOMETHING ELSE.

how the fuck does a war in iraq make them "more aware of the outside world" do you really think they are some sort of tribe of primitives who lived alone far in the mid east with no contact with us modern civilised sorts?

ONLY SOMEONE WITH NO CONCEPTION OF IRAN BEYOND WESTERN MEDIA REPORTS ABOUT HOW THEY USED TWITTER TO SPREAD THE REVOLUTION COULD POST SOMETHING LIKE THAT. I'm sorry. But what the fuck.

"I think the protest movement in Iraq is a serious threat to Ahmadinejad's government and I don't think this would have developed without a safer, more democratic middle east." WHAT THE FUCK PLANET ARE YOU ON? SINCE THE INVASION OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN THE MIDDLE EAST HAS GOTTEN PRETTY FUCKING UNSTABLE. HOW HAS THE INVASION MADE IT SAFER IN ANY WAY?

I'm sorry but you actually think the Iranians saw the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and said "well shit, look at how well that's going, time we get ourselves up to speed with modernity and ditch the turbans and start using electricity and stop sacrificing goats to allah!"

It's ironic that your conception of the Iranian people does not extend beyond a vastly misrepresented and shallow stereotype that you probably gathered from stories planted in the western media by American intelligence agencies to prepare the population for a future invasion, and you say the Iranians need democracy!

In their stupidity and hubris, the neo con cabal that orchestrated the invasion thought they'd be in and out of iraq and afghanistan in no time, and move swiftly onto Iran. They have no military bases there and it's from a strategic point they want it for control of the region and to transport oil across. The Iranians know this, they know that what happened in Iraq is what could happen to them. To suggest that this would make them more open to the west is absurd. There are people in Iran, as their are in the West, who are aware of the frightened, violent and sadistic patriarchs in both their governments and the evil they commit. You seem to suggest that the Iranians need a revolution, but we in the West don't. Because we have democracy. Which means we have freedom. Our leaders bestow it on us! It's called democracy because the people in charge give it to us! If only those poor middle eastern people could have freedom given to them too. I can just picture you back in 04 strolling thru Crawford ranch talkin' politics with George.

i thought Lurker was joking.

thank you ni'k, joking or not that was a necessary response. in regards to the US invasions and occupations of the Middle East, it is as horrifying a disaster as the Crusades.. there are millions and millions of refugees fleeing the region year after year.. untold destruction.. crippled economies.. bodies piling up in the hundreds of thousands... how could the US expect to do any good? I think Albert Pike's conspiracy of a genocidal Third World War in the Middle East is coming to fruition..



"tell the children the truth." bob marley

A book just released in the United States, detailing exhaustive interviews with now-retired US intelligence personnel who had direct knowledge of the 1951 French events, charges that the until-now unexplained "mass insanity" in the remote village were, rather, a top-secret CIA experiment conducted under the code-name Operation Span. Operation Span was a part of Project MK/NAOMI, itself an adjunct project to the more notorious Project MK/ULTRA, as in "ultra-top secret." The book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, by investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr. documents that the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak in 1951 was the result of a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Albarelli notes that the scientists who produced the bogus cover-up explanations of contaminated bread and or mercury poisoning to deflect from the real source of the events worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the US Army and CIA with LSD for research.

A French newspaper at the time of the bizarre events wrote, "It is neither Shakespeare nor Edgar Poe. It is, alas, the sad reality all around Pont-St.-Esprit and its environs, where terrifying scenes of hallucinations are taking place. They are scenes straight out of the Middle Ages, scenes of horror and pathos, full of sinister shadows."
The US Time magazine, whose publisher, Henry Luce was closely tied to CIA propaganda activities in the 1950's wrote, "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead. Pont-Saint-Esprit's hospital reported four attempts at suicide." As Albarelli notes, a Department of Justice website on the dangers of LSD states that in the early 1950s, "the Sandoz Chemical Company went as far as promoting LSD as a potential secret chemical warfare weapon to the US Government. Their main selling point in this was that a small amount in a main water supply or sprayed in the air could disorient and turn psychotic an entire company of soldiers leaving them harmless and unable to fight." He claims that the CIA entertained a number of proposals from American scientists concerning placing a large amount of LSD into the reservoir of a medium-to-large city, but, according to former agency officials, "the experiment was never approved due to the unexpected number of deaths during the operation in France."

Indeed, Albarelli has discovered once secret FBI documents that reveal that the Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division, a year prior to the Pont St. Esprit experiment, had targeted New York City's subway system for a similar experiment. States an August 1950 bureau memo, "[The] BW [biological warfare] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September, 1950, have been indefinitely postponed." The memo goes on to cite FBI concerns about "poisoning of food plants" and the "poisoning of the water supply" of large cities in the U.S. In an interview with this author, Albarelli described how he developed the shocking details of the CIA secret drug programs: "My first tip-off was a 1954 CIA document that detailed an encounter between an official of the Sandoz chemical company (the producers of LSD) and a CIA official in which 'the secret of Pont St. Esprit' was referenced. The Sandoz official went on to say, 'It was not the ergot at all.'"

