Photo downloaded from the internet, IIRC an article about Remembrance or "Poppy" Day events in England.
The article said that the C-47 Skytrain in the photo was an ex-RAF Dakota, despite it being painted in US Army Air Force livery, but it earned it's invasion stripes dropping paras behind Sword Beach on June 6th.
And, yes, those are poppies.
Anyone else
getting the feeling Pelosi wants to be known to history as
"Olivia Cromwell"?
— Drang
(@DWDrang) January
20, 2019
"For years I've watched governments take control of our lives, and their argument is always the same — fewer costs, greater efficiency — but the result is the same too," Violet said. "Less control by the people, more control by the state, until the individual's own wishes count for nothing. That is what I consider my duty to resist."
She went on to argue, "Your great-grandchildren won't thank you when the state is all powerful because we didn't fight."Alas, not only your great-grandchildren not know whether you fought or not, it will probably never occur to them that there was anything to fight about.
I'm all for the #YouAintNoMuslimBruv guy; but doesn't the chap who physically confronted the knife man deserve rather more plaudits?
— Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) December 7, 2015
So did I:
In the XXI Century, Hashtag Activism > Courageous Action. https://t.co/7ixmDPi3iP
— Drang (@DWDrang) December 7, 2015
English is not normal
No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language
Pretty interesting. He manages to avoid the whole "English lies in wait for unsuspecting languages, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets for spare grammar and syntax" thing, which I find oddly disappointing...English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.
... I have frequently ... referred to the English murder rates as historically low and currently very low compared to US murder rates. I blandly accepted the murder statistics published by the UK Home Office as definitive. I overlooked the details of what and how the English counted "murders." It turns out that was a big mistake. (I was first turned onto my error by this post at Extrano's Alley.)After citing the FBI's numbers, and definitions, there are several paragraphs discussing how they do thing in The Old Country, which is then followed by the summary:
I fell into a definitions trap you may not be aware of. The shortest version is this. We count and report crimes based on initial data. The Brits count and report crimes based on the outcome of the investigation and trial. Yep, that says what I meant it to say.
We're not comparing apples to apples, we're comparing apples to meatloaf.More discussion follows. Mr. Boatright attempts several methods to try and reconcile the UK figures to get to a definition of "murder" that would more-or-less match that used in the USA, but the closest he can get is comparing apples to pears, and they are dodgy looking pears, at that.
- Data includes weight, cholesterol, BMI, family health history and pulse rate
- Doctors will be forced to reveal alcohol consumption and smoking status
- Privacy campaigners described it as 'biggest data grab in NHS history'
- Part of new Health Service programme called Everyone Counts
- Officials insisted data will be anonymous and deleted after analysis
