I dunno, I found these assorted items but haven’t come up with a way to turn them into anything, so you’ll just have to take them like this:
Writing earlier this year in Foreign Policy, Harvard professor of international relations Stephen M. Walt notes something many of us have suspected ever since 9/11 — that the threat of terrorist attacks from Muslim extremists has been hugely overblown. His evidence is that in 2009 there were 294 acts of terrorism (in itself a 33% reduction from the previous year), and only ONE of those attacks was staged by Islamists. The vast majority of the attacks came from indigenous European separatist groups (such as the IRA, the ETA, and so on).
Here’s an interesting note from The Economist’s language blog “Johnson”: Mandarin Chinese does not have a direct equivalent for the present participle as expressed in English with the suffix “-ing”, which accounts for some of the challenges of translating English expressions into Chinese as it turns up in the countless funny pictures of signs translated into “Engrish” but also accounts for a new phenomenon where the “-ing” is added as-is for some translations. The habit of tacking “-ing” onto Chinese words is most often seen in coastal cities with a lot of Western influences, but is starting to spread into the interior of the country, too.
It’s no wonder people in this country aren’t willing to find real solutions to real problems…according to a recent poll conducted by Fox News (yeah, I know…) a full 77% of the American public actually believes in the power of prayer to heal people. Even self-identified liberals, who are usually a more skeptical and reality-based group, came in at 65%. Every time I think we have finally bottomed out, there’s evidence that there’s still room to drop.
