Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.
The Trump administration has decided to start phasing out HIV funding for South Africa following the country’s
“failure to make demonstrable progress on policy requests by the administration,”
a State Department official told POLITICO on Thursday.
The official, who agreed to discuss the decision only if POLITICO did not use their name,
said the decision to “initiate a phased drawdown of PEPFAR programming in South Africa”
is in line with Donald Trump’s February …
Five good things instead of three today:
1. Passed mid term project review with flying colours, technical officer proclaimed himself "impressed" (phew).
2. Visited super cool facility at DTU and learned a lot about measuring sunlight. Hopefully the start of some interesting new collaborations
3. Took my 2 wonderful teens out for vegan hotpot dinner in Vesterbro to celebrate end of their exams.
4. Lay out in garden listening to the blackbirds and identified 5 separate bee species within 10 mins
5. Tea and TV on the sofa with aforementioned teens just relaxing.
Perfect day really.
#threegoodthings
Alibaba open-sources its chip software, following similar plays from Huawei and Moore Threads, as Chinese GPU makers try to break the dominance of Nvidia's CUDA (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article
Halfway the EU gas storage filling season, the Netherlands is lagging. Our storages are only at 31% now, way behind the EU average of 53%, and other major storage countries like France (52%), Germany (45%) and Italy (71%).
Based on security of supply advice by Gasunie, Dutch government had set a target of 80% by 1 November 2026. Our EU obligation is 74%. Both would practically seem out of reach by now, which is unfortunate in view of our dependence on LNG imports in an unstable world.
You can really feel the warmth of the north american neighborhood
"Sovereignty comes with responsibility, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another country's airspace has not been met"
Reacting to a social media post about the air quality in Cleveland, Moreno wrote: "I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity."
It’s the dead of winter where I am; nonetheless, where @… blazes a trail, I can but follow. #BurningHeat is this week’s #ThursdayFiveList theme:
1. Goat—“Let…
Understanding Data Embassies and Corridors
https://fpf.org/blog/understanding-data-embassies-and-corridors/
@…
The following is a …
Just another place we visited in the Fränkische Schweiz. We just walked along a little stream and suddenly passed through this rock-gate with all the lush green on either side.
Just beautiful.
https://www.franzgraf.de/blog/2026/caves-and-meadows-d…
OHBOY! CHECK OUT THIS JUDGE'S SMACKDOWN OF A HOMELAND SECURITY AGENT!
This is a beautiful, beautiful smackdown of a Department of Homeland Security agent’s request for 5 search warrants in the case in which Don Lemon and colleagues were arrested for going into a church
(you remember that, right? From back in January?)
Keep in mind that the pastor of that church was also an ICE agent.
Following the arrests, Special Agent Timothy Gerber asked the Court to issue fiv…