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.

Why I Now Support Trump To Be America's New President (Yes, I Am Still Sane)


Alternate title: 

Žižek Is Absolutely Correct, And This Interview Blew My Mind.










Why I Now Support Trump As America's New President  or, Žizek Is Right And This Interview Blew My Mind.
Anyone who does not agree may misapprehend:  the gravity of the political moment,  the dangers of complacency,  or the virtue of taking responsibility for one's own agency.
So unerring is this Slavoj in opining, that thoughts of which some theoretical Lack of predictability could not (were Time a commons, public) have with  Any rational credibility been able to have been found; and yet they so Very credible, so perfect of utility, as to succeed where (and if you knew me! ) no  One else would have even thought to effect change of any depth  -- except of course, it be -- because  Justice, because Truth, and because the American way--    Žižek, I cried joyous wet tears, from the mistakes avoided, from the crises averted: Žižek, I love you, thank you, thank you, man, thank you, Every thing possible again from hope new and real.  And then, to write, to post; I thought you ought to Know.
Poem and post written  by a female faust after watching video of an interview with  Slavoj Žižek on Russia Today,  about the Presumptive President-Elect.



Be seeing you.

Another Web Guard Hack



before
Web Guard (I spoke of them here), tried to keep me from the Internet Archive on my new T-Mobile ZTE Hotspot.  I repeat, the Internet Archive was blocked, and none of my old hacks were good -- or fast -- enough, so I tried my hand at a new one.

Fuck censorship.

This requires you know the URL you want, and have the ability to cut, (how can anyone live without this?) see your address bar (not your search bar!), paste, and load without your paste being altered. You don't need to be able to read the source of the blocked content (though it gives you something equivalent to the ability to write it). 

after

How anyone can manage to go for even a dozen pages without viewing the source of a page is beyond me.  (Or disabling styles for that matter...)

I tried to be fancier; I did not succeed. This, however it looks, however awkward the interface, works. I decided to call this... application FWG* for  fuck Web Guard. Go there and paste your URL.



Hixie (Github).

N.B.:This self-contained version of the tool, alas, does not have the option of entering a URL.  A tip of my hat to Mr. Simon Willison for the elegance: I was more envious until I noticed the Tumblr trick.  Still, nice. Sure wish I could have, or you had, figured out the url functionality no one else seems to include...

No one except the venerable Ian Hickson, my hero, who wrote the underlying utility, which changed my life.  Seriously.  Thanks Hixie.



Be seeing you.

Trump Tells Japan PM A Really Funny Joke: "You'll Love This One."

A Faustian original. Protected under the laws that cover political satire.




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M.W.K.P.A | "Childhood's End" by Pink Floyd



Character is fate.


Walk in virtue and you will never walk alone.


All evidence to date indicates this in my life at least.  I myself am working for a universal rollout. To this end, I invite the Gentle Reader to read and listen:





If that doesn't play, click below to try the Youtube link.



 
N.B.:
In case you are new  to my blog, M.W.K.P.A. stands for Music What Kicketh Political Ass.  A search in the box to the right ought to bring up all the past entries, some of which may no longer include a playable sound file. Under the Internet Archive's policies, not even its Wayback Machine will come to our rescue, due to the legal and physical demise of its source; and with my being too lazy, until I go back and fix all the broken Grooveshark links, if you do visit these posts, I can only encourage you to Look It Up For Yourselves).

Be seeing you.

#NotYourPresident? Not Unless You Do This (I dare you)


Double dog dare, any Politically Correct Snowflakes out there.

Stop destroying other citizen's property and do something relevant.

Can you handle it?






Be seeing you.

MUST-SEE VIDEO: A sweet little bit of practical moral philosophy for our time.


THE MOST INSPIRING VIDEO I'VE SEEN IN 2016.


(and cheer is in short supply after the why-was-i-suddenly-not-registered and why-didn't-his-ballot-come-in-the-mail and gee-the-news-just-said-the-california-vote-is-irrelevant and look-ma-no-exit-polls-who-needs-em-they're-ortoriously-inaccurate and how-did-she-win-when-we-can't-find-anyone-hardly-who-voted-for-her and two-million-ballots-somehow-don't-matter-in-a-race-won-by-a-few-hundred-thousand landslide-for-the-warmoneymongers election.*)


Gentle readers, of this most excellent bit of philosophy, I ask you,




Original youtube link .

These were all real, true experiences, except for the part about exit polls, which was sarcasm.  All who are interested I suggest they watch the video in the next post for extra credit.


Be seeing you.

