Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

Another Oakland Man Murdered by Trigger Happy Cops With Flimsy Excuses; Oakland Protests; Helicopters Out In Force; Almost Nothing In Local Media.



Helicopters loudly proclaim that the America I remember is long gone. If it ever existed. Nothing in the news. Nothing on Twitter that I can find. Helicopters mocking me, circling, swooping. Frantically I'm typing, searching. Finally I find what has to be it -- not that any mainstream media has picked it up :



by Jeff Shuttleworth, reposted from the Bay City News


Rally, March To Protest Police Shootings Planned In Oakland This Afternoon


A rally will be held in Oakland today to protest the fatal shooting of barbershop owner Derrick Jones by two Oakland police officers on Nov. 8.
Oakland police said the officers shot Jones, 37, after they responded to a report that he was assaulting a woman at a laundromat next to his barbershop in the 5800 block of Bancroft Avenue.

Police said Jones refused repeated orders to surrender and was reaching into his waistband, which the officers thought indicated that he was reaching a gun. But no weapon was found at the scene.

The rally, organized by the activist group By Any Means Necessary, will begin outside the Alameda County District Attorney's Office at 1231 Fallon St. at 4 p.m.

Protesters will then march to Oakland City Hall, where they plan to speak at the City Council meeting scheduled to begin at 6 p.m.

In addition to protesting the fatal shooting of Jones, rally participants also will speak out against a bid by former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle to be granted bail while he appeals his involuntary manslaughter conviction for fatally shooting unarmed passenger Oscar Grant III at the Fruitvale station in Oakland on Jan. 1, 2009.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Perry is slated to consider Mehserle's bail motion at a hearing on Friday.



On Mehserle, reposted from a column by Tammerlin Drummond, in the Oakland Tribune

Justice not served in Mehserle sentencing

Seven months.

That's how much longer Johannes Mehserle will likely spend in prison for shooting and killing Oscar Grant III.

[snip]

"Many people contributed to the tragedy in this case," Perry said, blaming Grant for fighting on the train and blaming BART for its poor training of Mehserle, whose defense was that he mistook his gun for his Taser. "I made the ruling because I believe it is in justice to do so."

Actually, this is not what justice looks like. This is what happens when justice falls down on the job. Two years is not sufficient punishment for the criminal taking of a life -- especially if you are a police officer sworn to uphold the law. Perry's cavalier remarks from the bench chastising concerned Oakland residents who wrote to the court requesting Mehserle get the maximum sentence add further insult to injury.

[snip]

Mehserle told KTVU-TV Channel 2 that he never expected to go to prison after the verdict. He thought he would walk out of the courthouse a free man. Rains argued that the involuntary manslaughter conviction was unwarranted and that he will appeal...

Grant's family said Mehserle should have gone to prison for at least 14 years. John Burris, the Grant family attorney, said NFL star Michael Vick got a tougher sentence for running a dog fighting ring. "What you take from that is that Oscar Grant's life was not worth very much," Burris said.



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HUGE Structure Discovered At Center Of Milky Way: Comparison to Atom Now Unavoidable



Think you know what the Milky Way looks like? Think again.


Even if you know what 'everyone knows' the Sun is made of, how many moons Saturn has, where the magnetic north pole is, whether faster than light speeds have been demonstrated in the lab, and how may planets in the Solar System have rings, you may not know about the huge twin gamma ray bubbles at the center of the Galaxy.




As I understand it this is NOT an artist's rendition. From the Nasa's website:

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.

"What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don't fully understand their nature or origin.


These are HUGE - they take up half the night sky. Oh, and share nicknames with another new phenomena -- a chocolate bar (just do a search for 'galaxy bubbles'). Possibly caused by the bar magnet at the center, spinning... or is it a bowl of magnetic spaghetti? The Discover Blog posits "another possibility: The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. While relatively quiet now, a furious period of gobbling up matter and blasting out jets of material in the past could have" produced the bubbles.