Albarelli says he then obtained through the Freedom of Information Act a partially redacted 1955 CIA report entitled, A CIA Study of LSD-25. "That seemingly comprehensive report contained detailed information on the manufacture, supply, and use of LSD and LSD-type products worldwide. However, nearly its entire section on France and Pont St. Esprit were blacked out." Albarelli requested an un-redacted copy but CIA officials refused to provide one.

He continued, "Then I came across a letter written by a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent who was working secretly for the CIA; this was George Hunter White, who ran the CIA's New York City safe house in 1951-1954. White's letter referenced the Pont St. Esprit experiment. At that point, 5 years into my investigation, I began interviewing former Army biochemists who became very evasive and refused to talk about their work in France. Finally two former intelligence employees confirmed the experiment took place under the auspices of the Army's Special Operations Division and with CIA funding."http://www.rense.com/general89/50s.htm

great post tesla!!!!!! Very interesting the CIA sucks

My view on "the war" is this. I think we need to leave. We should have never been over there in the first place. But when we do leave, we better be ready for a giant backlash. The country is broken still and we will leave it that way and basically tell them it's not our problem and to deal with it. They will think "Those Americans came over here, made a big mess and are leaving us stranded, just like we had expected them to do" This is going to cause even more tension between the middle east and the western world. There is no good choice to make when a wrong choice began the process.

Very interestying stuff. It ties in to some degree with a lot of what suchfriends has talked about in the past, regarding those covert programmes in the 60s and 70s that facilitated the spread of hard drugs within major ghetto areas.

Drug money= CIA war-chest

What I found most interesting about Tesla's post wasn't the fact that government agencies were thinking about incorporating hard drugs into military tactics but the way companies like Sandoz were actively promoting LSD to them as 'a potential secret chemical warfare weapon'. I didn't realise Sandoz was an established company. Naive I know but I'd somehow always imagined Sandoz as more of an 'underground' set up. Apparantly not.

The drug companies are still doing some fucked up shit.

Yeah, I was speaking more specifically about Sandoz though. I just looked them up and they were far more a part of the 'establishment' than I'd previously realised. I'm blaming my confusion on Amon Duul II's 'Sandoz in the Rain'. Bloody Krauts.

Remember the US learned a lot of secrets from the Nazis, who for example put out contract bids for lethal gases for the concentration camps to which Degussa's Zyklon-B crystals won the bid. how horrifying a prospect..

... meanwhile the logistics for transporting prisoners to concentration camps was all done on machines provided by IBM. Never mind the fact that the Coca Cola company, unable to sell their regular drink to Germany during WWII due to it being so heavily promoted in association with the US war effort, created a drink solely for its German market: Fanta - literally Coca Cola for Nazis.

also the entire Nazi political machine and subsequent regime were financially backed by big business investors from the US through institutions like the Brown Bank and fat cats like Prescott Bush..

all this is why our intelligence agencies are so damned literally evil (SS), why our kids are immersed in brain wash education (Hitler Youth), why our media are just spin doctors and propagandists (Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), and of course why our police dogs STILL speak german (Society for the German Shepherd Dog) ;)

Not to mention George Lucas' involvement ...

Plus Hugo Boss made the SS uniforms.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/15/bu...l?pagewanted=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform..._Schutzstaffel

so you can blame the nazis for fanta too?
horrible people.

This may be of some interest to those in or around London this Friday that're interested in any of this stuff:

NuBureaucracy and Capitalist Realism

2-4pm
12th February 2010
Council Room
Laurie Grove Baths
Centre for Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths

Neoliberalism presents itself as the enemy of bureaucracy, the destroyer of the nanny state and the eliminator of red tape. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (Zer0 books, 2009) argues that, contrary to this widely accepted story, bureaucracy has proliferated under neoliberalism. Far from decreasing, bureaucracy has changed form, spreading all the more insidiously in its newly decentralised mode. This 'nu-bureaucracy' is often carried out by workers themselves, now induced into being their own auditors. Capitalist Realism aims to challenge the successful ideological doublethink in which workers' experience of increasing bureaucratisation co-exists with the idea that bureaucracy belongs to a 'Stalinist' past.


This symposium will explore nu-bureaucracy and other related concepts developed in Capitalist Realism, such as 'business ontology' and 'market Stalinism'. How has nu-bureaucracy affected education and public services, and how can it be resisted? What implications might the attack on nu-bureaucracy have for a renewed anti-capitalism?


