Real banger of an article here from Colin Drumm, the only person who can present obscure precapitalist financial instruments as excitingly as they deserve to be (Barring, perhaps, Akinobu Kuroda, whose book I have yet to read). We move from an examination of the functioning of bills of exchange as enablers of international trade/circulation under late medieval conditions where usury is illegal (once again revealing the key insight that markets must be made, and have a price, something that is obvious when you think about it but is often seemingly elided even by anticapitalists) through grey-area usury/internal lending, arriving at a post-legalization of usury state of affairs where these bills of exchange facilitate the slave trade in the West Indies, and how the possibility of financing ‘capital acquisition’ (i.e. Buying Human Beings) against future profits engendered in that market leads to the emergence of a uniquely capitalist dynamic.

mental illness hasn’t been destigmatised but commercialised

Sooo true.

You can’t have serious conversations about your mental illness and you can’t even mention having one of the more stigmatized mental illnesses.

But you can endure a long line of ads recommending medications, self-care products, gym memberships, self-help books, online seminars, crystals, plants, sunlight lamps and other overpriced shit that’s supposed to be good for your mental health but is mainly just there to take advantage of people who are at a vulnerable place in life. Disgusting.

Marta Russel called this “handicapitlaism” and identified it as one of the traps of bourgeoisie/free market disability rights activism 

There’ve been a few responses to/reblogs with tags on my post about DIY clothing embellishments that basically boil down to ‘I’d love to do this but I’m scared it’ll turn out bad/I’m not a good enough artist’. And I get it, I really do! I also want my art things to turn out nicely. But also…making it badly is sort of the point of punk DIY. 

Listen. We live in a world that would dearly love to charge you a subscription fee for breathing. The bastards are doing everything they possibly can to figure out how to turn art - stories, visual art, music, textile/fibre art, sculpture, crafts and creations of every kind - into a neat, discrete, packageable commodity, a product they can chop up into little pieces and stick behind a paywall so they can charge you for every drop of it you want to have in your life. 

The whole sneering idea that ‘everybody wants to be some kind of creator now’ and anything less than absolute mastery right out the gate is somehow shameful and embarrassing is a tool those bastards are using. It’s a way to reinforce the idea that only a set group of people can create and control art, and everybody else has to buy it. 

But art isn’t a product. Art is a fundamental human impulse. Nobody is entitled to a specific piece of art (which is where this message gets skewed into pitting people who love art against the artists who make it, while the bastards screw us all and run away with the money). But making art belongs to everybody. We make up songs and dances and stories, and paint things, and make clothes, and embellish them, and carve flowers into our furniture and our lintels and our doorframes, and make windows out of tiny pieces of coloured glass, and decorate our homes and our bodies and our lives with things we make and make up, simply for the love of beauty and of the act of creation. Grave goods from tens of thousands of years ago show that ancient hominids gave their dead wreaths of ceramic flowers, tattooed their bodies, beaded their shoes. Making things for the sake of beauty and enjoyment is one of the most ancient and human things we can do. 

The idea that we can’t, that we have to buy shit instead, because art is a product and you have to have the bestest prettiest most perfect product, is the enemy of joy. It’s the death of culture. And it means that, instead of whatever it is that you cherish and enjoy and value, you get whatever inoffensive (and to whom is it inoffensive?) bland meaningless samey-samey crap that the bastards want you to be allowed to have. What are you missing and what are you missing out on, if you don’t make or modify or decorate anything for yourself, if you don’t think you can because the product at the end won’t be polished or perfect or marketable enough? What do you lose? What do we lose? 

It is a desperately vital and necessary thing for you to make shit. For you to know that you can make shit, that you don’t have to just lie back and take whatever pablum the bastards want to force-feed you (and charge you through the nose for). That the bastards need you more than you need them. 

Become ungovernable. Be your own weirdly-endearing punk little freak. Paint on a t-shirt. Sing off-key in the shower or at karaoke night or at open mic night. Make up a story where you get to meet your favourite fictional character and you guys hug or fuck or punch each other in the face. Make art. Do it badly. Do it frequently. Do it enthusiastically. Do it for love and joy and creativity and fun and the spiteful joy of thumbing your nose at some smug motherfucker with a Swiss bank account who wants to track your heartbeat and location for the rest of your life in order to automatically pump AI-generated beats matched to your mood into your earbuds for a small monthly subscription fee of $24.99/month. It is literally the only way we are ever going to have even a chance to save art and our own lives from the bastards. 

