Word: benignity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...good thing, too, because he is the only menace around -- not nearly enough to sustain this endless tale. As it turns out, there is nothing else in the deep except some benign escapees from Steven Spielberg country. Harris and Mastrantonio do have a strong death and resurrection sequence, but long before that, one is pining for a rubber shark or a plastic octopus -- anything, in fact, out of a good old low-tech thriller...
...with You. The message is that a smart patient is an informed patient, who challenges a doctor's authority rather than submits uncritically to the physician's will and whims. Yet that approach rubs raw against a basic instinct. Patients want to trust their doctors, to view them as benign and authoritative. Even those who privately question a doctor's decisions may be loath to express dissent. Doctors admit that an aggressive or challenging patient can be very irritating. "When you can, under certain circumstances, play God, you sometimes tend to behave like you are God," says Cornell's David...
Like the Land of Oz, technology has good and bad witches. The bomb is a bad witch, microsurgery a good one. Not so long ago, electricity was firmly in the benign category. After all, it delivers energy with great reliability and little expense. So essential has electricity become that more than 2 million miles of power lines, literally huge extension cords, criss-cross the U.S. But nowadays many Americans are increasingly fearful that the electric and magnetic fields generated by such overhead cables pose a serious threat to human health, causing everything from learning disorders to cancer...
...gongs to drive away the spirit they thought was devouring the sun. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, aware that a most timely total eclipse was going to occur, escaped being burned at the stake by King Arthur's knights when he predicted that the sun would disappear. A benign form of sun worship continues to this day, not only among beachgoers but also by a group of intrepid American astronomy buffs who have traveled around the world by plane, ship and jeep, from Java to Siberia to Africa, to view each of the past dozen total eclipses...
Topeka (pop. 120,000) is not actively resisting desegregation, the court found, but the system has been exercising "benign neglect" concerning racial imbalances in some schools. The case has been returned to the U.S. district court in Topeka, which will decide on remedies. Linda Brown Buckner, whose father was the plaintiff in the original case, was among the Topeka parents who revived the lawsuit in 1979. Says her sister, Cheryl Brown Henderson, the family spokeswoman: "The quality of education was slipping, and it appeared that the only way to get attention was legal redress...