"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."- George Orwell, 1984
The Island of Funen, which has fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, is dense with Renaissance castles and pastel-washed villages, briny little fishing ports and ripe meadows that roll out in long, green flanks to meet the northern sky. But a big part of Funen’s fairy-tale cred is the fact that the island was the boyhood home of Hans Christian Andersen, his first muse and enduring inspiration. Andersen’s mother was an alcoholic washerwoman; his father was a poor cobbler who died when Andersen was 11; his aunt ran a brothel in Copenhagen. Andersen himself, despite his fame, was isolated by his early traumas. The loneliness is captured in his fairy tales, which are considered adult fiction in Denmark. All of Andersen’s lost boys and girls—the abandoned Little Match girl; the Little Mermaid who sacrifices her tongue in the original version—stay fixed in the memory because they are the emblems of our own early sorrows. (This is from a travel article on Funen)
The Church of England began in schism when Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to approve his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. This new pope is discussing serious changes in Catholic thought. So, if the Church decides to accept divorce now, was the Church wrong then?
Recapitulation, also known as the biogenetic law, states that the stages in an organism's embryonic development and differentiation (ontogeny) correspond to the stages of evolutionary development characteristic to its species (phylogeny). Ernst Haeckel, who proposed the theory in 1866, produced a number of controversial embryo drawings to support this premise. So the embryo stages are a reflection of the species historic phases. No one believes this anymore but it was very popular for a while.
China's "population policy" was not the first effort by a state to manipulate population numbers. In the late 19th century the French saw a shift in the balance of power in Europe away from them and toward Germany. German population was growing with its industry. The French government wanted to do something to encourage more French babies so it came up with a series of modest financial bonuses for families who had children, along with a public relations campaign "talking up" the importance of the French family. As a policy it wasn't terribly effective but the broader ramifications were considerable as it marked the introduction of modern population policy.
After WWII the emphasis shifted the other way--not to imply a faddish or superficial element in government thinking. In 1968, Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich published the best-selling book The Population Bomb in which he warned that overpopulation would soon lead to mass starvation. Birth control became a cornerstone of U.S. foreign aid policy.
In the late 1970s, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, introduced a program that involved the involuntary sterilization of many men and women.
Who is....Henry the Navigator?
Photography was a 'wet' art when George Eastman carried the large, heavy equipment necessary for photography on his vacation to Santo Domingo in1878. But Eastman read about gelatin emulsions capable of remaining light-sensitive after drying. Working at night, in his mother's kitchen, he began to experiment with his own varieties. A natural-born tinkerer, Eastman took less than two years to invent both a dry plate formula and a machine that fabricated dry plates. The Eastman Dry Plate Company was born. In 1884, Eastman invented roll film; four years later he came up with a camera capable of taking advantage of that roll. In 1888, that camera became commercially available.
Golden oldie:
Tribes in the central Sahara, lacking in gold, salt and other precious commodities, made the slave trade their principle source of wealth, trading over four million slaves from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries AD, sometimes in caravans of over 10,000 camels. In 1444, Europeans entered the business, beginning a lucrative practice that eventually sent millions of slaves to Europe and the Americas. Under Prince Henry the Navigator, Portugal pioneered major advances in shipbuilding and navigation. The Portuguese fleet was equipped with newly designed caravels, which were highly maneuverable and ideally suited for reconnaissance along unknown coasts. In 1434, a Portuguese crew sailed around Cape Bojador and returned safely against the wind. By 1445, Portuguese mariners reached the mouth of the Senegal River which traditionally marked the boundary between the Berber and Arab tribes of the Sahara and 'the Land of the Blacks'. In 1444, a Portuguese official, Lancarote de Freitas, backed by a consortium of merchant-adventurers from the Algarve port of Lagos, mounted an expedition of six caravels to islands on the Arguin Bank with the express purpose of capturing slaves. Their arrival onshore on 8 August 1444 became a public spectacle, watched by crowds of Lagos residents. Prince Henry himself was on hand to supervise the proceedings, mounted on a horse. The captives were marched to an open space outside one of the town gates and divided into five groups. One group of forty-six of the best slaves was set aside for Henry for his share of the booty. The remainder were either retained by their new owners or put up for auction.
Root beer is a dark brown sweet beverage traditionally made using the root or bark of the tree Sassafras albidum (sassafras) or the vine Smilax ornata (sarsaparilla) as the primary flavor. Root beer may be alcoholic or non-alcoholic, and may be carbonated or non-carbonated. Most root beer has a thick foamy head when poured. Modern, commercially produced *root beer* is generally sweet, foamy, carbonated, and non-alcoholic, and is flavored using artificial sassafras.