So. Paint that t-shirt. 

(Also support artists where you can, and buy your music from Bandcamp.)

Rick Fiala 1978

["I didn't know why hatchery salmon needed to be grown in Elk River. I knew dams on the Columbia and urban pollution in the Willamette had nearly destroyed the salmon runs in those rivers, but there were no dams and minimal pollution on Elk River. The propaganda that passed as outdoor education didn't speak of the effects of clearcutting on salmon habitat. No one explained that as spawning beds silt up with logging debris and disappear, fewer and fewer wild salmon can spawn. I never heard that if the trees shading a creek are cut, the direct sunlight warms the water. And if the water temperature rises enough in a watershed, salmon, which require relatively cold water to survive, are put at risk. Nor did the propaganda speak of over-fishing. The commercial salmon fishermen who made their livelihoods fishing the summer salmon runs off the coast of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska hadn't yet heard of sustainable yield. The salmon runs seemed endless.

The powers-that-be didn't teach us that hatchery salmon differ from wild salmon, that they are genetically more homogenous, more susceptible to disease, and less hardy once at sea. To raise salmon year after year in a hatchery, biologists use formaldehyde and other chemicals each summer to combat recurring diseases that kill thousands of hatchery fingerlings. The continuous pumping of water from the river washes these chemicals into the ecosystem. And each winter when the hatchery salmon don't return to the hatchery in large enough numbers, biologists go to natural spawning beds and net wild salmon, taking them to the hatchery to augment their supply of spawn. Soon wild salmon might not exist. The propaganda neglected these details.

My classmates and I were taught by teachers who worked for schools funded largely with timber taxes; by US Forestry Service rangers and their brochures; and by industry-supported textbooks, slide shows, and tours. The point isn't simply that we, like schoolchildren across the country, were taught half-truths about trees and salmon. Rather we learned even more fundamental lessons, that trees and salmon are endlessly renewable commodities. This view of the natural world, which puts clearcutting, replanting, and hatcheries at its center, conveniently supported the two industries, logging and fishing, that sustained the towns we lived in.

Not until I left Port Orford did I come into contact with other worldviews. Living in a city for the first time, I met people who knew salmon only as frozen patties, who used paper but had never been to a paper mill. For them trees were the tall, skinny maples, oaks, and beeches that grew along sidewalks. They navigated the seemingly impossible parking structures and bus stops with ease and comfort. Some of them believed that trees and salmon were more than just commodities.

They created a fuzzy, romanticized version of nature, combining memories of Walt Disney nature movies with their occasional summer vacations to overcrowded national parks. Or they believed in a white urban version of tree spirits and Mother Earth. Either way, my new acquaintances held trees and fish in an awestruck reverence as they talked about the dangers of nuclear power and the destruction of rainforests in Brazil, about clearcutting as rape. I simply listened. Surrounded by concrete and high-rises, I slowly stopped taking the familiar plants and animals of the Siskiyou National Forest for granted. When I returned home to visit, I caught glimpses of what was beautiful and extraordinary about the place I grew up in, and what was ugly and heartbreaking. I started to believe that trees and salmon weren't just harvestable crops. I read Sierra Club literature, the Earth First! Journal, Dave Foreman's ecotage manual, learned about Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Nevada Test Site, Big Mountain; and started to turn from a right-wing, Libertarian-influenced childhood toward a progressive adulthood. I never grew into the white urban reverence of tree spirits and Mother Earth, a reverence often stolen from Native spiritual traditions and changed from a demanding, reciprocal relationship with the world into something naïve and shallow that still places human life and form at the center. Nor did I ever grow comfortable with the metaphor of clearcutting as rape, the specificity of both acts too vivid for me to ever compare or conflate them. But I did come to believe that trees and fish are their own beings, important in and of themselves, and that I— as activist, consumer, and human being among the many beings on this planet— have a deeply complex relationship with them."]

Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

31981 Corral Hollow Rd, Tracy, California.

— Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

[text id: I don’t feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well. end id]

To all the people in the notes wondering how we got anywhere before GPS: we got lost a lot. Like a lot. If it was a new place we would pull out the maps, we all had local maps in the car and then these huge huge huge books of maps called atlases and we'd have one for every state we'd be driving through

And before a trip we would plot our whole entire route, and go back over it every night at the hotel, and we would write all the directions down on a little note and someone would be in charge of navigation and making sure we didn't miss any turns.

For local stuff all directions would be described in reference to other things. You still see this when older folks give directions. Do you ever get the "do you know where the ruby Tuesday is? No? How about the Buffalo wild wings? Yeah okay so from there go down til you see a Wendy's and turn left..." instead of them just telling u the address so u can plug it into ur GPS? That's why.

I have fond memories of getting helaciously lost in Kentucky because we had to go around a bad accident, and we didn't have a Kentucky map because we hadn't planned on going thru Kentucky and we stopped at a gas station to get a map but they didn't have any and my dad came back to the car swearing up and down about these goddamn Kentucky communists who didn't even sell maps in their gas stations,

honestly the funniest thing about this post is referring to kentuckians as communists.

I was told when I started looking at places to live that after I moved in I should spend a day getting incredibly lost/turned around in the area to help familiarize myself with the roads and landmarks nearby.

I have heard that advice and I still don't understand how I'm supposed to familiarize myself with roads and landmarks when I'm lost and don't know what they're relative to, which is to me a key factor of familiarity. Like, "wow good thing I know there's a Silver Diner cafe here... somewhere in a direction from where I live I guess." I think this must be one of those things neurotypical people just understand and whatever is wrong with me I'm gonna need at least five additional steps before it makes sense. Anyway whatever, I drove in a nearly straight line across Washington DC in rush hour with no GPS or map directly to my destination so in conclusion I don't want to ever do that again because I have no idea how I did it but I saved myself probably two hours of sitting in beltway traffic.

I remember, in the days before email, sending letters to family and friends to Invite them to a Thing at our house, and for those who hadn't been before, hand-drawing little maps to slip into the greeting card.

It was fun drawing those little maps.

I drew them with landmarks and everything.

Skaņaiskalns Nature Park, Latvia

Louise Michel Square, at the foot of the hill of Montmartre, where Louise Michel participated in the events that catalyzed the Paris Commune on March 18, 1871. (In the background, the hill is surmounted by the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, built by reactionary religious authorities to "expiate the sins of the Commune.")

The sign for the park also displays our classic "Community Watch Area: Police not Welcome" sticker.

https://crimethinc.com/stickers/police-not-welcome-community-watch-area

there’s an agronomy professor at my work who can take a common crop seed, let it soak in chemicals that dye living parts of the seed shades of red, and then can cut it open and tell you WHY it’s rotting instead of germinating AND can give an approximation of what stage of the growing/harvesting process might have gone wrong to kill it and honestly I’m just struck by how much of an incredibly powerful niche skillset this is. just incredibly valuable in any context, not just in dystopian monoculture corn reality where well-bred/treated/engineered crop seeds are incredibly expensive commodities to be bought and sold but also like, for most of human history? like is this not something kings and emperors and civilizations through human history would put you on courts and councils for. person who can tell you why the crops aren’t growing. remarkable

Apropos of nothing

If you are the techiest person in the house (and for many of you, this is not techy at all), today is a good day to build a pihole thanks to Google's new TLDs.

For the record, this straight up stopped Dad from getting computer viruses when coupled with the Ublock browser extension, so I will volunteer my time to get you set up. We will find an evening and do a Zoom call. I am serious.

Prerequisities:

Before you start, this will be way way easier if your router has a magic way to:

If you can't do this, I'm not saying you're stuck, but there's some non-obvious failure modes and maybe it's time to buy a better router.

