Friday, November 15, 2019

Justice in William Shakespeares King Lear Essay -- William Shakespear

Justice in William Shakespeare's King Lear The question of the origin of true, virtuous, and impartial justice has plagued mankind over the millennia and continues to do so today. In Shakespeare’s King Lear two potential forms of justice predominate: human examination through trial and divine supernatural recourse. Both systems emerge fundamentally flawed in practice, however, and by the end of the play a world of unjust chaos reigns supreme. Over the course of three â€Å"trials,† Lear’s daughters competing for his love, the blinding of Gloucester by Cornwall and Regan, and Lear’s imagined cross-examination of Goneril and Regan, Shakespeare strikingly illustrates the concept that human justice is essentially blind and the maintenance of faith in the divine intervention of the goods is hopeless naà ¯vetà ©. Man’s justice is profoundly corrupted by the imperfection of human nature and shrouded by the inherent vices of avarice and jealousy. The theme of flawed justice arising from defective character is demonstrated from the very outset of the play with King Lear’s demand that his three daughters compete for his love and estate. Certainly, any father that actively encourages sibling rivalry and so clearly plays favorites, as shown when he laments over Cordelia â€Å"I loved her most and thought to set my rest / on her kind nursery† (1.1.137-38), has something drastically wrong with his mindset. Thus, Shakespeare utilizes the establishment of Lear’s flawed character to reveal the detrimental effect imperfect human nature can have on the issuing of justice. Shakespeare does so in including the senseless decree that Lear rashly issues: the virtuous Cordelia and loyal Kent shall be banished, and Lear’s kingdom should be ... ...Lear states, â€Å"Through tattered clothes small vices do appear. / Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, / And the strong lance of justice heartless breaks† (4.6.180-83). Thus, only through madness is Lear able to see the rampant abundance of injustice present in the world caused by the abuse and negligence of the wealthy in power. The errant â€Å"trials† of King Lear all serve to illustrate the concept that human justice is inherently tainted by the natural human tendency to abuse power for selfish means. Furthermore, characters such as Gloucester who maintain a persistent faith in the divine justice of the gods are seen as fools in a world where the innocent are senselessly taken advantage of and ultimately killed. Thus, it seems that until the essential vices of human nature are eliminated, justice will remain shrouded, and evil will reign.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Medieval European Sports

Sports in the Middle Ages The sports of medieval Europe were less-well-organized than those of classical antiquity. Fairs and seasonal festivals were occasions for men to lift stones or sacks of grain and for women to run smock races (for a smock, not in one). The favourite sport of the peasantry was folk football, a wild no-holds-barred unbounded game that pitted married men against bachelors or one village against another.The violence of the game, which survived in Britain and in France until the late 19th century, prompted Renaissance humanists, such as Sir Thomas Elyot, to condemn it as more likely to maim than to benefit the participants. The nascent bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance amused itself with archery matches, some of which were arranged months in advance and staged with considerable fanfare. When town met town in a challenge of skill, the companies of crossbowmen and longbowmen marched behind the symbols of St.George, St. Sebastian, and other patrons o f the sport. It was not unusual for contests in running, jumping, cudgeling, and wrestling to be offered for the lower classes who attended the match as spectators. Grand feasts were part of the program, and drunkenness commonly added to the revelry. In Germanic areas a Pritschenkoenig was supposed to simultaneously keep order and entertain the crowd with clever verses. The burghers of medieval towns were welcome to watch the aristocracy at play, but they were not allowed to participate in tournaments or even, in most parts of Europe, to compete in imitative tournaments of their own. Tournaments were the jealously guarded prerogative of the medieval knight and were, along with hunting and hawking, his favourite pastime. At the tilt, in which mounted knights with lances tried to unhorse one another, the knight was practicing the art of war, his raison d’etre.He displayed his prowess before lords, ladies, and commoners and profited not only from valuable prizes but also from ra nsoms exacted from the losers. Between the 12th and the 16th century, the dangerously wild free-for-all of the early tournament evolved into dramatic presentations of courtly life in which elaborate pageantry and allegorical display quite overshadowed the frequently inept jousting. Some danger remained even amid the display. At one of the last great tournaments, in 1559, Henry II of France was mortally wounded by a splintered lance.Peasant women participated freely in the ball games and footraces of medieval times, and aristocratic ladies hunted and kept falcons, but middle-class women contented themselves with spectatorship. Even so, they were more active than their contemporaries in Heian Japan during the 8th to 12th centuries. Encumbered by many-layered robes and sequestered in their homes, the Japanese ladies were unable to do more than peep from behind their screens at the courtiers’ mounted archery contests