From Finkbeiner's paper:


We argue that these Galactic gamma-ray bubbles were most likely created by some large episode of energy injection in the Galactic center, such as past accretion events onto the central massive black hole, or a nuclear starburst in the last ~10 Myr. Dark matter annihilation/decay seems unlikely to generate all the features of the bubbles and the associated signals in WMAP and ROSAT; the bubbles must be understood in order to use measurements of the diffuse gamma-ray emission in the inner Galaxy as a probe of dark matter.

Or, my friend Lisa thinks, to use them as a time portal. 25,000 light years on either side of the Galactic plane, like two vast eyeballs looking at each other, like the headdress of an Egyptian God reflected, like a seed pod from the God tree, like.... a hydrogen atom.







Be seeing you.











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Don't Touch my Junk! song, lyrics, video






Lyrics by Mike Adams (the Health Ranger)

I went to the airport
To catch my flight
The TSA put me in the
Naked body scanner line

I don't want radiation
So I opted out (opt out!)
But when they grabbed my man junk
I couldn't help myself I had to shout,
I had to shout, I had to get my message out, I said

Don't touch my junk
Don't touch my junk
I'll have you arrested
If you touch my junk
Don't touch my junk
This ain't your lovely lady lump
I don't want to be molested
So don't touch my junk

So I went back
Wearing a Scottish kilt
I popped three Viagra
To make sure my stuff would not wilt

When it came my turn
For that nasty pat down
They thought I had a weapon
So they made me pull it out

Don't touch my junk
Don't touch my junk
I'll have you arrested
If you touch my junk
Don't touch my junk
Let go of my hump my hump my hump
I don't want to be molested
So don't touch my junk

Now who put these morons with a badge in charge, and gave them the right to molest us in the name of security?

Don't touch my junk (can't touch this)
Don't touch my junk (can't touch this)
They X-rayed my bags and then
They patted down my elephant trunk

They went up my shorts
They went down my pants
This ain't romance
No it's the TSA hustle
They felt me up
While they put me down
They squeezed my butt
In that TSA hustle

This is happening in the land of the free? Alex Jones was right! I'm gonna smuggle a copy of the Bill of Rights next to my body, so when they reach down there they get a hand full of Fourth Amendment.

Lordy Lordy I declare
Big Brother's in my underwear
Fly to London, fly to France
Big Sis checkin' out my underpants

They went up my shorts (can't touch this)
They went down my pants (can't touch this)
This ain't romance
No it's the TSA hustle
They felt me up
Like they were my personal physician
Put your hands in the air
In the surrender position

This ain't security
And this ain't sex
It's some other kind of tyranny
And now you're next

It's time to stop these
Big Brother Nazi thugs
Next time you fly just tell 'em
Don't touch my junk

The Bill of Rights, baby.


Here is the link to the Natural News post, where you can find background and related information.


Be seeing you -- no, not like that...





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ANALYSIS OF MSNBC "OBAMA AGENDA" TSA SCANNER POLL & DISINFO



The Full Text of my Response To OBAMA AGENDA: 81% favor body scanners.




Respectfully, a point seems to have eluded everyone who commented on this MSNBC article. The way this gem is worded, it seems to me that eighty percent preferred the scanners to the pat down. Would you rather be groped, or irradiated? ...If we assume for the sake of argument that they know what they are doing, the conclusion is obvious. We have a situation with an artificially restrictive set of options. That these are not the only options is not meant to be apparent, and one of the options is actually not viable for the overwhelming majority of intelligent citizens.




The new protocol was intended to force selection of the scanners:


They WANT us to hate the pat downs.



Previous comments had called our attention to the title, and it's implications : bravo I say : this sort of thing is insidious. WTF indeed with this "obama agenda?" What? By not calling it 'Obama's Agenda' they are effectively not even treating him like a real person. So if I take the headline at its word, I understand that my preference for future cancer over present public humiliation is intended, is part of my president's "agenda." It is implied this is common knowledge since this assumption is a priori to the very title and explained nowhere. WTF?!? WHAT?!?


Oh, yes, what was I thinking, this is MSMBC. I think I thought I was actually becoming informed -- researching -- learning about something -- but no, network quote news unquote had my attention instead -- and is even as we speak extracting and compiling. I am even this moment being datamined, reduced to a set of variables, no doubt to be sold on the open market.




