Word: devourers
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What can be done? The obvious answer is to erase some laws from the books. So-called "victimless" crimes like public intoxication, for example, devour court time across the country. Drug offenses account for 51% of all serious criminal cases in Los Angeles. If legislators repealed penalties for crimes like gambling and pot-smoking, the courts could obviously focus on the major crimes they now handle so badly...
...4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, nothing is sacred because everyone is scared-of the incipient madness that seeps back from the front. Ring Lardner Jr.'s overlapping Catch-22-caliber scenes devour congruity as war devours youth. In the abbatoir of the operating room a surgeon saws off a leg while he begs a nurse to scratch his nose. The unit's greatest nurse chaser, Dentist Painless Waldowski, decides that Don Juanism is a cover-up for homosexuality. Better never than latent, he decides after a nontumescent night, and instantly opts for the Right Thing: suicide...
...military figures." Shorn of its jargon, the statement means that the present collective leadership is not at all tempted to return to the principal feature of Stalinism: absolute one-man rule, reinforced by mass police terror. The men in the Kremlin well know that the Stalinist system would devour those who set it in motion again, as it once devoured tens of thousands of Stalin's colleagues. If Stalin's role as a World War II military leader is being upgraded, the object often is to correct the historical record by balancing the earlier attacks on him. Moreover...
Pesticides such as DDT, parathion, aldrin and dieldrin are both ally and enemy to man. The chemicals annihilate predators: the aphids that plague rose fanciers, disease-bearing mosquitoes, beetles that spread Dutch elm disease, in sects that devour crops. As a farmer's helper, pesticides increase crop yields, hence profits. But poison is blind. Loosed annually by the ton from planes, boats, trucks, tractors and handy spray cans, it cannot isolate its target. Since Rachel Carson exposed the pesticides' threat seven years ago, in Silent Spring, evidence of the chemicals' pernicious effects on birds, plants, fish, animals...
...ahead of its creditors by taking advantage of an Illinois law that permits it to float bonds without public consent. This kind of Micawberism has driven the city so deep into the red that debt service accounted for 35% of 1967's property-tax revenues and threatens to devour more than half...