Sunday, November 10, 2019

McDonald’s Foods

McDonald's is the largest and best-known global foodservice retailer with more than 26,000 restaurants in 119 countries. Their outstanding brand recognition, experienced management, site development expertise, advanced operational systems and unique global infrastructure position them to capitalize on global opportunities. There are 1. 5 million people works at McDonald's in 119 countries around the world. Are they creating employment? Yes they are. They create employment, but still workers in the fast food industry are paid low wages. McDonald's do not pay overtime rates even when employees work very long hours. Pressure to keep profits high and wage costs low results in understaffing, so staff has to work harder and faster. As a consequence, accidents (particularly burns) are common. Since they are pressured to keep their profits high, McDonald†s tends to receive plenty of money or even profit, plenty enough to be the indicator of economic growth. In small countries, when a McDonald†s franchised store opens the economic growth in those countries tends to increase. McDonald's promote their food as ‘nutritious', but the reality is that it is junk food – high in fat, sugar and salt, and low in fibre and vitamins. A diet of this type is linked with a greater risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other diseases. Their food also contains many chemical additives, some of which may cause ill health, and hyperactivity in children. Many products sold at McDonald's restaurants are high in fat and cholesterol, and low in fiber and certain vitamins. For example, according to Bowes and Church's Food Values of Portions Commonly Used (1989) by J. A. T. Pennington, 55% of the calories in a Big Mac come from fat, along with 83 mg of cholesterol. For a cheeseburger, fat content is 45%, with 41 mg of cholesterol. French fries are 47%, while a hamburger is 39% fat and holds 29 mg of cholesterol. Many other products sold by the restaurant chain are similarly high in fat and cholesterol. For comparison, beans are only 4% fat. Rice is 1-5% fat, depending on the variety. A potato is less than 1% fat. As a result of their high content of fat and cholesterol, McDonald's products contribute to heart disease, certain forms of cancer, and other diseases. The links between high-fat diets and certain diseases are established beyond any reasonable doubt. (Dr. Neal Barnard, US Physicians Cttee. – DIET & DISEASE) Even though McDonalds has some sort of negative impacts to their customer, but McDonalds has done great things to the community. For example the Calgary Ronald McDonald House. They have helped by accommodating more than 11,000 families from all over the world. Ronald McDonald House is a â€Å"home away from home† for out-of-town families with children, who have not reached their eighteenth birthday, who are receiving treatment at a Calgary medical facility. Space permitting, mothers who require medical treatment because of high-risk pregnancies may also use RMH accommodations. As the conclusion, McDonalds may have some negative impact on the community, but on the other hand McDonalds helps the community to become a better community.

