Author Archive

Why to syntax

Why to syntax

Haj Ross
Linguistics, University of North Texas
&
Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung
Munich, Germany
haj@unt.edu
Some poetics and some syntax papers are at:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/hajpapers.html

“There are some enterprises in which
a careful disorderliness
is the true method.”
Herman Melville

This note begins with what Valerie Koontz, a student in our course on syntax, this Spring of 2000, wrote as a response to my charge to the students, which was to say, in a non-formal way, how they had intersected with, what they had learned from, syntax, what syntax had had to do with them. I will start with what Valerie wrote, because it so accurately describes the kind of interaction with the heart of syntax, which is what I hope I will be lucky enough to midwife in any of my syntactic encounters with anyone, whether that person is officially a student (whose definition is supposedly completely and most importantly given by the fact that I am put in a position of having to evaluate their performance in a course, or a degree program, etc., an absurdity which I will try not to foam further at the mouth about), or a colleague, or one of my teachers. In short, any fellow being.

Before I start, let me explain a cryptic phrase that comes up twice in what follows: shooting for the stars. I say that doing syntax is a bit like the opposite of writing a poem. It is a truism that one can tell a poet by the following ability: give a poet a poem, and they will make it into a better poem. Well, the way to tell a syntactician is: give them a sentence and they will make it worse. I call this “shooting for the stars,” because when a syntactician has taken a perfectly decent sentence (like Lee watched TV all night) and has twisted it into *TV was watched all night by Lee), by misapplying to it the most famous rule, or transformation, in syntax – PASSIVIZATION – the syntactician prefixes to the wrecked result the symbol * (a star), to announce its hopelessness. All syntacticians shoot for the stars, because when they manage to get one, they realize that they have hit a nerve – that there is something fundamentally important in the structuring of English, which they have managed to hit, to thwart. And then they work to find more stars, to discover what it is that makes this starred sentence connect with all the sentences of English into a systematic whole.

Needless to say, many times, my invisibly structured (not to say chaotic) “methods” of shooting for this kind of stars leave many of my fellow syntax-lovers dismayed, angry, confused, thinking that I am a flake, and that nothing is going on except a wasting of their time. And in all honesty, I think that there are far too many people who come through “my” classes badly bummed out. I had in fact learned that that was the case this semester in another class, and was discouraged, though I had felt that our syntaxing together had worked in general pretty well in the class of which Valerie was a member.

So when I read what follows, I was very happy, and I wrote to her what you will see after reading what she wrote to me.

•

Syntax – What Have You Learned and How Will You Use It

You proposed the question and this is one of many responses from one of many students who has progressed from feeling lost and confused to knowing a little and desiring to know a lot more.

The problem for me with this paper and with syntax was where to begin. With such a mammoth subject to conquer, I was a bit overwhelmed in the beginning. It seemed as if syntax was a bottomless pit or that infinite number of stacking turtles that you described on the first day. “Shooting for the stars” seemed like an impossible task that only true scholars would ever be able to accomplish. As the semester progressed, I soon came to realize that the true joy of syntax was finding those stars and analyzing those turtles.

That is what I find to be the most true – the joy and frustration of syntax is taking structures and sentences apart and figuring them out. By figuring them out, I mean discovering what they can and cannot do. This is true even if you do not know why they can or cannot do what they can or cannot do. The joy comes in being able to take a sentence through various transformations and discovering what the deep structure really was and being able to explain how it went from that deep structure to the surface structure we use in everyday conversation or literature. Another aspect of that joy is being free to express new ideas about how or why certain structures perform the way they do and discussing those thoughts with others who are equally interested in the topic. Along with that joy also comes a kind of frustration when you cannot explain why it does not follow a certain rule or does not undergo a transformation that seems completely logical. But the frustration is minimal and motivates you to continue digging and working towards a solution.

For me, this class taught so much more than syntax. Sure, we talked about transformations, parts of speech, valence, selection, thematic roles, sentence families, grammatical relations, centrality, recursion, coordination, complements, negative polarity items, etc, etc, etc. True, it gave excellent information on all of these things that are so vital to the world of syntax. However, at the same time, it challenged me to develop my own thoughts and ideas about the way syntax should or might work, instead of saying that there was only one way to “do” syntax. The plethora of knowledge and information that came from you and other students was insightful as well as challenging. It’s so nice to know that the world of linguistics can revolve around someone other than Chomsky and his followers.

Upon reflection, I really just want to say thank you to you for opening a new door and making a scary, frightening topic into one that is now fascinating and intriguing. Thank you for introducing books and authors as suggested reading to enlighten the mind and challenge the preexisting thoughts that seem so difficult to overcome. I can’t wait to spend some time this summer looking at Tajik and the way the rules and theories I’ve learned in this class apply to this particular language.

So the answer to your question is all of the above. This class does have applications and implications far beyond the doors of the Language Building at UNT and I will use what I learned to expand my research and help me gain a better understanding of language in this country and others.

Have a wonderful time in Germany and thanks again.

Sincerely,

Valerie Koontz

•

Hi Valerie –

Just a quick note of thanks for your lovely thing, which I didn’t get a chance to read till I got over here to Munich. The kind of take you had on our time together star-shooting is just what I hope for whenever I start a class. I think that what you did with the time we had to learn together is exactly right. You have learned what it is like to walk around inside a syntactican’s head a little. You didn’t have to actually be a syntactician permanently – but I think you have come to see: syntax is a language. When we learn Gilyak or ASL, we do not do it so that we can sell more shoes to speakers of those languages, the popular “justification” for teaching Spanish, etc. We do it as cerebral calisthenics – so that our world becomes bigger, because we have found a new set of goggles which we know how to see the world through anew, if we should ever want to.

I have you to thank for coming to say this in this way. I have previously said that what one learns in linguistics courses is:

how to linguist

which is a helpful way for me to say what I hope people will learn in an introductory linguistics course. And I have even written about this, saying that chemistry is a language, and that history is, and that math is. But by talking about “the language of chemistry,” I do not mean to refer only to the symbols used in chemical formulas (like H2O), but rather to the way chemists view the world, and live in it, as members of the scientific community of chemists. I bet that two chemists look at substances and liquids and elements in ways that are very similar to one another, but are beyond imagining for us non-chemists.
But for some reason this way of understanding language in a deeply metaphorical sense had never sunk into my heart of linguistic hearts – I never tried to see syntax as a language too – the language that we syntacticians live (in).
So now I do think syntax is a language too, and the reason that we study it so that we can live in a bigger noetic universe. Not for any utilitarian purpose. We study it as musicians study the fugue, because if they do not know what is going on in a crab fugue (the one that goes backward), they will not be able to hear it, they will miss its intricate beauty. Similarly, it takes a lot of “work” to be able to “read” x-rays, to be able to hear that some far-out abstract jazzperson is playing a twelve-bar blues, even though the chords are pushed way outside the usual envelope. And it takes “work” to learn how to putt, to photograph, to knit, to cook, to be a parent, to teach. It is the same stretching and engrossing, like eating, sorta, which makes us bigger, because we have “gotten our minds around” a subject. Equivalently: we have gotten far into it.
How wild! It seems to me that what true learning consists of is

going beyond the usual polarity of inside/outside.

