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Showing posts with label WSJ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WSJ. Show all posts

Saturday, March 06, 2010

To Make a Global City [Today's News Poem March 6, 2010]

To Make a Global City [Today's News Poem March 6, 2010]

“"If we are to withdraw from unconventional policies and return to conventional economic policies, we need to choose the time very carefully. This includes the exchange rate policy for the renminbi,"”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703915204575104743815279822.html?mod=WSJ_Markets_LeadStory

“China had allowed its currency to slowly appreciate against the dollar until late 2008, when world economies sagged under the weight of the United States banking and securities collapse. Most economists say the Beijing government acted to maintain the price advantage of Chinese manufactured goods, a linchpin of the Chinese economy, at a time when exports were drying up.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/world/asia/07china.html

First, slather all the world with some concrete,
Then etch the human face of our elite;
Then paint the surface red and white and blue.
The bluebloods spill that commie ink—a hue
That contrasts with the white of so-called 'good,'
We crown with lies: enriching thieves and hoods.
This planet called America will own
The sun—such leverage will finance loans

To colonize the nearby space. The stars
Will serve as power-plants to animate
A polis Plato might have loved. The bars?
Are promissory notes and credit rates.

A human being will work as long as he's inspired;
Postpone the joy—most everything that she desired
To gain it back with savings after he's been hired,
Not knowing that before she wins that she'll be fired.

We sell the sale then tell the tale
Of how we won our megatons,
While workers solder, hammer nails:
We've fixed the game and have them spun.

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Saturday, February 27, 2010

Failure to Thrive [Today's News Sonnet, Feb 27, 2010]

Failure to Thrive [Today's News Sonnet, Feb 27, 2010]
“The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck off coastal Chile in the early hours of the morning is one of the biggest temblors anywhere in more than a century. ”
–Gautam Naik, Wall Street Journal, FEBRUARY 27, 2010, 3:44 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704231304575091611248294970.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular

“"From our human perspective with our relatively short and incomplete memories and better and better communications around the world, we hear about more earthquakes and it seems like they are more frequent," Arrowsmith said. "But this is probably not any indication of a global change in earthquake rate of significance."... However, "relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years," said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. "We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the earth's lithosphere."”
--MSNBC, Feb 27, 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35618526/ns/technology_and_science-science/

If even sun someday will serve as prey
To entropy, to holes so dense they're black
To us; then what has changed? The gods still fray
In all their forms; from Cronus, farther back
I'm sure, to Ancient Ones of Lovecraft fame,
To microscopes and telescopes that spot
Another entity usurping claims
Of ultimate hegemony. We thought
Our age of science granted might akin
To nebulae and yet the Earth's mishaps
Alone deny our transcendental win.
The paltry centuries disguise perhaps
Immense, perhaps impossible to grasp,
And mighty forces science—Gods can't clasp:
A death in eons, scoffed with dying rasps.

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