fatuously

THERE are, as we know, lies, damned lies and statistics and if you're looking for the next level of fatuously fictitious figures you could, perhaps, peruse the annual productivity report released by The Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Whoever fatuously attempts to create a link between radical Islamist attacks and the current problems between Israel and the Palestinians is fooling himself, his people and international public opinion.

Tony Blair famously (and fatuously) said his mission would only be complete when Labour learned to love conceited millionaire Peter Mandelson.

Similarly, the anonymous mock-almanac Vox Graculi, or Jack Dawes Prognostication (1623), predicts at one point (fatuously) that "The 10.

"Even assuming for the sake of argument that Enrile was just sitting or drinking coffee or smiling fatuously, his mere presence is sufficient to convince the court to a moral certainty that he was the mastermind pulling the strings of Reyes, so that they could profit from the illicit scam," Santiago said.

The day before the ousted President Muhammad Mursi appeared on the front page of the Egyptian Arabic daily Al-Masry Al-Youm in a white prison jumpsuit grinning fatuously, the MB-led Pro-Mursi Alliance has proposed "serious dialogue" toward ending the crisis based on these core premises: An end to the military takeover, constitutional legitimacy, retribution for those who've lost their lives, the return to air of Brotherhood satellite channels -- and the right to peaceful protest.

Impelled perhaps by a sense of racial or national guilt, I heard myself say to him one day, rather fatuously, I'm afraid, "What do you think are the most valuable things the white men have brought to the North?

? THERE have never been more gyms and health centres or people fatuously describing themselves as personal trainers.

Since the Swanson liaison is too notorious to elide, our biographer swings back and forth between forgiving boilerplate--"There was no one quite like her"--and fatuously Kennedy-channeling contempt: "The inescapable truth was that for Joseph R Kennedy, Swanson was another sexual conquest, one of many he would fit into his busy life."

And yet, whatever we may say about Gulliver at the present moment in the story, he is anything but fatuously complacent.

fatuously this year are The 1 percent either those people who can more money on a regular basis than the "other 99 percent" or those people wealth is in the top 1 percent of the population, said to be a firming minority with more and concentration of greenbacks.

They immediately get the joke that has a federal inspector or a state administrator fatuously saying, "We're from the government and here to help." Such suspicion is a healthy instinct--but one that is being carried to destructive and demagogic lengths.

The force most detrimental to Iowa pheasants is a political economy in which corn ethanol is fatuously deemed a good idea.