BUSTED: Caught you red-handed, MSNBC, angling for that lucrative Fox demographic. Pandering to the increasingly common "Obama-nation" element, the crypto-racist, cerebrally-challenged, slogan-driven Brown Shirts concerned above all with the Security of the Homeland, and easily manipulable by this Fourth iteration of the Reich. You know, the people whose respect and favor is most quickly won by insulting their intelligence, pandering to their fears, Like a bad political ad. Patent lies that sound logical held together with emotional language and punctuated with the occasional ad hominem snarky quip: "BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA. ----- Wrong on safety ----- Wrong on security ----- WRONG FOR AMERICA." No, dear MSNBC: you are in error. I am not part of the viewing audience.


I'm here because I read.


I haven't owned a TV in -- over a decade. And the fastest way to lose me, to lose all of us, is to pander to the worst of us. You've already lost the intelligent, the discerning, the cultured, the educated (even if by themselves), the cosmopolitan, and anyone with a brain or who ain't from here. You will lose what good-ol'-boys you gain once they catch onto what the Elite have in store for them. Just like the Brown Shirts. Under the bus.




Yes thats right -- --- and in the end I was supposed to blame Obama like all the other good little sheeple. And not for one of the real reasons I should be mad. Funny ain't it that ultimately the first Prez-of-Color, however articulate, happens to be


  • still in the upper class;
  • still for the upper class;
  • OBVIOUSLY CONTROLLED BY THE *(>/)%# CORPORATIONS, WHICH ARE KILLING AMERICA AND OUR PLANET,
  • not for the common people at all,
  • seamlessly and tirelessly continuing (and better at) all of his predecessors policies
  • in charge, coincidentally of course, for the worst period ever for the US citizen -- ever...
  • in charge, and thus capable of being blamed -- for a period brought to y'all by both parties because they have become the same; a period NOT brought to y'all by Kennedy. Or FDR. Brought to y'all by, dare I say it, a certain conservative element....

Of course anyone who understands me probably already agrees; nonetheless I needed to take up my keyboard. There you have it. I wish us the best of luck, and fear we may need it.



Be seeing you.



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Gulf Birds May Have Heavy Metal Poisoning


Test the birds for heavy metal poisoning - 

particularly vanadium and nickel.


please.  


because of stories like this:




and this:

Dead Bird Island - Terrebonne Parish Print E-mail

In "Julia," the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper Boston Whaler and a local fishing vessel we made our way south from Pointe Au Chien across Lake Chien and Lake Felicity to Modoto Island. What we encountered there stunned us all. The ground was littered with dead birds. So many dead birds that we aren't sure how many were out there, many dozens of dead birds just in the small area which we surveyed on the island. The dead appeared to included mostly seagulls and terns though some were badly decayed and identification was difficult. It was clear to me by the various states of decay, from scattered bones to a tern that couldn't have been dead for more than a day and everything in between, that this is an ongoing situation.

codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" height="385" width="640">

We also saw a juvenile gull that was in distress. It could hardly walk and was very unsteady when it took a step it also had very little energy. By the time we finished our sampling and were ready to leave the island the bird had died. I asked Kurt if he had seen anything like the dead birds and he said that he had been visiting this island his entire life and he has never seen dead birds in the numbers we were seeing. It is clear to me that these birds are somehow being poisoned by the BP event.

Paul Orr
Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper
  


and this one, which broke my heart and made me post this sketch of a post:


from

OnEarth, November 8, 2010:

Not only were they suddenly in dire financial straits, but the ecosystem surrounding them was in ruins. “As we’d be going down to Venice to provide paperwork for our claims, and searching for a job hopefully working with BP, there were sea gulls dead all over the road,” Darla says. “They weren’t hit by a car. They didn’t have oil on them. There was nothing wrong with them that you could see. I actually saw a couple of them flying and drop out of the sky.

oh and in case you missed it the first time,  
that mystery blight was not just affecting crops...
its near the end of the video, the woman mentions rather quickly --


Note -- dead birds as well.

