For your reading pleasure, I present this classic from 1970. A good laugh as an antidote to the gloom and doom, and a clarion call against the increase of Obfuscese into the political and economic lexicon
Have you noticed the new look in the English language: Everybody's using nouns as adjectives. Or to put that in the current argot, there's a modifier noun proliferation. More exactly, since the matter is getting out of hand, a modifier noun proliferation increase. In fact, every time I open a magazine these days or listen to the radio, I am struck by the modifier noun proliferation increase phenomenon. So, I decided to write--you guessed it--a modifier noun proliferation increase phenomenon article.
Frankly, I'm worried. Of course, phrases like "deer crossing" and "state university" have always been around where the first noun helps pin down what particular sort of thing that second noun might be. And very helpful and necessary those concrete phrases are. But I think we're on to something new and not too desirable when "students" become, for no good reason I can see, "student population" and "training" degenerates into "training program," and "investment" is "investment spending," and everything from highways to computers is being labeled "highway systems" and "computer systems" (which naturally means "computer systems analysts" and "highways systems engineers" and so on). What's happening is that nouns are being strung end to end in mindless litanies and the beauty that was Samuel Johnson and the brevity that was Oscar Wilde have gone down the drain. My theory is that sweet simplicity is what good prose is all about. I guess by now you know this is modifier noun proliferation increase phenomenon article protest. and there's more. Enjoy!
Posted by: Mr. Bill ||
01/12/2011 1:28 Comments ||
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#2
What's happening is that nouns are being strung end to end in mindless litanies
OMG! We're turning into Germans! Pretty soon, we will be, habitually and without thought, at the end of a sentence, modal or otherwise, a verb putting.
#4
Since the piece was written in 1970, I can only assume the Modifier Noun Proliferation problem has either worked itself out or become worse but to little effect. We've had double-speak for a long time.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
01/12/2011 16:20 Comments ||
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#7
Fuhrer schurr.
About 6 six years of it in junior and high school. Fur nichts. Always got lost by the end on the sentence, which never seemed to be the end, but just where the sentence stopt.
Posted by: Herman Clinens9220 ||
01/12/2011 17:59 Comments ||
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[Asharq al-Aswat] Usually, it is the powerless and the defeated that tend to interpret things as a 'conspiracy', and place blame on others. This is the case with those who seek to brand the secession of Southern Sudan as a foreign plot. The majority of southerners want independence, as we will see from the results of the referendum, but is it conceivable that all these people are involved in a conspiracy? Some of us do not realise that the southerners' struggle to gain independence was not a plot hatched overnight, but rather an explicit demand, dating back 50 years. Is it conceivable that a foreign conspiracy would last for 50 years, to achieve this one demand? Ultimately, branding the secession of Southern Sudan as a conspiracy is an expression of ignorance, and an insult to the nation as a whole.
There are two reasons behind the Arab conviction that the southerners' desire for separation is merely a foreign plot: Firstly, Arabs do not know the history of the cause, and have only recently heard of the southerners' struggle to gain independence for their own territory. As a result, they believe that it is an emergency situation, which leads them to have doubts over the timing of events. Secondly, as Arabs, we should not forget that the majority of us lived our lives chanting songs of unity and Arabism, and thus the thought of someone wishing to dismantle any Arab country is incomprehensible. As a result, the secession of Southern Sudan is deemed to be a suspicious foreign project.
Certainly, there are [foreign powers] who sympathise with the southern separatists, particularly in the West, and the South receives support from them. However, The infamous However... the southerners' desire for independence, and to be free from Khartoum's rule, is both sincere and longstanding. In fact, the South has so far paid an exorbitant price, represented in the blood of hundreds of thousands of victims.
Or 2 million, as the other article says. But six of one, half a dozen the other, really.
The Sudanese regime tried to go against the will of the South, and impose its rule by force, but it failed completely. Then the Naivasha Agreement was signed six years ago, whereby each party agreed upon the principle of a referendum, granting the southerners the right to self-determination, after the north had failed to impose unity by force.
The southerners' desire for secession should not prompt us to brand them as traitors, and similarly, the foreign support offered to them does not indicate a conspiracy. Rather what matters here is their true conviction and desire. We should also not forget the fact that South Sudan, unfortunately, as it gains independence, will become one of the world's poorest and most underdeveloped countries. The Sudanese regime could have rectified this situation, even as late as in the past 10 years, when oil became a significant source of national income, but it failed to do so. One cannot criticize the southerners for utilizing the sympathy and support of the West, when Arabs abandoned them for long decades. Had there been institutions in the Arab world acting with a noble, independent conscience, we would have not remained silent about what went on in Sudan, and the southerners would not have needed to reach out to foreigners for help. Arabs fought long and hard to gain independence from Turkish rule, and the case with Sudan is not much different.