Friday, November 8, 2019

Definition and Examples of Replacives in English

Definition and Examples of Replacives in English In  English grammar and morphology, a replacive is a word element that substitutes for another element within a stem. For example, the e in men (the plural form of man) is considered a replacive element. Replacives are  considered to be allomorphs, notes  Philip Orazio Tartaglia. More specifically, the replacive involved in going from goose to geese is an allomorph of the plural morpheme. Thus, we see that boys, cats, roses, oxen, sheep, and geese, all contain the plural morpheme though each contains a  different allomorph of the plural morpheme (Problems in the Construction of a Theory of Natural Language).   Examples and Observations The term [replacive] is particularly used in the label replacive morph or replacive morpheme to enable irregular forms such as men from man and sang or sung from sing to be described in morphemic terms, despite falling outside the straightforward rules for forming noun plurals or past verb forms by the addition of inflections.(Sylvia Chalker and Edmund Weiner, Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar. Oxford University Press, 1994)Tooth and Teeth: One Word or Two?-  [A] synthetic, tooth-colored material the consistency of dough is chemically fused onto stained, chipped, widely spaced, or misshapen teeth and molded into whatever new shape is desired.(Justine De Lacy, The New Skin of Your Teeth. New York, August 3, 1981)- Consider then the sentences This tooth needs attention and These teeth need attention. Are tooth and teeth instances of the same word or of different words? In one sense they are clearly different: they differ in pronunciation, spelling, meaning and in their grammatical behaviour. In another sense, however, they are manifestations of a single element, and indeed they are traditionally said to be forms of the same word. We thus have two distinct concepts here, the second more abstract than the first: I will use word in the less abstract sense and introduce the term lexeme for the more abstract one. Thus I will say that tooth and teeth are different words, but forms of the same lexeme. . . .More precisely, we will say that tooth and teeth are different inflectional forms of tooth, and will speak of singular and plural here as inflectional properties. Similarly with verbs: sang and sung, for example, are respectively the past tense and the past participle forms of the lexeme sing.(Rodney Huddleston, English Grammar: An Outline. Cambridge University Press, 1988) Verbs Derived From Nouns[W]e treat noun plurals in English such as men, feet, mice, teeth as occurring with replacives (i.e. replacements which are morphemic). . . . Replacive morphemes . . . may consist of segmental or suprasegmental phonemes . . .. A rather rarer type of replacement is represented by the English series bath : bathe, sheath : sheathe, wreath : wreathe, teeth : teethe, safe : save, strife : strive, thief : thieve, grief : grieve, half : halve, shelf : shelve, serf : serve, advice : advise, house /haws/ : house /hawz/, etc. In each pair, the noun has a voiceless continuant, the verb a voiced continuant. If we agree to derive the verbs from the nouns, we set up three replacive elements . . .; but since these three elements exhibit a phonetic-semantic resemblance to each other, and since their occurrence is phonologically conditioned, we combine them into a single replacive morpheme.(Eugene A. Nida, The Identification of Morphemes. Morphology: Critical Concepts in Lingu istics, ed. by Francis Katamba. Routledge, 2004)

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Timeline of the Mexican-American War

