Asheville City Council Member says her car windows were smashed, tires slashed- Asheville, NC
August 12, 2023
An Asheville City Council member said her car tires were slashed and car windows smashed Aug. 10.
Maggie Ullman, in an Aug. 11 Facebook post, said the vandalism happened after she and four other council members signed an open letter about public safety.
From Ungrateful Hyenas Editions
“Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.” — Solitude by Ursula LeGuin
As technological expansion hurtles forward at an increasingly dizzying pace, the presence of smartphones threatens to become normalized across the anarchist space; in many places, this presence has already been normalized for a long time. Among anarchists in the US, critiques of adopting smartphones, or any other new tech gadget, have generally failed to escape the dead-end binaristic logic of moralistic lifestyle politics. Choosing to live without technology is reduced to a form of consumer activism — an arbitrary personal code that is irrelevant to the struggle, or even harmful in terms of redirecting hostility against the state into judgments of individual consumer choices.
The concept of ‘there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism’ has, predictably, become a banner of the ‘radical’ social media consumption frenzy that has engulfed anarchist milieus in these territories and paved the way for the current state of things. Today it is nearly unheard of to live without a smartphone; when attending a meeting or event, one must assume there is a smartphone in each and every pocket, and any critique of this reality is largely viewed as the squawking of old-timer, out of touch wingnuts.
In some places anarchists have resisted this process of normalization and maintained a clear and consistent critique of the impact of smartphone adoption, warding off the incursion from taking hold in the first place. Everywhere that this is not the case however, including but not limited to the US, where any such critique has long since faded, is there any going back? What would it look like to propose that anarchists ditch the technologies we have become increasingly dependent on and addicted to for over a decade, that have come to mediate so much of our lives, relationships, and forms of struggle? Continue reading Beyond the Screen, the Stars
Statement of solidarity to the comrades struck by operation “Scripta scelera”
We receive and circulate:
SOLIDARITY WITH THE COMRADES STRUCK BY OPERATION “SCRIPTA SCELERA”
On Tuesday 8th of August the umpteenth anti-anarchist operation was unleashed in a number of cities in Italy.
With the magniloquent name of “Scripta Scelera” a new attack on anarchism has materialized, on its theoretical deepening and the practices of solidarity that it knows how to implement.
This time the “crimes in writing” are those of the fortnightly “Bezmotivny”, a publication born at the end of 2020. Just as happened in operation “Sibilla” that struck the anarchist paper “Vetriolo”, anarchist propaganda as such, its ability to affect consciences, binding exploited to other exploited beyond States and borders, has been criminalised once again.
Repressive measures against the comrade in Spoleto under investigation in operation Scripta Scelera (29 August 2023) have been increased.
This is to let you know that on August 29th the repressive measures concerning Michele, anarchist comrade involved in the Scripta Scelera investigation against the internationalist anarchist fortnightly magazine “Bezmotivny” have become more severe. In the context of the operation of 8th of August the comrade received a notice of obligatory residence with a night curfew at 7pm until 7am established by the judge for preliminary investigations Ghio in relation to the charges of incitement to commit crime (art. 414 c. p.) aggravated by aims of terrorism.
A microphone is found in a car. It is hidden inside the vehicle. The night before the device was found, one of the car’s windows was broken, a few things inside it were stolen, and four men were seen tampering with the vehicle – the theft was presumably a cover-up for the device installation.
Electrical Substation Attacks Analysis
Of all critical infrastructure sectors, utilities have been the most popular for targeted physical attacks lately. In fact, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)’s Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC), there were almost 1,700 physical security incidents reported to the E-ISAC in 2022, an increase of 10.5% from 2021.
While typical physical security incidents against utilities and substations involve vandalism, tampering, arson, and ballistic damage, most do not result in grid impacts; however, a trend toward more serious events occurred in 2022. As reported extensively in November 2022, a series of attacks occurred at six different substation facilities in Oregon and Washington state, five of which resulted in power disruptions. Then in December, gunfire disabled radiators and circuit breakers in two North Carolina substations, causing major outages for 42,000 customers during a cold spell in the area; and two Seattle substations were damaged resulting in Christmas outages.
Continue reading Electrical Substation Attacks Analysis – USA
In light of the actions that happened last month, I wanted to encourage everyone to revisit this post. Many of the points made about riotous moments apply to clandestine action as well.
If the people at 890 Memorial Drive intended to burn the vehicles, it was not a good idea to smash windows. Not only does this increase the risk of leaving DNA, breaking a window is very loud and likely to attract attention from passerby — which is exactly what interrupted that action, according to police. As demonstrated in this video, a firestarter cube, placed directly on a front tire (or the rear tire on the same side as the gas tank), is sufficient to assure the destruction of the vehicle. Once lit, it takes about five minutes for the firestarter to fully ignite the tire, which is plenty of time to leave the area unnoticed in most cases. Firestarter cubes can be purchased or racked at any grocery store. Cottonballs covered in vaseline can also work as a firestarter.
Munich : new construction machines burn to the ground
But who said summer wasn’t conducive to incendiary attacks on structures of domination? Not the police in Bavaria’s capital city, at any rate, where these have not ceased. On July 8, a construction machine set fire under the Föhringer Ring in the north of Munich, destroying the telecoms cables running along the bridge. On July 16, a cell phone antenna caught fire in Forstenrieder Park, south of Munich. Then on July 26, five construction machines at the Martinsried subway station were hit by flames in Planneg, this time in the west of the city. And on July 27, at around 10.30pm, a forestry machine used for felling large trees was engulfed in flames in the Perlach forest, south of the city, again causing over 100,000 euros worth of damage.
All this anonymous destruction is enough to make uniforms dizzy, as they no longer know which Saint to turn to or which direction to dig, so much so that helicopters have even taken to circling the skies over Munich at night, in search of saboteurs. All to no avail.
Continue reading Munich (Germany): new construction machines burn to the ground
London. Mass sabotage of surveillance cameras
Le Matin (Switzerland), August 18, 2023
London police reported on Friday that hundreds of cameras had been sabotaged in the run-up to the controversial extension of the tax on the most polluting vehicles, scheduled for the end of the month in the British capital. Restricted to central London when it was introduced in 2019, the ULEZ (ultra low emission zone) had already been considerably expanded in 2021 and is due to be extended to the whole of Greater London on August 29.
The extension of the tax, in the midst of the UK’s cost-of-living crisis, has been strongly criticized by local residents, and some opponents are attacking the cameras placed on the roads – which are supposed to read license plates to check that the vehicle is exempt or that the tax has been paid.
Continue reading London (UK): 288 surveillance cameras sabotaged in four months
The Fenix 2 trial
On 18 and 19 September 2023, at 8:30 a.m., the District Court in Most will hold the next hearing in the Phoenix 2 case.
https://antifenix.noblogs.org/post/2019/03/27/what-is-fenix-2-about/
The main charges concerned the support and promotion of the Network of Revolutionary cells (SRB) https://revolutionarycells.noblogs.org/, insurrectional anarchism, as well as blackmail and harm of others property. SRB focused several years on sabotage of the property of police and capitalists. So far, no one was convicted and condemned for these actions.
