Word: precursor
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Lenin applied his theories in the name of Karl Marx but, as Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington observes, "Lenin was not a disciple of Marx, rather Marx was a precursor of Lenin." Marx had not the faintest notion of what practical strategy and tactics could achieve his revolutionary goals. In many ways, Lenin revised-some would say subverted-the teachings of his proclaimed mentor. Marx predicted that the revolution would be possible only in industrially advanced nations, as the inevitable culmination of capitalist development. Lenin demonstrated that a successful Socialist revolution could take place in a backward, predominantly peasant...
...which not only events but their meaning strain human understanding. Merely to live with the omnipotence of science and technology is enough to send man back to the safe harbor of primitive myth. Just as myth was the predecessor of science and religion, so may rumor have been the precursor of myth. Long before man registered his thoughts on the pages of history, he committed his anxieties and his faith to rumor-that welcome channel of information and misinformation that made sense of senselessness...
Crap Game. Undaunted, companies go right on turning out new products. Last week Honeywell introduced a $10,600 "kitchen computer" programmed to help the U.S. housewife plan her meals and balance her checkbook. Though Honeywell might sell some to millionaires who have everything, the product could be the precursor of much cheaper small computers for the home; other companies are already working on the idea. Singer recently announced that its Friden office-equipment division will bring out at least one new product a month for the next year. "Developing new products is like a gigantic crap game," says Boone Gross...
...would work at all-turns on the vulnerability of its radar guidance. Without it, Spartan and Sprint would journey blind. A nuclear blast outside the atmosphere can create radar blackouts lasting critical tens of seconds, as both U.S. and Soviet tests demonstrated in the early 1960s. A "precursor warhead," launched just ahead of a missile attack and detonated as a kind of nuclear smoke screen for the following ICBMs, could black out U.S. perimeter acquisition radar and disrupt the ABM defense...
...Petit. Amazingly, the colors are as bright as the day Ernst painted them, and each of the 14 canvases carries something of that breathless, rarefied atmosphere of in sight and abandon in which they were created. More important, perhaps, notes Paintei Andre Masson, they prove that Ernst was a precursor as far as Sur realism was concerned. "While the rest of us were still formulating our ideas, he already had his foot in the door...