Timeline of the Mexican-American War The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) was a brutal conflict between neighbors largely sparked by the US annexation of Texas and their desire to take western lands such as California away from Mexico. The war lasted about two years in total and resulted in a victory for the Americans, who benefited greatly from the generous terms of the peace treaty following the war. Here are some of the more important dates of this conflict. 1821 Mexico gains independence from Spain and difficult and chaotic years follow. 1835 Settlers in Texas revolt and fight for independence from Mexico. October 2: Hostilities between Texas and Mexico commence with the Battle of Gonzales. October 28: The Battle of Concepcion takes place in San Antonio. 1836 March 6: The Mexican army overruns the defenders at the Battle of the Alamo, which becomes a rallying cry for Texas independence. March 27: Texan prisoners are slaughtered at the Goliad Massacre. April 21: Texas gains independence from Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto. 1844 On September 12, Antonio Là ³pez de Santa Anna  is deposed as President of Mexico. He goes into exile. 1845 March 1: President John Tyler signs the official proposal of statehood for Texas. Mexican leaders warn that annexing Texas could lead to war. July 4: Texas legislators agree to annexation. July 25: General Zachary Taylor and his army arrive in Corpus Christi, Texas. December 6: John Slidell is sent to Mexico to offer $30 million for California, but his efforts are rebuffed. 1846 January 2: Mariano Paredes becomes President of Mexico.March 28: General Taylor reaches the Rio Grande near Matamoros.April 12: John Riley deserts and joins the Mexican army. Because he did so before war was officially declared, he could not legally be executed later when he was captured.April 23: Mexico declares defensive war against the United States: it would defend its territories under attack but not take the offensive.April 25: Captain Seth Thorntons small reconnaissance force is ambushed near Brownsville: this small skirmish would be the spark that kicked off the war.May 3–9: Mexico lays siege to Fort Texas (later renamed Fort Brown).May 8: Battle of Palo Alto is the first major battle of the war.May 9: Battle of Resaca de la Palma takes place, which results in Mexican army being forced out of Texas.May 13: US Congress declares war on Mexico.May: The St. Patricks Battalion is organized in Mexico, led by John Riley. It consisted largely of Irish-born deserters from the U S army, but there are also men of other nationalities. It would become one of Mexicos best fighting forces in the war. June 16: Colonel Stephen Kearny and his army leave Fort Leavenworth. They will invade New Mexico and California.July 4: American settlers in California declare the  Bear Flag Republic in Sonoma. The independent republic of California only lasted a few weeks before American forces occupied the area.July 27: Mexican President Paredes leaves Mexico City to deal with a revolt in Guadalajara. He leaves Nicols Bravo in charge.August 4: Mexican President Paredes is deposed by General Mariano Salas as chief executive of Mexico; Salas re-institutes federalism.August 13: Commodore Robert F. Stockton occupies Los Angeles, California with naval forces.August 16: Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna returns to Mexico from exile. The Americans, hoping he would promote a peace accord, had let him back in. He quickly turned on the Americans, stepping up to lead the defense of Mexico from the invaders.August 18: Kearny occupies Santa Fe, New Mexico.September 20–24: The Siege of Monterrey: Taylor capt ures the Mexican city of Monterrey. November 19: US President James K. Polk names Winfield Scott as leader of an  invasion force. Major General Scott was  a highly decorated veteran of the War of 1812 and the highest-ranking US military officer.November 23: Scott leaves Washington for Texas.December 6: Mexican Congress names Santa Anna President.December 12: Kearny occupies San Diego.December 24: Mexican General/President Mariano Salas turns over power to Santa Annas Vice-president, Valentà ­n Gà ³mez Farà ­as. 1847 February 22–23: The Battle of Buena Vista is the last major battle in the northern theater. The Americans will hold the ground they gained until the end of the war, but not advance any farther.March 9: Scott and his army land unopposed near Veracruz.March 29: Veracruz falls to Scotts army. With Veracruz under control, Scott has access to resupply from the USA.February 26: Five Mexican National Guard units (the so-called polkos) refuse to mobilize, rebelling against President Santa Anna and Vice-President Gà ³mez Farà ­as. They demand repeal of a law forcing a loan from the Catholic Church to the government.February 28: Battle of Rio Sacramento near Chihuahua.March 2: Alexander Doniphan and his army occupy Chihuahua.March 21: Santa Anna returns to Mexico City, takes control of the government and reaches an agreement with the rebellious polkos soldiers.April 2: Santa Anna leaves to fight Scott. He leaves Pedro Marà ­a Anaya in the Presidency.April 18: Scott defeats Santa Anna at the Battle of Cerro Gordo. May 14: Nicholas Trist, charged with eventually creating a treaty, arrives at Jalapa.May 20: Santa Anna returns to Mexico City, assumes the presidency once more.May 28: Scott occupies Puebla.August 20: The Battle of Contreras and the Battle of Churubusco open the way for the Americans to attack Mexico City. Most of the St. Patricks Battalion is killed or captured.August 23: Court-martial of members of St. Patricks Battalion at Tacubaya.August 24: Armistice is declared between US and Mexico. It would only last about two weeks.August 26: Court-martial of members of St. Patricks Battalion at San Angel.September 6: Armistice breaks down. Scott accuses Mexicans of breaking the terms and using the time on defenses.September 8: Battle of Molino del Rey.September 10: Sixteen members of St. Patricks Battalion are hanged at San Angel.September 11: Four members of St. Patricks Battalion are hanged at Mixcoac.September 13: Battle of Chapultepec: Americans storm gates into Mexico City. Thirty mem bers of St. Patricks Battalion hanged within sight of the castle. September 14: Santa Anna moves his troops out of Mexico City. General Scott occupies the city.September 16: Santa Anna is relieved of command. The Mexican government attempts to re-group in Querà ©taro. Manuel de la Peà ±a y Peà ±a is named President.September 17: Polk sends recall order to Trist. He receives it on November 16 but decides to remain and finish the treaty. 1848 February 2: Trist and Mexican diplomats agree on the  Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.April: Santa Anna escapes from Mexico and goes into exile in Jamaica.March 10: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is ratified by the USA.May 13: Mexican President Manuel de la Peà ±a y Peà ±a resigns. General Josà © Joaquà ­n de Herrera is named to replace him.May 30: The Mexican Congress ratifies the treaty.July 15: The last US troops depart Mexico from Veracruz. Sources and Further Reading Foos, Paul. A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.Guardino, Peter. The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.McCaffrey, James M. Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848. New York: New York University Press, 1992.

