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MJ: You recently said that Bush’s re-election is an incredible opportunity.

DS: I did preface that by saying I thought it would be good to un-elect him! I don’t believe in a strategy of making people more miserable, but since we’re stuck with him there are a bunch of openings: It’s become transparent that elections don’t equal democracy, that the Democratic Party is a political space that is a coffin for social movements, that the conflict between elites and the rest of us is completely transparent, that they don’t understand social power but they understand how to manipulate and use the psychology of advertising. Just look at what’s happening in Iraq: they have no idea how people operate. So, if we can apply people power in the United States and stand up to the repression, it bodes well because they don’t understand it. And I believe the Bush Administration is so arrogant they’re going to bring about the collapse of empire and global capitalism.

MJ: Just on their own?

DS: It needs a push, especially from those of us in the United States. A big push. People in the United States are in such a privileged position in that we are located within the Achilles heel of the most powerful and dangerous institution in the history of planet Earth--the U.S. empire and the global economy. There’s actually no time or place that I’d rather be alive and fighting than right here and now.

MJ: So you’re not fleeing to Canada?

DS: No. People around the world have much more developed social movements and are fighting so hard, and we can do just a little bit and have a huge impact. What happened in Seattle, for example, or downtown San Francisco the day the United States preemptively invaded Iraq--it was really not a big deal for a lot of social movements in places like Bolivia or India. But because of who and where we were, it reverberated around the world.

MJ: Where do activists start?

The United States needs to become literate in people power. If the wealth of countries was based on their social movements, it would flip the world upside down, and Bolivia, Brazil, India, Mexico would be the wealthy nations and the United States would be a very poor, underdeveloped country. For example, in El Alto, Bolivia, at the same time they were kicking out the multinational water corporation, Suez, that was poisoning their water system and making it unaffordable, they were creating an alternative water system that would de-commodify water and be controlled by the community themselves, as they did earlier in Cochabamba.

Part of the challenge for us is to learn from past social movements. A lot of the ideas I learned came from the civil rights movement and the farm workers movement. But they’re not in people’s heads. It’s an amnesia of our own history. We have to learn how to organize, and create models that are replicable and not just dependent on non-profits and professionals. On the other hand, there’s a quandary about how the most overworked people on planet Earth find the time to organize ourselves. But, if you start to look around, there are people organizing themselves around all of our basic needs and organizing positive alternatives. There are a lot of pieces of my community--in my utopian vision of the world--that would remain essentially intact, just probably with more resources and more freedom, from the public library to the cultural centers to neighborhood organizations, community gardens to bicycle transportation. The challenge is to try to couple our oppositional organizing with the constructive alternatives, because often they end up in separate worlds.

MJ: This all sounds great, but aren’t these pillars you identify–the military, corporations, and corporate media disinformation–pretty huge? It seems that struggling to knock them down, even as you’re creating new alternatives, could be quickly discouraging.

DS: One key thing people do is pick achievable goals along the way so we can have milestone victories and break it down into little pieces. Can we do counter-recruitment work in this particular high school and get this many students not to go into the military? If your goal is to topple the empire, break it down. If everybody fights for achievable goals within a framework of stopping the war and occupation, they can add up. If we see ourselves as part of the same movement operating on some of the same systemic analyses, then our efforts become cumulative. You get overwhelmed if you think, “Oh my god, our small local group has to fill the vacuum after the system collapses AND help it collapse!”

Whereas North American microbes orient toward degrading fat, simple sugars, and protein, the microbes of subsistence communities so far studied are geared toward fermenting fiber.

think fiber is so important that they’ve given it a new designation: microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, or MACs. They think that the mismatch between the Westernized, MAC-starved microbiome and the human genome may predispose to Western diseases.

Scientists studying these communities suspect that while mortality is high from infectious diseases, chronic, non-communicable diseases are far less prevalent. At the same time, researchers since the late 20th century have repeatedly observed that even in the West, people who grow up on farms with livestock, or exposed to certain fecal-oral infections, like Hepatitis A and sundry parasites—environments that, in their relative microbial enrichment, resemble these subsistence communities—have a lower risk of certain Western afflictions, particularly hay fever, asthma, and certain autoimmune disorders.

trisha low on pop pop

what one might consider a silent ventriloquism, or a ventriloquism that, while deeply vacant, is still effectively mesmerizing. Mining dead source images can create a psychic energy field because of a saturation of association or because it becomes a lynchpin for an entire field of reference. Like Laura.

Because fangirls are also picture-perfect examples of prosumers, the results of an explosion of self-production technologies that encourage crowd-sourced and fan-made products, fictions and identities to be re-consumed and spat out in a claustrophobic cycle of disembodied virtual intensity—and intensity as capital. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write of this new model, “the great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also… agentic subjectivities within the biopolitical context: they produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds—which is to say, they produce producers.” Gotta love pop culture when what it really means is that feeling good becomes the most efficient form of facilitating sheep-like, sleepwalking labor. I don’t know. I don’t think I really believe all that, even if it is kind of a smart argument. Maybe what it all comes down to is that basically I believe in demonic possession. Like in The Exorcist when Linda Blair just projective vomits pea soup for longer than humanly possible, I want to be able to spew meaningless waste into platforms generated via my objects of desire. And then I want the world to drown in it. Is that so much to ask?

the "closet" or "cabinet," which was a woman's writing and reading study. The place where novels like Pamela were fantasizing about a woman's private life, and representing it as "authentic" or "true" take place, leading neither to the eroticization not of the woman, nor the fulfillment of any kind of voyeuristic desire, but the eroticization of the space itself, the space of the closet, much like the genre of the confessional, or maybe a virtual space like LiveJournal.

To falsify the overarching narrative of salvation, I guess and subsume it to an overwrought, noisy and intuitive imaginary logic. I have this gigantic crush on the artist Banks Violette. I'd marry him in a heartbeat. Or whatever, really whatever I can get. But he talks a lot about the strip-mining of subculture images and the contradiction between the increasing strip-mining of say, the classic iconography of a heavy metal subculture, skulls, churches, motorcycles, all while the increased investment of belief in these images as they begin to get really, really flimsy. That's how I feel about how I made the book. That's how I feel about "recovery" or "healing" or "reparation." For a lack of a better word, it's so high-pitched, the sharpness of that new belief, the second time around. It's so fucking hot.

#thought #trishalow

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