Hey #Anarchist #writers: "The Italian American Review seeks essays for a special issue dedicated to a re-thinking and re-articulation of the meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti both historically and today."

Call for Papers: Mobilizing Memory: Sacco and Vanzetti on the Centennial of Their Executions – Calandra Italian American Institute

Logistics is what wins or loses wars. Petroleum is the primary resource of oppression. It's just as critical to the MRAPs and Abrams that suppress foreign populations and protect oil extraction for the empire as it is to the MRAPs, armored vans, and police cars that protect the financial foundations of the empire and perpetuate the occupation of the imperial core. Motonormitivity and Petro-fascism are two sides of the same coin. So if you really want to undermine the occupation, the genocide machine, the system of global terror that has boomeranged back home, ask yourself how to separate the population and car culture. As you do that, you begin to separate the occupiers from their tools they need to maintain the occupation. There are those who credit bikes with winning the Vietnam War. That may be an overstatement, but it's not that far off. The Ho Chi Minh trail was a set of bike trails that formed the backbone of a logistics network that the US spent the entire war failing to stop. The primary lever of the occupation is itself logistical. How do you maintain a protest if the State can deliver soldiers anywhere it wants and can stop delivering food to supermarkets if "riots and looting break out"? What happens to the most marginalized in the world will happen to you. Do you think that if starvation works in Gaza do you think it won't be used to protect the integrity of other fascist states? Expect escalation, and prepare for it. Good luck. #USPol

Bring back the Diggers.

When European explorers first saw the "new" world, they took it to be an "unspoiled" wilderness. In reality, many of these "natural" environments were actually highly advanced agricultural systems that were carefully tended by #indigenous people. The "natural" plenty that amazed Europeans was, in fact, the result of generations of careful tending. Europeans are only now, hundreds of years later, "rediscovering" these methods (and, in typical European fashion, naming it #permaculture , pretending they invented it, and profiting from it instead of sharing it). No only is it being rediscovered in the Americas and South Pacific, but European models are now being rediscovered. Europeans could not believe the truth that indigenous people in the South Pacific and Americas had developed something so advanced that it took hundreds of years for colonizers to even recognize it as anything but "magic" (any sufficiently advanced technology, and all that). What's interesting to me is that the Enlightenment thinkers that inspired #socialism and #anarchism, and many European inspired anarchists to this day, do exactly the same thing for the social technologies they observed in the Americas and argued to bring the same to Europe. Rousseau thought that egalitarianism and liberty were just natural things, rather than things that had to be intentionally developed. The classical anarchist idea that "all we have to do is abolish the government" ignores generations of social evolution, of active development of social technology, by indigenous people. There continues to be an insurrectionary and adjacent trend within leftist thinking that still flows from this fallacy. I've already talked about how the idea of a revolutionary as a man with a gun is patriarchal because it ignores the invisible labor of building and sustaining a revolutionary culture. This patriarchal element intertwines with Eurocentric/colonizer biases, in both cases I've mentioned. The European men who wrote about the thoughts of indigenous intellectuals in the Americas only recognized men as people in the societies they interacted with. Women who worked in agriculture were, therefore, invisible. Therefore, the entire systems they maintained *did not exist* to the colonizers. They, instead, happened naturally... Like laundry magically being folded and food magically being made. As we figure out how to move forward from the failure of all elements of colonizer society (social, economic, technological), it's critical that we are aware of the omissions that have lead us to failure so many times in the past.

Tell me again why we're supposed to venerate a "monarchy with extra steps" political system designed by dead slavers, and ignore the last few hundred of advancements in cybernetics and governance theory. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-025-00041-3#ref-CR9

We were traveling out of Barcelona when the #SpainBlackout hit. We were actually waiting in line for the train. Power went out and cell service cut around noon. I was able to get wifi from a nearby hotel (I hope room 123 doesn't mind). I found an outage map for the city, but the map was entirely down. I overheard someone say it was national and found an article about that, but there really wasn't any info yet. After waiting for a while with no info, the train station was evacuated. My partner found a route by bus. So we took our kids and bags and started walking. Finding the right stop was challenging. #OrganicMaps doesn't seem to have bus lines and #CityMapper doesn't do great offline. The kids don't sleep well when traveling, so this was all compounded by several days of sleep deprivation. Navigatng was difficult. We managed to find a hotel with a generator who let us use their wifi to update our maps. So we traveled across the city. Trafic lights seemed to be the only things with power, though there were places those didn't work. Metro and tram were down. There seemed to be exra buses, all of them packed. The roads were packed with cars. It wasn't posible to get a regional bus ticket since the ticket machines were all down. The bus we were looking for didn't seem to actually exist and none of the bus drivers could answer questions. My spanish is not great and I didn't focus a lot on improving it since I'm already overwhelmed with learning dutch. After not being able to find the bus for a while, we were almost going to head back to the hotel and ask for a room. Then the power came back on. We got a regional bus ticket. After waiting for another hour or so, the bus never came. We went back to the hotel and were able to get a room. Wifi at the hotel didn't work after power came back, cell service was still down. Duo is mad at me. I have been off my disaster prep game for a bit, and was especially off while traveling. I have some notes... 1. Always have cash. 2. Download maps in advance (you can do this for google maps also, but you can't route without internet). 3. Download translation languages in advance. 4. Always have extra water and snacks. 5. Pack light so you don't have to haul massive amounts of luggage everywhere. Traveling with kids is hard under normal conditions. It's funny, I'm actually more calm in a crisis. Our kids did really well despite walking for hours around Barcelona (or perhaps because of it). It's interesting how the city prioritized cars by prioritizing power to traffic lights, but that just clogged everything with cars and made bus travel harder. The metro is generally better, imho, in Barcelona because it doesn't have the car problem. Barcelona appears to be deeply unprepared for actual emergencies. A lot of cities are. This is a good reminder that solar power and distributed grids are really important. Dedicated power to mass transit like trains and metro would help evacuate the city. Better bike infrastructure makes it easier to get around when cars clog the streets. I can see how much work is being done in this area, but there's a lot of room to improve. Cars are basically the worst solution for several reasons, including that they caused the problem in the first place. I hope Europe learns from this and continues to move towards greater resiliency. #ClimateChange is going to make things like this happen more often, and centralization makes small disasters larger and makes disaster response slower. Deploying a bunch of cops is not a solution to anything.