Learned Helplessness in the Second Eden [Today's News Poem, October 7, 2010]
Everything's pressurized: contents may burst.
Fungus and viruses kill-off the bees. Let's we
aponize sky. It's a monitor, scrolling the fight
er jets buzzing the city of animal urges. Whe
re canines displace those children surviving w
here grass grows to rubber, and even the road
sounds like gunshots deleting the data. Weapo
nize life and determine the outcome of bumbl
es that fly past the cellophane flowers and dan
ce on a can; buzzed on the syrup. They're high
er than drunkards that live in aluminum-own a
nd even the flies are reclaiming the waste in th
is city, by hovering over them: angels of shit. Y
es, nature yields itself and its patterns to willful
protagonists: impressed with our ultimate medi
cine. Send us the flavor we've craved since the
cells burst in water. Before there were mammal
s or fish, there was flavor. It guided us swiftly u
p watersheds, into the forests. We rode Amanita
spores, licked by the wind. We gripped on the b
ase of the oaks where we capped ourselves deat
h—Phalloides. We traded a supper with animals
, eaten first, before we ate their livers in turn. Th
ey suffered? We cannot imagine. Construction,
destruction; they merge into solvents of corn un
til there's a blessing: cathedrals of cola. The scal
pel of money can fit in your pocket—it's the foa
m on the lager. You blessed salvation, you mute
for the volume of hate that we scrambled receiv
ers are lauding. A poodle knocks over a child to
bite out her neck on a lawn by the freeway, for
even the animals know to identify traps when they're in one.
"These findings implicate co-infection by IIV and Nosema with honey bee colony decline, giving credence to older research pointing to IIV, interacting with Nosema and mites, as probable cause of bee losses in the USA, Europe, and Asia. We next need to characterize the IIV and Nosema that we detected and develop management practices to reduce honey bee losses."
—PLoS One
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013181
"Aluminum giant Alcoa Inc. (AA) posted stronger-than-expected third-quarter earnings Thursday as revenue rose on higher pricing and increasing demand that indicates the world's economy continues its slow recovery. "
—Matt Whittaker, Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal, OCTOBER 7, 2010, 7:23 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20101007-715301.html
"Cognitive factors, particularly the role of expectation, are involved in another learning phenomenon, called learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was discovered by accident. Psychologists were trying to find out if classically conditioned responses would affect the process of operant conditioning in dogs. The dogs weere strapped into harnesses and then exposed to a tone (the neural stimulus) paired with an unpleasant, but harmless "
—Don H. Hockenbury & Sandra E. Hockenbury, Psychology 4th Edition, Worth Publishers 2006, Page 226, "
http://books.google.com/books?id=QS_sw7AfVDMC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=psychology+experiment,+dog,+floor,+ele&source=bl&ots=2JtFSXlL_S&sig=V_f2PUhlfCH_fpqIPyujZPSe44E&hl=en&ei=rmCuTIe8NYX6swPzwIX-Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
"According to Salon.com, which checked with David Radford, director of sales and marketing of BFD Corp., an outfit that makes advanced meat recovery machines: Yes, this is what mechanically separated chicken looks like. That means no, it’s probably not strawberry ice cream."
—LiveScience Staff, 07 October 2010 01:25 pm ET
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/etc/mechanically-separated-chicken-photo-101007.html
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