In the newer culture of America few such signs [...of monopoly...] had been erected; from the sheer lack of organized monopolists, old monopolies could not be perpetuated. America broke down distinctions: where life was full of surprises, of unexplored wilderness, and of unpredictable problems, its tasks could not be neatly divided for legal distribution. Any man who preferred the even tenor of his way, who wished to pursue his licensed without the competition of amateurs, intruders, or vagrants, or who was unwilling to do jobs for which he had not been legally certified was better off in England.--Daniel Boorstin
By 1971, more than six hundred death courses were being offered across the United States, and five years later that number had nearly doubled. Now thousands of such classes can be found across disciplines from psychology to philosophy to medical science to sociology. Some colleges offer degree and certificate programs with death, dying, and bereavement concentrations, and increasingly, as at Kean University, undergraduates can take such classes as general electives. In 1985, two researchers from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette embarked on what would become a twenty-year study to solve this question: what kind of students take death education courses in college, and why? Sarah Brabant and Deann Kalich surveyed more than nine hundred students enrolled in Brabant's Sociology of Death and Dying course and found that nearly 24 percent wanted to deal with their own grief issues; but, most startlingly, close to half of the students surveyed had 'seriously contemplated committing suicide at some time in their lives.' Even more distressing, 10 percent of the students said they had actually tried to kill themselves at one point.
The first country to grant women the right to vote in the modern era was New Zealand in 1893.
According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "social expenditures" are expenditures that occur with the purpose of redistributing resources from one group to another, in order to benefit a lower-income or presumably disadvantaged population. These can be direct transfers or indirect. The U.S. has lower than most direct transfers but the indirect, through incentives, credits and private structures are high. Redistributive social spending in the US is indeed different from many other countries. But the overall magnitude is actually greater (both proportionally and in absolute terms) in the US than in almost all other countries measured. One can argue that the way that the wealth is redistributed through public policy in the US is "wrong" or "suboptimal." But, to argue that there is less redistribution as a result of public policy in the US than elsewhere is simply wrong.
In Washington, D.C., there has been an increase in homicides of more than 20% in neighborhoods across the city. Baltimore, a city of 600,000, is averaging more than one homicide a day—a rate higher than that of New York City, which has 13 times the people. Milwaukee’s murder rate has nearly doubled over the past year.
AAAAAnnnnnddddddd.....a portion of a report by a court Portuguese chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, in the Chronicle if Guinea on the arrival at the dock of Lagos of Lancarote de Freitas' first slaving voyage and the subsequent division of the slaves:
"Dividing them up proved difficult:
For
as soon as the children who had been assigned to one group saw the
parents in another they jumped up and ran towards them; mothers clasped
their other children in their arms and lay face down on the ground,
accepting wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather
than let their children be torn from them ...
The Island of Funen, which has fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, is dense with Renaissance castles and pastel-washed villages, briny little fishing ports and ripe meadows that roll out in long, green flanks to meet the northern sky. But a big part of Funen’s fairy-tale cred is the fact that the island was the boyhood home of Hans Christian Andersen, his first muse and enduring inspiration. Andersen’s mother was an alcoholic washerwoman; his father was a poor cobbler who died when Andersen was 11; his aunt ran a brothel in Copenhagen. Andersen himself, despite his fame, was isolated by his early traumas. The loneliness is captured in his fairy tales, which are considered adult fiction in Denmark. All of Andersen’s lost boys and girls—the abandoned Little Match girl; the Little Mermaid who sacrifices her tongue in the original version—stay fixed in the memory because they are the emblems of our own early sorrows. (This is from a travel article on Funen)
The Church of England began in schism when Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to approve his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. This new pope is discussing serious changes in Catholic thought. So, if the Church decides to accept divorce now, was the Church wrong then?
Just
because many successful people failed in early efforts, that does not
necessarily mean that failure leads to success. And it certainly doesn't
mean it is a prerequisite.
Cruelty grows
anywhere and is open-minded about its targets. Bloemfontein is
popularly and poetically known as "the city of roses", owing to the
abundance of these flowers and the annual rose festival held there. (The city's Sesotho name is Mangaung,
meaning "place of cheetahs," perhaps a better name.) During the Boer
War, British forces captured the city and built a concentration camp
nearby to house Boer women and children. The National Women's Monument,
on the outskirts of the city, pays homage to the 26,370 women and
children as well as 1,421 old men. (Also
14,154 black people, though some sources feel that the records are
unsatisfactory, and that this number could be as high as 20,000) who
died in these camps in various parts of the country.
