These writings I wouldn’t consider them myths, I would instead call them something like a narrative since their intentions are to tell what occurred during the Trojan War but they obviously still contain mythology since many gods are involved and they control many of the conclusions of what would happen during the war, who would die, who would win, who would kill… I do believe though that even though very few of the facts stated are actually really facts, this is really unable to be proven true, even though, I would really personally like to believe it true. I really enjoy reading Greek Mythology and The Trojan War was one interest I have had since I was young and I have really enjoyed reading about it.
My opinion about the war is that I sometimes believe that the Trojans should have won but then I think about the consequences this would have left on the rest of the world and then feel glad that it was the Greek that one. What bothers me most of the fact that the Greeks have won is not necessarily the fact that they are Greeks but how they won. Using a horse to enter the city, and attacking it when it isn’t ready to defend itself might have been witty but it lacks all kinds of values and courage. It makes me see the Greeks as cowards because they got tired after fighting for ten years, and I stopped honoring its rival by stooping to fight under equal conditions and both having the possibility to defend themselves.
lunes, 24 de septiembre de 2007
domingo, 23 de septiembre de 2007
Meleanger and Atalanta, Cupid and Psyche, and Vertumnus and Pomona
These three myths are all love stories, and these have made me realize once more how many of the Greek myths are actually based on relationships and how people interact in one relationship. Through these relationships and love pursuiting myths we are able to see many of the human flaws and see how gods punish or help the humans. These myths though, also remind me to many stories you sometimes gat to hear and they also resemble to the movies made currently, it’s as if humans have always been obsessed with love and they are always seeking it.
In Meleanger and Atalanta, for example, Meleanger falls in love with Atalanta and his love is so pure and strong that he even kills his relatives just to honor his beloved, still, his actions being disapproved by his mom, lead to his death, since she takes revenge. The same story but with less drastic actions occur every day. Many couples are not approved by their family or someone does something to dishonor them and then a revenge chain is begun between the people involved, and even though death is not commonly included, other drastic measures are taken between people that originally loved each other. Cupid and Psyche is another example of how family gets involved in every relationship. Cupid and Psyche had to overcome Cupids mom, Venus, and Psyches sisters, as obstacles to reach their long wanted love. It also occurred that both loving each other, were able to go over and defeat many obstacles just to be with one another once more. And in Vertumnus and Pomona, they both have to deal with different feelings to permit their relationship to prosper. Still at the end one always ends convincing the other to follow their feelings; in this case Vertumnus is able to convince Pomona to love him by taking the form of an old lady and telling him a story of a girl who was turned to stone due to her stony heart. And every day many people confess their love to someone and get them to fall in love with them.
In Meleanger and Atalanta, for example, Meleanger falls in love with Atalanta and his love is so pure and strong that he even kills his relatives just to honor his beloved, still, his actions being disapproved by his mom, lead to his death, since she takes revenge. The same story but with less drastic actions occur every day. Many couples are not approved by their family or someone does something to dishonor them and then a revenge chain is begun between the people involved, and even though death is not commonly included, other drastic measures are taken between people that originally loved each other. Cupid and Psyche is another example of how family gets involved in every relationship. Cupid and Psyche had to overcome Cupids mom, Venus, and Psyches sisters, as obstacles to reach their long wanted love. It also occurred that both loving each other, were able to go over and defeat many obstacles just to be with one another once more. And in Vertumnus and Pomona, they both have to deal with different feelings to permit their relationship to prosper. Still at the end one always ends convincing the other to follow their feelings; in this case Vertumnus is able to convince Pomona to love him by taking the form of an old lady and telling him a story of a girl who was turned to stone due to her stony heart. And every day many people confess their love to someone and get them to fall in love with them.
