Word: useless
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Optimists among political experts suggest that the spending may be reaching a natural limit, at which point it becomes useless or even backfires on the candidates. Unhappily, the evidence does not quite bear out their theory. It is true that several of the very biggest spenders lost. Among them: Republicans William Clements and Lewis Lehrman, who shelled out around $12.5 million each on the Texas and New York gubernatorial races; Democrat Mark Dayton, a department-store heir who laid out $6.9 million in an attempt to become a U.S. Senator from Minnesota, and Democrat Adam Levin, 33, a lawyer...
...Conquistador of the useless," a rival calls Fitzcarraldo. Fitz says: "I am the spectacle in the forest." This is Herzog talking, of course, not Kinski or Fitzcarraldo. Or rather, Herzog is all his characters, all his actors. He is the dreamer, the savage, the engulfing river. This time, Herzog steered his craft through rapids and longueurs, outside dangers and his own follies. A madman and a survivor: a moviemaking Ahab who lived to tell his fabulous tale. -By Richard Corliss
Each year some 10,000, or 5% of the nation's electrical engineers, transfer out of their field, many because they feel useless or technologically obsolescent. Yet by 1985 the U.S. is expected to suffer from a shortage of more than 100,000 engineers. This gap cannot be closed by increasing the output of engineering schools, which are at their production limit. As Ray Stata, president of Analog Devices, told the M.I.T. symposium, "Our only viable strategy for coping is for industry to increase the productivity, retention and competence of those engineers already engaged in the profession...
...understatement: the report advocates nothing less than a policy of forgiveness toward practicing homosexuals and contains a strong condemnation of church theology. It specifically criticizes the U.S. bishops, the Vatican and Pope John Paul II for inferior scholarship and says that traditional church views are "practically meaningless and pastorally useless." The report offers a list of 54 proposals for church action, including the end of sexual-preference screening for parochial school jobs, adoption or foster care; admission of openly "self-accepting" homosexuals as candidates to be priests and nuns; and the encouragement of gay student groups at parochial schools...
...television, its electrical cord trailing in the dirt like a useless tail, its great eye blank in the midday sun, was sitting in the center of the playground. In a semicircle around it stood a dozen four-year-olds, their eyes glazed, staring intently at the dark screen. Three adults emerged from the adjacent schoolhouse and lifted the set into the back of a station wagon. As the car pulled away, several of the children rushed to the wire fence, pushed their outstretched hands through the loops, and cried plaintively: "Goodbye, Mr. TV. Goodbye...