Word: harmless
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Some doctors now argue that admission should be governed entirely by medical boards, without interference from lay judges and juries. But lawyers fear that even harmless neurotics might wind up in institutions that are still primarily geared to restraint. The consensus is that involuntary admission should be extended to nondangerous persons only where hospitals are fully equipped to treat early symptoms. On the other hand, state hospitals are allowed to discharge patients without court intervention. In many places, nondangerous patients who succeed in going over the hill and staying free for a year are considered discharged, on the theory that...
...have no special sex organs, and often when they cling together it is not for love. But at least one kind of microscopic bug has a sex life with a difference. Professors Pavel Nemec and Vojtech Bystricky of the Slovak Polytechnical University in Bratislava report that the Caulobacter, a harmless bacterium found in soil, possesses a multi-purpose organ that it often uses for a primitive kind of conjugation...
...cases on file, almost all involving persons who have by word or in writing over the last 20 years expressed direct threats against the life of a President. The White House mail room is a prime source for the file, and the list is loaded with harmless crackpots. The Service tries to keep surveillance over about 100 people who are considered to be "serious risks" to the President; of these, between twelve and 15 are especially dangerous because they have no fixed address...
...While Oswald appeared to most of those who knew him as a meek and harmless person," says the Commission, "he sometimes imagined himself as 'the Commander' and, apparently seriously, as a political prophet?a man who said that after 20 years he would be prime minister. His wife testified that he compared himself with great leaders of history. Such ideas of grandeur were apparently accompanied by notions of oppression. He had a great hostility toward his environment, whatever it happened to be, which he expressed in striking and sometimes violent acts long before the assassination...
Ruling that California has no right to make Navajos conform to "mass society," the court added that peyote is harmless, is permitted in other states and is religiously more crucial than polygamy, without which modern Mormons are thriving. Since Peyotism "presents only slight danger to the state," the court voided the Navajos' convictions. Balancing its dictum, the court simultaneously rejected the appeal of a white, "selfstyled 'peyote preacher'" who made the same claim as the Indians. He must stand trial again, ordered the court, because he "has not proved that his asserted belief was an honest...