What is required now is to approach the Southern Sudanese case with humanity, sympathy, and understanding. After a long struggle, it is now the right of southern citizens to establish their own country, as they want it. It is our moral duty to offer an apology for how they were treated in the past, rather than branding them as conspirators or traitors. This way, we can create a positive relationship with this new nation in the future.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/12/2011 00:00 ||
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[Asharq al-Aswat] Some people continue to excel at denying the existence of problems, such as that some of our own have become affiliated with Al Qaeda and embroiled in terrorist crimes. However at the same time as this, Riyadh has publicly announced, during a presser, that it is pursuing a list of 47 most wanted terrorist suspects who are believed to be residing abroad, describing these Saudi nationals as being "very dangerous." Soddy Arabia provided this information to "all countries via Interpol, so that they can be fully aware of the danger posed by these individuals" according to the Soddy Arabian Interior Ministry front man.
The Interior Ministry announcement of this list of 47 most wanted terrorist suspects confirms that Saudi security has reached a stage of extreme development with regards to its professionalism and confidence. This is also evidence that the Saudi security apparatus have reached an important conviction, which is that transparency and clarity are among the best tools in confronting Al Qaeda; this is because the battle is one of public opinion, an internal conflict, rather than foreign propaganda.
There has not been a lot of national or international interest in news about terrorist plots being thwarted, or terrorist networks being dismantled, particularly when this news lack sufficient details such as names and pictures, and in fact such news is instead viewed as being nothing more than attempted propaganda. The best example here is when Iran recently announced that it had jugged Al Qaeda affiliates in its country and nobody paid any attention to this news, particularly as this news was revealed after information was leaked indicating that Tehran had released a number of Al Qaeda commanders who were residing there. It is [also] customary for states to warn one another and share information with regards to combating terrorism, for Al Qaeda does not operate without external coordination, and a security bigshot informed me that "our intelligence officers say that Al Qaeda does not operate without external communication."
While it is true that in some cases the security agencies must withhold certain information [from the public] to protect an investigation or operation, however this is something that should not last for too long, especially as Al Qaeda is proficient at media propaganda. This [media propaganda] is impossible to address except through transparency, which is something that the Saudi security apparatus realized very early on. Therefore, the Soddy Arabian announcement of this list of 47 most wanted terrorist suspects, and Riyadh warning all other countries of the danger posed by these individuals, is evidence of the professionalism of Soddy Arabian security, and proof of their leaderships' dependability. The Saudi security apparatus has a long reach today in combating terrorism, and we can recall that Saudi security was responsible for uncovering the Yemeni Parcel Bomb plot, which targeted cargo planes, warning some European countries of this, including La Belle France, as subsequently revealed by officials there.
When Soddy Arabia issues a public warning against some of its own sons, it is informing its citizens of the reality of the situation, and proving its responsibility and dependability to the world on the lam, doing its duty and warning everybody in a very clear manner. This also prevents those who want to falsely implicate Soddy Arabia with every terrorist act for no other reason than to harm Soddy Arabia's good name, particularly as Al Qaeda has utilized all nationalities in its wicked battle. Here we must also stress that the battle against Al Qaeda in Soddy Arabia is not merely a security battle, but also a battle to dismantle the seeds of this ideology; it is an ideological battle on all levels, and there must be a revision of many things which feed Soddy Arabian culture.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/12/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
Either they are satisfied how the stealth jihad is going, or they know somethings up and CYA.
#1
FTA: "Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett on Wednesday said he made the interim decision to reject the controversial $1.8 billion plan to dam the Mary River because evidence showed it could kill off endangered species."
IOW; We don't need no flood control, we got Global Warming!
Just because they had similar flooding in 1974 and non-econuts had planned for flood control but the Warmists now run the show?
#2
Treasury Secretary Geithner says in letter to Congress US may go into default..now. Just putting off the issue to another day...kicking the can down the road...
Does he have a viable solution that doesn't eventually result in default?