BREAKING NEWS FOR CALIFORNIA VOTERS:






WHEN THE MEDIA IS CORRUPT, 



DON'T LISTEN.




WHEN THE POLLS ARE RIGGED...





VOTE ANYWAY.






Unlike me, 
many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, 
and will die here like rotten cabbages.
The Prisoner



Be seeing you.

Officers Notice Nothing Unusual As They Read Miranda Rights To Woman They Are Arresting For Remaining Silent

 
Works only from Youtube page: Storyboard generated from video below using the Youtube Storyboard Bookmarklet.

That moment is priceless.  She, a lawyer, is suing.  Watch:



Story via Reason.com:

After New Jersey state troopers arrested Rebecca Musarra for remaining silent, they informed her, "You have the right to remain silent." That should have been a clue that something was amiss with their legal justification for hauling her off to jail.

According to a federal lawsuit filed by Musarra, a Philadelphia attorney, and dashcam footage recently obtained by NJ Advance Media, Trooper Matthew Stazzone pulled her over for speeding on October 16 and asked for her license, registration, and proof of insurance. She handed over the documents but did not respond when Stazzone asked her a question. He repeated the question several times, becoming increasingly agitated and warning her that she would be arrested if she did not answer. Here is the vitally important question that Stazzone kept asking: "Do you know why you're being pulled over tonight?"
Read more

Be seeing you. 

The Best Way To Locate And Contact Your Elected Officials | Public Service Announcement

Letter-writing at a portable desk with quill, inkwell, seal and an open book bound with clasps on a reading stand ... and a clock and bell (Antwerp, 19th c.)

Gentle Readers: A Public Service Announcement

Your opinions deserve to be heard by your elected representative.  Sometimes, they make a difference, and, given the precarious state of many issues vitally important to our health and well being, we need all the help we can get. 

An easy-peasy one-stop open-source web portal to locate your elected officials (congress or house), compose your thoughts in email, and send that email campaign tested, eff approved:


  "Democracy.io uses the SmartyStreets Geocoding API and the Sunlight Congress API to look up your representatives."  What's more, one can voice whatever opinion one wishes on whatever topic. 

Other resources:

If you need a template, there are a few appended to another look-up-your-elected-official site, beBusinessed (they have an interactive map, not better than eff's, but visual). 

Wondering about the proper formal address or title? Forms of Address has some useful pointers.

Also: How to Write Effective Letters to Congress: Real Letters Are Still the Best Way to Be Heard by Lawmakers.

***


This public service announcepost was inspired by:

The FDA just outlawed CBDs and hemp oil extracts by claiming all plant molecules now belong exclusively to Big Pharma

Perhaps you think that headline must be sensationalizing at the very least. I checked, and I don’t think it is. That is what the FDA legalizeis in fact saying, as difficult as that is for me to believe that they are being that nakedly opportunistic and sociopathic. More frighteningly totalitarian b.s., and if I have time I will deal with it in a separate post. For now let me quote a comment I left on this article over at BlackListed News:
One can voice whatever opinion one wishes on whatever topic. I suggest that if you want to keep not only your cannabis, but also your vitamins - and maybe even see your government continue to get its head out of wherever it has been and start responding ethically and humanely, that then "you" are that "one."
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Mr. Adams.

***


Be seeing you.

MUST SEE VIDEO PROOF TRUMP HITLER RESEMBLANCE




Then, after you see that bit, do rewind.  The whole video is excellent.

Be seeing you.

Defiant, Sci-Hub Continues To Provide Full Public Access To Almost 50 Million Scientific Papers Despite Court Order, Causing Uncontrollable Grinning In People Like Me


"The Little Bird Brings The Message" (Alternate Title: "Great Good fortune") 
a faustian original, dedicated to Alexandra Elbakyan: Right On, Sister.
People seeking access to scholarly publications -- professors, graduate students, undergrads, and the increasing number of scholars, makers, hackers, citizen scientists, and laymen -- have long been bereft of a free, reliable source for technical information and research materials.  Without this the basic underlying framework of academic learning is undermined, to say the least.  Without this we are unable to benefit from one another's work.  
Papers regularly cost thirty dollars each, sometimes more, just to download and read them, or one can rent them for a short while. Only the abstract or summary of the work is available to those who cannot pay, and often that is insufficient to determine if the information is suited to one's thesis.  It is tempting to allow one's budget to influence one's conclusion, that is, to not follow a line of inquiry merely because of cost.  This is unacceptable.
Although Aaron Swartz believed passionately in and fought for a variety of causes, we may recall that open access to information is the principle for which he was specifically fighting when he engineered a way to batch download papers that were only available, one by one, in person at the library. It is corporate response to those actions that set in motion the circumstances that would finally lead to his untimely death. 
Now, university libraries cannot afford all the academic journals they used to subscribe to; NPR reports that faculty themselves are turning to so called 'pirate' means to get illegal copies of articles.  Perhaps it is finally time to reevaluate the law.
Consider this: big corporate publishing houses like Elsevier and ScienceDirect don't just charge the academic end user.  They also retain the services of academics as copy-editors and content providers, without pay. In fact, their business model went so far that in 2012 academics went on strike.  Their demand?  Same as Aaron's: free and open access.

