Comparison of The Acharnians essays

Comparison of The Acharnians essays Comparison of The Acharnians, Written and Performed Aristophanes words and ideas proved to be relevant in todays society in Bailiwick Theaters performance of The Acharnians. According to the program, this performance of the The Acharnians is about one mans private peace during the compassionately conservative bombing campaign on Canada, the adventures that befell him thereafter, and what Jesus and the Tooth fairy had to say about it all. Based on this description one might think that this play does not even resemble the original play that Aristophanes had intended to be performed. I too, expected it to be more true to the classic poise and rhetoric, and was a little weary when the actors entered wearing tie dye shirts and overalls. Upon closer examination and consideration, I realized however that this adaptation is quite similar to the original script. Many parallels and comparisons can be made between modern times and classical times. The crew claim to have done little in adapting the script but change the names of gods, wars, an d government officials, but some of the basic plot and ideas were altered a bit also. Dicaeopolis, like that of his counterpart in the original version of this play, is a farmer who wants peace. His goal goes beyond that however. He is depicted as an extremely liberal and radical environmentalist who is more concerned with preservation of the environment and resistance to conformity than he is concerned with peace. He is against genetically engineered food, oppression of speech, and conformity to societys ideals. These ideals are the characteristics of a white, middle class, Christian, heterosexual male with 2.3 children, one dog, and one cat. His resistance to conformity might in fact be a parallel to resistance to urban life and longing to return to rural way of life though. In this adaptation the Peloponnesian War with Sparta is ins...

Best Summary and Analysis The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8

Best Summary and Analysis The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8 SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips In Great GatsbyChapter 8, things go from very bad to much, much worse. There’s an elegiac tone to half of the story in Chapter 8, as Nick tells us about Gatsby giving up on his dreams of Daisy and reminiscing about his time with her five years before. The other half of the chapter is all police thriller, as we hear Michaelis describe Wilson coming unglued and deciding to take bloody revenge for Myrtle’s death. Get ready for bittersweetness and gory shock, in thisThe Great GatsbyChapter 8 summary. Quick Note on Our Citations Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book. To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text. The Great Gatsby: Chapter 8 Summary That night Nick has trouble sleeping. He feels like he needs to warn Gatsby about something. When he meets up with Gatsby at dawn, Gatsby tells Nick nothing happened outside Daisy’s house all night.Gatsby’s house feels strangely enormous. It’s also poorly kept - dusty, unaired, and unusually dark. Nick advises Gatsby to lay low somewhere else so that his car isn’t found and linked to the accident. But Gatsby is unwilling to leave his lingering hopes for Daisy.Instead, Gatsby tells Nick about his background - the information Nick told us in Chapter 6. Gatsby's narrative begins with the description of Daisy as the first wealthy, upper-class girl Gatsby had ever met. He loved her huge beautiful house and the fact that many men had loved her before him. All of this made him see her as a prize. He knew that since he was poor, he shouldn’t really have been wooing her, but he slept with her anyway, under the false pretenses that he and she were in the same social class. Gatsby realized that he was in love with Daisy and was surprised to see that Daisy fell in love with him too.They were together for a month before Gatsby had to leave for the war in Europe. He was successful in the army, becoming a major. After the war he ended up at Oxford, unable to return to Daisy. Meanwhile, Daisy re-entered the normal rhythm of life: lavish living, snobbery, lots of dates, and all-night parties. Gatsby sensed from her letters that she was annoyed at having to wait for him, and instead wanted to finalize what her life would be like. The person who finalized her life in a practical way that made sense was Tom. Gatsby interrupts his narrative to again say that there’s no way that Daisy ever loved Tom - well, maybe for a second right after the wedding, tops, but that’s it. Then he goes back to his story, which concludes after Daisy's wedding to Tom.When Gatsbycame back from Oxford, Daisy and Tom were still on their honeymoon. Gatsby felt like the best thing in his life had disappeared forever. After breakfast, Gatsby’s gardener suggests draining the pool, but Gatsby wants to keep it filled since he hasn’t yet used it. Gatsby still hopes that Daisy will call him. Nick thanks Gatsby for the hospitality, pays him the backhanded compliment of saying that he is better than the â€Å"rotten crowd† of upper-class people (backhanded because it's setting the bar pretty low to be better than "rotten" people), and leaves to go to work. At work, Nick gets a phone call from Jordan, who is upset that Nick didn’t pay sufficient attention to her the night before. Nick is floored by this selfishness - after