jueves, 20 de septiembre de 2007
Proserpine, Glaucus and Scylla, and Ceyx and Halcycyone
These three myths, as many others, have the love feeling inside them. Even though in the three of them there is a partner’s love, such as in a relationship, in Proserpine, there is also the kind of love a mother feels towards her daughter, one of care and affection. In Proserpine the two kinds of love, confront each other too see who keeps Proserpine, and both being very strong and demanding, end up in a tie. That is why Proserpine is able to be with her mom during half of the year, and she spends the other half with her husband. Glaucus and Scylla is another love story but one of romance. When Glaucus is turned into a merman, he falls in love with one of the water nymphs, Scylla. Still the love felt in this relationship was one-sided, since Scylla didn’t want to be with Glaucus and ran from him. Glaucus, being desperately in love went and asked Circe, an enchantress, to make Scylla fall for him. Instead Circe was the one who fell for him but Glaucus rejected her and specified that his heart belonged to Scylla, and only Scylla. Circe was unhappy with the response she had gotten and therefore cursed him: shy turned Scylla very ugly and drowned her; Glaucus would have to spend a thousand years collecting the bodies of drowned ones. When the time had passed, Glaucus received help from Endymion and became young again and Scylla was restored to life. Then Ceyx and Halcyone is also a love story in which Ceyx dies at sea and Halcyone prays for his wellbeing. When she discovers he is dead she weeps and moans but then as she sees his body returning to her after being many days at sea, she goes to receive him and turns into a bird. The gods, deciding they should belong as a couple, turn Halcyone into a bird as well and they are able to rejoin once more and spend their time together.
miércoles, 19 de septiembre de 2007
Taxing the Hand that Feeds Us
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/opinion/20ponnuru.html
Op-Ed Contributor
By RAMESH PONNURU
Published: September 20, 2007
Washington
Grady White
REPUBLICAN presidential candidates can’t get elected without owning the tax issue. So far, the current crop is giving it away.
A huge reason for Ronald Reagan’s popularity was his cutting of all income-tax rates and ending of “bracket creep,” in which inflation pushed earners into higher tax groups. Congressional Republicans promised a tax credit for children while sweeping the 1994 elections. In 2000, George W. Bush promised to expand that tax credit and to reduce income taxes.
Yes, the top Republican contenders for 2008 are promising to keep all of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts. But the Democrats are not threatening the child tax credit or Mr. Bush’s reductions in the lower-level income-tax rates. Those issues are off the table.
What Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — who have made the most detailed remarks on taxes of the top-tier candidates — are really saying is that they will make sure that taxes on capital gains, dividends, estates and high earners will stay low. Not many middle-class taxpayers will benefit directly from any of those policies.
Mr. Romney adds that he will try to cut the corporate tax rate, which his adviser Glenn Hubbard calls “a drain on competitiveness.” Many of our trading partners have cut their corporate taxes, and more and more conservatives want the United States to follow suit. Apparently they haven’t been listening to their own speeches on free trade. Companies compete. Countries, however, are not engaged in a zero-sum contest where one nation’s gain is another’s loss. Cutting corporate tax rates may or may not be a good idea, but we don’t need to make it a priority to preserve our competitiveness.
Both Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani speak vaguely about making sure the alternative minimum tax doesn’t affect any more middle-class families. That is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t a tax cut.
Mr. Romney has also proposed an initiative to make the return on middle-class savings tax-free. It may also be a step in the right direction, but it’s small change. The primary focus of the Romney and Giuliani tax plans remains high earners.
What would be a serious middle-class tax cut? One answer is to expand the tax credit for children. But none of the candidates is proposing to do so, or any other big tax relief for regular folks. You might think that Mr. Giuliani would want to do everything he can to appeal to social conservatives short of actually becoming one himself. But why should he offer a pro-family tax cut when even the hard-core social conservatives in the race aren’t interested? Mike Huckabee wants a national sales tax and Sam Brownback wants a flat tax. Either proposal would increase taxes on a lot of middle-class families.
The Republicans in Congress are no better. For much of the right, the great passion of the moment is to make sure that the carried interest at hedge funds is taxed at what look an awful lot like preferential rates. For years, liberals have said that Republicans talk about “family values” but won’t do anything to meet the economic needs of families. Right now, on taxes, that charge hits home.
Two ideological misconceptions underlie the party’s lack of imagination. First, Republicans worry that taking people off the income-tax rolls, as an expanded child credit would do, would make voters think big government is free and turn to the Democrats. But there’s no real evidence for this. Besides, parents are likely to be future-oriented voters, and they will realize that they will be paying higher taxes again once their children have grown up.
Second, Republicans believe, in general, that the tax code should generate its revenue in a way that does the least damage possible to the economy. So they seek tax reforms that cut taxes on investment returns and thereby increase economic growth. What they ignore is that we overtax investments in children, too. Parents make financial sacrifices to produce the next generation of taxpayers, who will pay for everyone’s retirements. Yet the tax code does too little to recognize parents’ investments.
True, an expanded tax credit for children wouldn’t increase economic growth. Growth is good, and more growth is better. But present tax rates are perfectly compatible with healthy long-term growth. There is no pressing need to bring them down to improve growth.
