MR not Ducks.

OSAR, CD ED BD Wings?

YIB, MR Ducks.

 

See the itty bitty ducks?
‘em are not ducks.
Oh yes they are. See the itty bitty wings?
Well I’ll be. ‘em are ducks.

Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience Bad Medicine Columnist
Hospitals and health clinics have pharmacies for their patients, but why not add a place to pick up vegetables and fruits, too?
After years of treating their clientele for the ravages of poor nutrition — obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke — some doctors finally are catching on to the idea that prescribing carrots instead of pharmaceutical drugs might be a better option. It’s preventive medicine 101.

The Harris County Hospital District serving Houston, Texas, and its surroundings is among just a handful of health organizations that have incorporated a full-fledged farmers market into its facilities. The reasons are many: Most of the patients coming to its clinics are poor; their neighborhoods are largely devoid of grocery stores selling healthy foods and instead are filled with fast-food outlets and small shops selling snacks; and many of those people with access to supermarkets either cannot afford fresh foods there or do not understand basic nutrition.

As a result, the poor and middle class living in these murky food swamps, where unhealthy food is cheaper and more plentiful than healthy food, suffer disproportionately from high rates of obesity and related diseases. A doctor’s advice to “eat better” is essentially useless given these circumstances.

Via: Live Science

While shooting down such a powerful missile so soon after launch is a very difficult task, our brave soldiers fulfilled this task by firing multiple, well-timed volleys with their personal weapons from nearby mountain tops. All hail North Korea, her Army, our Great Leader, and his weanie-assed God-given spoiled brat of a Grandson!!

UPDATE: Kim Jong-Un Says “We Meant to Do That!”
North Korean leaders have just announced that they had been aiming at capitalist fish and that their launch was entirely successful. Kim Jong Un noted that the launch was merely a warning shot should Godzilla decide to leave Japan alone and attack North Korea instead.

An illusion; She hides truth from the unaware
A shadow; She reveals but a hint of truth, what is real
A glimpse; She teases with a brief look at truth, the true beauty of reality
A perception; She joys in teasing the senses, creates thirst for truth
A vision; She allows a fleeting awareness of truth’s loveliness

I long for Her reality, Her true beauty, seeking what She hides.
She opens her veil to me, my untrained eyes catching a hint of the truth She covers.
Oh, for the fog to clear from my eyes, to reveal all that is reality,
To know Her secrets, to penetrate Her enigma, to savor the reality She enshrouds.

She is Maya

~Written by James Milstid

I happened upon an article a few months ago about reality. I’m not Hindu, nor to I pretend to be at all knowledgeable about the Hindu beliefs, but the article mentioned the goddess Maya and it piqued my interest and prompted me to write the poetry above

Maya is the goddess of illusion, or as some would put it, delusion. Each of us perceive reality in a different way by putting our own spin on it. Our perceptions cloud what we see and think. Hindus strive to see the true reality, without the veil of human perception. Maya is all that we “put on” the true reality. Seeking Maya’s secrets and knowing of her allow us to see through our perceptions.

We shroud true reality every day. It’s simply a part of our nature.  It’s interesting that the ancient Hindus understood this and strive to see through Maya’s veil.

I was talking recently with a new friend who I’m just getting to know. She tends to be somewhat conservative, while I lean more toward the progressive side.

When our conversation drifted to politics, somehow the dreaded word “socialism” came up. My friend seemed totally shocked when I said “All socialism isn’t bad”. She became very serious and replied “So you want to take money away from the rich and give to the poor?” I smiled and said “No, not at all. Why do you think socialism mean taking money from the rich and giving to the poor?

“Well it is, isn’t it?” was her reply.

I explained to her that I rather liked something called Democratic Socialism, just as Senator Bernie Sanders, talk show host Thom Hartman, and many other people do. Democratic Socialism consists of a democratic form of government with a mix of socialism and capitalism. I proceeded to explain to her the actual meaning terms “democracy” and “socialism”.

Democracy is a form of government in which all citizens take part. It is government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Socialism is where we all put our resources together and work for the common good of us all and not just for our own benefit. In this sense, we are sharing the wealth within society.

Of course when people hear that term, “Share the wealth” they start screaming, “OMG you want to rob from the rich and give it all to the poor!” But that is NOT what Democratic Socialism means.

To a Democratic Socialist, sharing the wealth means pooling tax money together to design social programs that benefit ALL citizens of that country, city, state, etc.