all, someone died, so how could Jordan be so self-involved!They hang up on each other, clearly broken up. Nick tries to call Gatsby, but is told by the operator that the line is being kept free for a phone call from Detroit (which might actually be Gatsby's way of clearing the line in case Daisy calls? It's unclear).On the way back from the city, Nick purposefully sits on the side of the train car that won’t face Wilson’s garage. Nick now tells us what happened at the garage after he, Tom, and Jordan drove away the day before. Since he wasn't there, he's most likely recapping Michaelis's inquest statement. They found Myrtle’s sister too drunk to understand what had happened to Myrtle. Then she fainted and had to be taken away. Michaelis sat with Wilson until dawn, listening to Wilson talk about the yellow car that had run Myrtle over, and how to find it. Michaelis suggested that Wilson talk to a priest, but Wilson showed Michaelis an expensive dog leash that he found. To him, this was incontrovertible proof of her affair and the fact that her lover killed Myrtle on purpose. Wilson said that Myrtle was trying to run out to talk to the man in the car, while Michaelis believed that she had been trying to flee the house where Wilson had locked her up. Wilson had told Myrtle that God could see everything she was doing. The God he’s talking about? The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburgon the billboard near the garage. Wilson seemed calm, so Michaelis went home to sleep. By the time he came back to the garage, Wilson was gone. Wilson walked all the way to West Egg, asking about the yellow car. That afternoon, Gatsby gets in his pool for the first time that summer. He is still waiting for a call from Daisy. Nick tries to imagine what it must have been like to be Gatsby and know that your dream was lost. Gatsby’s chauffeur hears gunshots just as Nick pulls up to the house. In the pool, they see Gatsby’s dead body, and a little way off in the grass, they see Wilson’s body. Wilson has shot Gatsby and then himself. So the moral of the story is, if you have a nice pool, try to use it more often. Key Chapter 8 Quotes She was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed himhe had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived thereit was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisyit increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions. (8.10) The reason the word â€Å"nice† is in quotation marks is that Gatsby does not mean that Daisy is the first pleasant or amiable girl that he has met. Instead, the word â€Å"nice† here means refined, having elegant and elevated taste, picky and fastidious. In other words, from the very beginning what Gatsby most values about Daisy is that she belongs to that set of society that he is desperately trying to get into: the wealthy, upper echelon. Just like when he noted the Daisy’s voice has money in it, here Gatsby almost cannot separate Daisy herself from the beautiful house that he falls in love with. Notice also how much he values quantity of any kind – it’s wonderful that the house has many bedrooms and corridors, and it’s also wonderful that many men want Daisy. Either way, it’s the quantity itself that â€Å"increases value.† It’s almost like Gatsby’s love is operating in a market economy– the more demand there is for a particular good, the higher the worth of that good. Of course, thinking in this way makes it easy to understand why Gatsby is able to discard Daisy’s humanity and inner life when he idealizes her. For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and therelike rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor. Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately-and the decision must be made by some force-of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality-that was close at hand. (8.18-19) This description of Daisy’s life apart from Gatsby clarifies why she picks Tom in the end and goes back to her hopeless ennui and passive boredom: this is what she has grown up doing and is used to. Daisy’s life seems fancy. After all, there are orchids and orchestras and golden shoes. But already, even for the young people of high society, death and decay loom large. In this passage for example, not only is the orchestra’s rhythm full of sadness, but the orchids are dying, and the people themselves look like flowers past their prime. In the midst of this stagnation, Daisy longs for stability, financial security, and routine. Tom offered that then, and he continues to offer it now. "Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first marriedand loved me more even then, do you see?" Suddenly he came out with a curious remark: "In any case," he said, "it was just personal." What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured? (8.24-27) Even though he can now no longer be an absolutist about Daisy’s love, Gatsby is still trying to think about her feelings on his own terms. After admitting that the fact that many men loved Daisy before him is a positive, Gatsby is willing to admit that maybe Daisy had feelings for Tomafter all, just as long as her love for Gatsby was supreme. Gatsby is ambiguous admission that â€Å"it was just personal† carries several potential meanings: Nick assumes that the word â€Å"it† refers to Gatsby’s love, which Gatsby is describing as â€Å"personal† as a way of emphasizing how deep and inexplicable his feelings for Daisy are. But of course, the word â€Å"it† could just as easily be referring to Daisy’s decision to marry Tom. In this case, what is â€Å"personal† are Daisy’s reasons (the desire for status and money), which are hers alone, and have no bearing on the love that she and Gatsby feel for each other. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever. (8.30) Once again Gatsby is trying to reach something that is just out of grasp, a gestural motif that recurs frequently in this novel. Here already, even as a young man, he is trying to grab hold of an ephemeral memory. "They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruptionand he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye. (8.45-46) It’s interesting that here Nick suddenly tells us that he disapproves of Gatsby. One way to interpret this is that during that fateful summer, Nickdid indeed disapprove of what he saw, but has since come to admire and respect Gatsby, and it is that respect and admiration that come through in the way he tells the story most of the time. It’s also telling that Nick sees the comment he makes to Gatsby as a compliment. At best, it is a backhanded one – he is saying that Gatsby is better than a rotten crowd, but that is a bar set very low (if you think about it, it’s like saying â€Å"you’re so much smarter than that chipmunk!† and calling that high praise). Nick’s description of Gatsby’s outfit as both â€Å"gorgeous† and a â€Å"rag† underscores this sense of condescension. The reason Nick thinks that he is praising Gatsby by saying this is that suddenly, in this moment, Nick is able to look past his deeply and sincerely held snobbery, and to admit that Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all horrible people despite being upper crust. Still, backhanded as it is, this compliment also meant to genuinely make Gatsby feel a bit better. Since Gatsby cares so, so much about entering the old money world, it makes Nick glad to be able to tell Gatsby that he is so much better than the crowd he's desperate to join. Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool as if a divot from a green golf links had come sailing in at the office window but this morning it seemed harsh and dry. "I've left Daisy's house," she said. "I'm at Hempstead and I'm going down to Southampton this afternoon." Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the act annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid. "You weren't so nice to me last night." "How could it have mattered then?" (8.49-53) Jordan’s pragmatic opportunism, which has so far been a positive foil to Daisy’s listless inactivity, is suddenly revealed to be an amoral and self-involved way of going through life. Instead of being affected one way or another by Myrtle’s horrible death, Jordan’s takeaway from the previous day is that Nick simply wasn’t as attentive to her as she would like. Nick is staggered by the revelation that the cool aloofness that he liked so much throughout the summer - possibly because it was a nice contrast to the girl back home that Nick thought was overly attached to their non-engagement - is not actually an act. Jordan really doesn’t care about other people, and she really can just shrug off seeing Myrtle’s mutilated corpse and focus on whether Nick was treating her right. Nick, who has been trying to assimilate this kind of thinking all summer long, finds himself shocked back into his Middle West morality here. "I spoke to her," he muttered, after a long silence. "I told her she might fool me but she couldn't fool God. I took her to the window" With an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it, "and I said 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me but you can't fool God!' " Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night. "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. "That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight. (8.102-105) Clearly Wilson has been psychologically shaken first by Myrtle’s affair and then by her death - he is seeing the giant eyes of the optometrist billboardas a stand-in for God. But this delusion underlines the absence of any higher power in the novel. In the lawless, materialistic East, there is no moral center which could rein in people’s darker, immoral impulses. The motif of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes runs through the novel, as Nick notes them watching whatever goes on in the ashheaps. Here, that motif comes to a crescendo. Arguably, when Michaelis dispels Wilson’s delusion about the eyes, he takes away the final barrier to Wilson’s unhinged revenge plot. If there is no moral authority watching, anything goes. No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clockuntil long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (8.0) Nick tries to imagine what it might be like to be Gatsby, but a Gatsby without the activating dream that has spurred him throughout his life. For Nick, this would be the loss of the aesthetic sense - an inability to perceive beauty in roses or sunlight. Theideaof fall as a new, but horrifying, world of ghosts and unreal material contrasts nicely with Jordan’s earlier idea that fall brings with it rebirth. For Jordan, fall is a time of reinvention and possibility - but for Gatsby, it is literally the season of death. The Great GatsbyChapter 8 Analysis Now let's comb through this chapter to tease apart the themes that connect it to the rest of the novel. Themes and Symbols Unreliable