Bad Incident Quotes

We all have a limit. What we’re willing to put up with before we break. When I married your father, I knew exactly what my limit was. But slowly . . . with every incident . . . my limit was pushed a little more. And a little more. The first time your father hit me, he was immediately sorry. He swore it would never happen again. The second time he hit me, he was even more sorry. The third time it happened, it was more than a hit. It was a beating. And every single time, I took him back. But the fourth time, it was only a slap. And when that happened, I felt relieved. I remember thinking, ‘At least he didn’t beat me this time. This wasn’t so bad.

And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.

We all make mistakes, Steele. It’s what we do afterward that defines us more than the actual incident that led to the mistake. (Joe)

The object of the Bible is not to tell how good men are, but how bad men can become good.

Those who incessantly underestimate people will one day experience an incident that would make them want to plead everyone they had offended in the world.

That's going to be my last trip. This trading in n***ers is a bad business for a fellow that's got any heart.

.. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.

That was the thing about her. When you told her about an incident where you so badly screwed up, half expecting her to laugh at you in amusement, half anticipating a smirk of disgust, she would hardly express her pity or maybe she did express what she felt, for she would just nod her head, gesturing you to go on... As if it's normal... As if you're normal.

I don't think that incident necessarily defines you as bad. I think it makes you human. And I believe you would have stopped yourself. I think that's what makes a person good. Not that you make mistakes, but that you recognize them. You feel remorse for them. You want to correct them and do better.

If you are thinking that everything sucks, you’ll end up where everything does. This is how people get caught in a downward spiral and screw up their whole lives by never recovering from one bad incident.

It's bad for you if you never do anything bad for you.

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time. Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")

My life was awful. When I was a kid, I was fat, pretty ugly and had awful hair. I used to get teased every fucking day, slammed up against lockers, punched in the face - you name it. Hell, I had to go to prom with one of my female friends because I couldn’t even get a proper date. I can’t even look back at those photos because I look so bad. I transferred schools, but the teasing just got worse. After an, let’s say, ‘incident’ I had with the school play the bullying just got worse. But I made it through high school, only to find out that real life was pretty much the same. I just stayed in my dark room all day and didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t go outside. I just stayed inside and drew. I’d draw vampires, mummies, heroes, villains. Anything to help me escape all the bad in the world. I went to art school and didn’t really belong. All I could draw was comic book characters. I tried to put my only good talent to use by drawing a cartoon and pitching it - only to have it turned down. Life to me was just pointless. I started drinking, doing drugs and just generally wasting my life drawing.
Then one day, I saw bodies falling from the sky. I witnessed people dying. And that’s when I decided to turn my life around. I called up anyone I knew who had an instrument and we formed a band. Being on tour for the first few years was bad. All we’d do is get drunk and do drugs, but I loved it. Because I was doing something I loved with people I loved. And a few years ago I met the most perfect woman ever. It’s like we share a wave-link or something. She just knows me without even knowing me, if you understand. And now, 2011, I have a beautiful baby girl, a caring wife and I get to perform for my adoring fans everyday. I am living proof that no matter how bad it gets, it gets better. I am Gerard Way, and I survived.

How soon you overcome each incident, good or bad happening with you reveals how deeply you understand life.

I was angry at her for not recognising that I was no longer a simple intern, but I know that wasn’t everything. There was something spikier, crueller, underneath it. I was fond of Deenie Harrington, but in my head I had normalised that it was okay to do bad things to her. Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in. The cradle of me and Deenie would always be that she was the clueless wife of my best friend’s lover. There was a slice of me that would always condescend to her, no matter how sweet or clever or kind she was.

Our experiences always teach us something. If the experience is "bad", then the lesson is even more powerful and meaningful. Every unfortunate incident makes us stronger and better equipped to handle new challenges.

We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Fascism is always about controlling the narrative of the public. Any bad incident or bad decision is never their fault. It is always someone else’s fault. It is the opposition’s fault, it is foreign powers fault, or it is the minority population’s fault. As long as they control the narrative, they control the power.

When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what. Sometimes the systems don’t work. Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many. Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes. The reason why is because people should know better. But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.

This hell on earth is unlike anything that’s ever taken place. Who knows when it will end, or if it ever will? We might all be in for a lot of pain in the near future, so we need to be strong and we need to stick together. There’s no telling how bad things will get.

A fluffy poached egg is a good breakfast, and a good breakfast is better than a bad one, like a good book is better than having your toe chopped off.

Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape--I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightening that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance--which was not chance--had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this: She was Cunt. She had "lost" something. Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick--but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what she had "lost"). And there I was at eleven years of age: She was out late at night. She was in the wrong part of town. Her skirt was too short and that provoked him. She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk. I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a grey, geometric plane--or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies. I was dirty. I was crying. I demanded comfort. I was being inconvenient. I did not disappear into thin air.