Here's where it gets interesting.  All this reminded me of an incident that happened in Australia, in 2007, (and also there was another incident in Texas, but I don't know if that was resolved).




Birds fell out of the sky as a whole town was poisoned

By Kathy Marks in Sydney, for the Independent.co.uk, Thursday, 5 April 2007

A strange silence was the first clue that something was wrong. The dawn chorus that usually woke residents of the picturesque coastal town of Esperance, in Western Australia, had stopped. Then birds began falling out of the sky.

Local people were alarmed when they came across dead lorikeets, wattlebirds, honeyeaters and silvereyes in their parks and back yards. Health officials told them not to worry. But they tested their rainwater tanks, the main source of drinking water, and found dangerously high levels of lead or nickel in more than a third.

The authorities still insisted there was no cause for concern. Then they tested the seabed at the Esperance port, through which nickel and lead carbonate mined inland are shipped to Asia. Some samples contained 130 times the recommended health levels of the two metals.


THE USGS WAS CONCERNED ENOUGH TO FUND NOT JUST ONE STUDY

NICKEL HAZARDS TO FISH, WILDLIFE, AND INVERTEBRATES:  

A SYNOPTIC REVIEW 

 

 

by 

Ronald Eisler 

 

 

Patuxent Wildlife Research Center 

U.S. Geological Survey 

Laurel, MD 20708

Birds 

In mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), nickel accumulates in tissues when diets contain as little as 12.5 mg Ni/kg 

DW ration (Table 8). Metabolic upset and altered bone densities occur in mallards fed diets containing 800 mg 

Ni/kg ration for 90 days (Cain and Pafford 1981; Eastin and O’Shea 1981). Inhibited growth and reduced 

survival occur in mallards at dietary loadings of 1,200 mg Ni/kg ration (Table 8). Dietary nickel concentrations of 

0.074 mg Ni/kg ration have no adverse effects on Coturnix quail (Coturnix risoria). However, Japanese quail 

(Coturnix japonica) fed diets containing 0.71 mg Ni/kg ration have significantly elevated nickel concentrations in 

liver compared to controls fed diets containing 0.48 mg Ni/kg (Table 8). Increased concentrations of nickel in the 

diets of domestic chickens (Gallus sp.) were associated with decreased growth and survival and increased 

nickel concentrations in bone and kidney (Ling and Leach 1979).  Dietary loadings of 500 mg Ni/kg ration and 

higher were associated with reduced growth and high mortality in some strains of chickens, but not others 

(Table 8). No developmental abnormalities occurred in chicks from survivors challenged by nickel during 

embryogenesis (USPHS 1977). Chick embryos receiving a single injected dose of 3.6 mg Ni/kg embryo, 

however, experienced 50% mortality within 18 days (Ridgway and Karnofsky 1952). Chicks are more resistant 

than embryos to injected nickel. Chicks injected with 10 mg Ni/kg BW survived but had disrupted glucose 

metabolism; effects were exacerbated by starvation (Nielsen 1977). 

Table 8. Nickel effects on birds. 

BUT TWO
Vanadium Toxicity: A Potentially Unrecognized
Hazard to Waterfowl ?
Necropsy Findings of Dead Geese • no infectious agents • no brain ChE inhibition • no evidence of trauma • birds in good flesh • brain, lung, liver and kidney congested • small intestine hemorrhagic enteritis Delaware Department of Natural Resources & Environmental Control Goose liver V Goose kidney V 57.3 μg/g dw 226 μg/g dw As, Cd, Cr, Pb, Ni, Se, Tl <>
from
EPA Lies About BP Gulf Oil Spill Water Samples Exposed

Since Beginning Of Spill Only 297 [of over 18,000] EPA Water Samples Contaminated With Substances Besides Nickel or Vanadium


Only 297 EPA Water Samples Above Threshold Levels Entire Gulf Of Mexico, Excluding Nickel and Vanadium

So put it all together and you get what is in my humble opinion reasonable grounds for an hypothesis. ... 

