Word: humbug
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...folk hero to millions of Californians, a demagogic devil to others. A retired millionaire manufacturer, Jarvis has been railing against high taxes for 15 years. Jarvis, whose face looks a bit like a California mudslide, has been demolishing debating opponents with his oddly compelling blend of verbosity, profanity and humbug. He has enlisted U.C.L.A. Economist Neil Jacoby to polish his simplistic arguments about the stultifying impact of the rising property tax. Nobel-prizewinning Economist Milton Friedman, now teaching at Stanford, made TV commercials free of charge to back 13. Claims Friedman: "If we continue the growth of government...
This gift sustained him through all his diverse careers. Nothing fades faster than newspaper humor, and some of the Myles na Gopaleen columns that Editor Jones resurrects should have stayed in the morgue. Many pieces, though, seem remarkably fresh. Humbug and absurdity have not gone out of fashion, and Myles was keenly aware of both. When a local judge levied a stiff jail term on a woman who had been caught shoplifting, the journalist commented: "I suppose he was right when he said there was far too much shoplifting in Dublin but I am not clear how one calculates what...
...illnesses characterized by such distressing symptoms as delusions, disordered reasoning, hallucinations, withdrawal and other bizarre behavior. In his classic studies, the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing has argued, almost poetically, that schizophrenia is only a reaction to the insanity around us-of parents, family and even society at large. Humbug, reply more orthodox physicians, who say that schizophrenia is most probably a result of a flaw in body chemistry...
...Stefan Gierasch), a bluff, well-to-do bourgeois who courts innocence by association. His mind's eye is so befogged that he persistently mistakes sanctimoniousness for sanctity, guile for goodness. His chosen saint in residence, Tartuffe (John Wood), is a monster of false piety, a dark prince of humbug and hypocrisy. More significantly, he is the stinking essence of the world's wisdom: that a crime is no crime unless one gets caught...
...wouldn't be any natural selection," he says. "Obstacles have to be constantly put there. If I got to the top I'd have every intention of putting the obstacles there for the fellows behind." As for his dual households, he says: "Nobody can accuse me of humbug...