Word: fatalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cannot divorce without a husband's permission, and childless widows need a brother-in-law's approval for remarriage, sometimes gaining it with bribes. If a woman has been widowed three times, with all three husbands dying of natural causes, she is declared the isha katlanit, the fatal woman, and is legally forbidden to marry again. If a husband simply disappears, no matter how long he has been missing, his wife cannot remarry without absolute proof of his death...
...burning but by radiation. In order to determine monkeys' work capacity when healthy, they were conditioned by means of electric shocks to run on a treadmill for six hours. Then they were subjected to huge doses of radiation -from two to ten times what would ordinarily be fatal for most human beings -then put back on the treadmill to see how their capacities had been impaired and how long they survived. They lasted from seven hours to almost six days. In the meantime they suffered the predictable effects of excessive radiation exposure: vomiting, diarrhea, loss of hair. Despite this...
...hang-gliders do not glide in the air-space around the North Truro base anymore, at least not without the knowledge that they may be fried like a leg of chicken, or poisoned by potentially fatal doses of microwave radiation. But for a few years, the happy-go-lucky vacationers and beach-combers around North Truro swam, flew, and enjoyed their summers unaware of the fact that intense beams of microwave radiation were travelling through their bodies, much the same way more concentrated microwave frequencies are projected through the food inside brand new microwave ovens...much the same way every...
...notorious problems, however, have not only endured but even multiplied. Crime and political terrorism have continued to rise, with 76 kidnapings in 1977. Four shootings, presumably the work of political extremists, took place in Rome last week alone. A right-wing politician, suspected of participating in a fatal attack on a Communist Youth Federation member in 1976, was killed; two young leftists and the wife of a journalist working on the far-right newspaper II Secolo D'ltalia were wounded...
...custom, expectation, even divine ordination. Jefferson suggested as much: "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." Less elegantly, Henry Ford decided: "History is more or less bunk." Civilization of necessity operates by habit. But that process can groove the collective cortex into fatal designs-the ritual-hatreds of Arabs and Israelis, for example...