Word: vastness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...than sending bundles and battleships to Britain, America is aggressively exporting political technology and campaign expertise. Whether it is bringing exit polls to the Soviet Union or the first negative spots to Argentine TV, Americans are there -- on the ramparts of freedom -- trying to turn the world into one vast Super Tuesday primary...
...called Gleichschaltung, which means standardization or making things the same. All political parties except the Nazis were banned as divisive. Leftist union leaders were arrested and replaced by Nazis preaching the harmonious unity of the working classes (strikes were banned). Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, rallied students to a vast bonfire outside the University of Berlin, where the works of illustrious liberals (Emile Zola) and Jews (Heinrich Heine) were consigned to the flames. Jews were barred from public office, the civil service and professions like teaching and journalism. The basic idea behind all this was embodied in the slogan...
...forests (prized because of the high quality and quantity of their timber). The National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have cooperated, selling rights to new tracts of forest every year. This policy, combined with modern logging machinery that makes cutting on mountain slopes easier, has put vast stands of old-growth trees in the chain saw's path...
With the full-moon tides each May and June, tens of thousands of crabs swarm ashore like magic. Skittering shadows the size of an elephant's hoof, they mingle in piles along the water's edge. The sandy shoreline becomes the site of a vast, squabbling, tumultuous crab orgy...
...what end? To entertain, of course, but to do more than that. By junking the cages and building vast biological gardens, the zoos provide a decent, delightful place for animals and people to meet and, with luck, fall in love. Once that bond is made, the visitors discover there is a larger mission at hand, a crusade to join. Between the birth of Christ and the Pilgrims' landing, perhaps several species a year became extinct. By the 1990s the extinction rate may reach several species an hour, around the clock. American zoos are leading the battle to stop that clock...