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.







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