The Life Slant - Page 3

Rest in Power Spot

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For forty-six wonderful years,
Spot on fluke thrilled us,
Awesome mysterious humpback kin,
Glacier Bay Sitka Sound,
Magdalena Escarpment Sea of Cortez.

Stranded lifeless Killisnoo Island,
Way too young to leave!
Superb oxygen-maker carbon-storer,
May thee seafloor enrich,
Gone but not forgotten.

Fishers fluke scarred,
Wretched pain fraught,
Planet-destroying horrid industry,
Fishing bone cutting entanglement gear,
Forever poisons rubbish marine debris.

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Brainy Ones

Second largest brains orcas,
Twofold human adults,
Black/white largest prevalent dolphins,
Stunning sonar echolocation,
Pinpoint golf ball hundred-metre
split second!

Transient pack hunters,
Roaming oceans,
Sharks sealions porpoises,
Minke Gray calves,
Residents hug coastlines,
Herding balling devouring herring.

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Tarkine Callin’ Australians

Reese Halter Unearthly Wails

‘takayna/Tarkine inimitable oxygen gem,
Largest Southern temperate water-making
temple,
Purest planetary air,
Opulent Aboriginal heritage,
Indispensable climate stabaliser!

Chinese MMG heavy metal miners,
Ransacking church toxic tailings,
MP Sussan Ley’s blessings,
Pumpin’ poisons atop Pieman River,
Desecrating cherished rainforest,
Hideous biological annihilation!

Destroying rare Tasmanian masked owls,
Forest guardians harken nightly,
“Hoot . . . hoot, Save our Ship!”,
Now or never Australians,
Defend Mother’s sacredness,
Noblest direct-action campaign!

Reese Halter Unearthly Wails
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Gasping Combusted World

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Cyanobacteria three point five billion years,
Oversufficiency oxygenated ozone shield,
Great forests four hundred million years,
Ocean plush green mats bacteria,
Gratitude Mother earthly oxygen orb!

Littlest photosynthetic organism,
Teeny bacteria largest oxygen surface,
Prochlorococcus planetary oxygen twenty
per cent exhaler,
More than Amazon, Congo, Indo/Malayan
rainforests combined,
Indebtedness beloved Mother Earth!

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Princess Little Mary Mayhem

Unforgive us for we know!
Four legged friends’ co-evolvers,
You guided hunted protected us,
We turned dreadfully evilhearted.
Holier-than-thou learned hatred greed meanness.

We careened shockingly unmerciful,
‘Twasn’t oil trillion subsidies enough?
Matricide Athabasca MacKenzie naphthenic benzene tarred rivers,
Parks delisted boreal temples’ years steamed three hundred fifty degrees.
Tyrannical Jason Kenney, Premier Alberta,
Savagely eradicating wolfly kin.

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Planet-Killing Soviet Pollution

Minus fifty degrees Siberian berezhlivyy,
Ancient Gmelin larches, Siberian dwarf pines,
Nana willows, balsam poplars,
Tenacious festina lente,
Timeless, noble yet vulnerable.

Gold, silver, black gold fever!
Magadan Oblast, Yano-Kolyma,
Goltsovoye, Natalka,
Omusskchansky Coal Cluster mines,
Eureka! Riches galore.

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Loon Asylum

Oldest North American feathered friends,
Bigger than ducks, longer, thicker necks than grebes,
Splendiferous sculpted aquatic bodies,
Land walking nah,
Lifetime in water, save mating, nesting ashore.

Part submarine, part fighter jet,
Long open water runways,
Pattering into wind across watery faces,
Head down, hunched back, nose of jet.
Powerful wingbeats, impressive 112kph aeronautics.

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Fossil Fuel Confidence Tricksters

Credulity, naiveté, vanity, confidence,
Irresponsibility, greed, planet-killing.
Men, money, power, immortalise,
The long game, high stakes, illusions.
Name your price? More!

Unctuous fossil fuel conmen seep assuredly,
Mustn’t leave anyone without,
Such slithery goop duplicity bathed.
Asphyxiating pollution, black gold drying up,
Price ever-rising, people alert.

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Godforsaken Heat

Oppressive deathful hideous heat,
Combusting subsidised fossil fuels, wood pellets,
palm oil be damned.
Fire Age dire, so strange, past irrelevant,
No-narrative, no-analogue tomorrow.

