The way grammar lessons should be taught!

On his 74th birthday, a man in Colorado received a gift certificate from his wife. The certificate paid for a visit to a medicine man living on a nearby reservation. The medicine man was rumored to have a wonderful cure for erectile dysfunction.

After being persuaded, he drove to the reservation, handed his ticket to the medicine man, all the time wondering what was to come.

The old medicine man slowly and methodically produced a potion, which he handed to the 74 year-old. Gripping his shoulder, the medicine man warned, "This is powerful medicine and it must be respected. You take only a teaspoonful and then say '1-2-3'. When you do that, you will become manlier than you have ever been in your life and you will be able to perform as long as you want."

"0kay." The old man was encouraged. As he walked away, he turned and asked, "How do I stop the medicine from working?"

"Your partner must say '1-2-3-4,'" the medicine man responded.

"When she does that, the medicine will not work again until the next full moon."

The old man was very eager to see if the potion worked, so he went home, showered, shaved, took a spoonful of the medicine, and then invited his wife to join him in the bedroom.

When she came in, he took off his clothes and said, "1-2-3!" Immediately, he was the manliest of men.

His wife was excited and began throwing off her clothes. And then she asked, "What was the 1-2-3 for?"

And that, boys and girls, is why we should never end our sentences with a preposition – or one will end up with a dangling participle!

Freegans

I came across the Freegan's site today. These people definitely deserve a spot on my sidebar!

The Health Insurance Mafia Strikes Again

Rape is evidently a "pre-existing condition." Why anyone would want to keep health insurance companies running is beyond me. I'm all for a government-run plan.

Howard Zinn on the Obama Peace Prize

I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations – that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he had bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War, surely among stupid and deadly wars at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains on that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticised the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final peace agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war, with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, is given a peace prize!

People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Nobel peace committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history

Obama's Speech to Kids

The Martian Chronicles has a good review of Obama's speech to students titled If This is Socialist Progaganda, Please Send More.

Swissification of the U.S.

Krugman has a simple classification of healthcare systems as the British, French/Canadian, or Swiss options and says that the Obama plan essential reprsents the latter. I agree with Krugman that this is probably the worst of the three but much better than our current system.