Narrator. However much Nick has been backgrounding himself as a narrative force in the novel, in this chapter, we suddenly start to feel the heavy hand of his narration. Rather than the completely objective, nonjudgmental reporter that he has set out to be, Nick begins to edit and editorialize. First, he introduces a sense of foreboding, foreshadowing Gatsby’s death with bad dreams and ominous dread. Then, he talks about his decision to reveal Gatsby’s background not in the chronological order when he learned it, but before we heard about the argument in the hotel room. The novel is a long eulogy for a man Nick found himself admiring despite many reasons not to, so this choice to contextualize and mitigate Tom’s revelations by giving Gatsby the chance to provide context makes perfect sense. However, it calls into question Nick’s version of events, and his interpretation of the motivations of the people around him. He is a fundamentally unreliable narrator. Symbols: The Eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The absence of a church or religious figure in Wilson’s life, and his delusion that the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are a higher power, underscores how little moral clarity or prescription there is in the novel’s world. Characters are driven by emotional or material greed, by selfishness, and by a complete lack of concern about others. The people who thrive - from Wolfshiem to Jordan - do so because they are moral relativists. The people who fail - like Nick, or Gatsby, or Wilson - fail because they can’t put aside an absolutist ideal that drives their actions. The American Dream. Remember discussing variously described ambition in Chapter 6, when we saw a bunch of people on the make in different ways? In this chapter, that sense of forward momentum recurs, but in a twisted and darkly satiric way through the Terminator-like drive of Wilson to find the yellow car and its driver. He walks from Queens to West Egg for something like sixor sevenhours, finding evidence that can’t be reproduced, and using a route that can’t be retraced afterward. Unlike Gatsby, forever trying to grasp the thing out he knows well but can’t reach, Wilson homes in on a person he doesn’t know but unerringly reaches. Society and Class. By the end of this chapter, the rich and the poor are definitely separated - forever, by death. Every main character who isn’t from the upper class - Myrtle, Gatsby, and Wilson - is violently killed. On the other hand, those from the social elite - Jordan, Daisy, and Tom - can continue their lives totally unchanged. Jordan brushes these deaths off completely. Tom gets to hang on to his functionally dysfunctional marriage.AndDaisy literally gets away with murder (or at least manslaughter). Only Nick seems to be genuinely affected by what he has witnessed. He survives, but his retreat to his Midwest home marks a kind of death - the death of his romantic idea of achievement and success. Death and Failure. Rot, decay, and death are everywhere in this chapter: Gatsby’s house is in a state of almost supernatural disarray, with â€Å"inexplicable amount of dust everywhere† (8.4) after he fires his servants. Amidst the parties and gaiety of Daisy’s youth, her â€Å"dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor† (8.19). Nick’s phrase for the corruption and selfishness of the upper-class people he’s gotten to know is â€Å"rotten crowd† (8.45), people who are decomposing into garbage. Gatsby floats in a pool, trying to hang on to summer, but actually on the eve of fall, as nature around him turns â€Å"frightening,† â€Å"unfamiliar,† â€Å"grotesque,† and â€Å"raw† (8.0). This imagery culminates in figurative and literal cremation, as Wilson is described as â€Å"ashen† (8.0) and his murder-suicide as a â€Å"holocaust† (8.3). By the way, remember that when Fitzgerald uses the word â€Å"holocaust,† he isn’t talking about what happened in Nazi Germany - he is writing about 20 years before WWII. Instead, the word â€Å"holocaust† here means a sacrificial offering that is burned on an altar - unrooted to any specific religion, Wilson’s actions evoke an atavistic, pagan ritual sacrifice. Something is very rotten in the state of Denmark†¦ uh, Long Island. That rotten thing? The rich. Crucial Character Beats Nickhas a premonition that he wants to warn Gatsby about. Gatsby still holds out hope for Daisy and refuses to get out of town as Nick advises. Nick and Jordan break up - he is grossed out by her self-involvement and total lack of concern about the fact that Myrtle died the day before. Wilson goes somewhat crazy after Myrtle’s death, and slowly becomes convinced that the driver of the yellow car that killed her was also her lover, and that he killed her on purpose. He sets out to hunt the owner of the yellow car down. Wilson shoots Gatsby while Gatsby is waiting for Daisy’s phone call in his pool. Then Wilson shoots himself. What’s Next? Think about the novel’s connection to the motif of the seasonsby comparing the ways summer, fall, and winter are described and experienced by different characters. Get a handle on Gatsby’s revelations about his past by seeing all the events put into chronological order. Move on to the summary of Chapter 9, or revisit the summary of Chapter 7. Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points?We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