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Report to the Directors of USPS diagnosing the state of affairs and Essay - 1

Report to the Directors of USPS diagnosing the state of affairs and offering some prognosis on what might be a more sustainable business model - Essay Example However, reduction of certain required expenses will lead to a decline in the company’s service quality. For example, the Post Office decides to cut the services of the one of the mail sorting employees. The cut is based on the company’s decision to reduce its huge employee salary payments. The employee reduction will trigger a slow customer mail services. The current business model includes a ballooning debt figure. The debt included an unpaid $5.5 billion amount on its defaulted loan schedule. In fact, the current business model is characterized as not a profitable self-maintaining business entity. Likewise, the current business model is described as needing to sacrifice its services in order to reduce its operating expenses. For example, the lone postman is hired as a part time employee to deliver mails on a Wednesday and Friday. Consequently, mails that arrive on a Monday will be delivered two days later, Wednesday. Similarly, mails that arrive on a Thursday will be delivered on a Friday (Ross, 2012). The same article described the current business model is grounded on low stamp and parcel rates. The current rates of mailing the correspondences were not high enough to surpass the breakeven point. Consequently, an increase in the stamp and other post office rates will lead to the increase in the company’s overall revenue (Ross, 2012). The current business model fails to generate enough revenues needed to pay for the maturing debts (Epstein, 2011). A business is normally set up in order to generate revenues. This is the first step. The USPS accomplished this first business task. Next, the company must generated net profits. The net profit amounts are arrived at by subtracting operating expenses from the gross profit amount. Based on the company financial report, Table 1, the company failed to generate enough revenues needed to arrive at the bottom line. The bottom line is the passing grade of any company. The bottom line equates to a net

Friday, November 1, 2019

Determining causes and effects Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Determining causes and effects - Essay Example It is a fact without doubt that indeed most of the campus students spend a substantive time on campuses leading very stressful lives. Because students have to establish a balance between their studies, examinations, extra-curriculum activities, and some work, it is clearly an aspect of stress. Ideally, stress permeates from numerous aspects in the society, with stress among the teenagers, most especially in those in campus taking the greatest percentage. Despite the fact that stress has become part of human life, stress could be minimized through numerous ways. Indeed, stress in colleges and many teenagers is a significant problem considering the effects associated with it. Based on such a perspective, this paper discusses pressure of academic performance and finances as the causes of stress on college students, and a look into their effects. Stress among college students results from numerous causes, each of which has different effects depending on the circumstances involved. Of all the causes, the pressure of the academic problem is usually the greatest contributing factor to the numerous instances of stress among the campus students (Heidenreich, 2009). Whenever every student goes to campus, one of the primary requirements of the teenager is to perform excellently in the academics. Equally, parents usually encourage their children to have the best of performance in their studies. However, little is always told on how to achieve the academic excellence status.