Word: secretly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...what is? The Administration wants to be seen doing something, but any real counterterrorism must of necessity be kept secret. Part of the noise is psywar to put terrorist wannabes on notice, part is Washington's habitual CYA--cover your you-know-what. Says a senior U.S. official: "We don't want to get caught with our socks down again [as in Kenya and Tanzania]. If we warn people and nothing happens, they may be a little ticked off, but that's better than saying nothing if there's a chance something bad is going to happen...
...century's greater biological breakthrough was more basic. It was unceremoniously announced on Feb. 28, 1953, when Francis Crick winged into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, and declared that he and his partner James Watson had "found the secret of life...
...sense, of course, Newton's was the greatest magic of all: the thought (owing something to alchemy) that for all phenomena of nature and society, there must be not only a discoverable secret but a generalization with the force of law--a solution to every problem, scientific, social or moral...
...live in the consequences of that immense ambition; we have seen its results, both splendid and ghastly (space exploration, Marxist utopias). If religion taught faith and the mystery of the Causeless Cause (the ultimate secret, God), Newtonism located human intelligence in a cosmos of magnificently impassive reciprocities, celestial mechanics working by God's infinitely reliable and predictable cause and effect. Perhaps Newton merely codified what we intuitively knew (equal and opposite reactions, for example). As Einstein said, "The conceptions which he used to reduce the material of experience to order seemed to flow spontaneously from experience itself, from the beautiful...
Everyone else in his movie is, by comparison, an easy construct--a TV host with a guilty secret; his damaged, drugged out daughter; game-show contestants, current and has-been, wrestling with the consequences of brief, cheesy fame; a bumbling cop betrayed by his good nature. These characters are all well played, but we don't fully connect with them. Or, finally, with an endless movie that mostly mistakes inflation for importance...