Dems, media, sex.

[IntLibber]

You need to keep your stories straight. I had some contact with the Merry Pranksters and Wavy Gravy (Sky River). They were never terrorists.

Misguided? Maybe. Misinforming the youth? Quite possibly. But terrorists? I don't think so.

It is well documented that the Merry Pranksters received significant funding from the Tides Center in the 1990's and early oughties to operate boot camps to train people in various insurgency and agitprop tactics to engage in raids on animal testing labs, mink farms, genetic testing labs and farms, as well as the various left-anarchists behind the violence at various globalization conferences, like that in Seattle. I attended one of these schools as part of my investigation for the Extropy Institute into neoluddite and ecoterrorist activities.

During the Kerry campaign, Teresa's vast contributions to the Tides Center and the Tides Foundation came into question (due in part to my own expose) and a coverup ensued where the Tides Center issued a statement acknowledging their funding the Merry Pranksters boot camps but denied the actual dollars that Teresa donated were the actual dollars they donated to the Merry Pranksters for their camps.

There is a "underground railroad" going on across the US, involving IWW "Wobbly" operated reading rooms, CPUS, various stalinist and trotskyist organizations, helping to move these trained operatives around the country and into and out of Canada to help organise the various anti-globalization protests. The Merry Pranksters role in the network is merely to operate the boot camps. At one time they even had a website to recruit for the camps, until the FBI declared the ELF and ALF as terrorist organizations.

Online coordination is/was done via a canadian group called tao.ca, aka The Anarchist Organization. These people are not libertarian type anarchists. They refuse to recognise anarchocapitalists as anarchists. They are communists and syndicalists, as well as wobblies and other left wing radicals.

Tao.ca has a series of workshops /commune facilities in major cities across Canada.

As part of my investigation, after I finished the boot camp, I travelled their underground railroad, ate in their soup kitchens, slept in their hostels, hung out in their reading rooms, and I attended a few anti-globalization protests, and learned how these people manufacture "consensus" at the public planning sessions. They use the Diamond Method to manufacture the idea that people are organizing these protests spontaneously, anarchically, when in fact everything is preplanned and the sessions are merely agitprop motivational meetings to get everybody feeling like they had their input into things.

[MSimon]

OK. I see the problem. I knew the Pranksters in '69 or '70. By the '90s it was no doubt a whole new group of people.

[MSimon]

Ever been to the IWW offices in Chicago? A very sleepy place when I visited.

[MSimon]

Anarchism has long been associated with socialists. I believe Orwell was a anarcho-socialists. At least I read his "Catalonia" that way. The Soviets crushed them in favor of a more top down style.

[IntLibber]

Ever been to the IWW offices in Chicago? A very sleepy place when I visited.

Nah, we were encouraged to hang out in the reading room/bookstores they operated in order to make them seem more busy than they were and to provide audiences when leftie authors came to do readings and such... otherwise we were scouting out corporate locations, practicing infiltrations of industrial facilities and office buildings, brainstorming landmarks useful for kulturjamming and putting together plans for them (for instance, the big Joe Camel neon sign that got "fixed" to read "Am I Dead Yet?" was done by some of the team I travelled with).

Most of the places we stayed were like that group family home in Caprica. People would just show up at the door, give a sign, and be welcomed in to eat, to sleep in dormers in the basement, etc and typically in exchange we'd help out with various chores, either helping to trim bud in grow rooms, or more legit stuff like gardening duties, home repairs, etc.

One thing that had been coopted was the old hobo signal system.

[IntLibber]

Anarchism has long been associated with socialists. I believe Orwell was a anarcho-socialists. At least I read his "Catalonia" that way. The Soviets crushed them in favor of a more top down style.

Yeah, and anarcholibertarians recognise that in an anacap civilization, communes could peacefully coexist, but that ancap communities would not be permitted in a ansoc civilization.

While Orwell was originally ansoc, I think by the time he wrote 1984, it became clear to him that any type of socialism is pretty intolerant of any sort of economic freedom, and without economic freedom, social liberties are merely "opiates for the masses".

While ansoc's like to treat Proudhon as their intellectual father (and Bakunin as their martial father), and like to proclaim "Property is Theft" quite often, this phrase is taken out of context by them. Proudhon was not in opposition to petty bourgoisie small business and venture capital funded industry. His term of "property" was merely in reference to the vast landed aristocracy's ownership of most all of the land for generation after generation, and liberty from owing any significant taxes on owning this property.

This is ostensibly the major economic problem today in the US. Firstly 50% of the land in the US is owned by the state (fed, state or local) and free of any property taxes and unusable by the public for most purposes.

Most of the rest is owned by various corporations, trusts, and foundations which hold nonprofit status and also pay no property taxes. What is left is the farmlands and residential and urban communities where actual buildings exist, they pay all of the property taxes that goes to support services for the other 90% of the land in the country.

Frequently, significant economic activity occurs on this tax free land. For instance, Dartmouth College owns a township in northern New Hampshire which it logs. The logging revenues go to fund the endowment of the school, specifically for funding scholarships for native americans. There are a number of similar "land grant" colleges across the US, and in many cases, they also tend to be heavily environmentalist (like Dartmouth is) while earning some hefty money from doing to their land exactly what they condemn for profit corporations for doing on their own land.

[IntLibber]

OK. I see the problem. I knew the Pranksters in '69 or '70. By the '90s it was no doubt a whole new group of people.

You would be surprised. Some of the original people were large and in charge. You've heard of the Ruckus Society? They were the ones who ran the camps. Ruckus grew out of EarthFirst and Rainforest Action Network and Greepeace.

Some of The Merry Pranksters were some of the large individual donors who helped fund Ruckus before they started getting support from the big foundations like Ford, Tides, etc.

John Sellers was instrumental in helping Ruckus diversify its funding into the foundation circuit.

[MSimon]

Who Owns the World: The Surprising Truth About Every Piece of Land on the Planet

[MSimon]

OK. I see the problem. I knew the Pranksters in '69 or '70. By the '90s it was no doubt a whole new group of people.

You would be surprised. Some of the original people were large and in charge. You've heard of the Ruckus Society? They were the ones who ran the camps. Ruckus grew out of EarthFirst and Rainforest Action Network and Greepeace.

Some of The Merry Pranksters were some of the large individual donors who helped fund Ruckus before they started getting support from the big foundations like Ford, Tides, etc.

John Sellers was instrumental in helping Ruckus diversify its funding into the foundation circuit.

Those folks were way above my pay grade.