Word: thresholds
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...Mughals, the Muslim rulers of India from 1526 to 1858, were the Taliban's basic nightmare. They loved jewelry and ornamentation of all kinds, gleefully adapted local and European techniques and had a high threshold for excess. This eye-popping exhibition includes all one can imagine making with precious stones (dagger handles, walking sticks and fly whisks) and lots of things one cannot (a back scratcher, a pedestal for a huqqa--hookah, to some--and a conch-shell holder). The show, organized by the Kuwait National Museum and the Met, will also bedazzle London; Cleveland, Ohio; and Houston. Be warned...
This problem stems from the low threshold of evidence needed for conversations to be monitored at all. Rather than the probable cause required by the 4th Amendment, the attorney general need merely “certify” that the person in custody might be attempting to communicate to others about a future terrorist plot. Similarly weak grounds would suffice for a prosecutor to listen to the recordings and use them as a basis for a fishing expedition into the possible wrongdoings of the person in custody and anybody implicated in the conversations...
...fact, says Harvard's Matthew Meselson, a Nobel-prizewinning biologist who did an in-depth study of an anthrax accident at a Soviet bioweapons plant in Sverdlovsk in 1979, "there is no theoretical or experimental basis to believe in any sort of minimum threshold." A dozen or even fewer spores could be sufficient to kill, he suspects, under the right circumstances...
...Taliban leaders and demonstrate that there would be nothing sterile or safe about this war. The night we suffered those first casualties overseas--two confirmed dead in a helicopter crash--brought a sleepless end to a restless week. Day by day, people wrestled with a rising fear that a threshold had been crossed, that we had entered a world where Congress is evacuated and lawmakers discuss the use of tactical nuclear weapons and the tanks roll into Bethlehem and healthy people flood hospitals out of fear they have been exposed to a plague...
...struggle can end only with their complete and permanent destruction." We want the killing to stop, there and here, but because no one can point to an easy way out, some choice to make or policy to propose, the only way out is to run right over the threshold and through the flames...