Word: absurdities
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Among the odder jobs in the U.S. these days is one held by a man in northern Colorado who spends hours following a pronghorn antelope, watching it feed, and then whispering into a tape recorder. Absurd? Hardly. By such surveillance, ecologists are learning the animal's precise relationship to its environment-the grasslands of the American West. In time, the habits of the antelope and countless other creatures will be stored in the data banks of computers. Scientists will then be able to ask a computer what really happens when man changes the grasslands environment by farming, building roads...
...ELECTION SLOGAN "CONTINUITY AND OPENING": I have the weakness to think that there is no other formula for life than continuity and opening. In the old man there exists something that was already present in the child. That is continuity. Yet it would, of course, be absurd for him to keep on sucking his thumb all his life. He must open himself up to life as he gradually changes. ON FRANCE: My chief preoccupation is to make of France a modern country. This means many things. It means the transformation of agriculture, industrialization, the opening of frontiers, scientific and technical...
...Mitsui, a top Japanese trading company, "is better at information gathering than the CIA," swears one Singapore government official. "They send in 20 men to look at an investment. They read everything and they take down everything-even the jokes cracked at meetings." Japanese firms are famous for absorbing absurd losses just to get a piece of a market-which is why Toyota has 25% of the Philippine auto business...
Room for Criticism. Despite the President's vigorous tone and concrete proposals, the message invited some criticism. No mention was made of the danger of oil pollution from proliferating offshore wells, or the environmentally absurd SST, with its sonic boom and probable pollution of the stratosphere. Nixon offered no proposals for curbing exhaust from the 83 million old cars now on the roads. Moreover the President paid little attention to the key problem of enforcement. Last fall, for example, the Federal Government announced that DDT must soon be phased out of use in the U.S. But delaying actions...
...away to jail for Thoughtcrime. Nevertheless, everyone who has protested, at Chicago, or Washington, or Boston, against this nation's terrible insanity, should recognize the trial in Chicago as the most obvious attempt yet at political repression. When the courts resort to locking up lawyers we must realize how absurd quiet faith in the judicial process really is. One defendant thanked Hoffman for finally and totally exposing the American system to him as a lie. Hoffman deserves our thanks...