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.

Hey CBS: Here's Hella Reasons Why You Can Go Fuck Yourselves -- Love, Oakland



Hey KCBS, KPIX, et alia:



This is in response to your story, 5 Reasons Why Oakland Is Awesome And Ready For Its Closeup Following Warriors NBA Finals Win. The article is mostly good, if a little beer-heavy.  Art Murmur, check.  Panthers, check. Wonder of wonders, Occupy Oakland even gets a mention.  
But that first paragraph, the one featured in all the reblogging, crossposting, 
and tweeting?  It has got to go.  

It doesn't even sound like the rest of the article; maybe it was tacked on, for an editor, or by one; maybe he 
or she thought it would sell.  (It makes me wonder if the author is happy with her salary.  

Maybe writing that was worth it to her; after all, its just a little bit of soul.  A lil' here, a lil' there – easy money.)
The Warriors' triumph is important.  It is a much needed, well-deserved release.  It is something to go nuts about without being too political, without having to actually think,  without having to risk losing your job.  (Especially if you owe some lying, thieving bankers a whole lot of money for your mortgage, or medical bills, or college degree).

Besides, people tend to be woefully unfamiliar with how propaganda works, and will skim distractedly, not realizing how words can worm their way in.  Many will see just that first paragraph -- on twitter, for example -- and not the rest of the article.  

 Banner Nominated For Longest Lasting, Most Quoted, Occupy Oakland,
So, with apologies to the author,  (only fair;  in case she didn't know any better, or maybe thought she had no choice), here is a partial list of why whoever is responsible for that first paragraph can go fuck him or herself:  

1. "Ready For Its Closeup Now..."?  Fuck you number one. We were ready for our closeup when we shut down the port.  

2. "The Golden State Warriors NBA Crown is breathing life into a city..."  Whoa.  Hold it right there.  What?  The city was not dead.  Far from it.  Fuck you number two.   

3. "... high crime rates, and blight." Your Momma. This is the Oakland that Does Not Consent To Corporate Oligarchy. Or did you forget the banner you quoted? Maybe what you really wanted to say was "...more people of color, and significantly cheaper rents." Too bad. Three strikes -- no, wait -- make that three air-ball foul shots: fuck you.  

4. Oakland is more than just the red-headed stepsister of San Francisco, more than a sea of the fresh, young, faces of the recently transplanted, faces attached to bank accounts, whom the ongoing determination of Oakland protesters not only not to give up and go away, but to protest regularly, has left feeling uneasy.  


Scott Olsen, just before giving Oakland another reason to protest police brutality

5. But wait, maybe you can fix it, and say you were not so out of touch after all.  I mean, it's not really lying if people believe you, right? For instance, take the reference to "police brutality protests." No one would suspect you thought that the  peeps determined enough to keep marching down Telegraph in an attempt to remind you what 'FTP' stands for – it was a song, wasn't it? – were more of a problem than the motherfuckers whose thuglike behaviour caused the march in the first place. So call it a typo and say you forgot a comma:  It goes after "police brutality," and before "protests."

Speaking of crowd control, what's that I hear? Seven AM, and already the sky is all a-chopping.  OPD may be being lenient, but they couldn't miss the opportunity to waste a few grand in a show of force.  Just in case, no doubt.


To quote Oakland's own Boots Riley, "We got hella people, they got Helicopters."





Be seeing you.



TCHERNOBYL: Guess What Percentage
Of Children From Belarus
Have Sustained PERMANENT GENETIC DAMAGE?





A comment over at Energy News hipped me to this. (If you haven't spent some quality time below the 'Related' suggestions on an Energy News page, you don't know what you're missing, unless you are an asshole or a troll, or a paid shill, which is both, in which case, what I want you to please understand is instead this: they are all a bunch of wankers, and you should do yourself a favor and don't even waste your time, there or here.  In fact, if you are an asshole, or a troll, or a paid shill – or just curious – hold on a sec... okay, here, click below, and you will see the paragraph with which, for you, this blog ought more properly have opened.)


In fact, I have some texts you might find more to your liking: a couple from the Wall Street Journal, and one from Forbes, dating back to mid 2011. Click on this next button, and you can stay up here and reread them, while the rest of us go on and finish the post. Try not to fight amongst yourselves, please don't hack any widgets, and when you're done, remember to turn off the light and mouseover the marquee above the header (to turn off the scrolling) on the way out.


Anyway, where were we?
Oh yes. Reread the title: now guess. Permanent genetic damage, kids in Belarus today. Go ahead.... guess.

10%?

20%? 

30%?   

Here's a hint. According to Wikipedia, "about 60% of the fallout [from Tchernobyl] landed in Belarus."

Now how much would you guess? 

40%?

50%?  That would be alarming, wouldn't it? 