Respondent, Alberto Toscano, Department of Sociology

i dont think i have anything to do this friday
but how do you dress for things like this
exciting

and how do i pretend
i know anything

wear military green and use words like 'clustering' and 'fluidity' a lot. you'll be fine.

but i wanna look like im pro bureaucracy

come along with a clipboard and a timesheet?

yes
and take notes
and my glasses

definitely glasses.
and remember to sigh dismissively during people's papers.

and bring a dell. definitely no anarcho-mac stuff

i have a dell ho.

congratulations on this thread
look at how long it is

im proud of you

along with my sci-fi and fantasy art thread, i consider it my towering contribution to mankind. go me

I'm not going to reread my post. I probably wasn't clear so I'll just say what I really mean.


I don't mean that but they do clearly want democracy. The protests did start after what was probably a rigged vote.




Haha, I don't literally mean they didn't know about other countries! I meant with those wars they know that there are other nations who really oppose dictatorship. It helps to make it clear that Iran's hostility to America etc and development of nuclear weapons is just isolating and unhealthy. those wars hammered that home.


I don't think I've heard about them using Twitter...I'm curious to know where you get your "conceptions" from that isn't the liberal media?




Unstable, yes, but safer for Iran. The insrugents in Afghanistan and Iraq are in no way a threat to iran. Saddam was.
Remember Iran and Iraq have fought each other before and we all know that Saddam had a desire to increase his territory. If Iran was unstable due to a rebellion then that would be the opportunity for any nation to attack, when the country is in disarray. So Iranians could not have rebelled until now.


No I don't. I think it would have had a more subtle effect. I feeling of increased safety, of liberation.
And as far as I can tell Iran is more modernised than Iraq and Afghanistan were/are.


Why ironic?
I really don't think Iran should invaded, that would be fucking bad idea.




As I said I don't think freedom should be given to the Iranians. They should get it themselves.
You also seem to be saying that we need revolutions in the west. Why, where and of what sort?

ok firstly, just because the vote was rigged and there was rebellion does not mean the character of that rebellion is simply a desire for democracy, whatever that is. they want their votes to be counted right. they would be insane to want the utter fucking joke idea of democracy in the US, which is just a media spectacle of lobbyists hiring and bribing celebrity parliamentarian millionaires to pass whatever legislation the corporate interests want. it's a game that only the rich can play. all i see is a desire for the votes to be counted, it would be insane to want any of the ultra corruption of western style democracy, the very democracy that invades and murders a million people, but, you know, you have a right to disagree so its democracy so its good. i'm sorry but that's like if hitler gave his people a right to disagree with the concentration camps, but they still went on, and the people saying that their democracy is worth preserving. if democracy means that genocide happens but i get to be pissed off and vote either labour or tory (or democrat or republican) then democracy is not good enough. it seems to me that all the evil qualities of facism/ totalitarianism that democrats abhor are happening in democracy right now. all democracy is is a fantasy of a system that is keeping us from totalitarianism, that's its threat, that if it goes away the bad guys take over, so you better be grateful for the bad guys in charge now and forgive all their evil. not exactly difficult to see through this.

remember, in 79 they had a revolution to get rid of the US backed shah and replaced him and his modernising and westernising tendencies with a theocracy! this hardly reflects a particularily strong desire for democracy amongst the people. i do not accept your logic that rebellion was not possible because of saddam being in power. And the idea that the wars in iraq and afghanistan give the iranian people a feeling of "increased safety" and "liberation" is absurd, if not insane.

i don't disagree with you that there is not a strong desire in iran for democracy but i think anyone in a position to have an imminent chance for revolution is dreaming of a type of democracy so utterly beyond what the west has as to consider western democracy as one of the worst possible outcomes.

again, the idea that the iranians could not have rebelled until now i don't buy. look at 79, it was fast and i don't believe that it posed a signifcant blindspot for a possible invasion. if anything, considering the mobilisation and taking up of arms at the time, it was probably in a stronger position to fend off an invasion than before. a

I'm going to pretend you didn't use the phrase liberal media and just say that most of my knowledge of iran comes from zizek's comments on it, the book "we are iran" which is a collection of english translation of iranian blogs, wiki and various english and american blogs of people who visit it, loads of different articles in various magazines and sites etc. you do know that the cia/nsa/corporate interests routinely plant or hire people to write pro invasion propaganda and it gets published in the the likes of the nytimes/gaurdian etc. newspapers, that the mainstream media, online, in print and on tv is heavily censored by its governments (and this is legal due to war time restrictions on the press) and that if there is money to be made then there will be money spent on media efforts to persuade and set the agenda and frame of reality so the money can be pursued? you do realise that the coverage of iran on the bbc and the like could favourably be considered as crap?