A few conservative strategists have designed tax reform plans that modestly cut corporate tax rates and simplify the tax code while also helping families. (One idea is to make up the lost revenue by bumping affluent childless people into higher tax brackets.) So far, the candidates have not been interested.
As the Republican Party has gotten more socially conservative, its voter base has become lower in income. Many of the working-class social conservatives on whom the party relies are parents trying to make ends meet, or young people who want to start families but have financial worries. They have no particular attachment, or hostility, to free-market principles. A Republican Party that found a conservative way to meet their economic needs would both hold and expand its base.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review.
In this article the three kinds of rhetoric writing are found. For example the first paragraph is completely values, it is written in the present and it discuss how now days republicans have to own the tax issue to be able to be elected. This is all values because it is a reason for which people don’t consider voting for such a representative or for people to actually vote in their favor because is what they consider morally correct.
Still the author then changes to a different rhetoric characteristic. He uses the past to blame all the fake promises congressional republicans have made in the past. It also uses this for people to consider the future and make the correct choice of whom to vote for having in mind all that has happened in the past. And this once more connects to the present in which the ideas of the different candidates are presented and their morals and values will be compared with the beliefs of the voters, and by comparing and contrasting, the voters, in the future will once more make a choice of whom to vote for. The author then gives his own opinion of what should be done and suggested and states his values for them to get in the thoughts of the people in the present but for these values to influence the decision made in the future so that the wring things that have occurred in the past do not repeat themselves.
Referring to the other divisions of rhetoric, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, we could say this article, even though it contains from all three of these points of views, is mostly Pathos. This is mostly Pathos because the author is making the readers feel bad about how the republicans have before lied to the public and how they have used their power wrongly. It also makes the reader feel bad about the people in middle classes about the taxes because the author focuses in stating the problems these taxes would cause these families. And he blames the republicans for having turned their job into an economical business and benefiting themselves instead of paying attention to the ideas he suggested, which, according to him, wont make the middle class families suffer as much as the current republican ideas.
Op-Ed Contributor
By RAMESH PONNURU
Published: September 20, 2007
Washington
Grady White
REPUBLICAN presidential candidates can’t get elected without owning the tax issue. So far, the current crop is giving it away.
A huge reason for Ronald Reagan’s popularity was his cutting of all income-tax rates and ending of “bracket creep,” in which inflation pushed earners into higher tax groups. Congressional Republicans promised a tax credit for children while sweeping the 1994 elections. In 2000, George W. Bush promised to expand that tax credit and to reduce income taxes.
Yes, the top Republican contenders for 2008 are promising to keep all of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts. But the Democrats are not threatening the child tax credit or Mr. Bush’s reductions in the lower-level income-tax rates. Those issues are off the table.
What Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — who have made the most detailed remarks on taxes of the top-tier candidates — are really saying is that they will make sure that taxes on capital gains, dividends, estates and high earners will stay low. Not many middle-class taxpayers will benefit directly from any of those policies.
Mr. Romney adds that he will try to cut the corporate tax rate, which his adviser Glenn Hubbard calls “a drain on competitiveness.” Many of our trading partners have cut their corporate taxes, and more and more conservatives want the United States to follow suit. Apparently they haven’t been listening to their own speeches on free trade. Companies compete. Countries, however, are not engaged in a zero-sum contest where one nation’s gain is another’s loss. Cutting corporate tax rates may or may not be a good idea, but we don’t need to make it a priority to preserve our competitiveness.
Both Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani speak vaguely about making sure the alternative minimum tax doesn’t affect any more middle-class families. That is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t a tax cut.
Mr. Romney has also proposed an initiative to make the return on middle-class savings tax-free. It may also be a step in the right direction, but it’s small change. The primary focus of the Romney and Giuliani tax plans remains high earners.
What would be a serious middle-class tax cut? One answer is to expand the tax credit for children. But none of the candidates is proposing to do so, or any other big tax relief for regular folks. You might think that Mr. Giuliani would want to do everything he can to appeal to social conservatives short of actually becoming one himself. But why should he offer a pro-family tax cut when even the hard-core social conservatives in the race aren’t interested? Mike Huckabee wants a national sales tax and Sam Brownback wants a flat tax. Either proposal would increase taxes on a lot of middle-class families.
