The Importance of Being Earnest Essay Example for Free

The Importance of Being Earnest Essay The Importance of Being Earnest, having being written in the late Victorian period, shows examples of the contemporary societys attitudes to and customs of marriage. These attitudes serve a very important role throughout the play. The problems and trials of marriage provide the basis for this play. Although this theme of the problem of marriage has featured in a number of English authors works, for example Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde adapted the theme in order for his contemporary audience to relate to it, and so the play is quite unique. Act 1 of the play opens with Algernon holding a brief conversation with his servant Lane regarding marriage. We immediately have an insight into Algernons life as a single man; Algernon is more concerned with money and the high life than he is with responsibility and sensibility. He sees that not having a first rate brand of wine, as it was mentioned was the case in marriage, as demoralising. It is not surprising that Algy, later on in Act 1, expresses such cynical views of marriage. Lane touches on the lower classs attitudes towards marriage briefly in this scene. Lane says that he has had very little experience of marriage he explains that he was only married once and that was a misunderstanding between himself and a young person. The humour in this line lies in the point that experience shouldnt normally be measured in the amount of times one is married but the number of years one has lived in a marriage. He also says that it was a misunderstanding, which is intended to be funny, as marriage is an understanding between two persons. We learn more about Algernons views on marriage in his conversation with Jack. Algernon believes that a proposal is business. This is typical of the Victorian gentlemans attitudes towards marriage. The typical view of marriage was that it was more a way to achieve or sustain social status rather than a way of expressing love. Algernon actually believes that marriage puts an end to all romance. He says that girls never marry the men they flirt with. This is an example of one of Oscar Wildes humorous epigrams, what is even more funny is when it is completely contradicted by what Algernon says shortly after: The amount of women in London who flirt with their husbands is perfectly scandalous.

P.K. Dick’s The Minority Report and Steven Spielberg’s The Minority Rep

P.K. Dick’s The Minority Report and Steven Spielberg’s The Minority Report Death can occur in four ways. A person can die from a physical illness, viruses and infections. A person can die from an accident. A person can commit suicide. Finally a person can be murdered by another person. What if murders could be prevented? In P.K. Dick’s story The Minority Report, and in Spielberg’s film The Minority Report, the future can be altered by using incredible technology. The success of Spielberg’s adaptation of Dick’s short story to film can be determined by the way each was presented. While giving a tour or precrime to Edward Witwer, the main character John Anderton finds the he is supposed to kill a person he never met Leopold Kaplan. When he tries to run and hide from precrime, Anderton is kidnapped by Kaplan. Kaplan is about to turn Anderton in to the police when Anderton is rescued by Fleming. Fleming gives Anderton money and a clue, which leads Anderton to conclude that he has an alternate future that will clear his name. He then goes to precrime to find his minority report and prove to the police that he will not commit murder. He is discovered by his wife, who he suspects is working against him, and they both leave precrime in a helicopter. On the helicopter, Anderton, his wife Lisa, and Fleming get into a fight and Anderton kills Fleming after discovering that Fleming is working for Kaplan in order to take precrime down and establish a military police state. Lisa and Anderton return to precrime where Witwer and they come up with a plan to save precr ime by proving the predictions of the precogs correct where Anderton will kill Kaplan. At a press conference, Kaplan is about the revel the failure of precrime t... ...ck only had helicopters and regular fossil fuel buses in his story, while Spielberg went farther and made vehicles which are futuristic and practical. He modernized precrime by giving them a hover jet ship which has its roots in technology which is being developed by the US Air Force today. The idea of having cars that use magnetism to travel as super speed and still be environmentally safe, is an idea which is more practically sound to exist in the future. Spielberg also took the story a dove deeper into the characters and into precrime’s history. He took a great story which was written in the mid twentieth century and really modernized it to become believable and extraordinary. Bibliography Dick, Philip K. The Minority Report and other classic stories. New York. 1987 Spielberg, Steven. The Minority Report. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp, USA

