Word: absurdities
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Today's fissures in central authority might seem tiny by comparison, but they are significant nonetheless. In the boomtowns of Shanghai and Guangzhou, municipal meetings are often conducted in local dialects, as opposed to the national language, Mandarin. Trade rivalries between provinces have resulted in absurd internal tariffs that foreign manufacturers must pay when transporting their products out of China. And even though Beijing executed the country's former top food and drug regulator for graft last week, the international scandal over tainted Chinese products speaks more to the central government's inability to monitor what's going...
...wasn’t just the glamour—I wanted to go to Romania to see where my parents grew up. But the reality of the trip didn’t hit me until I found myself aboard the good ship Delta, noshing on the absurd amount of snacks that my obscenely over-prepared mother had brought...
...campaign is saying it expects to raise in the neighborhood of the $25.7 million it brought in for the first quarter, a figure that is almost certainly low-balled. But Obama aides are also insisting that the $40 million number that some of his competitors are throwing around is absurd. "The only people talking about our numbers are people who don't know," insists Obama spokesman Bill Burton...
Some of Florida's recent fixes have only exacerbated the frustration. In the 1990s the state adopted a "homestead" provision that eventually caps a homeowner's property tax increases at 3% a year. But when the house is sold, the cap no longer applies - creating absurd situations in which neighbors with similar homes pay wildly disparate property taxes. As a result, "there is now absolute consensus that local property taxes are out of control," says Republican state Senator Mike Haridopolos, co-chairman of the Joint Select Committee on Property Tax Reform and Relief...
...Garden of Eden was in Missouri without objecting to the beliefs that men turned the Nile into blood, parted the Red Sea, walked on water, turned water into wine and rose from the dead? To the unbelieving, the tenets and traditions of any religion may seem strange or even absurd. Believers understand those teachings on a spiritual level that transcends scientific fact. That's why it's called faith. Condemning one religion's inherently unverifiable beliefs without subjecting other religions' equally unverifiable beliefs to the same scrutiny is nothing less than bigotry. Jeff Mangum, Poway, California...