The goal of learning about something is to attain a state in which paradoxically, we are simultaneously inside that thing and ALSO wrapped around it! For when we have merged with it, we are “consubstantial” with it, to use (I hope not incorrectly) what I believe is Conor Cruse O’Brien’s word, which I think he means us to understand as being not only a term for art, but also for the true merging of spirit which is at the core of all re-lig-ion. (The root of this beautiful word is *lig, which is cognate with “league, ligament, link”). The idea is that when we are truly in the experience of living spirit we have reconnected, linked up again. But to understand this experience better, we must ask what the valence of connect is – that is, we have to ask what kinds of subjects and objects it “takes.”
If we look at a sentence like I connected the dots, we might mistakenly think that connect is a simple transitive verb. But connect is importantly different from run-of-the-mill transitives like lift, tickle, audit – these verbs have no requirement that their objects be plural. We can say either lift the stone, or lift the stones. Not so with connect: I connected the dots is fine, but not ?I connected the dot. The deeper way of seeing the valence of connect comes from a classic paper by George Lakoff and Stan Peters, “Phrasal conjunction and symmetric predicates,” in David Reibel and Sanford Schane, Modern Studies in English (1969: 113-142)]. They point out that connect is a symmetric predicate, like differ and collide. These last two verbs require deep plural subjects (The [papers / *paper] differed, The [trucks / *truck] collided). Lakoff and Peters postulate a transformational rule (CONJUNCT MOVEMENT) that can split up conjoined subjects to produce surface verbs which appear to have the valence of 2: A and B differ  A differs from B; A and B collided  A collided with B. But these plurality-requiring verbs are always logically symmetric: if A differs from, or collides with, B, then B differs from, and collides with, A.
This is not the case with normal valence-2 verbs; if A tickles B, or C dreams of D, there is no implication that B tickles A or that D dreams of C. The verb connect, like the verb contrast, can have their required plural arguments as subjects {when syntacticians put a * in front of a parenthesis, they mean that the parenthesized element is not optional: A*(B)C means ABC is good, but AC is bad. (Dot 1 *(and dot 2) can connect; Color 1 *(and color 2) will contrast), or as objects: I connected dot 1 *(and dot 2); The artist contrasted color 1 *(and color 2). The Lakoff-Peters analysis of symmetric predicates rests on a fundamental insight: while there are predicates which require certain arguments to be grammatically plural, there are no predicates which require arguments to be grammatically singular.
What does all of this have to do with seeing syntax as a language? To attempt an answer to this question will take me back to what it means to understand English, or German, or Portuguese, the three natural languages that I feel most at home in. My feeling is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct – that any language centers around a way of thinking, a way that is unique for that language. But if this is correct, I must claim that translation is impossible.
I do make that claim but not as stupidly as you might think. Translation is possible, but only for language which is unconnected with deep feelings. Translating instructions for assembling a lawn chair is easily done – but the more poetic or metaphysical a source text is, the less translatable it is.
And then what of the language of syntax? Is it translatable? My belief is that it is not, especially for those syntacticians, like me, who view linguistic theories as works of art. I do not recommend this stance towards anyone’s theory of language – I wish I could be a dispassionate scientist. But I confess that I am far from this ideal, which is why I believe there was so much more heat than light in the linguistic wars, which were the subject of Randy Harris’s book by that name. Thus there is not one language of syntax – each thinker finds her or his own. When the assumptions which underlie your language of syntax are close to those of another scholar, some understanding is, or seems, possible.
But then what can teaching syntax be? Do I want the students who come to my class to learn only my flavor of the language of syntax? Of course not. I offer to them my language, as a sort of snapshot of a possible lens through which to observe language. If I am honest, I emphasize very clearly all the things that my own view fails to explain. My goal is for each student to understand my way of looking at things syntactically as one possible way of looking at language. But what I hope for them is that they will go beyond my language of syntax (my “dialect” of Syntaxese) to find their own way of looking at language, their own language of syntax, one which makes the most sense to them, and is the most beautiful to them.
Thus teaching syntax is like teaching guitar, or painting, or any form of art.

I realize that any such statement will sound like lunacy to anyone who believes in the necessity of objectivity in science. Unfortunately (as many would say), or fortunately, as I would say, my own experiences as a combatant in the linguistic wars has shaped my inability to see any clear lines between the following four great enterprises of the human spirit (in alphabetic order): art, philosophy, religion and science.

I believe, with Socrates, that my best efforts as a teacher should be maieutic, a word I learned from my great friend and teacher, Tim Hoye, a colleague in political science. My work should be kin to that of a midwife: I should help any student to look as deeply into themselves as possible, so that each can arrive at a way of thinking about language which strikes her or him as most deeply beautiful and true.

While I am getting close to explaining what I try to teach, I realize that I am still far off. I teach syntax, or poetics (“two” endeavors which I think should be seen as interpenetratingly one) not in the hope that any student will arrive at only theories of language, but instead theories of whatever field is deepest within them and truest of them. My own work, as a syntactician or as a poético, is only to serve as an example of something which whatever they may end up coming around to may look vaguely similar to.
At the end of the day, I am really only interested in helping anyone who comes to learn with me to arrive at the deepest and truest understanding of themselves.

So why to syntax? Because it is one way to a deeply felt beauty, and because it may start an itch in you the scratching of which may lead you to find something from way deep within you which will give you as much joy as syntax has given me.