Elsevier's backpedalling not stopping scientist strike


What do we want? Open science access


Iain Thomson for The Register


Dutch publishing house Elsevier is facing increasing pressure from the scientific community, with the company's 2,000 journals now being blacklisted by over 8,600 academics.
In January, following an angry blog post by British mathematician Tom Gowers, academics started to sign a public petition refusing to submit, edit, or approve articles for publication in Elsevier's extensive stable of titles, which includes The Lancet and Cell.
The petition protested against the high prices Elsevier charges for its journals, its practice of requiring subscribers to buy bundles of publications rather than individual subscriptions, and the company's support for the Research Works Act (RWA) in the US Congress, which would close access to publicly-funded research.
The movement quickly caught on with academics, and within days over a thousand of them had signed up. Elsevier relies on academics to submit papers for publications, as well as others to proof, edit and peer-review research, so the strike struck at the heart of the publisher's business model.
Read more


There are few alternatives to paying exorbitant prices for the work of unpaid scholars who would rather give you the benefit of their knowledge than line the pockets of the bloated publishing houses, all of them require diligence and/or time, and their legality may seem different to different people depending on individual perspective and ethics:
  • One can always request a copy from someone who has it: researchers without money to burn have long relied on entreating privileged individuals (often the authors of the articles in question) at academic institutions for courtesy copies.  It is important that the paper not be destined for commercial reprint.
  • For a short while, the twitter phenomenon #ICanHazPDF allowed users to tweet requests that were subsequently filled by academics with access;
  • One can always go looking on the Interwebs for the paper, posted by a well meaning blogger perhaps.  Translate the title into the native tongue of, or utilize an elite proxy from, a country such as China or Ukraine, where the national ideas of intellectual copyright are different.  Be sure and include one of the author's names for best results;
  • Perhaps a working password may actually find its way to BugMeNot;
  • Perhaps a working password may actually be posted on Pastebin; 
  • Guest passwords may sometimes be found posted at the beginning of a given semester, for students newly inducted into this or that field.  This underscores the basic invisibility of an online presence from the point of view of the material world, and if we remain careful (or is that lucky?), it will remain that way.
  • And, since 2011, there is Sci-Hub.
One would not expect this to go over well with The Establishment, but surprisingly,  only the write-up by Nature (itself a corporate publisher like Elsevier) stood out against Sci-Hub. "Pirate research-paper sites play hide-and-seek with publishers: Millions of scientific articles remain freely accessible despite copyright violations." This is another sign of the broad based institutional support it has garnered. 
NPR dials in on the right side -- or at least a neutral side -- of the phenomenon with an interview with Heather Joseph, whose organization, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) "advocates for legal open access to academic journals."



from 




Expensive Journals Drive Academics To Break Copyright Law

HEATHER JOSEPH: Thank you for having me.
WERTHEIMER: So how do the academic journals that are charging a lot of money for what - for their subscriptions, what is their justification?
JOSEPH: Well, the justification I think is a good one for nonprofit organizations like Scholarly Societies that really do operate on pretty much a cost recovery model. The commercial ventures, though, that have the profit margins in the 30 and 40 percent range, there really is no justification. They're profit-maximizing businesses, which is fine. The question is, should such businesses be built around information that's vital to the public's good and the public's health?
WERTHEIMER: When these scholars do articles, who gets - do they get any of that money?
JOSEPH: They're unpaid. The authors of these articles traditionally contribute the work of writing the articles, the work of reviewing and verifying the information, and they're not paid....

Read more


Academics Support Sci-Hub In Clear Strong Language, Open With Quote From Little Prince, And Finally Tell Elsevier To Go Fuck Itself
click to view image;
for hyperlinked document
please visit 
http://custodians.online/


Aaron Swartz at the Freedom to Connect conference,
 Washington, DC area May 21-22, 2012, less than seven
nonths before his death.