India and China: Are catch-up theories relevant? Essay

For many decades, Japan has been the dominant power in Asia. Since 1945, America with the help of its close ally, Japan has dominated Asia. The spectacular rise of China during the past two decades has the potential to change this status quo. During the past 6-7 years, with impressive economic growth, India also has emerged as a nation to reckon with. USA and Japan see a stronger India as a means to limit China’s freedom to maneuver in the region. In short, Asia is becoming an arena for balance of power politics. After more than a century of relative stagnation, the economies of India and China have been growing at remarkably high rates over the past 25 years. In 1820 the two countries contributed nearly half of the world’s income; starting from roughly equal levels of per capita real income in 1870, India forged ahead of China until the outbreak of the First World War. Though both experienced declines in their per capita incomes thereafter (China more so than India) by 1950, India’s per capita income was about 40% higher than that of China. During the same period, the industrialized West pulled away, India and China had a share of less than one-tenth of the world income. It took roughly the next three decades for China to catch up with India. Since 1980, China has forged much farther ahead. China and India were the star performers in aggregate GDP growth in the 1980s and 1990s. China’s average growth of 10. 6% per year during the 90s had slowed slightly since to 9. 4%. India on the other hand albeit much lower rate of 6% in the 90s has a slight improvement since to 6. 2% (see Exhibit 1). Today, India and China are in 154th and 121st positions in a listing of the 230-odd countries ranked by per capita GDP. But their share in world GDP is around 2% and 5% respectively thanks to their billion-plus populations . Two countries account for 37. 5 percent of world population and 6. 4 percent of the value of world output. India and China have sustainable growth rates 7% and 10% respectively whereas the developed countries (USA, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, and Canada) have only 2% even though they contribute nearly 66% of world GDP. Given the kind of dramatic growth relative to the rest of the world, it has become very fashionable to compare India and China and indulge in a bit of crystal ball gazing. The two countries with one third of the world’s population is not only dominating the world statistics but also attracting the due attention of everyone like policymakers, industrial corporate, and economists alike. Understandably, there is a great deal of interest in learning about what has enabled China and India to grow so rapidly while many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have languished during the same period. Their growth already started showing its effect on global resources and if it continues as is expected for next two decades, it will have major implications on the world economy and hence for other countries. China’s economic reforms: During his tenure as China’s premier, Mao Zedong had encouraged social movements such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution which had had as their bases ideologies such as serving the people and maintaining the class struggle. However, two years after Mao’s death in 1976, Chinese leaders were searching for a solution to serious economic problems produced by these movements which left China in a state where agriculture is stagnant, industrial production was low, and the people’s living standards had not increased in twenty years. Communist Party leaders saw economic reform as a way to regain their and their party’s moral virtue and prestige which was eroded by the traumatic experience of the Cultural Revolution (Shirk, 1993). The initial reforms were not that radical in nature. The central government retained the dominant power in economic resource allocation and responsible local officials worked for the interest of the units under their control (Solinger, 1993). However, as time passed, some aspects of the old system were altered. In 1985, further reforms were introduced. The first part of Chinese economic reform involved implementing the household responsibility system in agriculture, by which farmers were able to retain surplus over individual plots of land rather than farming for the collective. Some commodities were freed from government controls so their prices could respond to market demand (Shirk, 1993). This allowed a great percentage of the populace to become involved in private enterprise and investment in family or group ventures. The conditions also allowed rural Chinese to leave the villages and become involved in industry in urban centers. The economy grew so quickly that inflation occurred and the government had to reinstitute price controls. China’s economy retains these characteristics of potential for growth–and inflation–to this day. Another important aspect of Chinese economic reform was the decision of China to join the world economy. Deng Xiaoping and his allies hoped to affect this 1979 resolution in two ways: by expanding foreign trade, and by encouraging foreign companies to invest in Chinese enterprises. The Open Policy, which designated limited areas in China â€Å"as places with preferential conditions for foreign investment and bases for the development of exports† (Nathan, 1990), was extremely successful in the areas where it was implemented. The implementation of the Open Policy was so successful that by 1988 the leaders of the CCP were encouraged to create a new program called the â€Å"coastal development strategy. † In this program, even more of the country was opened up to foreign investment-an area which, at the time, included nearly 200 million people. Moreover, by involving more overseas investors, â€Å"importing both capital and raw materials,† and â€Å"exporting China’s cheap excess labor power,† the new policy was one of â€Å"export-led growth or export-oriented industrialization†. It was explicitly modeled on the experiences of Taiwan and the other Asian ‘small dragons’ (Nathan, 1990). China took another step in the late 1990s and early 2000s, by the closing of unprofitable state-owned factories and the development of social security systems.

America’s Drug War Essay - 3563 Words

The War on Drugs, like the war on Terrorism, is a war that America may not be able to afford to win. For over forty years the United States has been fighting the War on Drugs and there is no end in sight. It has turned into a war that is about politics and economics rather than about drugs and criminals. The victims of this war are numerous; but perhaps they are not as numerous as those who benefit from the war itself. History of U.S Drug Policy: While laws prohibiting the use of drugs, in one form or another, can be traced back to the 1870s, it was not until 1968, when Richard M. Nixon was elected President, that our current drug war was conceived. In 1970 Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act.(2) With an†¦show more content†¦Assistant to Egil Krogh was G. Gordon Liddy. Howard Hunt was a consultant on the drug problem to the president’s Domestic Council. Both of these men would gain fame a few years later as Watergate conspirators. Under these men, instead of being understood as a health and social problem, drug addiction was defined as a law and order problem. On July 1, 1973 the War on Drugs was solidified with the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration.(15) The DEA, which was the result of merging the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs with various other law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies, including the ODALE, was given the responsibility of enforcing the nation’s federal drug laws. It’s enormous sphere of influence is reflected in its Mission Statement which states among other things; â€Å"The mission of the Drug Enforcement Administration is to enforce the controlled substances laws and regulations of the United States and bring to the criminal and civil justice system of the United States, or any other competent jurisdiction, those organizations and principal members of organizations involved in the growing, manufacture, or distribution of controlled substances appearing in or destined for illicit traffic in the United States†¦Ã¢â‚¬ (15) The DEA was designed as an American agency with an international agenda. During the Ford and Carter administrations drug use began to rise. In 1979 illicit drug use in the United States peakedShow MoreRelatedAmericas War On Drugs1528 Words   |  7 PagesAmerica’s war on drugs has failed. 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