The fire and police departments are both excellent examples of Democratic Socialism in America. Rather than leaving each individual responsible for protecting their own home from fire, everyone pools their money together, through taxes, to maintain a fire and police department. It’s operated under a non-profit status, and yes, your tax dollars pay for putting out other people’s fires. It would almost seem absurd to think of some corporation profiting from putting out fires. But it’s more efficient and far less expensive to have government run fire departments funded by tax dollars.

Similarly, public education is another social program in the USA. It benefits all of us to have a taxpayer supported, publicly run education system. Unfortunately, in America, the public education system ends with high school. Most of Europe now provides low cost or free college education for their citizens. This is because their citizens understand that an educated society is a safer, more productive and more prosperous society. Living in such a society, everyone benefits from public education.

When an American graduates from college, they usually hold burdensome debt in the form of student loans that may take 10 to even 30 years to pay off. Instead of being able to start a business or invest in their career, the college graduate has to send off monthly payments for years on end.

On the other hand, a new college graduate from a European country begins without the burdensome debt that an American is forced to take on. The young man or woman is freer to start up businesses, take an economic risk on a new venture, or invest more money in the economy, instead of spending their money paying off student loans to for-profit financial institutions. Of course this does not benefit wealthy corporations, but it does greatly benefit everyone in that society.

EXAMPLE American style capitalistic program for college: If you pay (average) $20,000 annually for four years of college, that will total $80,000 + interest for student loans. The interest you would owe could easily total or exceed the $80,000 you originally borrowed, which means your degree could cost in excess of $100,000.

EXAMPLE European style social program for college: Your college classes are paid for through government taxes. When you graduate from that college and begin your career, you also start paying an extra tax for fellow citizens to attend college.

Question – You might be thinking how is that fair? If you’re no longer attending college, why would you want to help everyone else pay for their college degree?

Answer – Every working citizen pays a tax that is equivalent to say, $20 monthly. If you work for 40 years and then retire, you will have paid $9,600 into the Social college program. So you could say that your degree ends up costing only $9,600. When everyone pools their money together and the program is non-profit, the price goes down tremendously. This allows you to keep more of your hard earned cash!

Health care is another example: If your employer does not provide health insurance, you must purchase a policy independently. The cost will be thousands of dollars annually, in addition to deductible and co-pays.

In Holland, an individual will pay around $35 monthly, period. Everyone pays into the system and this helps reduce the price for everyone, so they get to keep more of their hard earned cash.

In the United States we are told and frequently reminded that anything run by the government is bad and that everything should be operated by for-profit companies. Of course, with for-profit entities the cost to the consumer is much higher because they have corporate executives who expect compensation packages of tens of millions of dollars and shareholders who expect to be paid dividends, and so on.

This (and more) pushes up the price of everything, with much more money going to the already rich and powerful, which in turn, leaves the middle class with less spending money and creates greater class separation.

This economic framework makes it much more difficult for average Joes to ”lift themselves up by their bootstraps” and raise themselves to a higher economic standing.

So next time you hear the word “socialism” and “spreading the wealth” in the same breath, understand that this is a serious misconception.

Social programs require tax money and your taxes may be higher. But as you can see everyone benefits because other costs go down and, in the long run, you get to keep more of your hard earned cash!

Democratic Socialism does NOT mean taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It works to benefit everyone so the rich can no longer take advantage of the poor and middle class.

 
Via: Addicting Info

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t more use words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

By KITTY BURNS FLOREY

The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y. [1] His book, published in 1847, was called “A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.” His goal was to simplify the teaching of English grammar. It was more than 300 pages long, contained information on such things as unipersonal verbs and “rhetorico-grammatical figures,” and provided a long section on Prosody, which he defined as “that part of the Science of Language which treats of utterance.”

It may have been unwieldy, but this formidable tome was also quite revolutionary: out of the general murk of its tiny print, incessant repetitions, maze of definitions and uplifting examples emerged the profoundly innovative, dazzlingly ingenious and rather whimsical idea of analyzing sentences by turning them into pictures. “A Practical Grammar” was a reaction against the way the subject had been taught in America since it began to be taught at all.

Before diagramming, grammar was taught by means of its drabber older sibling, parsing. Parsing is a venerable method for teaching inflected languages like Latin; the word itself is schoolboy slang derived from pars orationis, Latin for “a part of speech.” Sometime in the 18th century, teachers began to realize that practical skills were more useful to young people than classical languages, and that the ability to speak English didn’t necessarily mean that a student spoke it well, wrote it correctly or understood its structure. To teach it, they borrowed the concept of parsing from the classical tradition in which they themselves had been trained.

