Word: comprehend
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While intrigued by American freedoms, political plurality and cultural diversity, the Soviet leadership is unable to comprehend fully the mechanism of the U.S. political system. There is little grasp of the relationship of American Congressmen to their constituencies, the real role of public opinion and that worst bugaboo, freedom of information, which they see as a threat to security. The idealism of the American Revolution, carried over into both domestic and foreign policy more than 200 years later, the Soviets perceive as crippling naivete. Its manifestations sometimes make them doubt American seriousness. Because such institutions are nonexistent in their...
...neighbors, who would drop by to grind flour and make rice wine with him. Deng returned to Peking in 1973 after the death of his rival, Lin Biao, and to full power in 1977. Evidently he retains warm feelings for Jiangxi. His days there, says Mao Mao, helped him "comprehend the actual social conditions of the people...
Reagan's kooky budget formula prolonged and deepened the recession and produced huge deficits. Reagan has had an unusual number of nincompoops working for his Administration. His insensitivities to the poor are monumental. His opposition to abortion and support for school prayer smack of zealotry. He still cannot comprehend the feminists. His beloved military wastes money hand over fist. But these are secondary issues. Those qualities of the spirit that Reagan so relentlessly thunders from the White House are what free and self-governing societies run on. It may yet be written in the history books that the genius...
...Third World populations is a problematic one. Greer has provided ample documented evidence that all too often governments force people to undergo operations against their will, and that even in the United States some women are compelled to undergo sterilization against their wishes or when they do not comprehend the consequences. Although there is a strong case for restraint in effecting mass sterilization, the claim that all peoples east of Europe want all or most of the children they bear is absurd. And to claim that Western governments are intruding when they try to make contraception available is equally wrongheaded...
...people cannot rely on the news for facts, however, then journalism has no reason for being. Alastair Reid may have forgotten that the principal reason journalists exist in society is that people have a need to be informed of and comprehend the details of experience. "The right to know and the right to be are one," wrote Wallace Stevens in a poem about Ulysses. The need is basic, biological. In that sense, everyone is a journalist, seeking the knowledge of the times in order to grasp the character of the world, to survive in the world, perhaps to move...