Word: inertia
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GOVERNMENT AGENCIES assigned a particular task often pursue it with a single-mindedness, an inertia, that precludes any kind of dissent. In his new book. The Cult of the Atom, Daniel Ford shows that this bureaucratic blindness is now here more apparent than in the case of the Atomic Energy Commission. Set up in 1946, the A.E.C. took on the task of overseeing and encouraging the development of the American nuclear power industry...
...budget plan showed, however, reality is a little more complicated. Not only do politicians rarely have a clear notion of the technical features of their own legislation, Grieder claims, but they also are usually powerless against the forces that distort and emasculate even the most comprehensive proposals--inertia, political horse-trading, special interest greed, and just plain human error. In such an "anarchic" milieu, Grieder says, grand conceptions about "the way the world works"--in Stockman's case, supply-side economics--fall by the wayside, and their beliefs lapse into cynical despair...
...economic crisis, which all parties agree is about to come to a head. It blends uncontrolled government spending with rising inflation and high unemployment. Complimenting other E.C. ministers on the steps their nations had taken to stabilize their economies, outgoing Treasury Minister Beniamino Andreatta deplored Italy's official inertia: "I believe our people also have that same courage [to favor stabilization], but our politicians, at least some of them, do not know how to read their feelings." It may take more courage than any of the parties are willing to show to translate those feelings into a disciplined economic...
...people. The next step is higher management." Minority journalists are not so sure. Les Payne, national editor of Long Island's Newsday and president of the National Association of Black Journalists, contends: "Some papers may be better than others, but we still have to break the pattern of inertia." -By William A. Henry III. Reported by Steven Holmes/Los Angeles and Don Winbush/Chicago
...where men and women address each other like creatures from different planets. Atwood's characters bitterly avoid human contact, as if under some delusion of strength in solitude and weakness in numbers. This is the generation of impermanence--of childless marriages and unmarried couples who "live together" out of inertia. The threat of nuclear war hangs over them perennially. The men and women in Dancing Girls respond not to each other, but only to their inward selves and how they might profit from someone else. In one story a man resists a women's advances by telling himself...