Syntax is an art form which has resonated in my core – I try to show you the beauties I see in it so that you will seek to find or invent a form of art which lies as deeply within you.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Comments

Restore your faith in humanity in 4 minutes flat

Hi gang –

Thanks to Ken Latta for this one:

ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btiDHCuWyBA

or:

http://tinyurl.com/of4fmm4

Peace –

Haj

Comments

Scientific predictions for 2026: http://tinyurl.com/ownp2kk

From: Timeless Voyager
Subject: Thomson Reuters Predicts the Top 10 Innovations for 2025
Date: July 2, 2014 at 12:54:14 AM CDT
To: Bruce Stephen Holms

Thanks to Pam:

http://thomsonreuters.com/press-releases/062014/Thomson-Reuters-Predicts-Innovations-2025

Thomson Reuters Predicts the Top 10 Innovations for 2025
PHILADELPHIA – The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters , the world leader in providing intelligent information to businesses and professionals, today released The World in 2025: 10 Predictions of Innovation , a new report that predicts the landscape of science and technology in 2025 by mining global patent data and scientific literature.

To conduct the study, researchers identified the top 10 emerging scientific research fronts based on an analysis of citation rankings using Thomson Reuters Web of Science . They next looked at global patent data in the Derwent World Patents Index to identify the top 10 patent fields with the highest number of inventions containing a priority date of 2012 and beyond. The resulting technology areas with the highest level of commercial and scientific research interest were then reviewed to identify hot spots of innovation that will lead to tomorrow’s biggest breakthroughs.

Following are some of the study’s predictions of innovation in 2025:
Solar is Largest Source of Energy on the Planet: According to the most highly-cited scientific research papers of the last two years, improvements in photovoltaic technology, chemical bonding and the use of photocatalysts are making the process of harvesting and converting the sun’s energy much more than a novelty for the environmentally conscious; solar power will be used for the masses.
Teleportation Testing Is Common: Thanks to the research that went into the Higgs Boson project, Scotty may soon be beaming things up. Scientific literature has exploded around the Higgs Boson, with over 400 citations of the 2012 study. And, recent patent applications related to Higgs Boson address “a body accelerating at the speed of light and growing into the square of the speed of light.”
Everything Will Be Digital, Everywhere: From the smallest of personal items to the largest continents, everything, everywhere will be digitally connected as a result of improved semiconductors, graphene-carbon nanotube capacitors, cell-free networks and 5G technology.
Type 1 Diabetes is Preventable: Advancements in ribonucleic acid-guided (RNA-guided) engineering will advance to a point where it will be possible to create a human genome engineering platform for identifying and treating disease-causing agents in humans. This field currently leads all areas of genetic-engineering patenting and has been identified as an emerging research front in the scientific literature.
DNA Mapping at Birth Is the Norm: Analysis of the human genome continues to be one of the hottest areas of scientific research, with one recent paper collecting over 1,000 citations. Advancements in nanotechnology coupled with more widespread Big Data technologies make in vivo measurements, for diagnoses to conduct precise, cell-level screenings, possible.
Additional predictions include: Cancer Treatments Have Very Few Toxic Side Effects; Petroleum-Based Packaging Is Replaced by Cellulose-Derived Packaging; Electric Air Transportation Takes Off; Food Shortages and Food Price Fluctuations Are Things of the Past; and Dementia Declines.

“While we do not purport to own a crystal ball, we do have the next best thing: citations to scientific literature and patent content. When analyzed in aggregate, these provide a fascinating window into innovations that will change our lives in the future,” said Basil Moftah, president, Thomson Reuters IP & Science. “By analyzing current R&D activity and commercial pipelines, we are shining a spotlight on some of the most exciting developments that will emerge over the next decade.”

The full report of The World in 2025: 10 Predictions of Innovation , provides snapshots of research-citation-and-patent-filing metrics for each technology area, alongside commentary that defines the key trends of these nascent technologies. Data for this report were compiled using Thomson Reuters Web of Science® , InCites® , Derwent World Patents Index® , and Thomson Innovation .

Read The World in 2025: 10 Predictions of Innovation report.

About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and science and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com .

Comments

The bees need our help

Friends –

It is horrible what we are doing to the biosphere. We are fouling our own nest. Please help.

http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/4667?n=75525909.02Zxsw

or, shorter:

http://tinyurl.com/p4keb53

Peace –

Haj

Comments

An essay by Senator Bernie Sanders

Friends –

If you were worried by the Supreme Court’s Citizens decision, and now the McCutcheon decision, you will be sad to hear that the news is even worse than you thought it could be. Some of the richest people in America (the Koch Brothers) want to buy the government. And they have made great gains, as Senator Sanders documents.