Put simply, parsing requires the student to break down a sentence into its component words, classifying each in terms of its part of speech, as well as its tense, number and function in the sentence.

Let’s say a teacher assigns a student the sentence “Virtue secures happiness”—a likely specimen in 1847. The youth stands up, spouts something like, “Virtue is a singular noun and the subject of the sentence; secures is a regular verb, indicative mode, active voice, present tense, third person singular; happiness is a singular noun, object of the sentence,” and sits back down with a sigh of relief.

Parsing was almost insufferably tedious. It was also very difficult. And both these deficiencies were intensified by the way grammar was taught. Typically, students were first made to memorize definitions and rules, and only when they could recite them accurately by rote were they expected to apply them to sentences.

Stephen Watkins Clark was the principal at the Cortland Academy, where he also taught English. Like many schoolmasters, he was frustrated trying to beat proper grammar into the heads of his students by means of parsing. Mr. Clark was not the first reformer to identify its problems, but he was the first to solve them by arranging the parts of a sentence into diagrams. He didn’t consider the idea particularly radical. As he notes in his preface, making the abstract rules of language into pictures was like using maps in a geography book or graphs in geometry.

But there are differences. Maps and geometric diagrams are ancient; both go back at least to the Greeks. Geometry, of course, can’t be taught without recourse to geometric figures, and schoolchildren can draw a map of their classroom or their front yard without much instruction from the teacher. But making a picture of the sentences we read and speak every day was a concept with no real history behind it: it was invented not by an ancient on the other side of the world but in Mr. Clark’s study, in his classrooms, on long meditative walks around the town of Homer.

And, radical or not, it apparently caught on at the academy. His fellow teachers urged him to take it public, and he wrote the book.

Mr. Clark’s early diagrams were basically balloons, though they might be mistaken for a fleet of airships or a family of hot-dog rolls:

Mr. Clark provided this diagram as a generic template for his students, with numbers assigned to different elements in the sentence.

Applied to the analysis of an actual simple sentence — 1 being the subject (noun), 2 the predicate (verb) and 3 the object — the balloons could be pleasantly straightforward:

From “A Practical Grammar” - “Virtue secures happiness.”

or unpleasantly convoluted:

From “A Practical Grammar” - “Our national resources are developed by an earnest culture of the arts of peace.”

Mr. Clark’s balloons weren’t that easy to draw. Do you make the circle and then write the word inside it, or write the word and then draw a balloon around it? Either way, try doing it on a slate with a piece of chalk, and the noble sentiments Clark prefers for his models look like cartoonish nonsense:

“Writing letters constitutes my most agreeable employment.”

“A Practical Grammar” went into several editions (my own copy, from 1860, is the 15th), but in the history of diagramming, the reign of the balloons was relatively brief. In 1877 two teachers — Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg — left them deflated on the classroom floor. Their book “Higher Lessons in English” finessed Mr. Clark’s bulky blobs into a system of lines and angles that were a snap to draw and took up less space.

“Writing letters constitutes my most agreeable employment.”

The book was enormously popular, and Mr. Reed and Mr. Brainerd’s diagramming swept through American schools like a refreshing breeze. By the latter half of the 19th century, chalkboards had become increasingly common in classrooms; for students, the impact of watching a sentence take shape on that large surface as a comprehensible, often elegant, and sometimes downright ingenious drawing must have been significant. It’s hard to believe anyone but the most dedicated pedant could have actually enjoyed parsing, but plenty of students — including me — loved diagramming.

A century and a half later, diagramming sentences is even more out of date than writing lessons on a piece of slate. When the book I wrote about it was published in 2006, a couple of hundred people sent me e-mails. One writer accused me of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome because I wrote so benignly about the nun who brainwashed me into thinking diagramming was fun. Another asked me for a date. Two objected to my political attitudes, as they deduced them between the lines. A dozen or so either faulted some of the diagrams or challenged me with a particularly tricky sentence.

The rest of the responses were eloquent, nostalgic and not unpersuasive laments for the lost art of diagramming, from people who blame everything from the death of whom to the end of civilization as we know it for its demise.

The question remains: Does diagramming sentences teach us anything except how to diagram sentences?

That particular can of worms is a subject for another post.

[1] The word “ago” is problematic in the diagram. There are other possibilities, but I have treated “years ago” as a phrasal adverb modified by “165.”

Kitty Burns Florey is the author of several works of nonfiction, including “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Curious History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences” and fiction, most recently a historical novel, “The Writing Master.”