Many people who struggle to find stable employment also contend with things like intergenerational poverty and/or trauma, cycles of abuse, mental illness, systemic discrimination, disability or neurological disorders. Not only are these all chronically stressful and traumatic circumstances, they have all been linked to a high incidence of impaired executive function. Welfare systems are not built to be easy for people who are anxious about using the phone, or people who mix up dates. They are not designed for people who are bad at keeping time, filling out forms, or people who can’t easily access all the relevant bank, residential and employment details from the past five years, if they thought to keep that information at all. Welfare systems don’t accommodate for transience because welfare systems are not built to be accessible, they are built to be temples of administrative doom, because, apparently, welfare is a treasure that must be protected.

While Elizabeth was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Sunny was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Arnav flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Sunny might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.

I realize in this moment that the hardest part about ending an abusive relationship is that you aren't necessarily putting an end to the bad moments. The bad moments still rear their ugly heads every now and then. When you end an abusive relationship, it's the good moments you put an end to. In our marriage, the few terrifying incidents were blanketed by so many good ones, but now that our marriage is over, the blanket has lifted and all I'm left with are the worst pieces of him. When our marriage was once full of heart and flesh that cushioned the skeleton, all that's left is the skeleton now. Sharp, bony edges that slice right through me.

So yeah, you were part of the job. Don't get me wrong, Mercer, I like you. You're smart, fluent in sarcasm, and, Bad Dog incident aside, pretty kick-ass at magic. And it's not like you're hard to look at." "Be still my beating heart." "But to answer your question, no part of the Archer Cross you knew at Hecate exists. That day in the cellar, I kissed you back because it was my job to stay close to you. If that's where you wanted to take things, then that's where I was going to go. I kissed you because I had to. Not exactly the hardest assignment I've ever had, but an assignment nonetheless." I stood there absorbing his words like blows, my heart aching. But it wasn't what he said that made me feel like I'd been punched in the chest. It's that I knew he was lying. That speech came out way too quickly and way too smooth, almost like he'd been practicing it in his head. The same way I'd been practing what I'd say to him if I ever saw him again. I couldn't even begin to handle that right now, so instead I just said, "Okay,then. Yay for honesty. Now that we're done with the confessional part of the evening, why don't you tell me why we're here." There was another pause, then he started walking again. I followed, leaves crunching under my feet. "Like I said, Hacte Hall has always made The Eye nervous." "Why? Are they allergic to plaid?" I thought he might laugh, but instead, he said, "Think about it,Mercer.One place where Prodigium round up their most powerful members? Don't tell me that's not suspicious." That had never occurred to me. I'd always just thought of all us at Hecate as giant screwups, but in a way, Archer was right. We'd all been sentenced to Hex Hall because of spells that were powerful and dangerous. I thought of Cal saying I created "too big." Wasn't that what just about everyone at Hecate had done? Still, the idea that the place I'd called home for nearly a year was actually some evil farm for powerful Prodigium was unsettling to say the least.

The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight,” he wrote. “There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble’s inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud…. The FBI reports mortgage-related fraud is up fivefold since 2000.” Bad behavior was no longer on the fringes of an otherwise sound economy; it was its central feature.

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.

The nine in our list are based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders. For more on CBT—how it works, and how to practice it—please see Appendix 1.) EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.” CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.” OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.” DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.” MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.” LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.” NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.” DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.” BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”11

This was, by far, the absolute worst weekend in his life.

A good breakfast is better than a bad one, like a good book is better than having your toe chopped off.

The party had gone spectacularly well, with only one and a half vomiting incidents, two hair-pulling fights, and four tragic tantrums about not winning.

One day he felt ready to give up on life. He overdosed on heroine and woke up a day later at the hospital, where he was diagnosed with cancer. Just perfect, he thought.

She was always doing things like that & hurting herself, but the headmaster never sent for Mother & Daddy. It was the same with the other children. Matters were always settled between the headmaster & the child concerned. Just as he had listened to Totto-Chan for four hours the day she first arrived at the school, he always listened to what a child had to say about an incident caused. He even listened to their excuses. And if the child had done something really bad & eventually recognized it was wrong, the headmaster would say, "Now apologize.

Every bad experience is a source of unhappiness. Yet the intensity of suffering can be controlled. Just like a person who has a million-dollar bank balance is likely to get less disturbed due to loss of a few dollars, you too can easily overcome some bad incidents in your life, without losing much joy, provided you already have a great amount of happiness in your life.

Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn't be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any incidents or characters that might occupy his theme; perhaps he never would. He could see though the book itself, he could feel its closed heft and see it opened, white pages comfortably large and shadowed gray by print; dense, numbered, full of meat. He sensed a narrative voice, speaking calmly and precisely, with immense assurance building, building; a voice too far off for him to hear, but speaking. ("Novelty")

This process, known as Pointing-and-Calling, is a safety system designed to reduce mistakes. It seems silly, but it works incredibly well. Pointing-and-Calling reduces errors by up to 85 percent and cuts accidents by 30 percent. The MTA subway system in New York City adopted a modified version that is “point-only,” and “within two years of implementation, incidents of incorrectly berthed subways fell 57 percent.

There was something deeply offensive about turning a tiny incident, a tragedy in an English village, into some sort of Mills & Boon morality tale, and reading it, I felt less bad about her review of Mindgame.

To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was 'empty talk'--except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés [ ] each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

And yet, despite the high numbers of girls experiencing sexual harassment in schools, only 12 percent said they ever reported it to an adult. "Some researchers claim that sexual harassment is so common for girls that many fail to recognize it as sexual harassment when it happens," said the AAUW report. A 2014 study, published in Gender & Society, of students in a Midwestern city also found that girls failed to report incidents of sexual harassment in school because they regarded them as "normal." Their lack of reporting was found to stem from girls' fear of being labeled "bad girls" by teachers and administrators, who they felt would view them as provoking how they were treated. They also feared the condemnation of other girls, some of whom were shown to be unsupportive, accusing them of exaggerating or lying. Many girls saw everyday sexual harassment and abuse as "normal" male behavior male behavior and something they had to ignore, endure, or maneuver around.

As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

One bad thing can often be rectified or overlooked, but several of them can sometimes coalesce into a compound disaster that sprouts tentacles and develops a self-directed will of its own, the kind of thing my dear old dad used to call a cluster fudge bar.

Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from.

Well, there’s a purity to being innocent. Being unaware of the bad things in the world. Being unaware of the bad things people can do. Even people close to you. People you love. Animals are innocent because they aren’t motivated by things other than survival.

He likes me? He picks on me because he likes me? Jiyoung was confused. She went over the series of incidents that she had suffered because of him, and still couldn’t make sense of what the teacher was saying. If you like someone, you’re friendlier and nicer to them. To friends, to family, to your pet dogs and cats. Even at the age of eight, this was common sense to Jiyoung. The desk-mate’s pranks made school life so difficult for her. What he’d put her through was awful enough, and now the teacher was making her out to be a bad child who misunderstood her friend.

There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it?

I move too much. I would end up next to you.” “Would that be such a bad thing?” He hadn’t touched her since before the incident, nothing beyond the merest brushing of his hands across her as he settled a blanket around her or helped her out of bed. He sighed, a heavy sound. “Eve, you flinch when I touch you.

And it’s best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it’s bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don’t know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.

1 This is not a metaphor, it is a simile, which means that it really did look like there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils and if you make a picture in your head of a man with two very small mice hiding in his nostrils you will know what the police inspector looked like. And a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.

Dearest J.D.,” Mamaw wrote when she learned of the incident, “I must say I have been waiting for them dick face bastards to start on you—and now they have. Words aren’t invented to describe how they piss me off. . . . You just keep on doing the best you can do and keep thinking about this stupid asshole with an IQ of 2 thinking he is Bobby bad ass but he wears girls underwear. I hate all of them.

The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, ‘commitment’ and so on is that they are rushing into a discipline, any discipline at all, which will save them from the poison of the word ‘artist’ used by the enemy. I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this — why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game — that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all — not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

Jimmy had a loyal supporter in Puerto Rico named Frank Chavez. But however, Frank Chavez was a definite troublemaker. He was very hotheaded. He’s the one who sent Bobby Kennedy a letter from his local in Puerto Rico the day John F. Kennedy got assassinated. He told Bobby that in honor of all the bad things Bobby Kennedy had done to Jimmy Hoffa, his Puerto Rican local was going to put flowers on the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald and maintain them and keep them fresh. That still has to make you cringe a little. Let the dead rest in peace. You honor the dead, especially that man. He was a war hero who saved his own men in that PT boat incident. Bobby was a son of a bitch, but the man had just lost his brother and he must have known it was all connected with him and that it was his own fault, besides. Frank

One side of his mouth twitched with the hint of a smile. “Sounds like that person is a genius. Probably shockingly good-looking, too.” “Eh.” She laughed when he actually looked wounded. “Oh please, you know you’re a heartbreaker. You don’t need me to tell you that.” “Hey, I have never broken any hearts.” “Maybe not intentionally. But come on. When you or Fitz start dating, there will be crying in the Foxfire halls. I bet there are girls crying now, wishing you guys hadn’t left.” “Not if they’ve heard how awesome my mom is.” “There are still just as many Keefe fangirls, trust me. Everyone loves the bad boys.” She expected some epic Keefe teasing about her use of the word “everyone.” Instead, his shoulders dropped and he asked, “So . . . you think I’m bad?” She grabbed a note that said “The Great Gulon Incident” and handed it to him. His half smile returned. “Point taken.