Art Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Art - Essay Example In Cassatt’s work, she uses very light colours and avoiding black producing a very romantic painting that depicts a mother and child. In Manet’s works, he disregards what was the dictum of impressionism by his characteristic use of black. Both artists are working from a Japanese style of design and perspective which according to many reports heavily influenced their paintings. According to pbs.org, Manet’s paints his forms quickly in rough brushstrokes clearly visible on the surface of the canvas. Instead of the carefully constructed perspective that leads the eye deep into the space of the painting, Manet offers a picture frame flattened into two planes. The foreground is the glowing white body of Olympia on the bed; the background is darkness. (Edouard Manet’s Olympia). The treatment of the subject matter is very different in both paintings. According to pbs.org, Manet chooses to paint a woman of his time -- not a feminine ideal, but a real woman, and a courtesan at that.(Edouard Manet’s Olympia).This woman is a self-assured prostitute and view of the public of the nineteenth century a scandalous painting which would have been destroyed by the public as reported by many people. According to the Guardian, â€Å"The subject matter is sensational - a nude who, in the eyes of 19th-century observers, was clearly a prostitute, in her trashy mules with a bootlace for a necklace, tucked in, to the ruffled white pillows and her skin is a bright, glaring white. The fully dressed black servant is featured, presenting her with flowers from one of her male companions.†(Olympia, Edouard Manet).In viewing the painting the prostitute clearly has a defiant and confrontational look which according to the Guardian, it is impossible to know whether her mood is one of melancholy or contempt.( Olympia Edouard Manet(1863)) On the other hand, Cassatt’s mother and child are much more easier and pleasurable to view. The â€Å"mother an d child† clearly depict the intimate love and bond between a mother and her child. According to Danielle Peltakian, â€Å"she painted in delicate brush strokes of pastel pigments typical of the style of Renoir and Degas. She created a romantic depiction of the female figure reminiscent of the early Italian renaissance Madonna and child†( American member of the french impressionists school:note print maker.) According to tfaoi.com, The mother in the painting exudes a sense of dignity and purpose that challenges conventional notions of decorative femininity.(Mary Cassat, Modern woman).According to Anne Higonet, Cassatt made the experience of tiny children's bodies a visceral pleasure, both for the mothers represented within her pictures and for us, the viewers of the pictures(Two ways of thinking about Cassatt).She goes further in explaining that Cassatt's picture joins the forms of mother and child. The integrity of the individual body, which we could also call its isola tion, is replaced by a formal fiction of merged bodies. Cassatt engages us in the joys of infant flesh. (Two ways of thinking about Cassatt). In comparing the two pictures by Cassatt and Manet, the differences in depiction of women is immense. In manet’s Olympia, the woman is depicted as an object, while in Cassatt’s Mother and child the woman is a subject. Mary Cassatt depicted the modern woman of the Paris. A feminist perspective of her work pervades most of the explanation and analysis of her work which describe her as expressing her

Is it worth investing in a pension (UK context) Dissertation

Is it worth investing in a pension (UK context) - Dissertation Example (Nader, 1991). As such, the overall importance of investing into pensions is critical from the point of view of maintaining a certain level of life style. It also ensures that the individuals have the sufficient funds apart from the State related benefits to maintain a very decent life style. (Lluberas, 2007). This is also evident from the fact that the overall pension funding gap is increasing rapidly every year and individuals require up to ?10,000 every year to fill that pension gap and the overall gap will be over ?300 billion per year.1 Trends also suggest that as the population ages, the overall ratio of people working to support the State Pension will decrease from 3.32 in 2001 to 2.44 in 2060. This decline in the overall number suggests that more and more people will be on the State Pension and as such the overall benefits may continue to decline due to the increasing pressure on the government to pay off State Pension to such large number of people every year. (Bonoli & Shin kawa, 2005) It is however, important to note that the different studies have suggested that the pension funds in which individuals invest for their pensions may not be performing well. Though most of the pension funds in UK achieved positive returns in 2010 however, considering the long term nature of such investments, it may be relatively arbitrary to conclude that the pension funds can provide sufficient and desired returns to ensure that the investors (individuals) will have sufficient pensions to live a comfortable retirement life. (Blake,2000) The choice of this topic has been mostly based on the assumptions that as the number of people grow and rely more on the State Pension, their overall standards of living may decline sharply when they are in the retirement age. Such sharp decline in the standards of living therefore requires that the people must consider investing into the