Parts:

Raspberry Pi 4B. 2GB if you just want to set and forget, 8GB if you want to do more things on this than just your pihole (Coughs in a MarioKart box) -> https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

Spare USB-C charger if you don't have one already. I'm a fan of https://www.amazon.com/Argon-USB-C-Power-Supply-Switch/dp/B0919CQKQ8/ myself

A microSD card at least UHS class 3 or better. 32 is fine for just a pihole, I have a 512 in some of mine that I use for more stuff. https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/raspberry-pi-microsd-cards

Some method of flashing the card if you don't have one (Some come with SD to micro-SD adapters, if not a USB to SD/micro-SD adapter is about $10 off Amazon)

If you really feel like going nuts, go buy yourself an Argon case and then very very carefully never ever install the software for the fan that does nothing. The value is entirely in having a big giant brick that is self-cooling. If you want to play MarioKart, I would consider this a requirement. https://www.amazon.com/Argon-Raspberry-Aluminum-Heatsink-Supports/dp/B07WP8WC3V

Setup:

Do yourself a favor and ignore all the signs telling you to go get Raspbian and instead go grab an ISO of Ubuntu 64-bit using RPi Imager. Because Raspbian cannot be upgraded across version WHY U DO THIS

Download Rpi Imager, plug the microSD card into your computer,

Other General Purpose OS -> Ubuntu -> Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

So now you have an operating system on an SD card.

Assemble the case if you bought one, plug in the SD card, power supply, ethernet cable if you have one or mouse and (mini) HDMI cable if you don't. If you bought that Argon case, you can just plug a keyboard (server OS means no mouse gang; In this house, we use the Command Line) and HDMI cable into the Pi. Turn it on.

Gaining access

The end state of this is that your pi is:

If you plugged in an ethernet cable, once it's done booting (1-2 minutes?), you should be able to ssh to "ubuntu@<the IP of the system>". Look it up in your router. It may make sense to give the static IP NOW to keep it stable.

If you've never used SSH before, I think the standard is Putty on Window or you can just open a terminal in Mac. (And if you know enough Linux to have a Linux computer, why are you reading this?)

If you didn't plug it in, and need to setup the wifi, there's magic incantations to attach it to the wifi and to be quite blunt, I forget what they are.

Your username is ubuntu, your password is ubuntu and then it will ask you to make a new password. If you know the meaning of the phrase "keypair-based access", it may make sense to run `ssh-copy-id` at this point in time.

Router settings (part 1)

Give your new Pi a static IP address, and reboot your pi (as simple as typing in `sudo reboot`).

Open a new SSH session to the pihole on the new address.

Installing pihole

Open up an SSH session and

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

This is interactive. Answer the questions

When it's done, on your other computer, navigate to <the ip>/admin

Login with the password you just set. Router settings part 2

Give your new Pi a static IP address then point your router at that address

Set the DNS servers to the static IP

Then ensure you're blocking something. Anything.

Then do what you want to do. You'll probably need to whitelist some sites, blacklist some more, but the main thing is going to be "Adding more list of bad sites". Reddit has some lists.

And... enjoy.

/But seriously, there's some stuff to do for maintenance and things. I wasn't joking about the pair setup.

“No Loyalty to the Bosses.

No Loyalty to the Institution”

We act like mass migrations are this mystical force in animals and yeah it's incredible that some species just inherit the memory of one river to head to but what THEY experience is always either "this place sucks now, I'm leaving" or "oh God I'm so horny and I'm even hornier in this direction"

old lesbian messaging was super vague and ominous i Love It

we passed a sign in boring that said their sister city is dull, scotland

oh there's a third! bland, new south wales!

I'm sorry but I just have to appreciate the wordplay on that last sign. It's brilliant.

John Wojtowicz poses at the Brooklyn branch Chase Bank that he robbed in 1972 in an attempt to fund sexual reassignment surgery for his lover.

cavemen probably had it good. drink stream water from rock cup. sounds refreshing as fuck

how IS any of this blogging

discovering the queer country scene has honestly been so healing because most queer musicians i've seen recommended for years i just couldn't really connect with because it wasn't the sort of music i listened to or had investment in and with queer country it's like. yes. this is the language i speak in. this is Fuck You, I Belong Here Too, not just as a queer person in the country but as a rural person among (sub)urban queers, and saying it with a laugh. when will my hometown take pride in me, goddamn it

Drop the list!!

FIRST: rachel holst does the adobe & teardrops blog as well as the rainbow rodeo newsletter & zine. look into the black opry also, there are plenty of black queer country/folk/americana artists & there is a lot of collaboration between them and other queer country/folk/americana musicians

my personal list: