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.

Micro Drones: If You See Something, Say Something (VIDEO)

 
...or shoot,  er, film something....




Of the four Industry-tested, Military-approved promotional videos hyperlinked at the title source, I find the third one scariest.

As you watch, try to keep a few questions in your mind. Who are these people - how would you describe them if you met at the corner store? What exactly are they doing?   Where does it look to be taking place?  Will you be able to tell when you are being targeted?  How? Pay attention to the implied answers to these questions: as they atttempt to remain unasked..  




Army's Mini-Drone Swarm                                                                            
Thumbnail

Play all






 Be seeing you.





A Mutated Dahlia, And Other Northern California Anomalies



Found In A Front Yard In Oakland, California.
Week Of July 26, 2012. 
Cause officially unknown at this time, of course.


click to enlarge. h/t caseycum93.
click to enlarge. h/t caseycum93.

The woman who took these pictures, an amateur herbalist, botanist, and avid gardener, has lived in Northern California for over twenty years, is keenly observant, and thoroughly familiar with phenotypical standards.  She had never before seen a dahlia so fucked up.  (This is more than I can say for the gnarled lemon leaves and fruit I encountered a few weeks ago. Having seen pesticides wreak similar havoc, I did not think they warranted a post, and now unfortunately the specimens are rather degraded.) 


Healthy dahlia blooms are of course necessary for reference.  To this end, the first page of Yahoo Image Search results, keyword 'dahlia.'  Please disregard the occasional irrelevant image: 


Click to enlarge.
But what,
 might the Gentle Reader ask, of research anomalies such as may be generated by search personalization algorithms,
temporal or geographic context, the sudden disappearance of major search engines,  computers, or electricity, ELE's, etc.?

Ah, well, here you may 
have an archive of the specific results retrieved for my particular search (PDF).
Print it out with waterproof inks on acid free paper, and perhaps it will survive long enough to be of use to future historians.
Unlike almost everything else from this, the Post Postmodern age. I rather prefer to call it 'Preapocalyptic.' By a hair. Perhaps.


-----------------------------------------------------------------





By early February, nearly a year had passed since the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. During that time I fought a creeping helplessness, a feeling I could do nothing but listen and watch and read the news in horror, as lies were slowly and painstakingly fabricated to placate the public.  And I suspect I am not alone. Although I am not in Japan, I am on the West Coast of the United States. Milk here, that continued to stock grocery shelves, including those of such health-touting moneymakers as Whole Foods, had reached one of the limits set for its allowed radioactivity and passed it by half:


Best Buy Date of 02/16/2012:
  • Cs-134 @ 0.052 Bq/L
  • Cs-137 @ 0.115 Bq/L
0.167 Bq/L of radioactive cesium = 4.526 picocuries/L (1 Bq = 27.1 picocuries)
The EPA Maximum Contaminant Level for radioactive cesium in milk is 3 picocuries/L:
“EPA lumps these gamma and beta emitters together under one collective MCL [Maximum Contaminant Level], so if you’re seeing cesium-137 in your milk or water, the MCL is 3.0 picocuries per liter; if you’re seeing iodine-131, the MCL is 3.0; if you’re seeing cesium-137 and iodine-131, the MCL is still 3.0.” -Forbes.com
These are the highest cesium levels detected by UCB since at least August 2011 (As the MDA was higher over the summer, it’s hard to be sure of the exact levels at that time)...
Read more

Are you still putting cream in your coffee?  I am, although I avoided it till September of last year. I am uncomfortable with that.  It is no endorsement.  In fact, let me make myself clear: Find out whether your food is safe.  Find out how safe.  We still have an Internet.  Let's use it.  





Radioactive Cesium detected in Palo Alto yard
posted Sunday, July 15, 2012 by Johannes

UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Air Monitoring Station, July 13, 2012: We measured a sample of sand from a yard in Palo Alto in the Bay Area. As we have seen in the various soil measurements we have made in the Bay Area, very tiny amounts of Cs-134 and Cs-137 can be detected by our very sensitive germanium detectors. [...

Food Chain Sampling Results: “Cesium 134 [...] is a signature, it is a fingerprint for the radiation coming out of Fukushima” -Source

Read more


The main tracer patch reaches the coastal waters of North America after 5–6 years, with maximum relative concentrations ( > 1 × 104) covering a broad swath of the eastern North Pacific between Vancouver Island and Baja California. Simultaneously some fraction of the southern rim of the tracer cloud becomes entrained in the North Equatorial Current (NEC), resulting in a westward extending wedge around 20°N that skirts the northern shores of the Hawaiian Archipelago. After 10 years the concentrations become nearly homogeneous over the whole Pacific, with higher values in the east, extending along the North American coast with a maximum (~1 × 104) off Baja California.

[snip]

The magnitude of additional peak radioactivity should drop to values comparable to the pre-Fukushima levels after 6–9 years (i.e. total peak concentrations would then have declined below twice pre-Fukushima levels). (iv) By then the tracer cloud will span almost the entire North Pacific, with peak concentrations off the North American coast an order-of-magnitude higher than in the western Pacific.

Read more

 

IF YOU LIVE IN AN AFFECTED AREA, 
PLEASE
DO WHAT YOU CAN TO PREVENT 
THE CONSUMPTION OF 
LOCALLY SOURCED 
HIGH-RISK FOODS 
(LIKE DAIRY,  SEAFOOD, 
STRAWBERRIES, MUSHROOMS, 
OR DARK GREEN VEGGIES) 
BY BABIES, CHILDREN, OR TEENAGERS.

"Imaganimals2"
Courttesy of the Center for the Post Apocalyptic Renaissance. Used with permission.



Be seeing you.

DYI Nonviolent Revolution:
From Dictatorship To Democracy
...Now Hosted By... Your Address Bar



"Revolution?"
Some rights reserved
 by Lori Greig
If you are not familiar with Gene Sharp's From Dictatorship To Democracy, an introduction is in order.  I follow The International Center On Non-Violent Conflict in choosing the following excerpt:







In recent years various dictatorships—of both internal and external origin—have collapsed or stumbled when confronted by defiant, mobilized people. Often seen as firmly entrenched and impregnable, some of these dictatorships proved unable to withstand the concerted political, economic, and social defiance of the people. 

Since 1980 dictatorships have collapsed before the predominantly nonviolent defiance of people in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Slovenia, Madagascar, Mali, Bolivia, and the Philippines. Nonviolent resistance has furthered the movement toward democratization in Nepal, Zambia, South Korea, Chile, Argentina, Haiti, Brazil, Uruguay, Malawi, Thailand, Bulgaria, Hungary, Zaire, Nigeria, and various parts of the former Soviet Union (playing a significant role in the defeat of the August 1991 attempted hard-line coup d’état). 

In addition, mass political defiance has occurred in China, Burma, and Tibet in recent years. Although those struggles have not brought an end to the ruling dictatorships or occupations, they have exposed the brutal nature of those repressive regimes to the world community and have provided the populations with valuable experience with this form of struggle. 

The collapse of dictatorships in the above named countries certainly has not erased all other problems in those societies: poverty, crime, bureaucratic inefficiency, and environmental destruction are often the legacy of brutal regimes. However, the downfall of these dictatorships has minimally lifted much of the suffering of the victims of oppression, and has opened the way for the rebuilding of these societies with greater political democracy, personal liberties, and social justice.


And, for an overview, Wikipedia:


Topics covered
From Dictatorship to Democracy contains a preface and ten sections. Its first appendix includes 198 Methods Of Nonviolent Action that were taken from Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), Part Two, The Methods of Nonviolent Action. The main sections of the 4th US edition are entitled:
1. Facing Dictatorships Realistically
2. The Dangers of Negotiations
3. Whence Comes the Power?
4. Dictatorships Have Weaknesses
5. Exercising Power
6. The Need for Strategic Planning
7. Planning Strategy
8. Applying Political Defiance
9. Disintegrating the Dictatorship
10. Groundwork for Durable Democracy

Three appendices are included in the fourth US edition of FDTD:
Appendix 1. The Methods of Nonviolent Action
Appendix 2. Acknowledgements and Notes on the History of From Dictatorship to Democracy
Appendix 3. A Note About Translations and Reprinting of this Publication
For Further Reading
Appendix 3 gives a step-by-step procedure for effectively translating FDTD into other languages.

Influence
From Dictatorship to Democracy has been circulated worldwide and cited repeatedly as influencing movements such as the Arab Spring (pictured) in 2011.[3][4][5][6] Sharp has stated that after FDTD was first written, "although no efforts were made to promote the publication for use in other countries, translations and distribution of the publication began to spread on their own.... We usually do not know how awareness of this publication has spread from country to country."[7]:88-9
A CNN profile of Sharp in 2012 stated that FDTD had "spread like a virus," calling it a "viral pamphlet."[3] The book "started life in Myanmar as incendiary advice printed on a few sheets of paper and surreptitiously exchanged by activists living under a military dictatorship." Later it "took on a life of its own... eventually, some say, inspiring the uprisings known as the Arab Spring."[3]
The Pakistani Daily Times stated that FDTD "has had an impact on the Arabic-speaking world even though the setting is in a non-Arabic world."[4]
[snip]
The Financial Times, in discussing the prospects for dictators worldwide, described Sharp as "the Lenin of the new Gandhi-ism" stating that
What is new... is the wildfire spread of systematically non-violent insurgency. This owes a great deal to the strategic thinking of Gene Sharp, an American academic whose how-to-topple-your-tyrant manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy, is the bible of activists from Belgrade to Rangoon.[5]
The BBC reported in 2004 that FDTD "was used practically as a textbook" in lectures attended by members of Otpor, the Serbian resistance movement, in the year 2000.[38]
The New York Times reported in 2011 that From Dictatorship to Democracy had been posted by the Muslim Brotherhood on its website during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.[39]
More recently, The New York Times noted that FDTD was "available for download in more than two dozen languages" (and provided a link), while describing Sharp as a "leading [advocate] of grass-roots democracy."[6]

From Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 
Read more


And now a note concerning the format of this experiment: Data-encoded URIs.  Personally I am rather fond of them: the document is stored in your own address bar.  Right-click and bingo. The advantage of the data-encoded URI should be obvious in cases such as societal transformation through non-violent regime change -- there is no chance of retribution for hosting this tract.  It hosts itself.


I have converted Gene Sharp's From Dictatorship To Democracy into a QR code as well for ease of mobile access.


My apologies if you have IE and thus cannot benefit; may I suggest another browser? Thanks to Tinyurl and Doiop I may have successfully persuaded Blogger to host the PDF in this format. Oh and of course many thanks to Hixie.ch for awesome software The Data URI Kitchen If a link does not work for you please try another. Or just scroll down to the source link appended at the end.


Pass it on.


.Link #1: Data-encoded PDF                      .Link #2: Data-encoded HTML

Link #3: QR-(long)

QR Code generator
Thanks to goqr.me QR Code Generator,
QR code of the entire 500,000+ data-encoded URL
-- without third party mediation --
may not work with older phones -- click to enlarge. 
                             Link #1: QR (short)

QR Code generator
Suitable for older phones, this QR Code from goqr.me
was made from the above URI, shortened beautifully
by the wonderful folks at Tinyurl.  Thank you Tinyurl! 



yes, virginia, a google-hosted PDF! Right-click and... so forth.




and the original source:




Be seeing you!