Word: crackpot
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That iconoclastic temperament has also driven Buchanan to give sympathetic attention to crackpot Holocaust revisionists. In addition, he made intemperate comments during his crusade to prove the innocence of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker convicted by an Israeli court of having helped murder hundreds of thousands of Jews as a Nazi death-camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. There is considerable evidence that Buchanan may be right that Demjanjuk could not have been the mass murderer of Treblinka. But Buchanan has also claimed that diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody, much less...
...Germinal Choice. Its purpose: to make the sperm of brainy men (preferably Nobel prizewinners) available to brainy, childless women, who would then theoretically bear superintelligent babies. Three Nobel laureates contributed to this experiment, although the only one to announce his deposits was William Shockley (physics, 1956), a proponent of crackpot theories about the genetic inferiority of blacks. After ten years the repository has spawned 111 children, with 30 more on the way, but not a single one of them was sired by a laureate. Why? The advanced age of typical male Nobel prizewinners handicaps their sperm in the conception sweepstakes...
...20th century was the politicization of life. The totalitarians, left and right, showed the way, politicizing everything: economics, education, art, religion, family life. Not even genetics could escape politics. One remembers with disbelief not just Hitler's eugenic lunacies but also Stalin's designation of Lysenko's crackpot genetics as official truth, enforced by secret police...
...most spectacular bailout would be a repeat of the Berlin airlift launched by the U.S., Britain and France when the Soviets cut off supplies to the city's western sectors in 1948. But as Paul Craig Roberts, professor of political economy at Georgetown University, notes, "It's a crackpot idea." West Berlin, then as now, was under the control of the three Allies and could be reached through an air corridor to which they had legal access. Getting to Lithuania, whether by plane, train, truck or ship, would mean violating the Soviet border -- as Moscow draws it anyway. "That...
With a small but dedicated following, Mecham would benefit if Annetta Conant swells the G.O.P. field to six. She is a former Evanista who pushed the legalization of Laetrile, the crackpot cancer cure, and secured a letter from Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (a fellow Arizonan) erroneously citing legal precedents for the Christian-nation resolution. The most recent entrant is ex-Congressman Sam Steiger, a rodeo bulldogger, airplane wing walker, horse-race broadcaster, rancher and now electronic-equipment entrepreneur. He was convicted of extortion when he was an aide to Mecham, but it was overturned...