Biopower against Nazis

Marking this Guardian news piece for consideration:

Turd Reich: San Francisco dog owners lay minefield of poo for rightwing rally.

Animality of the animal meets politics and the cultural signification of shit. 

Alligator, John Sayles

The 1980 film Alligator is one in a line of pop-horror films made to capitalize off of the success of Jaws (1975).  Grizzly (1976), Orca (1977), and Piranha (1978, also written by Sayles) are other examples. And while it is a fun B-film, Sayles is a smart writer and his cleverness shows through the tropes of the genre. Here are a few quick notes and reflections:

Quick plot summary: a baby alligator is flushed down the toilet by a little girl's father who doesn't want the pet around any more. In the sewers the beast is exposed to hormones and other chemicals from a medical lab and these cause the alligator to grow to the size of a car and have a huge appetite (mainly for dogs and humans). After killing a number of folks, a cop (recently fired from the force for his 'crazy' ideas about an alligator in the sewers) finds the beast and destroys it (while winning the female biologist love interest).

Things to note: 
- Like radioactive boar and radioactive rabbits, this is about a return of the repressed. Even John Oliver is talking about radioactive alligators! 
- The whole film is anti-authority. Father who naively flushes the baby alligator down the toilet is shown to be wrong (it doesn't die), expert hunter is killed, cops are killed, owner of the medical establishment that created the beast-enhancing hormones is killed, etc. 
- More anti-authority. The film is set in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention (briefly mentioned over the radio toward the beginning of the film). Rather than convention riots, we get the alligator! The alligator is anti-police, not the rioters. He is the riot! and more importantly, he is anti-human and like the monstrous body for a riot, the violence of the animal is chaotic. 
- More on violence. It is chaotic but with a moral feel that the 'bad guys' in the movie get what they deserve. The film has it both ways... indiscriminate violence of animality and moral killings.
- What is in our water? The alligator is a stand-in for the toxins he absorbs and that are the slow mutations of contaminated public water. Medicines are in our water. This is the return of the repressed. "Discarded Drugs May Contaminate 40 Million Americans' Drinking Water" as Scientific America reports. 
- The end of the film. A manhole cover is placed over the viewer. We are stuck in the sewer--to be eaten or to become the alligator. A small baby alligator is flushed into the sewer. The story will repeat.

Notes for how to conduct the animal revolution

China Mieville on Utopias 
"Rather than touting our togetherness, we fight best by embracing our not-togetherness.... Rather than hoping for cohesion, our best hope might lie in conflict. Our aim, an aspect of this very utopianism, should be this strategy of tension." from The Limits of Utopia - 2014 Nelson Institute Earth Day Conference

Sea change

I'm laying down a marker for myself and whoever might read this. Guardian headline: "Soaring ocean temperature is 'greatest hidden challenge of our generation.'" 

Oliver Milman in Honolulu

@olliemilman

Monday 5 September 2016 19.00 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 6 September 201612.01 BST

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The soaring temperature of the oceans is the “greatest hidden challenge of our generation” that is altering the make-up of marine species, shrinking fishing areas and starting to spread disease to humans, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of ocean warming.

anthrax... return from a forgotten time

This from Salekhard, Russia. Far north climate change has eroded the permafrost. Dead animal and human remains buried in shallow graves are being exposed as the permafrost melts. The dead bodies release anthrax into the air and water table. Time exposes the past to the present in deadly ways.

CERN news:
"Animals are a recurring problem to scientific progress" says NPR science reporter. This after a furry critter, likely a weasel, chewed through power cables at the Large Hadron Collider (the world's largest particle accelerator) and shorted the magnets. His furry body was found dead on the scene.   This is not the first time animals have shut down the power of to the massive 17 miles accelerator ring. Once a bird dropped a piece of bread into the power complex causing a short. The animal world does not know the sensitivity of these machines or rather is testing their limits by way of, well, being animals. Other worldings effect our own notion of progress.

Beavers

Beavers through their dams and the ecologies (microbes etc created) de-couple nitrogen from the water. It matters because our fertilizer run-off has created too much nitrogen in the water which creates algae blooms and kills fish... basically rupturing the equilibrium. So, today more beavers could mean better ecology. Beavers also help (re)distribute water in ways that could smartly conserve it for an ecological future. Could we save California through beaver engineering? Take that human dam builders! Hoover dam and Glenn Canyon have nothing on the humble beaver!