Word: unfitness
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Streets for People, A primer for Americans by Bernard Rudofsky. Illustrated. 351 pages. Doubleday. $14.95. A U.S. architect, engineer and enraged gadfly, Rudofsky thinks American city streets are now and always have been ugly, dirty and unfit for human habitation; and he offers fascinating pictures, mainly from Europe, to show how things could be improved. Rudofsky's pet hates: noise, cars, haste, uniformity, ugliness, greed and his fellow countrymen's habit of suggesting that criticism is unpatriotic. What he wants more of and thinks feasible are steps, arcades, automobile-free streets, covered sidewalks, plazas suitable for strolling...
...shrill voice is echoed in every essay. Tory M.P. Angus Maud writes: "We must reject the chimera of equality and proclaim the ideal of quality." Novelist Kingsley Amis encapsulates mass education with the slogan, "more means worse," and blames student unrest at universities on the presence of the academically unfit. Psychologist Sir Cyril Burt offers statistics purporting to prove that skills in reading, spelling and arithmetic have dropped in the past 55 years. Underlying the invective is a pervasive fear that educational reform is the cutting edge of a Labor Party plan to break down Britain's social structure...
BISMARCK barred them from political life, and Kaiser Wilhelm scourged them as an unpatriotic rabble. Konrad Adenauer, who presided over the rebirth of West Germany, dismissed them as unfit to govern, and for years millions of his countrymen agreed. Last week, in the wake of one of the closest elections in the 20-year history of the Federal Republic, the Social Democrats, long the outcasts of German politics, prepared to take power. Unless the coalition carefully pasted together with the Free Democrats suddenly comes unstuck, Willy Brandt will be sworn in as the Chancellor of West Germany...
Arterbury pointed out that it was common in the South for prison wardens to economize by assigning prisoners to guard other inmates; he claimed that the shooting was an accident. But Arthur's lawyers argued that Williams' record made him unfit to be trusted with firearms. Since the defense did not ask for a jury, the decision was up to Federal Judge William Keady. Late last month Keady ordered Arterbury to pay $85,000 in damages to Arthur. "The moral sense of all reasonable men," said the judge, "would be shocked by the punishment visited upon the plaintiff...
...impossible job," says Westbrook. "The gestation period for rats is 21 days. A healthy female has a litter of twelve every four weeks. We have to kill constantly just to keep pace." The real solution lies in cleaning up the city and training residents to make their homes unfit for vermin. Westbrook is not optimistic. "Even if we had strict sanitation laws, it's doubtful that people would obey them," he says. "People around here are not accustomed to obeying laws...