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.

OAKLAND POLICE:
NEW TACTICS IN TIME FOR
MAY 1 GENERAL STRIKE


Just in time for the upcoming May 1rst general strike, Oakland Police have supposedly been 'retrained.'  Chief of Police Howard Jordan, however, has suggested that he may use Tango Teams, or specially skilled units, to 'snatch and grab' specific 'troublemakers' out of the crowd, to preemptively neutralize the crowd's assumed inevitable lack of control. This, rather than deploying chemical and less then lethal rounds with a lack of discretion that could easily turn lethal.  


OPD has said words that imply that they have learned -- or are learning -- from recent embarrassments. However, what they have done -- and are likely intending to do -- is to give teams of Officers known to be the most violent the delicate responsibility of controlling Oakland activists.  So the question is by which should they be measured -- the forward looking empty promises? the unfair, unbalanced, media-abetted damage-control? or the tally of the beaten, mistreated, framed, and unjustly deprived of their freedom? 




OAKLAND POLICE 
Redefine Their Crowd Control Policy?
TANGO and QRF

Published on Apr 27, 2012 by Jacobzladder

Oakland Police claim that they have retrained all their officers in crowd control tactics for the upcoming May 1rst general strike. While much is unclear about what will be different, there are things that are sure to be the same. Officers that make up most of Oakland's Police Shootings will continue to be deployed as Tango and QRF (Quick Response Force). 

Howard Jordan has suggested that he may send specialized units into the crowd for the purpose of making surgical arrests, rather than use lethal force through the deployment of chemical and less then lethal rounds indiscriminately. However, sending teams of Officers that are known for their relationship to violence into large crowds of people is a clear indication that OPD intends to incite panic and chaos rather than develop better methods for interfacing with large groups of people.

Copyright by Jacob Crawford 2012


Now, as an added bonus, people trying to better their lives and their country may be rewarded for their efforts before the fact, snatched and grabbed with surgcal precision out of a crowd because their face matches a photo in a OPD book that may as well have the word  "homegrown" on its cover.




Jacob Crawford thought the following article, by PrivacySOS.orgwent well with the video he produced, above.


Oakland Police to deploy new snatch and grab tactics?

After waves of protest and condemnation in the wake of extensive abuse of protesters, Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan has announced that he is going to tweak OPD’s crowd control policies and training procedures for officers.

The OPD tear gas cannister hit on Iraq war veteran and Occupy Oakland demonstrator Scott Olsen was the most notorious case of abuse since Occupy hit the streets last September, but the department — which normally receives about 1,000 misconduct reports per year — has thus far received an additional 1,000 complaints related to its handling of the movement alone.

These measures have generated a substantial volume of negative press, so the Police Chief is changing the rules. Sounds good, right?

Wrong.

The devil’s in the details. Instead of putting forth a clear plan and publishing the new guidelines, the department has issued a series of generalities and vague statements. The only thing we know for sure is that the police plan to drop the current guidelines, which had been official crowd control policy for ten years in Oakland.

The ACLU of Northern California and the National Lawyers Guild are concerned that abandonment of the old rules without something tangible to replace them invites yet more abuse. IndyBay reports:

“Even with clear directives in place last fall, OPD dramatically mishandled its response to the Occupy protests,” said ACLU-NC staff attorney Linda Lye. “If OPD eliminates important prohibitions against specific tactics from its Policy and replaces them with vague standards, it will invite a repetition or worse, rather than prevent a recurrence, of what happened last fall.”

“OPD and the Oakland City Attorney have repeatedly acknowledged that OPD is bound by the court approved Crowd Control Policy. It’s unclear why the police seem to think they can abandon it now, unless they are simply trying to deflect attention from the fact that OPD’s response to Occupy has violated nearly every aspect of its own Policy,” said NLG lawyer Rachel Lederman, counsel on the prior and current lawsuits against OPD.

Another IndyBay piece suggests that Chief Jordan may use his newfound freedom to deploy US military style “snatch and grab” tactics in place of heavy deployment of chemical weapons and “less than lethals”, which make for pretty ugly optics when the scenes are broadcast on the local and national news.

Howard Jordan has suggested that he may send specialized units into the crowd for the purpose of making surgical arrests, rather than use lethal force through the deployment of chemical and less then lethal rounds indiscriminately. However, sending teams of Officers that are known for their relationship to violence into large crowds of people is a clear indication that OPD intends to incite panic and chaos rather than develop better methods for interfacing with large groups of people.