#6
Arthur laffer's take on the debt ceiling (should be called target) in today's WSG. A Price for Raising the Debt Ceiling Republicans should attach provisions repealing the worst aspects of ObamaCare and financial reform to spending that the president absolutely needs
#8
IIRC GLEN BECK SHOW [Fox] > I believe His Glenn-ness argued that, due to POTUS FDR's Depression-era Socialist economic polices + for WW2 per se, YEAR 1944 > DESPITE CLEAR TREND TOWARDS ABSOLUTE US-ALLIED MIL VICTORY AGZ NAZI GERMANY + JAPAN, THE US DEBT-TO-GDP ECON RATIO FOR 1946 WAS CALCULATED TO RISE TO BE AS HIGH AS 146% OF GDP, IFF NOT HIGHER, WHICH NEARLY ALL US GOVT + ACADEMIC PERTS PERTS ARGUED WOULD INEVITABLY INDUCE A US NATIONAL COLLAPSE ON OR BEFORE 1950 UNLESS US GOVT SPENDING + DEFICITS WERE BROUGHT IMMEDIATELY UNDER CONTROL.
IOW, the US would had militarily won WW2 but collapsed in utter national econ ruin on or before 1950. a mere five years after said victory.
Which in turn is why His Glenn-ness argued ALL AMERICA SHOULD THANK GOD THAT THE US GOP-RIGHT WON THE MORE IMPORTANT US CONGRESS ELEX IN 1944, NOT THE PRESIDENCY AGZ POTUS FDR [or even POTUS Truman?].
Slowly but surely the GOP-Right won WW2 in 1945 while simultan beginning THE DOWNSIZING, DEMOBILIZATION + PRIVATIZATION, OF POTUS ROOSEVELT'S MASSIVELY OVER-SIZED 1930's-1945 US GOVT, which resulted in the Boom-N-Prosperity Years that was the EISENHOWER ERA = 1950's.
#9
GLEN BECK > POTUS BAMMER'S OBAMACARE + ECON STIMULUS WILL ONLY INCREASE THE SIZE + LIABILITIES OF THE FED, NOT REDUCE THEM, hence increases the risk/danger of per se US NATIONAL COLLAPSE???
Of all the grotesquely irresponsible claims made about a madmans shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, this must rank among the very worst:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton labeled Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner an extremist while taping a town hall segment for a talk show in Abu Dhabi today.
Her remarks came during her trip through the Middle East, where she is working to build relationships with leaders in the region. Indeed, Clinton seemed to use the word to encourage collaboration among Arab countries and the U.S. to eradicate extremism everywhere.
Look, we have extremists in my country, Clinton said. A wonderful, incredibly brave young woman Congress member, Congresswoman Giffords was just shot in our country. We have the same kinds of problems. So rather than standing off from each other, we should work to try to prevent the extremists anywhere from being able to commit violence.
Its clear that Clinton was at one level equating a lone and universally reviled madman, acting from some crazed concern for bad grammar and a third currency, with organised international terrorist groups drawing inspiration from a popular jihadist ideology. She also drew a moral equivalence not just between the US and the Middle East, but, between the US Right wing and terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.
What she has done is not just tell an untruth about Loughner, making an insane loner of (if anything) the Left seem a tool of the Right.
She has not just told an untruth about the US by implying it a faces in Loughner a challenge analogous to what Muslim nations face with jihadist movements.
She has not just smeared the US Right by implying Loughner has some popular mandate for what hes done as jihadist have for their actions.
Worse, she has further trashed the USs moral stature in the fight against jihadism, apparently just to politicise a random and despicable tragedy.
And Democrats dare moralise about toxic rhetoric and the consequences of rash political speech.
#3
Loughner sounds more like a left wing loon than someone on the right. The left would love to make Loughner a poster boy for being a "right wing extremist boogeyman." I tell you these folks on left are either all paranoid or seeking to create political turmoil out of tragedy.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
01/12/2011 19:31 Comments ||
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#7
Doncha just love the way the left is "toning down the rhetoric"? Oh wait!"Toning down the rhetoric" means you folks on the right STFU and let us lefties do all the talking.
Mira Sethi (son of a liberal Pak journalist) is pretty honest. His opinion piece is entitled, "It's shocking how many of my countrymen celebrated the murder of a secular politician.". He notes the Pak lawyers who support the murderer.
Two days ago, Fareed Zakaria opined in the WaPo and almost admitted that Pakland is dominated by Islamic Terrorists but then went squishy and said that the problem was Waristan
Carlotta Gal in the NYTimes said it was a young/old divide with the young being Islamic Terror friendly and being so because of their university education. But this is hidden underneath a more soothing headline that says, "Pakistan Faces a Divide of Age on Muslim Law"
On the other hand, no one in the Obama Admin has said anything even remotely realistic on Islam and Pakistan ever (and neither did anyone in the Bush Admin that I can remember).