What can we do?

There seems to be very little, aside from what this letter tries to do: talk to your friends, tell them how you see things. Tell them to be suspicious of candidates who have very deep pockets and support oligarchic views. And vote the bums out, despite their huge wealth.

I myself would rather not having to do this political work. I would like to live in a country where there were no special powers given to someone just because of their wealth. But that place is a dream place. So I write to you today, in the hopes that you will write to your friends, to warn them of the danger.

Peace –

Haj

As a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, billionaires and large corporations can now spend an unlimited amount of money to influence the political process. The results of that decision are clear. In the coming months and years the Koch brothers and other extraordinarily wealthy families will spend billions of dollars to elect right-wing candidates to the Senate, the House, governors’ mansions and the presidency of the United States. These billionaires already own much of our economy. That, apparently, is not enough. Now, they want to own the United States government as well.

Four years ago, the Supreme Court passed Citizens United. A few weeks ago, they passed the equally horrendous McCutcheon campaign finance decision which gives even more political power to the rich. Now, many Republicans want to push this Supreme Court to go even further. In the name of “free speech,” they want the Court to eliminate all restrictions on campaign spending — a position that Justice Thomas supported in McCutcheon — and a view supported by the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Not surprisingly, as it will give them the opportunity to buy politicians at will, this has always been the position of the Koch brothers.

The Koch brothers are the second wealthiest family in America, making most of their money in the fossil fuel industry. According to Forbes Magazine, they saw their wealth increase last year from $68 billion to $80 billion. In other words, under the “anti-business”, “socialist” and “oppressive” Obama administration, their wealth went up by $12 billion in one year.

In their 2012 campaigns, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each spent a little more than $1 billion. For the Koch brothers, spending more than Obama and Romney combined in an election would be a drop in the bucket. They would hardly miss the few billion spent.

Given the reality that the Koch brothers are now the most important and powerful players in American politics, it is important to know what they want and what their agenda is.

Interestingly and not widely known, David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980. He believed that Ronald Reagan was much too liberal. Despite Mr. Koch putting a substantial sum of money into the campaign, his ticket only received one percent of the vote. Most Americans thought the Libertarian Party’s platform of 1980 was extremist and way out of touch with what the American people wanted and needed.

Fast-forward 34 years and the most significant reality of modern politics is how successful David Koch and like-minded billionaires have been in moving the Republican Party to the extreme right. Amazingly, much of what was considered “extremist” and “kooky” in 1980 has become part of today’s mainstream Republican thinking.

Let me give you just a few examples:

In 1980, Libertarian vice-presidential candidate David Koch ran on a platform that called for abolishing the minimum wage. 34 years ago, that was an extreme view of a fringe party that had the support of one percent of the American people.

Today, not only does virtually every Republican in Congress oppose raising the $7.25 an hour minimum wage, many of them, including Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and John McCain, are on record for abolishing the concept of the federal minimum wage.

In 1980, the platform of David Koch’s Libertarian Party favored “the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.” 34 years ago, that was an extreme view of a fringe party that had the support of one percent of the American people.

Today, the mainstream view of the Republican Party, as seen in the recently passed Ryan budget, is to end Medicare as we know it, cut Medicaid by more than $1.5 trillion over the next decade, and repeal the Affordable Care Act. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Under the Ryan plan, at least 40 million people — 1 in 8 Americans — would lose health insurance or fail to obtain insurance by 2024. Most of them would be people with low or moderate incomes.”

In 1980, the platform of David Koch’s Libertarian Party called for “the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system.” 34 years ago, that was an extreme view of a fringe party that had the support of one percent of the American people.

Today, the mainstream view of the Republican Party is that “entitlement reform” is absolutely necessary. For some, this means major cuts in Social Security. For others who believe Social Security is unconstitutional or a Ponzi scheme this means the privatization of Social Security or abolishing this program completely for those who are under 60 years of age.

In 1980, David Koch’s Libertarian Party platform stated “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes … We support the eventual repeal of all taxation … As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.” 34 years ago, that was an extreme view of a fringe party that had the support of one percent of the American people.