EXCLUSIVE: Robin Hood neuroscientist behind Sci-Hub research-pirate site talks to RT




This infamy led to popular scientific publisher Elsevier filing a lawsuit, which was successful late last year in getting a temporary injunction against Sci-Hub’s activities. This was after in 2012, a large community of scientists boycotted it; so much so that even Harvard University complained it didn’t have enough funds to keep paying Elsevier.
The publisher estimated its losses to be in the area of $75,000-150,000, court records stated. It now wants this figure paid out for each and every pirated article. There are hundreds of thousands. Its reasoning is that monetizing access to academic knowledge helps bring in funding for academic research. But Elbakyan and others say most study authors don’t actually get paid for published work – and that is why Sci-Hub is so different from some illegal music or movie download service.
Currently, Elbakayn says she’s been served with a temporary injunction. It could still go either way for Sci-Hub, but it is unlikely that a US court would rule in favor of free information, she believes.
[snip]
After Elsevier’s court victory last year, many scientists who had already previously boycotted the publisher wrote an open letter in support of Sci-Hub and the Netherlands-based Library Genesis.
Read more

Unpaid authors are unhappy.  Unhappy authors do not make good friends of publishers. When the injuction came down against Sci-Hub, academics around the world quickly rallied in defense of the site.  In case you do not take the time to read it -- and you really should, it is and inspiring and beautiful document -- here is an excerpt from the conclusion:


The above is from RT; to the right is the open letter penned in support of Sci-Hub.  

More than seven years ago Aaron Swartz, who spared no risk in standing up for what we here urge you to stand up for too, wrote: "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"
We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our voices.
Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share your writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata - care for the backup. Water the flowers - clean the volcanoes.

So this is what makes Sci-Hub's situation seem so different than your average instance of peer-to-peer file sharing, copyright-infringement, or computer assisted piracy: its essential goodness is hard to dispute, and so the means used to achieve its ends are more easily given a pass

But wait -- is that really a difference?  That would depend on who you talk to, wouldn't it.  Even so, your average end user running a non genuine Windows operating system would not think to stand up for his right to do so in defiance of  Miscrosoft. 

Given the righteousness thus inspired, and the overwhelming support that the website has from everyone but the evil conglomerates, it appears as though that Alexandra Elbakyan just might go down in history as the David to Elsevier's brand of Goliath.  Rejoice.  

Certainly (and with the caveat, that this is in no way legal advice, nor do I speak on behalf of... anyone really, including myself) certainly one could make downloads while the Sci-Hub shines.
Besides, if anything happens, Freedom still has a few tricks up its sleeve:


Either way, American courts can’t really cause much more damage to Sci-Hub than ruling in Elsevier’s favor. Firstly, because Sci-Hub servers are outside the US, in Russia. The New York district court can’t prosecute Elbakyan, because she has no US assets; secondly, because an ever-growing body of scientists actually support the initiative and increasingly turn against the capitalizing publishers; and third – because even if someone tried to target Sci-Hub, they couldn’t: its servers have moved to the dark net– that concealed corner of the internet normally reserved for buying drugs, ordering hits on people or trading in child pornography.


“Even if legal access to [Sci-Hub] is blocked, the user can still get in through the TOR network and immediately gain access to all the articles. However, we intent to fight for free access to all information. After all, using TOR still provides obstacles. And I believe there should be no obstacles on the way to scientific knowledge.”
Read more


and its method is basically to simulate the process academics had learned to finagle the access to the materials without which they could not complete their work.  
Most of the recent flurry of articles about Sci-Hub speak only generally about how this miracle has been accomplished. A few go into more detail.  As I researched it online, however, I found very little by way of instruction for the end user of the site, even in articles wholly in favor of Sci-Hub's mission.  Yes of course there are instructions on the site, and a forum for those who are baffled, but one would think that of these many positve (or at least curous) treatments of the phenomenon, at least one or two would provide step by step instructions.  Some braved explaining the theory behind the code, but not the nuts-and-bolts which can be a little confusing at first (at least it was to me).
This is not the case. The Wikipedia page, though not officially a 'stub,' is sparse; here is the section on the website itself:




Sci-Hub provides readers with articles without requiring a subscription or payment. An average of 200,000 users visited Sci-Hub per day in January 2016. Before the project's original domain, Sci-Hub.org, was blocked, the website had an average of 80,000 visitors per day. The site can gain access to papers on demand in two ways: first, it will check whether the requested paper is available at LibGen, a similar website hosted in Russia. If the paper isn't available there, Sci-hub will then pass through the corresponding paywall and retrieve the document from the original publisher's website. Sci-hub is able to achieve this thanks to a collection of subscription credentials that anonymous academics from around the world have donated. Sci-hub has credentials to access papers published at JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier, among others. If a paper is retrieved that was not previously available at LibGen, Sci-hub will share a copy of the document with LibGen for future use. 




