Word: functional
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...linked together in a network that was classically known as Indra's Net. Thus, calling Chinese individuals your enemy and Tibetans your friend, the Dalai Lama might suggest, is as crazy as calling your right eye your ally and your left your adversary; you usually need both to function well, and all parts of the world body depend on all other parts. "Before," I heard him say last November, "destruction of your enemy was victory for your side." But in our globalized world, where ecology enforces our sense of mutual dependence, "destruction of your enemy is destruction of yourself...
...Long RoadThe central question surrounding Tibet, of course, is what will happen when the current Dalai Lama dies. In preparation for that event, the man has been stressing for years that the function of any Dalai Lama is only to fulfill the work of the previous Dalai Lama; therefore, any young child selected by Chinese authorities and declared to be the 15th Dalai Lama, a Beijing puppet, will not be the true "Dalai Lama of Tibetan hearts." As practical and flexible as ever and holding to the Buddhist ideas of impermanence and nonattachment, he told me as far back...
...require spending time on the road meeting strangers who often have the desire to throw things at you. Both are difficult, if not impossible, to do all alone. And both rely heavily on personality. In an era when our main exports are entertainment and democracy, comedy is practically a function of the presidential office. George W. Bush has dutifully, if not intentionally, provided Americans with laughs for nearly a decade. He has also made them cry, sometimes for the same reason. Americans have many bizarre criteria by which they select their next Commander in Chief, and a sense of humor...
These highest state courts are meant to be bastions of political and social order. They function as an essential, stable check on the state’s other governmental institutions, themselves self-interested and beholden to popular opinion—the legislature and the governor’s office. Both of these institutions face one undying concern—re-election—which influences their decisions. And rightly so: these institutions are meant to reflect the interests of their constituencies...
However, the courts serve a different role—that of justice. Justice sometimes calls for protecting the minority against the majority, for the unpopular decision. Where an electoral system is in place, this function of the judiciary is undermined further. Prospective justices have to embrace platform issues, such as “ethics reform,” in order to market themselves to voters. Apparently, voters respond well to “tough” judges, which sheds some light on Texas’s 26 criminal executions this past year. (No other state executed more than three people...