I
have been reading Furst's WWII spy stories. They are wonderful in their
atmosphere, their reflection of that time of fear and hope before the
war. And one strange element: There is little depth. It is unapologetic,
too. This was a time--and a people--of circumstance. That terrible
vulnerability gives each story its power.
"None" is
a pronoun most of the time. It means nothing, zero, no one, or not any
part. Some believe it can only be singular in construction, but that is
not true. Most seem to think that because none can mean ‘not one’ that it is always singular, but none can also mean ‘not any’. See the examples for uses in plural or singular. E.G.:
"Perhaps none is more vulnerable than James, a soft-spoken 19-year-old who is quick to flash a smile that would melt ice."
"Based on the forecasts that we have gotten so far this year, none of them were very close to what the game conditions were."
Howard
Hughes was a successful Hollywood movie producer when he founded the
Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. He personally tested cutting-edge
aircraft of his own design and in 1937 broke the transcontinental
flight-time record. In 1938, he flew around the world in a record three
days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.
Recapitulation, also known as the biogenetic law, states that the stages in an organism's embryonic development and differentiation (ontogeny) correspond to the stages of evolutionary development characteristic to its species (phylogeny). Ernst Haeckel, who proposed the theory in 1866, produced a number of controversial embryo drawings to support this premise. So the embryo stages are a reflection of the species historic phases. No one believes this anymore but it was very popular for a while.
China's "population policy" was not the first effort by a state to manipulate population numbers. In the late 19th century the French saw a shift in the balance of power in Europe away from them and toward Germany. German population was growing with its industry. The French government wanted to do something to encourage more French babies so it came up with a series of modest financial bonuses for families who had children, along with a public relations campaign "talking up" the importance of the French family. As a policy it wasn't terribly effective but the broader ramifications were considerable as it marked the introduction of modern population policy.
After WWII the emphasis shifted the other way--not to imply a faddish or superficial element in government thinking. In 1968, Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich published the best-selling book The Population Bomb in which he warned that overpopulation would soon lead to mass starvation. Birth control became a cornerstone of U.S. foreign aid policy.
In the late 1970s, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, introduced a program that involved the involuntary sterilization of many men and women.
Terrorism is an old game.
'My
object was to terrorize so as to force society to look attentively at
those who suffer.' Thus spake Ravachol, a Frenchman born François
Koeningstein (he took his mother's name, Ravachol, although it sounds
like a corrosive) who so typified the crazed bomb-throwing anarchist
that his name became a verb.
In the late
1800s, the harsh oppression of factory workers and the new specter of
unemployment and homelessness spawned in backlash, "anarchism." The
Anarchists believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil,
eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another, and human
nature would be released to seek its natural level of justice among
men. The vision was of a stateless society, without government, without
law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions
having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended
him. Six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty
years before 1914. They were President Carnot of France in 1894, Premier
Canovas of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King
Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley of the United States in
1901, and another Premier of Spain, Canalejas, in 1912. Not one could
qualify as a tyrant.
But random destruction is meaningful if one assumes an underlying nascent order of things.
Attorney
General Loretta Lynch will release the first wave of 46,000-plus
federal inmates, whose sentences were slashed, in the largest mass
prison release ever. The mass release, which represents half the federal
prison population of drug offenders, is part of President Obama's
"criminal justice reform." Under
new administration guidelines, criminal sentences were retroactively cut
by an average 25 months as a way to make punishment for drug crimes
"fair" to minorities, whom Obama says are disproportionately affected by
mandatory-minimum sentences. Three-fourths of the parolees are
minorities. So the judicial system is trumped by the executive?
Who is....Henry the Navigator?
Photography was a 'wet' art when George Eastman carried the large, heavy equipment necessary for photography on his vacation to Santo Domingo in1878. But Eastman read about gelatin emulsions capable of remaining light-sensitive after drying. Working at night, in his mother's kitchen, he began to experiment with his own varieties. A natural-born tinkerer, Eastman took less than two years to invent both a dry plate formula and a machine that fabricated dry plates. The Eastman Dry Plate Company was born. In 1884, Eastman invented roll film; four years later he came up with a camera capable of taking advantage of that roll. In 1888, that camera became commercially available.