Pensions from the days when they are earning higher amounts every year. (Cohen, 1981). A gradual cont ribution of the certain sum of money every year can help individuals to become more self sufficient in their retirement age. However, given the fact that the overall performance of the pension funds has not been up to the mark in recent times, a natural question arises as to whether it is rational to invest into pension funds? Could they provide the desired returns to the individuals when they are in retirement so that they can live a more comfortable life? Considering the above situation, the logical question also arises as to whether it is good to invest into pension funds? Can pension funds provide the desired level of returns over the period of time to ensure that they meet the objectives of the pension holders? The basic aim of this paper therefore is to explore and analyze the question of whether it is good to invest in pensions with special reference to UK market. This research project will also attempt to explore the question of whether the tax saving benefits can help the p ension industry, are there any factors which provide the incentive to save for the pensions considering the factors such as job mobility, with the stretching of the pension age by the government, what effect this could have on the overall planning for the retirement life of the

The Relationships between Happiness and Meaning Essay Example for Free

The Relationships between Happiness and Meaning Essay Every person on earth experiences happiness as well as unhappiness.   Even infants cry as well as laugh.   Ultimately they grow to realize that there are things that make them happy just as there are situations that make them unhappy.   Understanding the nature of these different things and/or situations is to know how the meanings of these things and/or situations are related to one’s happiness or unhappiness.   Thus, happiness and meaning happen to be closely connected with each other.    There is a reason why we experience happiness or unhappiness.   These reasons are the meanings of our experiences of happiness or unhappiness.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   There are many ways to understand happiness.   A person who is ecstatic is understood to be extremely happy.   Another person may experience happiness as he or she enjoys life.   Conversely, a person who does not really attempt to enjoy life may be satisfied with his or her life nevertheless.   All of these people may be happy.   Even so, all of them may have different reasons for being happy.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Prophets and sages have often stated that things on earth cannot always make us happy.   A person who is truly happy with life because he or she enjoys a nearly perfect relationship with his or her spouse may lose the spouse to death.   Another person may believe that material things, e.g. new cars, are responsible for his or her happiness.   The person who loses his or her spouse will experience unhappiness, just as the individual who loses all of his or money would become depressed.   People who believe that happiness is equivalent to material success may also develop â€Å"affluenza,† described in the following ways: (1) â€Å"The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses;† (2) â€Å"An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream;† and (3) â€Å"An unsustainable addiction to economic growth (Leon).†Ã‚   Perhaps the rich people who have committed suicide, e.g. Kurt Cobain, were suffering from affluenza.   Regardless, it is generally believed that a person must find the meaning of his or her life to be truly happy (Brain).   Hence, the person who loses his or her spouse has a couple of choices: (1) Either to commit suicide because he or she cannot deal with the unhappiness caused by the loss; or (2) Find reasons to be happy despite the loss.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Psychologists have found that people feel happy when they increase their understanding.   In other words, knowing the meaning of the things in our world is bound to increase our happiness.   Thus, many people feel satisfied when they read books.   The person who was dependent on his or her spouse for happiness may find happiness in this way.   Alternatively, the individual may decide to pursue a goal that helps to move the human society forward in some way.   The meaning of life is also understood by people to be the service of God (Brain). Regardless of the meaning of life realized by the person who had believed that his or her spouse was responsible for his or her happiness; understanding what his or her life is worth may help the individual to experience satisfaction with life once again.   Moreover, whether the person chooses to serve society or God, by knowing the meaning of his or her existence, the individual opens up to future experiences that may very well allow him or her to find happiness without the spouse.   After all, pursuing a goal to fulfill the meaning of life may lead the person to joyful experiences.   Hence, meaning and happiness could never be separated. Works Cited Brain, Marshall. â€Å"Chapter 41: Material Things Will Not Bring You Happiness.† The Teenager’s Guide to the Real World. 1997. 10 Dec 2007. http://www.bygpub.com/books/tg2rw/chap41excerpt.htm. Leon, Virginia De. â€Å"Money cant buy meaning: Many simplify to find happiness.† Spokesman Review. 9 Jul 2006.

