Word: chimeras
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Like generations of Americans before them, Washington's leaders are getting it wrong about China. In the beginning, the chimera of a vast market of hundreds of millions of consumers sent Yankee traders sailing to the China coast in the 18th century, though then as now, the Chinese masses had no money to spend on imported goods. As late as 1900, the U.S. sold only $15 million worth of goods a year to China; today the U.S. buys far more ($15.2 billion in 1990) than it sells ($4.8 billion...
...problem goes something like this: the only reason any young professors want to come to Harvard is to have a chance to study with the pre-eminent senior scholars here. Tenure from within is a chimera at Harvard, and most junior faculty members know that. With very few exceptions, young professors are sent packing after their eight-year contracts...
Imagine a monster with the teeth of a shark, the talons of an eagle, the neck of an antelope and the hindquarters of an ostrich. A mythological chimera? Not at all. "I stepped down into this gulch," recounts University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, "took 25 steps and screamed." Directly ahead, atop a sandstone knoll, lay the full skeleton of a 2-meter-long (about 6 ft.) carnivore. It proved to be the most ancient dinosaur discovered to date...
...most of them, return was a financial and political chimera. Against their wishes and traditions, home became the U.S. Initially, their neighbors regarded them, in Bret Harte's words, as the "Heathen Chinee," an enduring caricature of cheap labor and social isolation, living in towns within cities, operating behind the impenetrable facades of restaurants and laundries. It was decades before the hostility softened to tolerance and, in recent years, to appreciation...
This is a chimera and liberals with a consistent philosophy realize it. The liberal notion of individual liberty and right to privacy, as we all know, holds only insofar as one person's actions do not adversely affect other people in society. It is impossible to argue that an abortionist's actions do not adversely affect at least one important person in addition to the woman: her child...