Today, 75 Republicans in the House have co-sponsored a bill that Paul Ryan has said “would eliminate taxes on wages, corporations, self-employment, capital gains, and gift and death taxes in favor of a personal-consumption tax.”

Here is what every American should be deeply concerned about. The Koch brothers, through the expenditure of billions of dollars and the creation and support of dozens of extreme right organizations, have taken fringe extremist ideas and made them mainstream within the Republican Party. And now with Citizens United (which is allowing them to pour unlimited sums of money into the political process) their power is greater than ever.

And let’s be very clear. Their goal is not only to defund Obamacare, cut Social Security, oppose an increase in the minimum wage or cut federal funding for education. Their world view and eventual goal is much greater than all of that. They want to repeal every major piece of legislation that has been signed into law over the past 80 years that has protected the middle class, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the most vulnerable in this country. Every piece of legislation!

The truth is that the agenda of the Koch brothers is to move this country from a democratic society with a strong middle class to an oligarchic form of society in which the economic and political life of the nation are controlled by a handful of billionaire families.

Our great nation must not be hijacked by right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers.

For the sake of our children and our grandchildren, we must fight back.

Sincerely,
Bernie Sanders
Senator Bernie Sanders

Comments

Friends!

Workers in Qatar are being forced to work in 122 degree hear, and are being cheated of their wages – many have died, and FIFA, the committee which chooses the sites for the Cup, has said nothing.

Please sign at petition at

http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/4432?l=DQ39ZUqYXPg

or at

http://tinyurl.com/lnhccbs

And pass the word on.

Thanks, and peace –

Haj

Comments

Time for a joke: Au Canada!

Oh Canada!

A man in a supermarket tries to buy half a head of lettuce. The produce assistant tells him they sell only whole heads of lettuce. The man persists and asks to see the manager. The produce assistant says he’ll ask his manager about it.

Walking into the back room, the boy said to his manager,

“Some asshole wants to buy half a head of lettuce.”

As he finished his sentence, he turned to find the customer standing right behind him, So he added,

“And this gentleman has kindly offered to buy the other half.”

The manager approved the deal, and the customer went on his way. Later the manager asked the produce assistant,

“I was impressed with the way you got yourself out of that situation earlier. We like people who think on their feet here. Where are you from, son?”

“Canada, sir,” the boy replied.

“Well, why did you leave Canada?” the manager asked.

The boy said,

“Sir, there’s nothing but whores and hockey players up there.”

“Really?” said the manager. “My wife is from Canada.”

“No shit?” replied the boy. “Who’d she play for?”

A present from Robo
20.VI.2012

Comments

This isn’t a democracy, it’s an auction. http://tinyurl.com/mt9ldm8

Friends –

It doesn’t remind me of the America that I grew up proud to be a citizen of.
We’re worse than a lot of banana republics.

I’m really sick of the newest Supreme Court outrage – they say that now there is NO limit on the amount a “person” can give.

How sick! Just because you make $145000 a day) Like the president of Exxon-Mobil) you should have more infuence with the politicians you can buy than I can? How unfair!

I’d like to be proud of my country again, and to elect politicians who only go into the government to make money.

If you agree, like a senator from Montana just did – Senator Walsh – go to this webpage and give some money if you casn, but spread the word: You are one of us who are sick of venal “Congress people.” Click over to

http://tinyurl.com/mt9ldm8

and tell more citizens how you feel. I think this should be OUR country, not the country of the top 500 corporations.

Peace –

Haj

Comments

An arresting video: http://tinyurl.com/ocublh9

Friends –

I have just been sent,by a dear friend, the following link:

(a shorter link is:  http://tinyurl.com/ocublh9)

It is very long – almost two hours.   I found it riveting.

It is vital that the problems which this video documents be addressed.   They are vocal for you, your children, your grandchildren.

I urge that you take the time to watch the whole thing, to assess its credibility.   I doubt that you will find that it could be a hoax.

Peace –

Haj

Comments

Are you in a committed relationship?

Are you in a committed relationship? Do you currently reside in the United States? Have you been cohabitating with your significant other for at least a year? Are you and your partner willing to volunteer completing a series of questions on relationships and emotions for 15-30 minutes online? If so, then please contact rossn789@newschool.edu and thanks in advance!

Comments