Golden oldie:
Tribes in the central Sahara, lacking in gold, salt and other precious commodities, made the slave trade their principle source of wealth, trading over four million slaves from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries AD, sometimes in caravans of over 10,000 camels. In 1444, Europeans entered the business, beginning a lucrative practice that eventually sent millions of slaves to Europe and the Americas. Under Prince Henry the Navigator, Portugal pioneered major advances in shipbuilding and navigation. The Portuguese fleet was equipped with newly designed caravels, which were highly maneuverable and ideally suited for reconnaissance along unknown coasts. In 1434, a Portuguese crew sailed around Cape Bojador and returned safely against the wind. By 1445, Portuguese mariners reached the mouth of the Senegal River which traditionally marked the boundary between the Berber and Arab tribes of the Sahara and 'the Land of the Blacks'. In 1444, a Portuguese official, Lancarote de Freitas, backed by a consortium of merchant-adventurers from the Algarve port of Lagos, mounted an expedition of six caravels to islands on the Arguin Bank with the express purpose of capturing slaves. Their arrival onshore on 8 August 1444 became a public spectacle, watched by crowds of Lagos residents. Prince Henry himself was on hand to supervise the proceedings, mounted on a horse. The captives were marched to an open space outside one of the town gates and divided into five groups. One group of forty-six of the best slaves was set aside for Henry for his share of the booty. The remainder were either retained by their new owners or put up for auction.
Root beer is a dark brown sweet beverage traditionally made using the root or bark of the tree Sassafras albidum (sassafras) or the vine Smilax ornata (sarsaparilla) as the primary flavor. Root beer may be alcoholic or non-alcoholic, and may be carbonated or non-carbonated. Most root beer has a thick foamy head when poured. Modern, commercially produced *root beer* is generally sweet, foamy, carbonated, and non-alcoholic, and is flavored using artificial sassafras.
In the newer culture of America few such signs [...of monopoly...] had been erected; from the sheer lack of organized monopolists, old monopolies could not be perpetuated. America broke down distinctions: where life was full of surprises, of unexplored wilderness, and of unpredictable problems, its tasks could not be neatly divided for legal distribution. Any man who preferred the even tenor of his way, who wished to pursue his licensed without the competition of amateurs, intruders, or vagrants, or who was unwilling to do jobs for which he had not been legally certified was better off in England.--Daniel Boorstin
By 1971, more than six hundred death courses were being offered across the United States, and five years later that number had nearly doubled. Now thousands of such classes can be found across disciplines from psychology to philosophy to medical science to sociology. Some colleges offer degree and certificate programs with death, dying, and bereavement concentrations, and increasingly, as at Kean University, undergraduates can take such classes as general electives. In 1985, two researchers from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette embarked on what would become a twenty-year study to solve this question: what kind of students take death education courses in college, and why? Sarah Brabant and Deann Kalich surveyed more than nine hundred students enrolled in Brabant's Sociology of Death and Dying course and found that nearly 24 percent wanted to deal with their own grief issues; but, most startlingly, close to half of the students surveyed had 'seriously contemplated committing suicide at some time in their lives.' Even more distressing, 10 percent of the students said they had actually tried to kill themselves at one point.
The first country to grant women the right to vote in the modern era was New Zealand in 1893.
According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "social expenditures" are expenditures that occur with the purpose of redistributing resources from one group to another, in order to benefit a lower-income or presumably disadvantaged population. These can be direct transfers or indirect. The U.S. has lower than most direct transfers but the indirect, through incentives, credits and private structures are high. Redistributive social spending in the US is indeed different from many other countries. But the overall magnitude is actually greater (both proportionally and in absolute terms) in the US than in almost all other countries measured. One can argue that the way that the wealth is redistributed through public policy in the US is "wrong" or "suboptimal." But, to argue that there is less redistribution as a result of public policy in the US than elsewhere is simply wrong.
In Washington, D.C., there has been an increase in homicides of more than 20% in neighborhoods across the city. Baltimore, a city of 600,000, is averaging more than one homicide a day—a rate higher than that of New York City, which has 13 times the people. Milwaukee’s murder rate has nearly doubled over the past year.
AAAAAnnnnnddddddd.....a portion of a report by a court Portuguese chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, in the Chronicle if Guinea on the arrival at the dock of Lagos of Lancarote de Freitas' first slaving voyage and the subsequent division of the slaves:
These
people, assembled together on that open place, were an astonishing
sight to behold ... Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in
tears as they looked at each other; some groaned very piteously, looking
towards the heavens fixedly and crying out aloud, as if they were
calling on the father of the universe to help them; others struck their
faces with their hands and threw themselves full length on the ground;
yet others lamented in the form of a chant, according to the custom of
their native land, and though the words of the language in which they
sang could not be understood by our people, the chant revealed clearly
enough the degree of their grief. To increase their anguish still more,
those who had charge of the division then arrived and began to separate
them one from another so that they formed five equal lots. This made it
necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their
husbands and brother from brother. No account was taken of friendship or
relationship, but each one ending up where chance placed him ...
"Dividing them up proved difficult:
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