Pepe Escobar Talks Live With The Real News' Paul Jay About The Outcome Of The Iranian Election



It's useless to wait—for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality the me must choose sides.


The Coming Insurrection


“Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have brought us to the most extreme alienations—from ourselves, from others, from worlds. The fiction of the individual has decomposed with the same speed that it once became real. Children of the metropolis, we offer this wager: that it’s in the most profound deprivation of existence—perpetually stifled, perpetually conjured away—that the possibility of communism resides.”—


The Coming Insurrection, Introduction to the English edition

The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as "the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality."
The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to "spread anarchy and live communism Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the "war on terror." Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

The Invisible Committee is a collective and anonymous penname




Sunday, June 7th – 7:00 pm
THE REVOLUTION OF DESIRE SCREENING AND PERFORMANCES


Please join us in celebrating the closing of the show Screwball Asses at the Company in Chinatown featuring artworks by Gene Barnes AKA Portia Manson, Sheyla Baykal, Gary Lee Boas, Robert Alan Hyde, Hedi El Kholti, Matt Fishbeck, Mark Flores, Paul Gellman, David Jones, William E. Jones, Brian Kenny, Slava Mogutin, and Donnie & Travis; and the upcoming release by Semiotext(e) of Guy Hocquenghem's pamphlet, The Screwball Asses.

Perfomances at The Company at 7:30 PM by Tall Paul + Mare, and Alex Black + Samuel Vasquez.

The Company
946 Yale Street, Los Angeles, Ca, 90012


Screening at the Mountain Bar at 8:30 PM of The Revolution of Desire by Alessandro Avellis & Gabriele Ferluga, 2006 (52 mn).

The Revolution of Desire explores the nebulous post-'68 circumstances that birthed the sexual liberation movement in France, and interrogates its transformation from a grassroots rebellion to an effort to normalize homosexuals. Referencing the work of impassioned activists and intriguingly titled essays ­ Le rapport contre la normalité (“A Report Against Normalcy”) and Trois milliards de pervers (“Three Billion Perverts”) ­, the film sketches the lives of Guy Hocquenghem and Françoise d’Eaubonne, brilliant intellectuals and unconditional supporters of the “revolution of desire.” We meet philosopher René Schérer, MLF photographer Catherine Deudon, militant filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos, Guy’s brother Joani Hocquenghem, historian Marie-Jo Bonnet, the Panthères roses and numerous other key players. The Revolution of Desire is a rare and valuable document that explores the past but more importantly questions the present.


The Mountain Bar
473 Gin Ling Way, Los Angeles, Ca, 90012



comic by Tim Bollinger

Pecha Kucha at Wellington Overseas Terminal

Dear Pecha Kucha Fans

First of all a big thank you to all of you for supporting our Pecha Kucha Nights in Wellington and for telling all your friends about the one coming up!

I am delighted to announce the current line-up for our next Pecha Kucha Night at the wonderful Overseas Terminal venue on 9 June. We will start at 7.30 pm sharp with the first presentation so come early to grab a seat. There will be a great bar, a brilliant wood burner and some food too. Door sales cash only, $9.

The line up so far confirmed is:


Ralph Johns // landscape architect // Isthmus Group Limited // about new
sea land
Stacey Childs // about discounderworld
Sam Trubridge // Director & Designer // about Sleep/Wake
Mervin Singham // Artist // about his inspiration for his work
Edward Lynden-Bell // Writer & Filmmaker // about the Drake Equation
Tim Bollinger // Cartoonist // about his cartoons
Joshua Judkins // about playing "The Lost Ring" and Ponoko
Jared Forbes // Creative Director // Lumen Digital Ltd
Emma Knight // Experience Design Consultant/Snowboarder
Luke Pittar // on travel sketching as an educational experience
Chris Jackson // industrial designer // 2000 years in 20 chairs
Maurice Bennett // the toastman//
Tao Wells // unemployed


Killing them softly with air strikes

Don't Be Fooled by the Taliban Hysteria in Pakistan: They Aren't Going to Take Over


By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times. Posted May 1, 2009.


The fear being stoked of Taliban taking over nuclear-armed Pakistan are a ruse to legitimize Obama's expanding Af-Pak war.

Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.

But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.

Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embraceTalibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.

The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.

To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.

Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.

Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad's own designs.

Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.

Read the rest at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/story/139228/don%27t_be_fooled_by_the_taliban_hysteria_in_pakistan%3A_they_aren%27t_going_to_take_over/

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