Word: wrench
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...Years Late. Mumford's profoundly reactionary answer to the megamachine is to throw a monkey wrench into it and send it down a time tunnel. Go back to Benedictine monasteries, where work was a "byword for zealous efficiency and formal perfection." Discover new prophets of "modest, humane disposition," like Jesus and Confucius. Establish new routines, such as the Hebrew Sabbath that "found a way of obstructing the megamachine and challenging its inflated claims." Abandon the modern constitutional equivalents of ancient kingships and revert to Neolithic culture. In other words, Mumford would perfect man with weaving, pottery and thatched-village...
...either hated or particularly loved the country's 200,000-man military, but have simply accepted it on its own terms as the arbiter of national politics and the guardian of the constitution. Unlike the bloody revolutions of most of the Spanish-American nations, Brazil's gentle wrench from Portugal in 1822 did not create a pantheon of army heroes or a military history that put its people in debt to soldiers. Today, Brazil's military organization is run by a bright, intellectual class of officers who are strongly influenced by the tenets of Comtian and Spencerian...
...foreign-exchange costs of $250 million a year. But also last week Wilson jetted to The Hague on his fifth mission to Common Market countries and reiterated a now familiar theme. His argument: the pound has become so stable that Britain could enter the market without much of a wrench-or without much danger that market members might have to bail Britain out of future financial crises...
...value of the visits would be seriously jeopardized if critics of the visitors were able to force some sort of open and acrimonious confrontation. But the concern and, in many cases, disgust with which a substantial portion of the University community viewed the war in Vietnam threw a monkey wrench into the Institute's delicately wrought design...
...workman sprinted across the catwalk leading to the craft, tried desperately to loosen the hatch cover. He was driven back by the intense heat and smoke, but half a dozen other technicians, some wearing face masks and asbestos gloves, raced to help. One or two would try to wrench open the hatch, then fall back from the scorching heat while others struggled with it. Six minutes after the cry of alarm, the hatch sprang open. A blast of hot air shot out, followed by suffocating clouds of smoke...