Word: screed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...would be judged. This decision not only ran counter to the nation's long tradition of local control (thanks to local funding) of public schools; it also proved embarrassingly hard to implement. A blue-ribbon panel dithered over a national history standard and eventually brought forth a politically correct screed that was denounced by professional historians and rejected last year by a Senate vote of 99 to 1. A similar report on national English standards struck many people as so poorly written as to be useless...
...John Hancock (he of the signature). It is the only Copley painting to show a political figure engaged in conflict. Tight-lipped, all Calvinist fervor and republican anger, Adams points with one rigid finger at the royal charter of the Massachusetts colony, while gripping in the other hand a screed of protest from Boston citizens. In its sharp contrasts of highlighted flesh and dark clothes, it is a most dramatic image, and yet you can't tell from it where Copley's own political sympathies lay--with the common citizenry that he came from and Adams spoke for, or with...
...sound of Mark Fuhrman's voice filling a Los Angeles courtroom--swaggering and all too believable as the former cop describes the brutalizing of suspects, fabrication of evidence and abuse of minorities. Although the O.J. Simpson jury will hear only two small snippets of the Fuhrman screed, to the rest of America the tapes provide a profane voice-over to real-life police corruption and brutality dramas that have been playing out not only in Los Angeles--where last Friday two officers were implicated in evidence tampering in a murder case--but also in New York City, Philadelphia, New Orleans...
College professors as a rule do not lead swashbuckling lives. But some 50 or 60 of them last week were given a chance to help in the pursuit of the nation's most wanted serial killer. The FBI gave them copies of the notorious Unabomber's 35,000-word screed against technology, the same document the terrorist mailed on June 24 to the New York Times, the Washington Post and Penthouse (which had previously offered to publish it). Since then, both papers have been fretting over the bargain the Unabomber proposed: publish the tract in toto within three months...
...future. ``Ask not what your country can do for you. Do it yourself,'' we said, happily perverting J.F.K.'s Inaugural exhortation. Our ethic of self-reliance came partly from science fiction. We all read Robert Heinlein's epic Stranger in a Strange Land as well as his libertarian screed-novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Hippies and nerds alike reveled in Heinlein's contempt for centralized authority. To this day, computer scientists and technicians are almost universally science-fiction fans. And ever since the 1950s, for reasons that are unclear to me, science fiction has been almost universally libertarian...