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.

Bristol Riots: Us, 1; Them, 0


  PART OF THE END CORPORATE PERSONHOOD SERIES



Bristol Neighborhood Erupts,
Pushes Back and
Scores a Win

Guest Post by

Unless you're keyed in to radical struggles already, or perhaps live in the UK, it's doubtful that you have gotten wind of the rioting in the streets of Bristol this past week. 

Background: 
from neurobonkers, a blog written by a long time local: 

"I was dismayed by the council and police reaction to a sustained peaceful protest that has existed against Tesco for over two years. Until this week Stokes Croft was the last remaining major high street in the West of England inhabited exclusively by independent establishments. Tesco moved in despite universal local disapproval in an area already surrounded by dozens of Tesco stores. Despite the palpable disquiet protests have been entirely peaceful. This was not a volatile situation until police moved in to the area in full riot dress with no explanation for kettleing stokes croft except health and safety and something to do with Tescos. As police entered Telepathic Heights rumour spread that more raids on houses were intended. As this was not an unlikely story due to recent dawn raids on protesters houses and confiscation of computers and books over the last (xmas) exam period the community barricaded the remaining entrances to stokes croft and the police responded by charging the barricades, apparently for no other reason than for a fight. This action alone provoked violence from the famously diverse, educated, peaceful, loving and pacifist community of Stokes Croft."

Photos: a quality photoset by Jonathan Taphouse (copyright photos reproduced with permission).





GUESS WHAT? THEY BOOTED THE COPS OUT! They won on the street forcing the corporate/cop side in the fight back onto the mediated battlefields of the press.

I was asked "Will Tesco just put another store in,.. just replace the sacked one? Would that be a dumb move?" 
Well, They are now in an even deeper hole. Power found in the street GROWS! Leave it to the cops to provoke a community into full solidarity and militancy. A commercial outlet in a cultural free-zone? IT'S NOW ABOUT COMMUNITY AND SELF DEFENSE! KONICHIWA, BITCHES!


I have been most pleased to have welcomed, and to have introduced to you, Gentle Reader, 

grouchosuave, as guest contributing author.   

Should you run into him elsewhere, best be blunt, forthright, & true, or it may not go as well for you as it could have.

Be seeing you.

Foucault on the Death of Osama Bin Laden





"The public execution, then has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has places the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force.... The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of 'terror.'.... The public execution did not reestablish justice, it reactivated power." 







h/t -> grouchosuave








be seeing you.

Bristol Tesco Riot 2011 | photography by Jonathan Taphouse



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Sun may be behind change in laws of matter. Or is it Time. Really.


Just when we all thought things couldn't get any stranger -- 

-- not that we thought that.  

Something -- is screwing with previously un-screwable-with properties of matter.  What was previously thought of (at least by most of us) as universal constants -- like the radioactive decay rate, which for us, Gentle Reader, governs our understanding of time.  Terrence Aym sums up popular hypotheses thusly:

Now evidence has surfaced that something potentially more dangerous is happening deep within the hidden core of our life-giving star: never-before-seen particles—or some mysterious force—is being shot out from the sun and it’s hitting Earth.
Whatever it is, the evidence suggests it’s affecting all matter.

To be exact, the rate of radioactive decay -- appears -- to -- no -- longer -- be -- constant.   And they don't know why.  But it appears they know that the Sun is the culprit, and that it is possible that neither neutrinos nor some previously unknown force are the cause, but could in fact be the effect.

Time dilation?

Excuse me, but I just barely had my coffee.  What?!



Be seeing you.  



Time dilation?!?