Word: thumbscrew
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...curb terrorism? There is every mechanism already available to the state to properly detect and detain and investigate. What is not just unacceptable, but plain wrong, is to say that a person suspected of terrorism deserves the rule book being torn up - basically a retreat to medieval rack and thumbscrew, and that's what Guantánamo is all about. Haven't the threats changed? These are simply not new problems. Every country has faced its challenges. Look at the way [James] Madison and [Thomas] Jefferson corresponded when they were trying to hammer out what rights a people should have...
...really attack inflation, high interest rates and unemployment? Reagan rammed through Congress his radical tax-reduction scheme and some curbs on domestic spending. Just as important, he supported the harsh restraints already being applied by the Federal Reserve Board under Paul Volcker. Inflation succumbed, at last, to the thumbscrew treatment after Reagan waited out the most severe recession since the 1930s. This painful therapy, together with the borrowing binge required to finance the budget and trade deficits, produced the economic expansion now in its seventh year. Today, with unemployment at a 14-year low of 5.3% and inflation...
...Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles or Yeatsian gyres but the thumbscrew. On this subject, the correspondents begin to correspond: "The past is a holding tank from which time's wastes recirculate . . . History really is that bird you [Barth] mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament...
...Mass and private confession are outlawed, and the church's ecumenical embrace is even touching Buddhists. Theological liberalism and social activism, canonized by Rome's authority, have become the new orthodoxy. Rome is still Rome, however, ready to enforce the new dogmas with some of the same thumbscrew pressure that it once used to enforce...
...good management that has done it. Though they would rather submit to the thumbscrew than say so publicly, executives of rival auto companies privately concede the superiority of G.M.'s organization. Says one Detroit titan famed for his aggressive competition with G.M.: "General Motors is the best managed organization in American industry-or, for that matter, anywhere in the world." Says another Big Three executive: "The General Motors system is so well thought out that you could run almost any business in any field successfully by using the G.M. philosophy, method and standards of organizational living...