Posts tagged spending
My Cold, Dead Fingers The Naked Curmudgeon by Dan Culberson
Dec 22nd
Here’s what gets me.
Does it have to take an English major to explain the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution and put to rest this unjustifiable crutch of the right-wing, gun-toting fanatics and their conservative supporters?
For those of you who don’t remember, Amendment II states “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Even for those of you who do remember, Amendment II states “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
That is what it says word for word, comma for comma, capitalization for capitalization. Notice that the subject is “Militia,” the verb is “shall not be infringed,” and the sentence becomes “A well regulated Militia shall not be infringed.”
“What about the bits between commas?” you say? Those are two appositional phrases, and an apposition is “a grammatical construction in which a noun or pronoun is followed by another that explains it.”
The subject, a noun (See how it works?), is followed by “being necessary to the security of a free State,” and it is followed by “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” in order to explain “a well regulated Militia,” the subject of the sentence.
The subject cannot be “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” because you cannot put a single comma between the subject and the verb of a sentence. You cannot write “The dog, ran around the yard.” You can write “The dog, being frightened by the gunfire, ran around the yard,” because now we have two commas separating the subject and the verb. You can also write “The dog, being frightened by the gunfire, the pet of the neighbor, ran around the yard.”
That sentence is not “The pet of the neighbor, ran around the yard,” because that would be ungrammatical, just as “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is ungrammatical and therefore not the sentence of Amendment II.
“The right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is an apposition that explains the subject, “a well regulated Militia,” just as the other apposition, “being necessary to the security of a free State,” does. It is a “Militia” that is “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” which is necessary to the security of a free State and which shall not be infringed.
In other words, the citizens of the United States have the right to keep and bear Arms in “a well regulated Militia,” not to stockpile weapons at home and to carry a gun around with them in some Old West mentality.
And what did the sheriff in the Old West do to maintain order? Do the words “Check your guns at the door” strike a familiar note? That didn’t mean “Inspect your guns to ensure that they are in proper working order.” That meant “Turn your guns in at the door. It’s too dangerous for you to carry guns here.”
Now, the possibility of everyone having a concealed weapon might deter a few criminal acts, but the probability that hotheads and teenagers carrying a weapon could use it in a moment of unbridled emotion is far greater.
Sir William Blackstone (1723-80), a British jurist and Oxford instructor who was the first at a British university to teach English law as opposed to Roman law (See how those appositions work?), wrote in his great work Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.”
I believe it is better that ten crimes be committed than one innocent victim be killed by a convenient handgun.
Luke Woodham, a teenager in Pearl, Mississippi, who is spending the rest of his life in prison for murdering his mother and two fellow students in October 1997 when he was 16, kept a map on his bedroom wall with the slogan “One Nation Under My Gun.” Do we want our immature, impressionable children growing up and believing this heinous claim?
We used to see so-called Amendment II supporters brag “I’ll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”
After a moment of rage, I don’t want those cold, dead fingers to be mine.
I rest my case.
Flagler College releases economic impact study
Sep 27th
The economic impact study was produced for the college by EconImpact LLC of Louisville, Ky., one of the leading providers of economic impact studies for private colleges. The purpose of the report was to detail the ways in which Flagler College contributes both directly and indirectly to the local economy.
According to the report, during the 2010-2011 fiscal year, Flagler College contributed $218 million to the Greater Jacksonville area, including St. Johns, Duval, Flagler, Baker, Clay and Nassau counties. The college, along with its employees, students and visitors, were responsible for $179 million; alumni contributed $24 million in increased earnings and $12 million in social benefits due to positive lifestyle choices.
The City of St. Augustine treasury received a $343,214 net benefit due to the presence of Flagler College. St. Johns County received a $2.7 million net benefit.
Some other highlights of the report:
• The college provided full and part-time employment opportunities for 412 people.
• There are 3,045 working Flagler alumni in the Metro Jacksonville area.
• The Flagler College community contributed $188,482 in community service activities in 2011: $101,764 by Flagler students and $86,718 by Flagler employees. Flagler College students participated in 7,428 hours of community service in Metro Jacksonville.
• Visitors who came to St. Augustine because of Flagler College brought more than $18 million in new money to Greater Jacksonville in 2011
• The direct spending by the college, its employees, students and visitors was $78 million. This money was spent and re-spent several times in the community. The amount of the turnover was $100.7 million in 2011.
