Word: pendulum
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...scenes were repeated as major earthquakes jolted the region around the small Mississippi River town of New Madrid, Mo. Because the region was sparsely inhabited, few lives were lost. Still, the shocks were so powerful that they caused church bells to ring as far away as Charleston, S.C., stopped pendulum clocks in Washington, D.C., and shook buildings in New York City. No seismographs existed at the time, but detailed descriptions by survivors indicate that the intensities of the three quakes would have ranged between 7.3 and 7.5 on the Richter scale. By comparison, the big quake that destroyed San Francisco...
...Belief that it would ultimately be proven true was the exception: skepticism was the rule. The "glorious tapestry" that we now appreciate was periously close to never being woven. So not only was guage theory momentous, but it was propitious, for with its discovery, the pendulum of scientific opinion swung in the other direction. As Bamberg suggests, "there's now abundant optimism where once there was none...
Harvard followed a conservative market strategy through the 1960s, when other investors were taking ever-larger risks, and today--though it remains prudent compared to most private investors--Harvard is buying more stocks. "We think stocks got over-valued from 1950 to 1972, and now there's a pendulum swing the other way," Putnam says. "We're taking this as a long-term opportunity to get some damn good stocks cheap," Cabot says...
Fortunately, notes Kissinger, though Nixon was eager for a summit in 1970, the Soviets overreached themselves and Nixon "did not need it as desperately as Moscow reckoned." The U.S. bided its time, and soon the pendulum was swinging its way. In December 1970, trouble erupted on the Soviets' own doorstep with food-price riots in Poland. In July 1971 came the announcement of Nixon's trip to China. Less than four weeks later, the Soviets formally invited the U.S. President to visit Moscow in the spring of 1972. Kissinger served as a kind of diplomatic advance...
...morality campaign of 1976, a Connally candidacy would have been almost unthinkable. But the pendulum of American political preferences seems always swinging, moving from a fear of an imperial leader to a fear of a weak one, from a desire for a moral President to a desire for a shrewd horse trader. So, as Johnson and Nixon begat Carter, now Carter could just conceivably beget John Connaly, if the horse-trading rancher can satisfy skeptical Americans that his steed is white and he will never come home with a spavined and one-eyed...