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Showing posts with label anti-Eden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Eden. Show all posts

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Learned Helplessness in the Second Eden [Today's News Poem, October 7, 2010]

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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Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Chalk-Fruit of Knowledge [Today's News Poem, September 21, 2010]

Chalk-Fruit of Knowledge [Today's News Poem, September 21, 2010]

The schoolmaster claps her erasers together
And figurines form from the dust.
Each of them offers agenda; from pawn
To king. They're arrayed to do battle and whether
They like it or hate it, they must
Sit in their black and white rows on the lawn:
Apples of chalk that will sprout into saplings
Fruiting varieties ranging from blossom-
Dappled, to mealy potato. A garden
Board where agendas are set by the awesome
Eraser; where gardeners prune to alignment
Orchards of scrimmages: frozen assignment.

“But there is nothing within its halls or on its Web site that indicates what differentiates British International from the teeming masses of expensive private schools in New York: It is run for profit. ”
– JENNY ANDERSON, The New York Times, September 21, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/nyregion/22private.html


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Friday, September 03, 2010

Oasis in Malthusville [Today's News Poem, September 3, 2010]

Oasis in Malthusville [Today's News Poem, September 3, 2010]

Witness this valley of vines—
Tell me that surplus is gone.
Chase me with bundles of grapes.
Dodge through the tubers and trip
Over the carcass of buck.
Spigots of Eden have shot
Holier spirits than wine.
Drink up the creeks while you can.
Even the cougars approach,
Hungry like always... but splash
Anyhow; play with your kids
While this oasis is wet.

“With memories still fresh of food riots set off by spiking prices just two years ago, agricultural experts on Friday cast a wary eye on the steep rise in the cost of wheat prompted by a Russian export ban and the questions looming over harvests in other parts of the world because of drought or flooding. ”
– NEIL MacFARQUHAR, The New York Times, September 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/world/04food.html

“Berkeley police shot and killed a mountain lion early Tuesday as it roamed a neighborhood around the city's famous Gourmet Ghetto for at least an hour, leaping over fences from one backyard to another.
Three officers shot and killed the 100-pound adult female with rifles and a shotgun shortly before 3:30 a.m. outside a home on the 1600 block of Walnut Street, just blocks from Chez Panisse restaurant, the flagship Peet's Coffee store, the Cheese Board Collective and other businesses along busy Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley.”
– Henry K. Lee, San Francisco Chronicle, Wednesday, September 1, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/01/MNV41F6FIP.DTL



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