Word: vacuum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Political Spectrum. Whatever the un rest that is disturbing the Franco regime, it has so far not benefited Spain's splintered political parties, which are hardly parties in the usual sense. They operate in a vacuum, with no means of reaching the Spanish people, and they suffer from that fierce individualism that turns any three Spaniards meeting on a street corner into a new political faction...
...Into the Vacuum. But so far, Rockefeller seems to have weathered his divorce well. And recently, quite independently of his own efforts, he has been thrust into the vacuum in national leadership that plagues either U.S. political party when it does not hold the White House. Nixon, the G.O.P.'s "titular leader," has in recent weeks run into trouble in California and, despite last week's primary victory, faces a hard struggle for survival in his fight against Governor Pat Brown. Goldwater, who seemed for a while to be a hopeful G.O.P. prospect, has been hobbled...
Smoke Screen. Purpose of the high-altitude shots is both military and scientific. Nuclear explosions in the vacuum of space or in the thin fringe of the atmosphere do not behave as they do in the dense air near sea level. Little or none of their energy goes into shock waves; most of it escapes as X rays, neutrons, and other varieties of radiation that are relatively unimportant in ground-level bursts. But military men are most anxious to learn what this radiation will do to missiles and satellites, and even to aircraft...
...Time and again, the psychiatrist is consulted by patients who doubt that life has any meaning," said Dr. Frankl. "This condition I have called 'existential vacuum.'" And in a survey of his own students, Dr. Frankl found that while 40% of the Germans, Swiss and Austrians report existential vacuum, no less than 81% of the Americans say they have felt...
Said Dr. Frankl, "We must not draw the conclusion that the existential vacuum is predominantly an American disease, but rather that it is apparently a concomitant of industrialization." It results, he thinks, from a loss of the instinctual security of the animal world on the one hand and of social tradition on the other. "At present, instincts do not tell man what he has to do, nor do traditions direct him toward what he ought to do; soon he will not even know what he wants to do, thus completely succumbing to conformism...