Since the OPD claims to have retrained its officers in advance of the May 1st General Strike, it seems likely that we will soon find out exactly what kind of new rules apply.

Jacob Crawford




Be seeing you.

A Spammer Has Stolen My Posts Wholesale For Their Evil Spam Blog



... and I am most unhappy about it.  I am not linking to it directly here, for several reasons. My description, as put recently in a question posted at the appropriate forum, with the most dangerous details emphasized:
some [expletive deleted] individual has copied all my posts for a spam-generating 'blog' of his own.  

all my posts, with the exception, perhaps, of the newest (have not checked).  some written by me, some 'read more' reposts, some original artwork, some guest posts. 
all copied wholesale & imported into another blog onto which he has slapped his stupid [expletive deleted] name, post by post, starting (as far as i know) last year &, backdating, has impersonated my blog --- with a different, really dumb, title -- all the way back to my first post.

i don't know how to report it, that is, how to categorize it.  is it spam?  piracy?  impersonation?  i cannot even locate an email address -- a simple email address -- to contact google properly in this regard.  i would certainly settle for a phone number, or snail mail identification. (lat/long however, does me little good.  i intend to contact via the general Mountainview address or number, if i must, & as last resort).

yes this person has a blogger account.  he has, however, copied posts older than the earliest date for which he has officially had an account.  he also includes my name in the posts -- i suppose that is better than not, but this is not my blog, not authorized by me, & the content is just used as bait since as soon as one clicks a tentacled advert monster explodes out of your screen like the alien baby in the beginning of the first "Alien" move exploding out of a human abdomen, but instead of running off to join a google group it attached itself with a slimy sucking sound to your face muffling your bloodcurdling screams in anticipation of its feast & since you cannot pry it off & you cannot click anywhere (or if you can, you shouldn't) you will suffocate unless you close the tab.  (at least it isn't the species, exemplified by the 'you-have-won-a-new-ipad' phenotype, after whose vicious paralyzing attacks one has to force quit one's browser altogether.) 

There you have it.  I sandboxed the motherfucker and data-encoded the sandbox, below.



And for the curious, I only lightly muzzled it so you could see some of it's evil spammy ways, (hopefully -- even more hopefully, without getting any on you -- click at own risk):

It already has outranked me on some searches.


I hope to have its head on a stick soon.






Be seeing you.

Pluto-kun: Japanese Nuclear Propaganda Video (SUBTITLED)





Meet Plutonium Boy -- 

a cute little cartoon character created by a certain Japanese company specifically to sway public opinion.  For some reason the Japanese public was (and, I might add, is again) most decidedly not on the side of the nuclear industry after World War II.  For some reason.  Thus the people were the single biggest obstacle, then and now, to the onward march of progress.  What to do?

Enter Plutonium Boy.

Did you know that you could drink plutonium laced water with no ill consequences? That all you need to do is wash it off your hands with soap and water? That no one has died from Plutonium? That the Plutonium from nuclear reactors cannot be used to make a bomb?

His rather unexpected advice has been much discussed  on the internet -- the problem, for someone who has never met the little rascal, is finding a video intact.  For some reason in the past year or so the very many online copies of this video that have been posted have all vanished.  A few were removed by their owner.  The vast majority however were removed by that same company on the basis of copyright infringement.  This despite the fact that, when asked about little Pluto, they claimed to have lost all copies of the video, and thus could be of no help to those curious about his antics.  


...But perhaps the most controversial of all promotional characters is Pluto-kun, or Little Mr. Pluto, who represents the friendly side of one of the most toxic substances known to man, plutonium.
The brainchild of a now defunct government research organization, the apple-cheeked animated Little Mr. Pluto debuted in the mid-1990s wearing a green helmet with a pair of antennae and the chemical symbol for plutonium, PU. Promising to “never be scary or dangerous,” Little Mr. Pluto extolled the benefits of plutonium, which Japanese nuclear authorities have viewed as a fuel of the future for fast breeder reactor technology.
But an animated video used in educational materials included a widely criticized scene showing Little Mr. PU shaking hands with a boy who safely downs a plutonium-tainted beverage to make the debatable point the substance would pass through a body without doing harm.
Hello Kitty needn’t have worried about the competition. Much like Japan’s single fast breeder reactor, Mr. Pluto never caught on in a big way. His patron was shut down in 1998 after a series of nuclear accidents and was replaced with another government entity. Today, he exists without much fanfare buried on the website of the state-funded Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute.
He whiles away the days in relative obscurity sliding down an animated rainbow with a few radiation-tolerant pals such as Little Miss Sodium (a pink blob with red pumps representing sodium coolant) and Uranium Boy (a frowning Pac-Man-like orb surrounded by two atomic rings). Little Mr. Pluto and friends are the official hosts of Atom World, an interactive museum in Ibaraki prefecture north of Tokyo sponsored by the government’s Japan Atomic Energy Agency.
“We use these characters for educational outreach,” said Isamu Ishii, a spokesman for JNCDI. “But as far I know, we no longer have a video.” 
Read More