So immense unimaginable coming upheavals,
Inherited knowledge arc, past to future, broken.
No precedent forthcoming,
Impossible to triangulate accumulated wisdom.
A future never known.

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Healing Haida Hummers

Hale diminutive warm-blooded hummingbirds,
Joyful, bathing, fearless, 80kph speedsters,
Heard before seen, iridescent metallics.
Brush-tipped tongues French kiss flowers,
One thousand to two thousand sexy daily osculations.

Rolling shoulder joints, wingtip figure eights,
Two hundred beats per second, the perfect hoverer.
Altering wing angle, forward, backward, sideways,
Enthralling upside-down airborne acrobatics, finesse.
Practise. Forty million years. Stupendous!


Highest animal oxygen requirements,
Nine thin-walled air sacs,
Supreme lung gas volume.
Three hundred breaths per minute rest,
Five hundred breaths per minute flight.

Copious nectar rich water, 160 per cent body weight, daily.
Gnats, flies, aphids, beetles,
Delectable spider silk-wrapped prey, proteinaceous insects!
Overnight food cache, crop satiates caloric needs,
Autumn gorge doubles body weight.
Sailing a twenty-seven hundred kilometre-migration!

Fulltime Pacific Northwest residents, Anna’s.
Unexampled Arctic climate storms frostbiting, deadly.
Lifeless looking miraculously still alive!
Urban rescuers warm feeders thrice daily,
Recipe in hand: one thumb sugar, four fingers water.
Blest be ye fine feathered friends!

©2022 ReeseHalter.com

Agitate. Disrupt. Defend.

#UnearthlyWails
#ZeroCombustionEconomy2030
#GoVegan
#RefuseStuff
#BoycottChineseGoods
#RefusePlastics
#WalkMore
#ForestBathing
#LoveNature
#LoveIsTheSolution
#GenZEmergency

Reese Halter

Reese Halter is a bees/trees/seas defender.
His latest book is GenZ Emergency.
Email: HalterBooks@gmail.com for your autographed copy.
In Australia, order from the Bob Brown Foundation by emailing: Contact@BobBrown.org.au

Going Vegan

Review: The Matrix – Resurrections

Matrix Resurrection Review

If you’re like me and was coming of age when the first Matrix dropped in 1999, this was more than just a film. It was a paradigm shifting experience. From the storyline – a reality bending what-if, to special effects never before seen on the big screen, and a theme that would later lead me to question the very existence I knew which – is still evident today, in my adult career as a journalist. It was complete with the perfect pairing of angry, thought-proving, tracks from Rage Against the Machine.

SPOILER ALERTS!

By now, most of you have probably seen at least the first of the original Matrix trilogy. But if you haven’t – I suggest you stop reading now.

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Gobsmacking Globetrotters

O greatest long distance earthly wanderers,
Travelling limits of seemingly limitless seas.
Superlative endurance, Olympians of the sky,
Extreme in size, Royal’s tip-to-tip 3.5 metres.
Hale wise airborne centurions!

Light as a feather, lifetime at sea,
Furthermost range, pure gliders, windiest oceans.
Lifting force to air resistance astoundingly 40:1.
One hundred and twenty-thousand kilometres annually,
Eleven million eight-hundred thousand kilometres lifespan!

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COVID-19, Conspiracies, and Corpses

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Before year 2020, what does not kill me makes me stronger. After the year 2020, it mutates and tries again. Freedom in the Unites States means you can choose to die if you wish. You have the right to refuse to wear a mask, and the organizations that you visit have the right to refuse you entry into their property if you decline to wear said mask. The reason these organizations have the right to refuse your entry is because you do not have the right to infect other people. When your rights impose a risk to other citizens, it becomes a societal problem.

Historically, free speech in the United States has seen limitations. You cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theatre.  Free speech ends when it threatens lives of other citizens. Citizens have been tried for manslaughter when they urged other citizens to kill themselves.  The great thing about the United States is that you may listen and follow the advice, no matter how naïve, of other citizens. If that advice results in your demise, then the mistake is yours, a decision you are free to make.

You may believe that you have the right to consume intoxicants and operate a vehicle, but if your behavior threatens the safety of other citizens, that right impinges on other citizens who have the right to be protected from your behavior.  As a citizen, you have the right to refuse vaccination, which in some cases, has cost people their lives.  Social media has become saturated with uncredentialed self-proclaimed “experts” who have found numerous reasons why you shouldn’t be vaccinated.  These experts have reasons too long to discuss in this essay. Statistically speaking, there is, and I will not deny it, a small amount of risk if you get vaccinated, since the vaccine has not been tested on millions of people, but that risk is very, very small.