ARSENIC


from the everlovin' EPA:


In birds tolerance to arsenic varies among species, but effects include destruction of gut blood vessels, blood-cell damage, muscular incoordination, debility, slowness, jerkiness, falling, hyperactivity, fluffed feathers, drooped eyelids, immobility, seizures, and systemic, growth, behavioral, and reproductive problems (Stanley et al. 1994; Whitworth et al. 1991; Camardese et al. 1990). 



CADMIUM

also from those wonderful defenders of truth and freedom over at the f*cking EPA:

Cadmium is highly toxic to wildlife; it is cancer-causing and teratogenic and potentially mutation-causing, with severe sublethal and lethal effects at low environmental concentrations (Eisler 1985a). It is associated with increased mortality, and it effects respiratory functions, enzyme levels, muscle contractions, growth reduction, and reproduction. It bioaccumulates at all trophic levels, accumulating in the livers and kidneys of fish (Sindayigaya, et al. 1994; Sadiq 1992).




NICKEL



from

Impairment Assessment Report for Copper and Nickel in Lower South San Francisco Bay

Tetra Tech, Inc. Page C-11


3.0 TOXICITY PROFILE FOR NICKEL

Nickel is an essential micronutrient and is typically found in low concentrations in animal tissue (Hoar

1975). Nickel compounds can be grouped according to their solubility in water: soluble compounds

(e.g., nickel chloride, nickel sulfate, nickel nitrate) and insoluble compounds (e.g., nickel oxide). Both

the soluble and insoluble nickel compounds are important with regard to all relevant routes of exposure.

Generally, the soluble compounds are considered more toxic than the insoluble compounds. Ingestion of

nickel compounds may cause intestinal disorders, convulsions, and asphyxia (Lewis 1992)



from

Biological Science Report USGS/BRD/BSR-1998-0001

April 1998 - Contaminant Hazard Reviews, Report No. 34:


Nickel affects endocrine and enzymatic processes. Nickel-induced endocrine effects include inhibition of

insulin production in pancreas, prolactin in hypothalamus, amylase excretion in parotid gland, and iodine uptake

in thyroid (Mushak 1980; USEPA 1980, 1986; USPHS 1977; WHO 1991). Inhibition of enzyme activity by nickel

is reported for RNA polymerase, ATPase, dialkyl fluorophosphate, and aspartase (NAS 1975). Inhibition of

ATPase is associated with neurological abnormalities, such as tremors, convulsions, and coma; altered

hormone release or action; and internal rearrangement of calcium ions in muscle that might cause paralysis and

abnormal heart rhythm (Nielsen 1977).


from "Nickel," Wikipedia:


Water hardness affects nickel toxicity to aquatic organisms; the softer the water, the higher the toxicity.


from "Nickel Tetracarbonyl" Wikipedia:


Some subjects exposed to puffs up to 5 ppm described the odour as musty or sooty, but since the compound is so exceedingly toxic its smell provides no reliable warning against a potentially fatal exposure.[6] Historically, laboratories that used Ni(CO)4 would keep a canary in the lab as an indicator of nickel carbonyl toxicity, due to the higher sensitivity of birds to this poison.



What do you think?


Transcript Summary from video, above:


    Sea birds and swans sick and dying from a mystery illness has investigators worried tonight. They want to know if the sick birds off longboat key have anything to do with the BP oil spill. If it does that could be bad news for other kinds of area wildlife as well.


    What’s attacking the birds and swans on Longboat Key?


    Concerns that it’s  toxins in the water or dispersant used in oil spill.


    Swans started getting sick 2 months after spill and they’re not the only ones dying. So are all kinds of sea birds, gulls, terns and more. Rehabbers are worried because they can’t save these birds like usual. 65 have been lost in a little over a month… you know there’s a problem.


    The symptoms are all the same, but could not diagnose the problem.


    The birds become weak, paralyzed and just drop dead.


    The symptoms and duration are unusual…


    It’s a matter of life and death…


    Could it mean the dispersants are here?




NOT IF YOU ASK BP............................ huh....







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