Word: sham
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Addressing contemporary ambivalences, confusions, culture heroes, and false panaceas these essays are heated by the intensity of one who has wrested truth and value out of confusion, wrong-headedness, and sham...
...Since then, the Ellicott City, Md., couple have remarried and been divorced a third time. They figure that their revolving-door matrimony has saved them $15,000. The reason: federal laws that favor single taxpayers. The Internal Revenue Service challenged the couple, arguing that the first two divorces were "sham transactions" and that they would not be recognized by Maryland. Last week the IRS won a court decision ordering the Boyters to pay $3,135.34 in back taxes...
...other old Olympics sham is that the Games foster international good will. If logic failed to destroy that idea, observation would do nicely, since the sight of mingling, embracing athletes at the close of the Games is characteristic of nothing in the world or in the Games themselves but momentary (and partly ceremonial) good nature. Observers of the sporting life, like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, had a dimmer view of the Games. Orwell called them "war minus the shooting." The connection with war has always been up front. Coubertin, who argued for French colonialism as ardently...
...ignoring the ACSR's recommendation, the Corporation has also exposed its "case-by-case" approach to be as indefensibly a sham as the most angry student protesters have charged. The ACSR supposedly exists to do the research leg-work that members of the Corporation lack the time for, and pass on recommendations that represent the most responsible positions--by Corporation standards...
...James Byars lives in a dreamworld, it is a complete and creative world. He is no philosopher, but he is no sham either, for he believes in his art and he convinces others to believe in it. Even if he treats questions and ideas as if they were mere objects, he delights in all of them as an artist delights in sights and sounds. He is an artist who receives and gives ideas and questions as if they were delicate dolls to be admired but not touched, lest they be broken, and, at the slightest suggestion that ideas...