Word: sane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...propelled by "can't miss" contagiousness. Over the past 19 months investors have bid up such issues, spectacularly and speculatively, by spending a record $60 billion on the stock of start-up companies. That many of these outfits lacked the fundamental attributes--oh, minor things, such as profits--that sane folks use as the basis for plunking down their money didn't matter. Any company linked to computers or the World Wide Web may as well have been linked to a mint...
...time, the myth of monarchy presented the King as a father figure. This was almost always wishful thinking. The royal houses of the world probably have a slightly worse record for producing sane, responsible, intelligent parents than most families do. Monarchs have rarely been role models of any kind, probably because they felt no need to be. The role of the inspired prince as leader--the type of whom Charles is the ghost's memory of a remnant--vanished long ago, and following Agincourt, the servants have done the fighting. Princes of the royal blood since then have opened trade...
...cope with; but surely it imposes upon them an obligation where their children are concerned. A lot of illustrious parents have produced unhappy offspring. Winston Churchill, himself a neglected child, did not do well with his profligate boozehound son Randolph. On the other hand, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis raised sane and decent children against what, one guesses, were considerable odds. Bill and Hillary Clinton, whatever their private shortcomings, seem to be faring well in giving their daughter a constructive, intelligent upbringing...
...cannot call ourselves sane and at the same time convince ourselves that the decision process lies independent of an individual's moral conception. The notion of ethics is rooted in an individual's ability to have his actions and decisions reflect his moral standing. And clearly, if we are to have a capable president, one fit to inhabit the most respected office in the United States, in the world, we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that because he may stand for my belief, he won't amorally sacrifice that belief in the name of political gain...
Paranoia could be the only sane strategy for getting through the '90s. When sci-fi solon William Gibson is asked if his fiction is an optimistic or pessimistic view of the future, he replies, "A realistic view of the present. I don't think of myself as a futurist. I think of myself as someone who inhabits a baffling and in many ways terrifying present in 1996. Science fiction is always about the year in which it is written. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a McCarthyite fantasy. Today, I think, the alien is inside, a virus of one kind...