Read more

Although it describes the process in detail, these details are of no use to users for whom requested materials are bafflingly nonforthcoming.  A tip of the hat, however, for the inclusion of Noah Fahlgren's simple, elegant bookmarklet, which you can drag as the word sci-hub into your toolbar, or get it from githubAlthough I reproduced it here, I have not gotten it to work. I get redirected back to the original non-Sci-hub corporate portal.
Perhaps these articles, in being neutral, if not supportive of Sci-Hub, are just hedging their bets, like the mainstream media after Occupy took off, when it realized it couldn't openly express disdain. Which leads me to wonder if the nice folks at, say, NPR, actually used Sci-Hub to download a paper; or if, as some may infer from a neutral if not encouraging stance, they actually wanted other people to. Perhaps I ought to wonder: if they wanted other people not to. 
Of course, the question is rhetorical, and of course I mean no ill will. That being said - that is, with the understanding that I am not going so far as to criticize anyone for not making completely certain thyat anyone reading their post came away able to download any scientific publication they desired -- still I would like to comment BigThink for being one of the few to go into useful detail: 

from


Meet the Robin Hood of Science

by SIMON OXENHAM

As the number of papers in the LibGen database expands, the frequency with which Sci-Hub has to dip into publishers’ repositories falls and consequently the risk of Sci-Hub triggering its alarm bells becomes ever smaller. Elbakyan explains, “We have already downloaded most paywalled articles to the library ... we have almost everything!” This may well be no exaggeration. Elsevier, one of the most prolific and controversial scientific publishers in the world, recently alleged in court that Sci-Hub is currently harvesting Elsevier content at a rate of thousands of papers per day. Elbakyan puts the number of papers downloaded from various publishers through Sci-Hub in the range of hundreds of thousands per day, delivered to a running total of over 19 million visitors.
The efficiency of the system is really quite astounding, working far better than the comparatively primitive modes of access given to researchers at top universities, tools that universities must fork out millions of pounds for every year. Users now don’t even have to visit the Sci-Hub website at all; instead, when faced with a journal paywall they can simply take the Sci-Hub URL and paste it into the address bar of a paywalled journal article immediately after the “.com” or “.org” part of the journal URL and before the remainder of the URL. When this happens, Sci-Hub automatically bypasses the paywall, taking the reader straight to a PDF without the user ever having to visit the Sci-Hub website itself.
If, at first pass the network fails to gain access to the paper, the system automatically tries different institutions’ credentials until it gains access. In one fell swoop, a network has been created that likely has a greater level of access to science than any individual university, or even government for that matter, anywhere in the world. Sci-Hub represents the sum of countless different universities' institutional access — literally a world of knowledge. This is important now more than ever in a world where even Harvard University can no longer afford to pay skyrocketing academic journal subscription fees, while Cornell axed many of its Elsevier subscriptions over a decade ago. For researchers outside the US' and Western Europe’s richest institutions, routine piracy has long been the only way to conduct science, but increasingly the problem of unaffordable journals is coming closer to home.
Read more

Bravo! That was useful information. To that, may I add: use the DOI.  Worked for me every time.  

And this: If you attempt to use the site, and are redirected in a way that will never complete, well, there are non-censoring DNS servers. And if Sci-Hub runs into legtal turbulence at last, well, wikipedia mentioned a mirror site at http://sci-hub.cc, and there's the always dark web, accessible through TOR. If the website is marked as untrusted for no reason, perhaps we will stop waiting for Firefox to get over its recent and unexpected love affair with wrongheadedness, and finally commit to a new browser.  
More to the point: if the site goes down, somebody, or a group of somebodies, will no doubt have hard copy on those 5o million papers.
And they want to share them as much as we want them shared.
Excuse me while I grin uncontrollably for the next week.


----------------------------------------------
NOTE: In unfamiliar situations, at least to appearances, it is easier to take other people's analysis as proxy for one's own. 

One does not want to cavil over details if one can at all help it; especially if discoursing with 'experts' (see "The war of one against all: The roots of our enslavement‎", an excellent essay by Dr. Herb Ruhs, about what is wrong with the American social discursive model -- among other things.) In fact, exactly what is being assumed, taken for granted, or grandfathered in one of the first things likely to have slid away unnoticed.  

In fact, (Even music file sharing on a vast scale. This, to my mind, is a shame, but whether or not access to music is as vital as access to science is not germane to the present discussion)
------------------------------------------


Be seeing you.