What you said about freedom does not sit well with me. george bush logic. the idea that the west is in a position to give freedom to iran is a complete delusion. if i was iranian, i would say tell that nation of genocidal polluters to shove their freedom up their fat assholes. i don't like the way you have phrased freedom as something you can "get". i think the notion is just a neo con buzzword. whatever it is i know i as a westerner don't have it and if i was a non westerner i wouldn't want it and would be worried when i heard the word. of course it's a stretch to accuse you of equating freedom with bush's conception, which was the freedom of iraqis to get bombed and murdered and have washington and the corporations fucking them instead of having to tow the party line in public about saddam and live in relative peace, so i won't assume that's what you're trying to say.

as for iran's hostility to america, you know nothing of it. after what america has done to iran this century and considering what it is doing now the actual attitude of the people (not the leaders who have their statements to make in public of course) is in many cases REMARKABLY less than it deservedly should be. of course i am anti nuke, but the west has nukes aswell. what the west is saying to iran is basically "we can have all the nukes and all the missles pointed at your country (america does) but you can't have any". now OF COURSE this is does not mean i want the iranians to have nuclear bombs, i don't want nuclear bombs to exist, but it is utter hypocrisy for obama to make a speech about wanting nuclear disarament and then just ordering more. to me, that's what western democracy is, there's a market demand for a parliamentarian to deliver an anti nuke speech, so he does, and there's a market demand for this same politician to order more nukes, so he does. you think the iranians are hostle? to a country that is threatening to invade them? to one that would have had it not fucked up so spectacularily in iraq and afghanisatan and totally misjudged it's chances at success? at one whose sanctions affect the prosperity of its people? i suggest you take a cursory glance at american and british escapades in iran this century and see for yourself. as for the argument that the wars show iranians that we in the west REALLY oppose dictatorship, that's insane. we in the west FUND dictators and put them in power when it suits our interests. the invasion WAS NOT to rid the people of dictatorship, it was to get the oil, get a strategic foothold in the region and stop the saddam from moving away from the US currency. the removing dictators thing was a neo con propaganda lie that your supposed democracy has given you the right to believe in. the democracy that elected cheney, a man on the boards of oil corporations who wanted to keep their profits high, and was paid off by them for the invasion. if thats democracy then democracy is not working and not good enough and not worth preserving in its current form. to me this is merely a form of totalitarianism that is democratic only in the sense that you can be in charge if you have enough cash, so admittance to the leadership is based on finance, which you will loose if you do not follow the ideology of pure profit.

What i love about Iran, is that the people there are actually happy in a way that our freedom denies us. They are at a stage when drinking alcohol, partying, listening to music or watching certain films are prohibited in such a way as to run real risk (not all the time of course but the social prohibiton is still there) and thus ACTUALLY BE ENJOYABLE, because you have the feeling of accessing prohibited knowledge and opening up new feelings of liberation and wonder! unlike us in our over saturated brain dead fug obesity of permanent entertainment and pleasure. there is actually a bad father figure holding back enjoyment, thus creating enjoyment in transgressing him. we in the west LONG for this, but the truth is we don't have it. eat drink fuck smoke drug yourself to oblivion, say and do what you want, nobody cares, you're living utter conformity and people are making money off your consumption, when it drives you mentally ill they can make money selling you medications too. your only freedom comes in destroying the self you work so hard at mainting in order to compete to stay alive. all your art and fashion and radicality means nothing and offends noone. but imagine something like punk happening in iran!

as for western revolution. it's pretty obvious we need to be able to stop the genocide. dismantle our armies, get rid of the nukes, stop polluting and destroying the world, because we are not only making ourselves sick and dead, we are ruining it for future generations. the massive poverty and crumbling infastructure? the fact that we spend billions a day on wars instead of, oh i don't know, curing diseases handing out aid building sustainable and long lasting energy supplies transport and architecture using our wealth knowledge and equipment to take people out of poverty... i could go on. of course i'm omitting lots too, like TRUE democracy (something were their is actual collective power and everyone has a say), (communism, whatever you want to call it).

we need to overthrow the elite who are running things now, the people who are ruining our lives for their own profit. that is all it comes down to and it is that imperialism that is ruining things.

and everyday the gap between rich and poor gets more uneven, more people starve, the western infastructure crumbles, and wealth is funneled to an even tinier elite who own even more. it's insanity. we all know it. but it's a democracy so we have the right to ignore it and believe whatever we want, as long as we keep consuming and don't utter resistance, in which case we will be killed.

the germans did have the coolest uniforms ever.

^^ni'k. I can't disagree with much of what you say there, at least in providing examples of the numerous failings of Western democracies. I did disagree with this point though:


This isn't about utopias but functioning alternatives. I'm sure a woman or homosexual man currently living in Iran is quite aware of the failings of Western democracy but are they really insane if they want that over a regime that systematically condemns their very being? A life governed by lobbyists and 'celebrity parliamentarian millionaires', for all of its faults, is probably quite appealing to a lot of people forced to live under Sharia Law.