I think I’ve spotted an actual desiring machine in the field! Scientific American:

Splenda is not satisfying—at least according to the brain. A new study found that even when the palate cannot distinguish between the artificial sweetener and sugar, our brain knows the difference.

At the University of California, San Diego, 12 women underwent functional MRI while sipping water sweetened with either real sugar (sucrose) or Splenda (sucralose). Sweeteners, real or artificial, bind to and stimulate receptors on the taste buds, which then signal the brain via the cranial nerve. Although both sugar and Splenda initiate the same taste and pleasure pathways in the brain—and the subjects could not tell the solutions apart—the sugar activated pleasure-related brain regions more extensively than the Splenda did. In particular, “the real thing, the sugar, elicits a much greater response in the insula,” says the study’s lead author, psych­ia­trist Guido Frank, now at the Univer­sity of Colorado at Denver. The insula, involved with taste, also plays a role in enjoyment by connecting regions in the reward system that encode the sens­a­tion of pleasantness.

“Looking at the connection between the taste areas, Splenda is stronger,” Frank says. He suggests that when we taste Splenda, the reward system becomes activated but not satiated. “Our hypoth­esis is that Splenda has less of a feedback mechanism to stop the craving, to get satisfied.”

“The reward system becomes activated but not satiated…” What could go wrong?  Read more 

Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom.

When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen.

The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.

Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.

Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter months ends up on the shelves of supermarkets and is also served in the country’s top restaurants and in tens of thousands of fast-food outlets.  Read more 

Speaking of micro-organisisms, DarkSyde has a wonderful post up at Kos about the bedbugs, the Black Death, and Halloween (among other things). Read the whole thing, but this sentence leaped out at me:

While to one another we are lovers, strangers, friend or foe, to germs we’re nothing but walking meat markets: you and I are food.

Vivid and telling. And if you change two phrases, even more telling:

While to one another we are lovers, strangers, friend or foe, to corporations we’re nothing but walking meat markets: you and I are human resources.

As below, so above?  Read more 

Film at 11: Desiring machines have a biological substrate.

The desiring machines in the news want chocolate—but I’m sure there are other desiring machines that desire other things.

From the abstract at the Journal of Proteome Research (PDF)

Human metabolic phenotypes link directly to specific dietary preferences in healthy individuals
Sunil Kochhar and colleagues at the Nestle Research Center (Switzerland) and Imperial College London set out to distinguish the two populations at the molecular level. The team developed a novel approach they call “nutrimetabonomics” to correlate metabolic phenotypes with a behavioral phenotype—namely, an affinity for rich, creamy chocolate.

Upon statistical analysis, the plasma metabolic profiles of those who desired chocolate could be distinguished from those who were indifferent to its charms.

All of these findings point to differences between the two groups in the functionality of gut microflora.

Bacteria that crave chocolate. I wonder if somebody did a study on fast food or soda, what they would find? Anybody remember The Space Merchants?  Read more 

Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.
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Several years ago, in the pages of my first blog, ddjangoWIrE, I wrote an essay with the same title. When Blogger “accidentally” deleted my account, relegated ddjangoWIrE to a stripped archive, and “lost” some of my posts, the piece converted to disconnected bits in cyberspace and the essay was gone.

I’m really not going to use that disappearance as the primary excuse to post another brief essay on the same subject. Given the state of our nation, our democracy, and the inattention, malaise, and downright selfishness of its people, there are quite enough reasons to revisit this territory.  Read more 

When a dealer that’s more predatory and businesslike than the norm—one who doesn’t live with his mother—goes down, the Feds confiscate his assets (before sending him to jail for graduate work in gang studies and homosexual rape).

But compared to corporations, dealers are penny ante.

So, last I checked, corporations were legal persons—with rights of free speech, and everything.

But who said corporations got to live forever?  Read more 

Bonddad and Tula explain the hard stuff so I don’t have to. Bottom line: the investor class is whining like a bunch of skeer’d little bitches, and that’s a good thing.

The U.S. House passed legislation last week that would level the playing field for employees trying to form a union—but judging by the reaction in the business community, you’d think the bill is the end of corporate freedom as we know it.

On March 1, the House voted 241–185 for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would establish stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations. It also would allow employees to form unions through a majority verification process, in which workers sign cards to indicate their support for a union.

In attacking the bill, Big Business has misleadingly insisted it would take away the secret ballot election process by which workers now form unions. But that argument is a red herring. First of all, Employee Free Choice Act doesn’t take away the secret ballot process. Workers will have a choice between the ballot process and majority verification.  Read more 

I’m not even going to recount mine. I’m ready to kill or break something. deep breath But I’m pretty sure we’ve all had them. Is it just me, or are cell phones getting crappier with every new “upgrade?” Sure, it’s great to play some music and take a photo with your phone, but it’d also be nice if they weren’t as sensitive as an albino nun at an all-gender orgy in the Mojave desert. Four 1-800 calls, six crashed web pages, three stores and several “customer service” representatives later, I may be able to talk on the phone again…as soon as next Wednesday. And I only had to pay a hundred and some dollars to do it! Yeah for me.

Peasant, wage slaves, corporate serfs: how much more of this are we going to tolerate? The company name doesn’t matter; I’ve had service with all the big names, and it’s always the same story. The suck. They don’t care. They screw you over at every turn. It’s not like this in Asia, or Europe. Corporations without government regulation are evil. And as the Righteous say: “Evil must be opposed.”

This is what the corporatists are planning for all of us, so pay attention:

[Morning shift] mployees at a Wal-Mart Super Center in Hialeah Gardens, Fla. walked out in protest against the new policies and rallied outside the store, shouting “We want justice” and criticizing the company’s recent policies as “inhuman.” Workers said the number of participants was about 200, or nearly all of the people on the shift.  Read more 

Lovely:

The Hewlett-Packard Co. spying effort that has sparked criminal investigations was wide-ranging and included physical surveillance, photographs and spyware sent via e-mail, and it also targeted wives and other relatives of HP board members and reporters, according to a consultant’s report prepared for the company.

The Feb. 10 report, obtained by The Washington Post, summarized in eight pages how investigators, to identify an internal leak of confidential HP information, surreptitiously followed HP board member George A. Keyworth II while he was giving a lecture at the University of Colorado. They watched his home in Piedmont, Calif. They used photographs of a reporter to see if the reporter met with him. And they tried to recover a laptop computer stolen from him in Italy so they could analyze its contents.

Look, I’m certain this is all very localized, and no indication whatever of corporate best practices as a whole. Let alone an indictment of corporate culture.

And I’m especially sure that the Bush administration has never treated leaks in a similar fashion.

Just because all their golfing buddies are going it. And their campaign contributors.  Read more 

Now, I know not everyone doing this is doing so for “good” reasons. But the radical in me just loooooves to hear this kind of news:

“This is not just companies being paranoid about blogging, because they don’t understand it,” says Proofpoint’s Crosley. “This is a real enterprise issue, and there are real risks and impacts to the companies. One of ten publicly traded companies surveyed say they investigated the exposure of financial information that was directly relevant to the corporation in the past year. Obviously such exposure can negatively impact the price of a company’s stock, and it could lead to insider trading issues as well.”  Read more