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.

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.


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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)...
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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.

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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.

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