Word: benignity
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...answer from America is benign but not satisfactory. America's idea of Australia is mostly thin and vague. Americans fantasize in a desultory way about Australia but know much less about us than we do about them. Australia, we hear, is rather like Texas 50 or 100 years ago. The basic American idea of the basic Australian male is--who else?--whatsizname, him with the big knife, star of Crocodile Dundee. Aussies (wrongly pronounced Awzies; the correct pronunciation is Ozzies, though we'd rather you Yanks dropped the dumb pseudointimacy altogether and just called us Australians) are all supposed...
...unpopular and divisive war. Again, the élites have the privilege of avoiding military service because it's an all-voluntary military now. We have a much bigger drug culture now than we had then. The recreational use of drugs [then], some of it was quite benign. Now it has given way to vast criminal empires that are ravaging the inner cities of this country...
...appears to have been too much for the mythic sensibility of the West, which wanted to believe that the Templars must somehow have survived, adapted, or been subsumed into another, even more secretive trans-national group. Over the centuries, the allegedly still-extant order has been portrayed as malevolent, benign, heroic and occult. Organizations all over the world, without any direct connection, have appropriated its name. (The Freemasons reportedly have an "Order of the Knights of Templar," thus consummating a kind of conspiracy theorist's dream marriage.) Such homages should not obscure the fact that however much power they enjoy...
...cheaper RFID tags get, the more ubiquitous they'll become. But personally I envision a slightly more benign future, one in which the trend of human-implantable RFID tags merges with the online social-networking craze. What if all the information in your Facebook profile were tucked snugly into a tiny RFID-like chip embedded, say, in the ball of your thumb? Your RFID-enabled cell phone could beep every time you walked past somebody two degrees of separation or less from you or who had the same favorite novel you do or who liked to play Scrabble and wasn...
...Neither McDonough nor other Florida corrections officials will discuss the suits, since they're still pending. But the state in the past has insisted that pepper spray is one of the more benign means of controlling violent and mentally ill prisoners - and Florida is hardly the only state that uses such chemical agents to handle unruly inmates. But beyond the pepper spray issue, groups like Berg's acknowledge that McDonough, an MIT grad and former Army colonel, has begun long-overdue reforms to tackle corruption and other abuses. "We're changing the culture of the Department," McDonough insists. "There...