“[T]he decision that just came down from the federal judgment in Virginia — that the federal health care mandate is unconstitutional — is an example that decades of Republicans packing the federal judiciary with activist judges has finally paid off.”
I think Bush v Gore removed all doubt about the ethics of some “conservative” judges. And made the Radical Wrong’s braying against activist judges clearly hypocritical.
I think.
I find it impossible to believe that anything human beings can communicate in one language can’t be communicated in another, except when widely divergent cultures meet for the very first time (ie, two languages that overlap the same culture can describe the same things). What this study actually “proves” is that translation is imperfect and suspect – it really says nothing about metaphor.
Sign languages help us understand the nature of metaphors
But quite often, when trying to translate metaphors from a spoken language to a sign language, we find that it is impossible to use the same words.
Sign languages help us understand the nature of metaphors
Call me a fussy literalist, but I think by definition it is impossible to use “the same words” in translation. Equivalent words, maybe, although the very flaw in the concept of translation is that words aren’t really equivalent.
The single example cited in the study, that “time flies” *cannot* be translated literally into (Israeli) sign language, is maddening. Who is to say I don’t imagine wings when I hear the expression. In fact, if analog clocks have hands, the sign for flying might be a richer metaphor than the spoke word. Now, if I say I am throwing up my hands at this example, that might be tricky to translate.
Thomas Jefferson on Wealth Inequality – Grasping Reality with Both Hands
Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise.
Thomas Jefferson on Wealth Inequality – Grasping Reality with Both Hands
Geometrical progression! The roots of the tree of liberty must be watered with the excess wealth of the rich.
It might be worth holding your nose and trying to keep down your lunch to read Krauthammer’s entire column. Makes Obama look brilliant. (And we know Obama is damn smart.)
Charles Krauthammer – Swindle of the year
Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years – which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?
Very interesting take by Andrew Sullivan. Did the GOP just legitimized Obama’s presidency?
How Do You Compromise With Stalin? – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
By simply rallying behind Obama against his liberal base, the GOP leadership has deeply damaged the grass-roots campaign to make Obama seem like a remote alien, who has taken over America, rather than a president who is trying to govern it. That’s one big concession that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, and it will benefit Obama almost as much as the massive second stimulus the GOP just gave him for re-election.
How Do You Compromise With Stalin? – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan