Word: crackpotisms
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Greenspan first won worldwide attention during the Depression (TIME, July 22, 1935) when he accurately forecast earthquakes in Chile, Peru, Japan and India, as well as a savage volcanic eruption in Krakatoa. He was more or less dismissed by the scientific community as a lucky crackpot. But he resurfaced within the past couple of years in Laguna Beach, and astounded Californians by predicting the time and date (Feb. 9, 1971 at 6 a.m.) of the San Fernando earthquake that killed 64 people and wrought more than $500 million worth of damage. Greenspan has missed the mark before; he has thrice...
...good as Ambler," say the cover blurbs on all those derivative thrillers that aren't. The Levanter shows why. Nobody else is quite so much at home down there behind the Middle Eastern gasworks where the real horrors breed, among the machines and crackpot politics and bills of lading, the irony and the ironmonger. Nobody but Ambler is quite so willing to risk boring us with the crucial facts-why the Russian rocket needs a special mounting flange to take a Chinese fuse, why it isn't all that simple to plot a new course for a merchant...
...been men like Henry Ford and his dull-eyed descendants in the corporate board room who have monopolized the American way of thinking. "What's good for General Motors is good for the country" seemed like a worthy precept to everyone, except all those strident moralists and crackpot spiritual athletes who thought otherwise. The artist, of course, was always in this small group of dissidents, and, if he didn't go off to Europe seeking art for art's sake, he spent most of his time at home pointing out the dilemmas of a society whose sole motivation is blind...
Medvedev irritated Soviet authorities when two of his works reached the West. In 1969 the Columbia University Press printed The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, a devastating history of how the crackpot genetic theories of Stalin's pet scientist were established as unassailable dogma until the fall of Khrushchev...
...Depression '30s, a lanky South Dakota doctor named Francis Townsend won the backing of millions of elderly Americans with his plan for $200-a-month pensions for everyone over 60. Today his scheme, which most economists once dismissed as a crackpot idea, seems almost conservative. It has been upstaged by a combination of Social Security and private pension plans that offer retirement income to workers as a matter of course. Still, the difference between plans and payoffs is often painful. Many of those who lost their jobs during last year's recession and this summer's slow...