The copy WSJ alludes to is one of those disabled due to copyright.  One would think the PNC -- which is not defunct, as WSJ states, but merged to become what is now the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (!) -- would have at the very least downloaded and kept a copy.  Well, now they can! Not only has a copy been found -- and with passable English subtitles at that! -- but (it is hoped) it will not be able to be lost again.  

Here is as excellent digest of the plot from Pink Tentacle:

[~1:30] The video begins with Pluto-kun disguised as a ghost. He explains that much of the fear surrounding plutonium is due to misconceptions. He says that it is very unfortunate that plutonium is used in nuclear weapons [like the one dropped on Nagasaki]. But he hates war! He loves to work for peace. He aspires to be like dynamite, whose power has been used for the benefit of mankind.
[1:30] Pluto-kun provides some basic information about plutonium. He explains that plutonium is created from uranium in nuclear reactors. He also says it was discovered by the US scientist Glenn T. Seaborg in 1940, and that it was named after the dwarf planet Pluto. (See Wikipedia for more.)
[2:30] Misconception #1 -- Pluto-kun addresses the fear that criminals could obtain plutonium and build a nuclear weapon. He explains two reasons why this would be virtually impossible. First, weapons require plutonium with a purity of at least 93%, but plutonium from reactors is only about 70% pure. A high level of technology would be required to produce weapons from this plutonium. Second, a high level of security is maintained around plutonium in Japan, making it all but impossible to steal.
[4:00] Misconception #2 -- Pluto-kun addresses the fear that plutonium is deadly and causes cancer. Plutonium's danger to the human body stems from the alpha radiation it emits. Because alpha radiation is relatively weak, it does not penetrate the skin, and plutonium is not absorbed into the body if it comes into contact with skin. He explains that you would not die instantly if you were to drink plutonium. If swallowed, the vast majority simply passes through the digestive tract without being absorbed. If it enters the blood stream (through a cut, for example) it cannot be removed easily from the body. It accumulates in the lymph nodes before ending up in the bones or liver, where it continues emitting alpha radiation. Plutonium can also get into the liver or bones if it is inhaled into the lungs. It is important not to breathe it in or allow it to enter the blood stream.
[6:00] No human is ever known to have died because of inhaling or ingesting plutonium.
[7:00] Pluto-kun explains what would happen if criminals dumped plutonium into a reservoir that provides our drinking water. Plutonium is heavy and it does not dissolve easily in water, so most of it would sink to the bottom. Even if you were to drink plutonium-laced water everyday, the vast majority of it would simply pass through the digestive system without being absorbed by the body.
[7:30] Pluto-kun suggests that the dangers of plutonium are often overemphasized, making it seem scarier than it actually is. He explains that most people associate plutonium with deadly radiation and nuclear weapons, but he likens this to a fear of non-existent ghosts.
[9:40] Pluto-kun explains that he is not a monster, and he asks you to understand who he truly is. As long as people use him peacefully and with care, there will never be any danger or anything to fear. He will provide an endless source of energy for a long time to come. He will be a reliable friend
Read More


The video is available for viewing below, from my channel at YouTube. As always, if anything here is amiss I want to fix it; drop me a line here, on Gmail, or on Twitter. (No I am not on SurFaceBook.)  And so without further ado:


    Stills containing the subtitles have been extracted and compiled into a slideshow, also below.  

    All of this will, by the time you read this, Gentle Reader, have hopefully had its screenshot added to the Internet Archive.  Feel free to download what you will.  As an educational resource for the global community about the lengths to which truth may be stretched in service of profit, this juicy bit of propaganda is far too valuable to lose.


Should anyone want to help clean up the English subtitles, drop me a note in the comments, or email me (female DOT faust AT gmail DOT com).

Tinyurl alias for this page: pu-boy:
http://tinyurl.com/pu-boy.

Be seeing you.