Motorcycles are cool. Electric motorcycles are even cooler, especially if you’re a filthy ecosocialist like me. Unfortunately, like any new and developing technology, they are plagued with security vulnerabilities purely due to the fact that they’re too new to have been subject to as much malicious scrutiny as older technologies.…

The Xutsnoowú Ḵwáan, a tribe of the Tlingit people located on Admiralty Island, Southeast Alaska, is unfortunately best know to white America for one thing: they are the origin of the word “hooch.”

When researching claims of pre-contact fermentation practices in the Pacific Northwest, I came across the following quote:…

If you ever find yourself reading through the Wikipedia article on “Alcohol and Native Americans” or “The History of Alcoholic Beverages,” you may find the following passages:

“In the northwest, the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island produced a mildly alcoholic drink using elderberry juice, black chitons, and tobacco.[57] Despite the fact that they had little to no agriculture, both the Aleuts and Yuit of Kodiak Island in Alaska were observed making alcoholic drinks from fermented raspberries.[56]”

and,…

Look, sometimes you need quite a large volume of artificial saliva for very normal reasons. We’ve all been there. In my case, it’s because I was researching pre-contact fermentation practices in the Americas, and wanted an alternative to manually chewing starchy base ingredients (corn in the case of chicha, or mesquite beans in the specific case I was researching – more on that later.) What if, I thought, instead of manually chewing the beans I could instead put them in something like a mochi machine with my artificial saliva, and pseudo-masticate them that way.…