Word: rationalizers
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...million yearly in Soviet aid. Tigre-led forces are 80 miles from the capital and may sever its links with the country's major port. The government is conscripting women and children and threatening to divert all development aid to mobilization. At gunpoint or with threats of confiscating ration cards, soldiers dragoon crowds for "patriotic" rallies. Mengistu narrowly missed assassination two months...
...bombs dropping, nobody screaming, nothing to fear but a line on a graph or a handful of numbers on a computer printout? Dare we change the world on the basis of a wobbly line on a graph? We can change the world, and those numbers, slowly, painfully -- we can ration, recycle, carpool, tax and use the World Bank to bend underdeveloped nations to our will. But the problem is neither the world nor those numbers. The problem is ourselves...
...rigid attention under the cover of multicolored beach umbrellas, but because Beijing too exhibits the limits of governmental control. For example, China has strict residency rules. Identity documents guarantee that a person who receives permission to move from his hometown to a new location is still eligible for ration coupons, housing allowances and other subsidies. But even without permission, people have been drawn by the economic reforms to the major cities, and the financial opportunities they have found there more than compensate for their lost stipends. In central Beijing it is estimated that a fifth of the 6 million residents...
...strike soon spread to nine other cities in the Kuzbass. Grimy miners complained that when they came up after six hours underground, they could not find a bar of soap to wash with; the ration is one bar every two months. "Who can tell us what to feed our husbands?" shouted a woman protesting empty shelves in the stores. Many called for complete independence from central planning, insisting the miners could run things themselves...
...cauterizing of provincialism. One neighbor (played by Bruce Dern with wonderfully psychotic poise and a barbed-wire halo of gray hair) responds to every real or imagined threat to his property values as if he were commanding a platoon in Nam -- with trusty telescope, walkie-talkie and a K ration of animal crackers. Another friend (Rick Ducommun) is your basic bully-wimp who goads Ray into all manner of illicit snooping. And Ray is the mild soul caught in the middle; with no special convictions, he mutates from a slightly curious homeowner to a horribly singed home wrecker. Hanks throws...