Word: direness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...begins one episode -- which then tells that story in rich detail: how higher-octane fuel helped British planes outmaneuver their German foes during the Battle of Britain; how gasoline shortages slowed down Rommel and frustrated Patton; how the fuel situation in Germany near the war's end was so dire that a newly developed jet had to be toted onto the runway by cows...
...Bolshevik coup led to massacres of tens of millions of citizens, as well as psychological terror and state interference on a scale unprecedented in human history. Before World War II the threat of the Bolshevik regime played a major role in rallying Germans to the Nazi Party, bringing obvious dire consequences for the rest of the world. After World War II, the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States brought the world to the brink of nuclear war several times...
...Such dire results of the Bolshevik coup are what make it so delightful to observe the bitter realities now facing the world's remaining Marxist regimes. Along the southern coast of the People's Republic of China, near Hong Kong, an outburst of capitalism is taking place. And the Miami police force has enacted a working plan to handle celebrations to follow the overthrow of Fidel Castro...
...elbow in the dark. Most will never know what it is to be dwarfed by an old-growth forest, spy brook trout sipping mayflies or hear a wolf howl. For many, such subtle communion has been replaced by the stridency of environmentalism, a full-blown crusade, and by dire appeals on behalf of distant rain forests and a bestiary of endangered species. In these alliances, those remote from nature draw comfort that though embattled, the wild still exists...
...life, a parabola of supreme artistry and self-destruction, was, as she says, up a little bit, then down. Way down. Her last dire days, her body racked with junk and her voice cracked like thawing ice, have been rued and romanticized. When she died in 1959, the superstructure of the legend was already raised: the instinctive jazz talent, full of early genius, snuffed out by racism, callow commercialism and self-indulgence, her best work far behind...