Posted by: lord garth ||
01/12/2011 00:00 ||
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[6 views]
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#1
Uh, uh, RADICAL ISLAM = MILTERRS IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR "TEAMSTERS" + "UAW"???
If the circumstances were not so hideous, the successful attempt by Pakistan to persuade the UN Human Rights Council to condemn blasphemers who defame religion would have been a black comedy. Every word its diplomats used in 2009 to protest against Islamophobia turned out to be a precise description of the prejudices the Pakistani state was appeasing at home.
They told the UN it must approve a universal blasphemy law to protect religious minorities from "intolerance, discrimination and acts of violence". If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan's religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.
Taseer did not go so far as to assert that the Qur'an, like the Talmud and the Bible, was the work of men, not God, or criticise the teachings of Muhammad. His crime was to stand up against the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, a subject that the media of the supposedly warmongering, culturally imperialist "crusaders" of the west barely mention for fear of causing "offence". He denounced the treatment of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five. She had argued with Muslim women who refused to drink water she had carried because she was impure and therefore the drink she carried was contaminated. They told the local cleric she had taken Muhammad's name in vain.
That was enough for the judge to order that she be hanged by the neck until she was dead. Not much respect shown for her minority rights, then. Nor for the rights of Salmaan Taseer, whose last sight on earth was of Constable Mumtaz Qadri firing 26 bullets into his body, while other members of his bodyguard stood by and let him do it.
"Defamation of religion is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence," thundered the Pakistani officials to the UN in 2009.
Mutatis mutandis, Pakistan has become a country so scared of the inciters of religious violence that liberals stay silent for fear the assassins will come for them; a land so benighted Jamaat-e-Islami and other mobster theocrats can get away with blaming Taseer for his own death and treating his killer as a hero for enforcing the will of god.
"RIP Pakistan," sighed Salman Rushdie after Taseer's murder. "What should one say of a country in which an assassin is showered with rose petals while a decent man lies dead?" Despair is a reasonable response to a failed state. When Islamists have penetrated the bodyguards of leading politicians and threaten one day to capture nuclear weapons, it may be the only response. But the relativism which asserts that human rights are all well and good for us but not for the peoples of the poor world is no response at all.
Pakistan is not a land apart, living in another century. Notice how it was able to dress up its assault on freedom of speech in the modern language of human rights. Notice, too, that the UN Human Rights Council approved its duplicity. Admittedly, the council is not so much a black comedy as a sick joke, whose members include China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and many another human rights abuser. Nevertheless, it remains astonishing that a United Nations the gullible still see as a moral arbiter endorsed blasphemy.
It is the most pernicious of attacks on free speech because defendants can never know the nature of their offence. Who is meant to be their victim? Are they meant to have injured the feelings of believers, whose faith is so weak mockery and doubt can threaten it? Perhaps they stand accused of assaulting whatever god or gods the faithful follow. In which case, are the deities in question so feeble and thin-skinned they demand that criticism be punished with human sacrifices?
In November, Freedom House published a report on the abuses of power that follow the endorsement of such a nebulous offence. It documented how Islamic states and religious vigilantes use blasphemy laws to persecute Christians, Ahmadis and Muslims who believe that Muhammad was not the final prophet and, of course, ex-Muslims such as Rushdie who decide to change or renounce their faith, as free men and women should be entitled to do.
In Iran and Egypt, blasphemy is used to prosecute political opponents of the regime. And everywhere the malicious call on it to pursue petty vendettas, as poor Mrs Bibi learned to her cost. Blasphemy is not a protector of religious freedom, as the UN maintains, but its mortal enemy. If free speech is absent, citizens are not free to argue for and practise their beliefs without the fear of state or clerical intimidation.
Let us forsake pretence and acknowledge that that same fear has caught our tongues. We, too, are scared. But instead of acknowledging our fear we dress up our refusal to speak plainly in woozy therapeutic language. We talk of our "respect" for diversity and our determination to protect "the other" and fail to notice that we are abandoning "the other's" victims and aiding and abetting their enemies. Islamists threatened Ahmadis in Surrey, but the story passed virtually without comment in the British press.
#1
The way to deal with this irrationality is with the Monty Python method, as seen in Life of Brian. That is, to accuse the accusers.
In this case, pick those who are the loudest accusers, and start spreading rumors that they are doing things much, much worse, like they are secretly worshiping Satan, consulting with djinn, are secret Jews, etc., and that some of their followers are in on it.
The great part of blasphemy laws is that they require no evidence, and there is no way to prove that someone didn't do it. And that sword can cut both ways. Who better to be a witch than a witchfinder?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