Gunner Pass Driving School :: Business Management Studies

Gunner Pass Driving School A good location for any business is vital. You might need to be right in the middle of the city, or you could be better off in an out of town Retail Park or Industrial Estate. To decide what location is best, businesses should think about: * Will we attract passing trade * Will we make regular trips to the bank or a postal depot * Will there be public transport links nearby Whatever option a business goes for, there will be disadvantages. An office in a rural setting might be relaxing, but could be awkward for staff or suppliers making deliveries. Being right in the middle of a city can be very convenient, but also more expensive. Adrian has no workplace for Gunner Pass other than when he is out in his car, and when he is at home. At home he works within his office with his computer and has a telephone for communications. A map to show the location of Gunner Pass is shown below. As of yet he has no other offices or locations for his business. If he decided to rent an office this would be a disadvantage because he would have to pay costs to use the premises. The local areas in which Adrian provides his service are expanding. New homes are being built, this means more shops will be needed to supply everyone’s needs. The houses being built are all in excess of  £100k plus. This means Daventry is attracting wealthy families. Adrian can benefit from this, because there will be more customers in the area needing driving lessons. This could be a disadvantage for Adrian as other driving schools may be set up because of the rise of population in the area. Adrian would now have competition. Adrian needs to be reasonably near his customers. The location of his customers isn’t a big factor as it is with other businesses. This is because he drives to his customer’s house when they are having a lesson. His customers cannot be too far away, as Adrian will have to pay more on petrol to go to them. Adrian’s car runs on Diesel the reasons for this are: †¢ It’s cheap †¢ More Mileage †¢ Less pollution Buying your own premises: advantages and disadvantages If Adrian feels it neccassery he may decide to buy or rent an office and premesis. This will be a new location for Gunner Pass. The new location would need to be in the local area. He is likely only to consider this if he has plans to expand. Buying a property gives you the freedom to use it as you wish - subject to planning regulations or

The Ira

The Irish Republican Army or IRA is Northern Ireland’s most notorious terrorist organization. Like many other groups, the IRA is a militant nationalist group with Marxist tendencies. They use violent attacks such as bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, extortion, and robberies that they used . to send their message. The ultimate goal of the IRA is to use militant behavior to make British rule in Northern Ireland obsolete, thus letting Northern Ireland become an independent republic, instead of two separate countries with different governments.The IRA was founded in 1919 as a successor to the Irish Volunteers, a militant nationalist organization that was founded in 1913. One of the alias’s for the group is Direct Action Against Drugs, or DADD. The IRA operates independently of any political control or party, and† in some periods actually took the upper hand in the independence movement. †(Britannica) Unlike some terrorist groups, the IRA does not carry out attacks on countries that are not in close vicinity of Northern Ireland. The majority of their operations are based out if Great Britain, and Ireland.Some of their most favored targets were senior British Government officials, British military and police in Northern Ireland, and Northern Irish Loyalist paramilitary groups. By attacking these individuals they hoped to demoralize Great Britain to the point of turning Ireland over to the people. The IRA did not want to overthrow the government and run it themselves, they simply wanted to see a change in the government so that it would benefit the people of Northern Ireland. The IRA is organized into small, tightly knit cells under the leadership of the Army Council.While they only have a few hundred members, they have thousands of sympathizers who contribute by donating money, supplies, shelter, and even weapons. â€Å"The IRA Is suspected of receiving funds, arms, and other terrorist-related materiel from sympathizers in the United S tates. †(Britannica) the IRA also received a large amount of support at one point from the PLO, a â€Å"freedom fighter† group from Libya. Not only do they receive aid from other terrorist groups with similar agendas, but in 2002 three suspected IRA members were arrested in Colombia on charges of assisting the FARC to improve its explosives capabilities.The IRA was in their prime during the late 1950’s and 1960’s, though they did play a big part in the Irish Civil war of 1922. As a result of this war, the IRA became more closely related to Sinn Fein, which is the Irish Nationalist party. â€Å"In December 1969, the IRA divided into â€Å"Official† and â€Å"Provisional† wings. Although