Word: hokum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...kickoff rally of an up-from-nowhere independent presidential campaign. Not bad for an almost candidate who says he deplores the hokum and hoopla of professional politics. Not bad for a reluctant dragon whose supporters had just filed petitions containing more than 200,000 signatures -- about four times what he needs to get on the ballot in Texas. The speech, delivered in his trademark East Texas twang, was more sound bite than substance: "If I could wish for one thing for my children, it's to leave the American Dream intact, so they can dream great dreams and have those...
...million calculation: counting the stock-incentive portion of his pay ($115 million) is misleading, he claims, since the options won't be exercised until later years. He blasts the compensation consultants who estimate executive pay as "a bunch of self-appointed pseudo experts who thrive on sensationalism and pure hokum." A recent survey conducted by the National Association of Corporate Directors found that chief executives are extremely reluctant to grant outsiders any power over their pay. Although 20% said they would be willing to have shareholders approve directors' compensation, only 8% were willing to give them similar control over their...
Biosphere 2 is not the only project to blur the line between hokum and hard science. In fact, a vital symbiosis seems to be developing. Today even the purest adventuring, from climbing Mount Everest to trekking across Antarctica, often comes cloaked in scientific respectability. Consider the 1990 International Trans-Antarctica Expedition. Publicity about the seven-month trek played up the scientific research: collecting snow samples, conducting experiments in meteorology and monitoring the team's physiology. But the expedition emerged mainly as an exotic sporting event. To date, few scientific findings have been published, and critics point out that such information...
David Belin, former counsel to the Warren Commission and author of two books on the assassination, calls the script "a bunch of hokum." By ignoring key pieces of evidence and misrepresenting others, Belin says, Stone casts doubt even on issues that are relatively clear-cut, like Oswald's murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. (Oswald was identified as the gunman at the scene by at least six eyewitnesses.) "It is a shame that a man as talented as Stone has had to go to such lengths to deceive the American public," says Belin...
...that many of them are not junk food. In Curiosity Kills, last month's USA entry, C. Thomas Howell and Rae Dawn Chong play a photographer and his neighbor who suspect a new tenant of being a killer; despite some bloody violence, it's routine Nancy Drew hokum. USA's Dead Reckoning contrived to place a rich doctor (Cliff Robertson), his wife and her former lover on a pleasure boat together in the middle of the ocean, then promptly sank in a sea of implausibility...