Word: draconianism
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...sacred and the tacky. The approach of the year 2000 has swelled the ranks of the fearful and credulous. On the Internet, cults multiply in service to Ashtar and Sananda, deities with names you could find at a perfume counter, or to extraterrestrials--the Zeta Reticuli, the Draconian Reptoids--who sound like softball teams at the Star Wars cantina. Carl Raschke, a cult specialist at the University of Denver, predicts "an explosion of bizarre and dangerous" cults. "Millennial fever will be on a lot of minds...
Some years passed, and then we got a tip. A garbled cell call told us of a private boarding school and ranch near Bozeman, Montana, where "students" were either exceptionally attractive, exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally devious or all three. So-called school employees signed draconian pre-agreements barring them from revealing anything. One had escaped, garnered our cell number from a local Webzine ad and whispered instructions as dogs barked in the background...
...brain, in a display of biological exuberance, produces trillions more connections between neurons than it can possibly use. Then, through a process that resembles Darwinian competition, the brain eliminates connections, or synapses, that are seldom or never used. The excess synapses in a child's brain undergo a draconian pruning, starting around the age of 10 or earlier, leaving behind a mind whose patterns of emotion and thought are, for better or worse, unique...
...years later, Fujimori seized near dictatorial powers in a "self-coup" that savaged virtually every democratic institution in the country but enabled him to implement draconian security measures that eventually crippled both rebel movements. By 1993 Abymael Guzman, the Shining Path warlord whose face had not been seen in 25 years, was in jail and Polay had been recaptured. An elated Fujimori boasted to a Chilean reporter that "no one here in Peru any longer doubts that [Tupac Amaru] will be defeated this year...
Despite exasperated complaints of overwhelming workloads and Draconian exam schedules, several hundred Harvard students simply refuse to take a break...