Word: cataclysmic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cataclysm usually makes for a teaching moment. Not so with the resignation of Larry Summers.If I hadn’t witnessed it firsthand, I’d say Summers’ ouster had all the makings of one of those storylines in which implausible characters make the plot altogether fantastic and unredeemed.The recent events are a scene lifted from Kafka, where an unthinking chimera called the Faculty of Arts and Sciences seizes upon wrongdoings that few outside the academy would conceive of as wrong and then tenaciously holds on, overseeing the two-year-long persecution of their boss for these...
...Bobby Mehta, CEO of HSBC in North America, believes there is still potential in the U.S. market. He says strong loan growth in the third quarter of 2005 produced a 9.5% jump in profits for all of HSBC's U.S. businesses. "We don't believe there is any credit cataclysm coming" in the U.S., Mehta says. "When you compare the U.S. market to other developed markets, it looks attractive...
...Mystery does not sit well with us, nor random tragedy, nor helplessness in the face of a ruthless wind, so we place our trust in better sensors and protocols and reinforced concrete and roofs designed to rebuff the gale. The cataclysm of Katrina has been blamed on everything from SUV drivers to coastal developers to the Army Corps of Engineers, in a strange rite of reassurance: if man has the power to cause these calamities, maybe he would have the power to prevent them. The speed with which the commentariat moved from covering an actual storm to a political...
This tragedy, however, should make us take an account of ourselves. We should not allow the mythic significance of this moment to pass without proper consideration. Let us assess the size of this cataclysm in cultural terms, not in dollars and cents or politics. Americans are far less successful at doing that because we have never understood how our core beliefs are manifest in culture--and how culture should guide political and economic realities. That's what the city of New Orleans can now teach the nation again as we are all forced by circumstance to literally come closer...
...potential risks to humanity are far greater than they have been historically,” Summers said. “The other thing that could be in those history books is the tragic errors that we could make that could lead to global conflict, to global cataclysm...