Word: selfing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ghana's first President, Kwame Nkrumah, was a master of using his office for personal benefit. In six years of increasingly ruinous rule, the self-proclaimed "Redeemer" of Ghana managed to squander his way through the country's entire treasury of $560 million and run up another $1 billion in foreign debts. He built vast and useless public monuments as well as an overpowering presidential palace. To take care of odds and ends, he also accepted bribes in return for government favors...
...worried, when all the present evils were layered over by our national smugness. We may even be on the mend. But our salvation will never be handed to us. If we are lucky, we will be given the chance to earn it. Unfortunately, we are enormously clever at avoiding self-examination...
Such a society will not just serve the individual but give him an opportunity to serve. When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless; they no longer feel rootless. Without allegiance and commitment, individual freedom degenerates into a sterile self-preoccupation...
...subject his view of the world to the cleansing discipline of historical perspective or contemporary relevance. He defines the problem to suit himself. He can spin fantasies of what might be, without the heartbreaking, backbreaking work of building social change into resistant human institutions. Out of such self-indulgent and feckless radicalism come few victories...
...Karp alive for a week or two. It is about the same size as a natural heart and is made of Silastic (a silicone plastic), with Dacron cuffs for attachment to the "distributor cap," or blood-vessel connections, in the remnant of Karp's own heart. It is self-contained except for one essential ingredient: a power system to deliver a steady, pumping beat. This must come from an external console as big as a refrigerator standing at the bedside, to which the artificial heart is attached by two thin air hoses...