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Glorious Gray Kin

Gray Whale

Mysterious adventurers, epic long-distance voyagers,
We landlubbers marvel at your Royal Highnesses.
Marbled gray, sleek tapered head, streamlined robust body,
A dozen knuckles supporting eighty thousand pounds,
Barnacles, sea lice, ecosystems within gray’s ecosystem. Hallelujah!

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Christmas Wish ’21

The “Alfred Burt Carols” are a marvelous collection of fifteen Christmas songs.  They were written by Alfred S. Burt from 1942 and 1954 and annually distributed to friends as Christmas Cards.  After learning about them in high school choir, my buddy Dave and I decided we would follow suit.  We each wrote a little ditty, hand-copied ten or twelve copies, and mailed them out, vowing to continue to do so every year hence.  I’ve lost touch with Dave, but I know I haven’t done it again since.

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Vale Silver Superfish

O pinnacle of piscine evolution,
Pointed snout, plump middle, crescent caudal,
The ultimate predator, bluefin tuna.
Counter-shaded, dark topside, light below,
Blue, green, silver befitting only the regal.

Olympians inhaling ramjet oxygen-loaded seawater,
Travelling a distance equal to length each second.
Sampson-like heart 10X other’s size.
Gracefully cruising 46 knots, top-end 55 knots!
Night schooling, slower, musing, bunched.

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Smart, Screaming, Carnivorous Bees, Kith and Kin

MEXICO CITY – Our comrades, the bees, are intriguing wee creatures and vital to a healthy natural world.

Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) was the first to discover that the elaborate language of honeybees revolves around complex dances. In addition to deciphering their communications, von Frisch was also able to train honeybees to arrive at feeding stations in three, four and five separate periods within 24 hours. The fact that bees possess a memory for time is astonishing.

The waggle dance is one of the most extraordinary forms of communication in the animal kingdom. The dance conveys precise information about food, water and tree resin location, including its direction and distance from the hive as far as 13 kilometres (8mi). See my book, The Incomparable Honeybee for a detailed explanation of the waggle dance and the angle of the sun. Credit: Yemin Deng

Years later, my colleagues from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama showed that social bees have a bigger brain area for both learning and memory compared to solitary bees. And like people, bees show the effects of aging. For example, honeybees’ memories fade and their ability to learn decreases. One way we both can slow down aging is by getting restorative sleep.

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Terrified Asian honeybees, just like us, other primates, birds and meerkats, shriek when faced with a life-threatening situation. When giant Asian hornets attack the hive, honeybees release a “rallying call for collective defence”. It eerily sounds like bloodcurdling human screams. When these colossal merciless hornets storm the colony, they feast on larvae, decapitate adult bees and feed severed body parts to their young.

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Australia Greenlights Two More Giant Fracking Mines, Armageddon

ALICE SPRINGS – Are you fed-up with the worst, least qualified and most unscrupulous citizens, the world’s leaders, lying about reducing emissions and failing to address the climate emergency? 

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison just greenlit two humongous fracking mines in the Northern Territory (NT) and Western Australia (WA). Morrison blatantly disregarded the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be NO more new coal, oil and gas extractions if we are to limit temperature increases to below the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees. 

Morrison’s most recent planetary destructive fracking decision followed on the heels of U.S. President Joe Biden’s move to auction off oil and gas leases across 32.4  million hectares (80M ac) of the Gulf of Mexico. Old boys business as usual.

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A Football Field of Native Forests Annihilated Every Second

MELBOURNE – Native forests need wildlife to thrive. We “wise apes” need native forests to save us from the man-made climate crisis. If we lose those forests, we die.

Destruction of Native Forests
Our beloved oxygen-makers, carbon storehouses, intercontinental rain-makers, cloud-makers, climate stabilisers, medicine chests, wildlife-rich glorious native forests are unique to planet Earth. Credit: Fancis Eatherington

At the recent twenty-sixth climate talks in Glasgow, the world’s leaders refused pleas by environmental groups and forest biologists to protect earth’s best climate stabilisers, its native forests. Instead, the world’s negotiators delayed an agreement greenlighting another decade of forest plunder.

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