both factions were committed to a united socialist Irish republic, the Officials preferred parliamentary tactics and eschewed violence after 1972, whereas the Provisionals, or â€Å"Provos,† believed that violence— particularly terrorism—w as a necessary part of the struggle to rid Ireland of the British. (Global Security) This was a result of a Sinn Fein conference that had taken place in August.After 1970, the IRA was slowly slipping into the darkness, as they had stopped attacking as much, and was not as big of a concern anymore. Because of â€Å"Bloody Sunday’, when thirteen innocent Catholic protestors were killed by British soldiers, the IRA gained support from the Catholic Church, which gave them their reputation back for a while. Eventually though, they were back where they had left off before Bloody Sunday. The IRA reorganized in 1977 into detached cells to protect against infiltration† and their arms dealing was back in full force. It was said that â€Å"in the late 1990s that the IRA had enough weapons in its arsenal to continue its campaign for at least another decade. †(Britannica) For a long time the IRA tried to use peaceful methods to gain equal treatment for the Catholic minority in the Protestant Northern Ireland. But they were were met with resistance. The Protestants and the British government met the peaceful attempts of the IRA with violence i. e. Bloody Sunday.The IRA had no other choice but to employ violent methods to gain equality and civil rights for the Catholic Minority in Ulster. The IRA began implementing methods such as Bombings, sniper attacks, and assassinations on British citizens. (www. CFR. org) The afore mentioned Sinn Fein, which means â€Å"We Ourselves† first emerged in the early 1900s. It is the oldest political party in Ireland’s history. It was a â€Å"federation of nationalist clubs and eventually, all nationalists to the left of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster came to be popularly known as Sinn Feiners. (SinnFein. org) The party, like the IRA, was based on the demand for an Irish Republic. It won the 1918 election by a landslide and set up Dail Eireann which is translated to â€Å"Assembly of Ireland. † Following three years of war, led by an underground republican government, the party split in 1922 on the issue of the Treaty which partitioned Ireland into two separate provinces. The leader of Sinn Fein left the party in 1926, causing the party to lose a lot of credibility.However, its fortunes recovered and flourished in the late 1950s and early 1960s with its new association to the IRA and their border campaign. During this time the group experienced a substantial amount of electoral success. In present day, Sinn Fein is split into two parties, Sinn Fein and Republican Sinn Fein. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) was formed in 1969 as the covert armed wing of Sinn Fein. The members of this group, called, â€Å"Provos† were formed from the Official Sinn Fein and the Official IRA.The Provisional IRA was the largest of the three republican armed resistance groups (Sinn Fein, IRA and PIRA). The policies of Sinn Fein under the new leadership of Gerry Adams led to a split in the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1997. One side accepted the new â€Å"Good Friday Agreement† and the New or Real IRA continuing armed resistance against the British. The PIRA has at this point accepted the ceasefire and is still most commonly confused with the real IRA because of their similar connections and name.The IRA and PIRA are not totally different groups, but they are actually two groups that used to function as one. It is my opinion that the split of the IRA into two factions is one of the major reasons why their goal was never accomplished. The army was in need of a way to make money and fundraise to support their cause. They became adept at raising money in Northern Ireland through â€Å"extortion, racketeering, and other illegal activities† and they policed their own neighborhoods through mock trials and beatings.As a result of this Mafia like enforcement, Sinn Fein began to play a more prominent role in trying to end the arms pr oblem that the IRA was causing. â€Å"Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, together with John Hume, head of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), sought ways to end the armed struggle and bring republicans into democratic politics. They were successful in doing so, and in 1994 the IRA declared a cease fire with Britain so that Sinn Fein was able to legally engage in politics with the Irish Parliament.This ceasefire was shortly ended in 1996 when a bomb that was suspected to be from the IRA killed two civilians. However it was reinstated the following year, returning things back to being civilized between the IRA and Great Britain. Technically the IRA is still a functioning terrorist group, but due to the ceasefire they have been dormant since around 2002 when the final ceasefire was laid out and agreed upon. The IRA has a very important place in Irish history, as well as the history of terrorism because of their prominence in the 1950’s and 1960â€⠄¢s.