Word: foolish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...investment officer David Swensen and his associate Michael Schmidt encouraged turning newspapers into “nonprofit, endowed institutions—like colleges and universities… [to enhance] autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.” This is incredibly foolish, not to mention expensive: The last thing we need populating the news business is hundreds of lumbering, immortal white elephants sucking the talent out of the business of economically reporting news. Most damagingly, newspaper bailouts, endowments, and other artificial life support would crowd out human capital from being invested efficiently...
Gelb is at his best describing the three "demons" that render America's politicians congenitally foolish and unable to project power creatively - our tendency to turn principles into dogma, domestic political pressures, and the delusion that America can do anything. George W. Bush was badly boggled by all three. His "Freedom Agenda," which wantonly promoted democracy, led to disasters like the rise of Hamas in Gaza (after Bush forced elections that neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority wanted). Bush also played domestic tough-guy politics disgracefully: his opponents were inevitably "soft on terrorism." And he played the darker avenues...
...were young and foolish. We felt we were committing an idealized, ideological action to obtain government-insured money and that we were not stealing from ordinary people. In the end, we stole someone's life." -Apologizing during a 2002 court appearance in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Myrna Opsahl, who was killed during a 1975 bank robbery. (AP, March...
...While undergraduates might appreciate their liberal arts education, Ager says that students may be unprepared to enter the workforce due to the lack of business classes at Harvard. “It’s very foolish to think that anybody could start any sort of enterprise without having some basic knowledge of accounting and finance,” he says. “Can you learn? Eventually you can. But I think that you’re at a significant disadvantage to these other students from these others schools who have these backgrounds because they understand finance, they understand...
...None of this is to say that all cockiness leads to ruin - sometimes it's what's needed for a leader seeking greatness. During his brief presidency, John F. Kennedy had the preposterous idea that the CIA could topple the government of Cuba and the equally foolish notion that the U.S. could put a man on the moon before 1970. One plan led to the Bay of Pigs, the other to the Sea of Tranquility...