60%?  Correlation coefficient approaching +1 with that fallout statistic?  

Isn't that too high for an area from which not everyone was evacuated?  I would have thought so, in a sane world.

How about 85%?

EIGHTY-FIVE PER CENT.

Don't believe me?  That's all right, it is fully understandable. I didn't believe it either.  My research led to this post.  It was very preliminary; it consisted of a search, and the viewing of the result.  Here's the search string, and a few choice hyperlinks it retrieved:


Now think a moment about Fukushima.  All those families being told it was safe to go back to their homes.  All those kids made to clean and decontaminate their schools.  All those people shamed into eating Fukushima produce.  All that skipjack tuna – remember that 80% of the world's miso soup is made from the tuna caught off the NE of Japan – all that prime skipjack which was not allowed to live its contaminated life in comparative peace. All that tuna which should not have been caught and sold and eaten, but which, by hook and by crook, by stealth and subterfuge, most certainly was.

Which, at least in 2011, was all of it.

And that was then.  That is not now.  

Now, just today, I have seen the most unnerving headline I have seen yet at Energy News, and still do not know even where to start.  It happened again:  Tepco at the wheel: dear us, oh look, dear dear, we really do not understand how this could be happening, oh well.


Apologies to parents, whether they hail from Belarus or not, for my ranting: if I came across as insensitive, it was not my intent.  Far from it.

Be seeing you.

NOT SO FAST: Lawyer Wants 'Missing' Clinton Emails Subpoenaed – FROM THE NSA.

Credit goes to Fark (that will get you a 403, but image is not at source either), Google image search, and screenshot technology
Vast quantities of our electronic papers and effects are indexed and archived under each of our names (but of course they are not "collected," since collected, it seems, means looked at, not intercepted, diverted, or recorded).  This is common knowledge, no matter how many times Mitch "the-content-of-calls-are-not-captured" McConnell Jr. says otherwise.

How many of us, as we daily are forced to witness our government merge with the good old dystopian fiction we were supposed to have read in school, as we realized the chilling literal reality of the surveillance state erected around us, have nervously joked about putting all that data to good use for a change?  

Hard drive crash?  Ask the NSA.  Lost your cell phone?  Ask the NSA.  Forgot when you said you'd be there?  Ask the NSA.

Hillary says the emails are missing?  Hey, we have an idea!

Subpoena the NSA!

Larry Klayman, founder of FreedomWatch,  just might be the kind of outlier on the bell-curve of sane and rational that makes those of us with the ability to reason that leads us to independently reject involvement in the 'birther' debate cringe.  Despite, notwithstanding, or possibly because of this fact, a certain three letter agency taking the fall for US surveillance and data-retention might just find themselves served with exactly such a subpoena:

U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks of Florida's Federal District Court in West Palm Beach, officially announced on Friday, May 29, 2015, that the civil RICO trial -- Klayman v. Hillary Clinton et all -- will commence on Wednesday, January 25, 2016, which is also noticeably a major election year. The plaintiff in the case is former Justice Department prosecutor, now public interest attorney, Larry Klayman. Klayman is the founder and former president of Judicial Watch and now the founder and chief attorney of Freedom Watch, a nonprofit organization that uses the federal civil court system to expose government corruption and abuse.      
In addition to the Florida RICO suit, Klayman is requesting that both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) turn overcopies of Clinton's emails they allegedly, surreptitiously intercepted. "It's a known fact that the U.S. intelligence agencies under orders from the Obama White House has played loose-and-fancy-free when it comes to electronic eavesdropping. To believe that the NSA or CIA would skip monitoring [Hillary] Clinton's emails and cell phone activity would cause a person to accept the absurdity of such a situation. They've got her emails and cell phone calls or transcripts," said former law enforcement officer Stephen Kablonsky, an expert in electronic surveillance.
Read more at The ExaminerFor a more well rounded view, check out this post at Fark.

Stress is a healthy response, when witnessing the excruciating slide of a loved one into the depths of self-destructive behavior or criminal activity, when each day new lows are discovered, breaches of ethics, uses of force or fraud, lies.  Lies told boldly, despite being obviously transparent.   Stress is healthy, as one is forced to choose between options neither of which are attractive.  Face disapproval, ire, or acts of retaliation, if one speaks up, if one warns others, takes action. Or slide oneself into the silence of denial and complicity.

Violence, injustice, corruption:  evil, experienced or witnessed, produces a form of stress which leads to illness if not processed.  The illness has lately been called post traumatic stress disorder.  The stress is increasingly produced by modern life.  The stress response is healthy,  but not dealing with it consciously can lead to physical illness (impaired immune system), psychological problems (emotional outbursts, errors in judgement), or spiritual malaise (depression, learned helplessness).

More power to you, Mr. Klayman.  Best of luck, really, on this one.

Be seeing you.