Word: thumbings
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Even then, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney judges "remote" the likelihood of intercontinental ballistic missiles coming under the thumb of anyone who would fire them at the U.S. The real menace, most experts believe, is a breakdown of the command structure that would put the easily mobile tactical weapons into dangerous hands. These nukes -- artillery shells, warheads on short-range missiles, nuclear mines -- are much easier to seize than ICBMs stored in underground silos. Already the southern republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan have "nationalized" all military property on their soil, prompting Moscow to announce that the army would shoot...
...danger, though, is that society may turn out to be more like a "salad bar," in which each ingredient is separated by nearly impenetrable barriers and an out-of-place vegetable sticks out like a sore thumb--or a white student at an Asian American Association meeting...
...patients hormone treatments that simulated the effects of early pregnancy. At hearings before a committee of the Virginia Board of Medicine in 1989, several women wept as they described how Jacobson would show them sonograms of what he said was their fetus, pointing out nonexistent heartbeats, fetal movements and thumb-sucking. He would give them fetal snapshots to take home -- only to announce several weeks later that their baby had died...
...most impressive new British play, Hare's Murmuring Judges, starts as a panoramic survey of a criminal-justice system shamefully subverted by careerism and bureaucracy. Gradually the story focuses on a hapless petty burglar, imprisoned almost five years for a first offense. Hare, a left- winger, has a thumb on the scales: his inmate is penitent, as innocent of spirit as Candide. Moreover, the police are widely known to have tainted the evidence, but admitting that would inconvenience powerful people, so injustice prevails. Much of the dialogue is barely digested statistics; the silliest, mouthed by a reformist young black woman...
Trying to look as if he were not eavesdropping, he wrote down practiced insults by old combatants at Darla's bar, in a town called Bazaar. She: "You're so dumb, if you fell in a barrel of tits you'd come up sucking your thumb." He: "You're so ugly we're all hoping that wind don't blow off your clothes." In the same town, he finds the spare, waste-no-words diary of 18-year-old Elizabeth Ann Mardin, a bride newly arrived in Kansas. For June 21, 1862: "I went a goosebarrying in the fore noon...