The Republicans in Congress are no better. For much of the right, the great passion of the moment is to make sure that the carried interest at hedge funds is taxed at what look an awful lot like preferential rates. For years, liberals have said that Republicans talk about “family values” but won’t do anything to meet the economic needs of families. Right now, on taxes, that charge hits home.
Two ideological misconceptions underlie the party’s lack of imagination. First, Republicans worry that taking people off the income-tax rolls, as an expanded child credit would do, would make voters think big government is free and turn to the Democrats. But there’s no real evidence for this. Besides, parents are likely to be future-oriented voters, and they will realize that they will be paying higher taxes again once their children have grown up.
Second, Republicans believe, in general, that the tax code should generate its revenue in a way that does the least damage possible to the economy. So they seek tax reforms that cut taxes on investment returns and thereby increase economic growth. What they ignore is that we overtax investments in children, too. Parents make financial sacrifices to produce the next generation of taxpayers, who will pay for everyone’s retirements. Yet the tax code does too little to recognize parents’ investments.
True, an expanded tax credit for children wouldn’t increase economic growth. Growth is good, and more growth is better. But present tax rates are perfectly compatible with healthy long-term growth. There is no pressing need to bring them down to improve growth.
A few conservative strategists have designed tax reform plans that modestly cut corporate tax rates and simplify the tax code while also helping families. (One idea is to make up the lost revenue by bumping affluent childless people into higher tax brackets.) So far, the candidates have not been interested.
As the Republican Party has gotten more socially conservative, its voter base has become lower in income. Many of the working-class social conservatives on whom the party relies are parents trying to make ends meet, or young people who want to start families but have financial worries. They have no particular attachment, or hostility, to free-market principles. A Republican Party that found a conservative way to meet their economic needs would both hold and expand its base.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review.
In this article the three kinds of rhetoric writing are found. For example the first paragraph is completely values, it is written in the present and it discuss how now days republicans have to own the tax issue to be able to be elected. This is all values because it is a reason for which people don’t consider voting for such a representative or for people to actually vote in their favor because is what they consider morally correct.
Still the author then changes to a different rhetoric characteristic. He uses the past to blame all the fake promises congressional republicans have made in the past. It also uses this for people to consider the future and make the correct choice of whom to vote for having in mind all that has happened in the past. And this once more connects to the present in which the ideas of the different candidates are presented and their morals and values will be compared with the beliefs of the voters, and by comparing and contrasting, the voters, in the future will once more make a choice of whom to vote for. The author then gives his own opinion of what should be done and suggested and states his values for them to get in the thoughts of the people in the present but for these values to influence the decision made in the future so that the wring things that have occurred in the past do not repeat themselves.
Referring to the other divisions of rhetoric, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, we could say this article, even though it contains from all three of these points of views, is mostly Pathos. This is mostly Pathos because the author is making the readers feel bad about how the republicans have before lied to the public and how they have used their power wrongly. It also makes the reader feel bad about the people in middle classes about the taxes because the author focuses in stating the problems these taxes would cause these families. And he blames the republicans for having turned their job into an economical business and benefiting themselves instead of paying attention to the ideas he suggested, which, according to him, wont make the middle class families suffer as much as the current republican ideas.
martes, 18 de septiembre de 2007
Phaeton, Midas, Baucis and Philemon
In all of the three stories we are able to witness mistakes made by the power of choosing and being stubborn. In the first story, Phaeton gets his father to grant him any one wish he asks for to prove him that he is his father. His wish, even though it was definitely not recommended by his father, was final. He would ride the suns chariot and would die in the way. But he didn’t just die, he as well got the earth in flames and destroyed many beautiful characteristics of the earth. In the second story a very mistaken decision is also made, Midas, after being hospitable for ten days and nights with Bacchus is then rewarded by anything he chooses. Being a power-hungry man who wanted wealth, Midas asks for the wish of anything he touches, turning into gold. This though was not as great as he wanted and this makes him incapable of many things.He isnt able to enjoy food and drinks, he can no longer feel any other texture that the golds, and he cant enjoy his life anymore. He then receives a pair of donkey ears since the gods decide on it and the gods do this because of the fact that he supported Pan, during Pans combat against Apollo.
Baucious and Philemon and they two are a swell rewarded for having been a family very well organized and they get a price for their hospitality. Since the rest of the village didn’t will to help the hidden goddesses, the gods punish them all except Baucis and Philemon. But this time they get a positive reward since they are able to die together and at the same time, just like they wanted.