“The college produces alumni who earn more than individuals who did not complete a degree in higher education,” said Kevin Stokes, who wrote the final study. “The college provides employment opportunities, not only through jobs on campus, but also through jobs generated by business the college and its members conduct locally.”
For the full report, visit http://www.flagler.edu/news/current_news/FLAGLER-ECONOMIC-IMPACT-REPORT-2012.pdf
Source: Flagler College
Quick Guide to Social Media using WordPress
Jul 9th
Top three reason to use your wordpress site as your Social Media Distribution system rather than the competitions.
1. If you have a WordPress site or some other CMS like it then you should take this as a rock, not a grain of salt.
2. If you’re using social media for your company like twitter, Facebook etc… You should listen, it wont take long.
3. If you’re tired of using multiple Social media accounts or paying someone to do so in order to promote a product or event. You can still do this but now all in one place.
Let’s start.
Using WordPress and a few simple but powerful tools can get this all done in a flash.
First and foremost I suggest that you start all of your content from your home (your website) and then tree out to the social media sites. Why give them the all your hits and probably never see them kick back any in return.
Some tools I use for our wordpress sites are. RSS Graffiti, WP to Twitter and Twitter Feed. Are simple to setup and you’ll never need to touch anything except for wordpress for a while. Especially if all your doing is saying things like. How was your weekend, come see this, come on in and check this out etc… And last but not least is Shareaholic an easy to install plugin for WordPress.
All wordpress RSS is handled in a simple way. To find your feed you may need to look at the wordpress feeds page : http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds and figure out what format you may be using depending on if you use permalinks or not it could be as simple as just adding /feed/ to the end of a WordPress category URL…. That’s how we roll.
First off find your feed. Example: http://c1n.tv/feed/
Chrome reads feeds fairly standard so if you’re interested in the appearance I suggest FF IE, Safari. On a sidenote: Wow Google have you not even checked or I guess they make you use a reader?
RSS Graffiti: http://www.rssgraffiti.com/ / https://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/
A little slow but works beautifully, Simple to register and feed your post category to Facebook. Enough said. Search for RSS Graffiti on Facebook and they walk you through the steps to get a feed setup for a Facebook page you made or at least have admin access too.
WP to Twitter: http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/
Probably the most time consuming to setup but by far the best one I’ve found for twitter. This one lets you not only send your new posts to twitter but also resend a post to twitter without having to republish one and duplicate content just by clicking update (Just beware if you don’t want things going to twitter if you update a lot.). As well it provides you with a way to push content to a Hash-tag ! Sweet! Login to twitter and select API down there at the bottom and/or visit https://dev.twitter.com/ to get started. The plugin designer also wrote a nice walk-through on how to do this as well. But you’ll need to creat a new Application, call it what you will, put your URL in (Not yoru feed) and make sure you have it set to read and write access level. That should get you all the keys and tokens you need to copy into the WP to twitter settings. Once setup it works great. Believe me.
Twitter Feed: http://twitterfeed.com/
Simple to register and feed to twitter. Can also be used for more than one account and not just for twitter, however I only use it for secondary accounts, for example. You have a category that you want to feed to a separate twitter account, this is made possible by twitter feed. It’s not instant like WP to twitter but like RSS graffiti it sends a category feed to an account you define. Great if you have multiple twitter accounts and directly relate to categories you have made in wordpress, like News, Movies, Music etc… Not as pretty, but then again are tweets pretty? lol. I don’t think they allow that yet.
Shareaholic: http://www.shareaholic.com/
Simple to install plugin for sharing posts, pages etc… I usually use this after I have sent things out to Facebook and twitter. This pretty much encapsulates the rest of places you can socialize your post with in one simple click. The key to sharing using shareaholic I think would be that whatever you are sharing is share with whoever you’re logged in as. To make sure your sharing as the right person just make sure you’re logged in as them or else it will share from your personal account.
Hope these applications give you a little insight into what you should be using for social media rather than spending your time on 3 or 4, why not just press a button and feed the family all in one, on top of that you’ll be sending people to your website rather than keeping them outside and so easily moved to something else in 5 seconds or less. Let’s hope that’s not the case. Feel free to comment, if it’s related I’ll approve it.
Thanks!
Aaron Smith
webmaster@boulderchannel1.com