Baucious and Philemon and they two are a swell rewarded for having been a family very well organized and they get a price for their hospitality. Since the rest of the village didn’t will to help the hidden goddesses, the gods punish them all except Baucis and Philemon. But this time they get a positive reward since they are able to die together and at the same time, just like they wanted.
lunes, 17 de septiembre de 2007
Apollo and Daphne- Pyramus and Thisbe- Cephalus and Procris
Under my point of view I consider all of these three myths to be tragedies. It annoys me that to people that love each other are not allowed being together for one reason or another. In Apollo and Daphne, Cupid made sure love was only felt from Apollo while Daphne did not wished to be loved. Pyramus and Thisbe, though living in the same village and loving each other, are not permitted by their parents to unite. And even though Cephalus declines Aurora to keep his wife, at the end, they too are separated from one another. The fact that they were separated by death and by their own fault causes even more frustration upon me. Daphne is taken away from Apollo by becoming a tree and this is because, she, herself, asked for it while trying to escape Apollo. Then Pyramus kills himself because he believes Thisbe is dead and then Thisbe realizes what happened and kills herself as well. And then Procris spies her husband because she believes he is cheating on her after he actually renounced a goddess for her, and not being able to see her, but hearing her, Cephalus kills her with his javelin, thinking she is an animal. The fact that two people that love each other are not able to be with one another makes me feel pity as well since I do not hope for that kind of feeling of wanting but not having.
domingo, 16 de septiembre de 2007
Cadmus, the Myrmidons and Apollo and Hyacinthus
These three myths are very different. They each have what I consider a different message to transmit. Apollo and Hyacinthus is about the preferences the god Apollo had towards Hyacinthus and how he accidentally killed him one day. In his honor Apollo created a flower silver and purple, more beautiful than any other, and this one revives every spring making sure Hyacinthhs’s memory is not forgotten. So this Myth explains how this flower was created and what it purpose was but it also shows that Apollo’s favoritism towards Hyacinthus lead him to his death since he, being a god, should not show favoritism toward anybody.
Cadmus however is a very different style of myth. This one shows how a grate serpent of great importance to the gods was killed by Cadmus after the serpent had killed most, or all, of Cadmus’s soldiers. After Cadmus sleights the serpent, he forms a family and founds a city, but the gods never stop haunting him for having killed the serpent so he offers to become a serpent himself. The gods accept his offer, and his wife not wanting to stay alone, chooses the same fate. My interpretation of the message of this myth is that it reminds you that your past can’t be forgiven and that it will affect your future.
And the myth of the myrmidons is of their creation. It explains how after a terrible disease kills the whole city of Aegina, this was a course sent by Juno but no offering or preach is capable of make her stop. Everyone dies except the king and his family and so Aeacus, the king, asks Juno to either take him as well, as she did with his entire city, or give him people to begin a new city once more. Juno decides to give him some soldiers that kill each other until five are left and these help Aeacus build a new city and calls them myrmidons, inspired by the ant colony from which Aeacus had gotten his idea to ask for people. The inner message of this story I would say is hope because Aeacus always waited for his city to recover and when it didn’t, he still looked for a new solution. He always hoped for Juno’s forgiveness and he eventually did receive what he waited so long for.
Cadmus however is a very different style of myth. This one shows how a grate serpent of great importance to the gods was killed by Cadmus after the serpent had killed most, or all, of Cadmus’s soldiers. After Cadmus sleights the serpent, he forms a family and founds a city, but the gods never stop haunting him for having killed the serpent so he offers to become a serpent himself. The gods accept his offer, and his wife not wanting to stay alone, chooses the same fate. My interpretation of the message of this myth is that it reminds you that your past can’t be forgiven and that it will affect your future.
And the myth of the myrmidons is of their creation. It explains how after a terrible disease kills the whole city of Aegina, this was a course sent by Juno but no offering or preach is capable of make her stop. Everyone dies except the king and his family and so Aeacus, the king, asks Juno to either take him as well, as she did with his entire city, or give him people to begin a new city once more. Juno decides to give him some soldiers that kill each other until five are left and these help Aeacus build a new city and calls them myrmidons, inspired by the ant colony from which Aeacus had gotten his idea to ask for people. The inner message of this story I would say is hope because Aeacus always waited for his city to recover and when it didn’t, he still looked for a new solution. He always hoped for Juno’s forgiveness and he eventually did receive what he waited so long for.
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)