Utah ranks number one in incidents of depression and suicides, nationwide. One study reported: “In Utah, 14 percent of adults and adolescents reported experiencing severe psychological distress, and 10 percent said they’d had a major depressive episode in the past year. Bad mental health days come three times a month for those living in Utah.”i Incidentally, Utah leads the nation in fraud (see “God is Not a Good Investment Advisor,” chapter 8) and pornography consumptionii

When we clean obsessively we do indeed get rid of everything, both bad and good. This can not be a good kind of cleanliness. As it happens the higher the hygiene standards in a country the higher that nations incidents of allergies and autoimmune diseases. The more sterile a household is the more its members will suffer from allergies and autoimmune diseases. Thirty years ago about 1 person in 10 had an allergy. Today that figure is 1 in 3. At the same time, the number of infections has not fallen significantly. This is not smart hygiene.

walk as quietly as I can out into the hallway. I can see that Cathy’s bedroom door is open. I peer into her room. Her bed is made. It’s possible she has already got up and made it, but I don’t think she stayed here last night, which is a source of some relief. If she isn’t here, she didn’t see or hear me come in last night, which means that she doesn’t know how bad I was. This shouldn’t matter, but it does: the sense of shame I feel about an incident is proportionate not just to the gravity of the situation, but also to the number of people who witnessed it.

When I met Maria at Sachs' apartment in 1979, she hadn't slept with a man in close to three years. It took her that long to recover from the shock of the beating, and abstinence was not a choice so much as a necessity, the only possible cure. As much as the physical humiliation she had suffered, the incident with Jerome had been a spiritual defeat. For the first time in her life, Maria had been chastened. She had stepped over the boundaries of herself, and the brutality of that experience had altered her sense of who she was. Until then, she had imagined herself capable of any thing: any adventure, any transgression, any dare. She had felt stronger than other people, immunized against the ravages and failures that afflict the rest of humanity. After the switch with Lilian, she learned how badly she had deceived herself. She was weak, she discovered, a person hemmed in by her own fears and inner constraints, as mortal and confused as anyone else. It took her three years to repair the damage (to the extent that it was ever repaired), and when we crossed paths at Sachs's apartment that night, she was more or less ready to emerge from her shell.

There is no overtime, and I had to use the potion in the bathroom.” Valen’s cheeks begin to turn pink. Tisha hums. She already knows the story, but she’s not going to give up the details. I round on Valen. “Did you get caught spanking the monkey?” Dane snickers. “Valen squeezed his lemon at the airport?” “I did not squeeze my lemon or spank a monkey.” He huffs and crosses his arms. “If you must know, I had an incident with a breakfast croissant.” I pinch my eyebrows together. “You used your potion on someone who heard you take a crap?” His eyes narrow. “It was a bad croissant.

When I first met you,” she said, “with that stupid carry-on about how the shop wanted to put on the launch for his awful book. I knew something was off. It didn’t make any sense. And then when I actually saw you…” She allowed herself a dry cackle. “I thought, Oh God, how silly, she’s just a chubby student with a crush.” Of all the things Deenie Harrington said that night, this is the line that I have come back to the most. On my worst days, on my bad dates, on the job interviews that didn’t quite work out the way they should. Just a chubby student with a crush. Big blotches broke out on Deenie’s neck

You know, the sound of a 45 rpm record being played at 33 rpm. But as soon as I remembered that this is a CD and not vinyl, I could only marvel at the fact that these guys are so gol-darned HEAVY [author’s emphasis].”25 In an interview with the now-defunct influential extreme hardcore band Lärm, a band member recalls an incident in which the band’s definition of music collided with a sound engineer’s more mainstream ditto: “The sound check of our first concert ever was funny, the PA guy kept asking us when we were actually going to play a song…we already played three, we said.He shut down the PA and left…

My point is that bias is not advertised by a glowing sign worn around jurors’ necks; we are all guilty of it, because the brain is wired for us to see what we believe, and it usually happens outside of everyone’s awareness. Affective realism decimates the ideal of the impartial juror. Want to increase the likelihood of a conviction in a murder trial? Show the jury some gruesome photographic evidence. Tip their body budgets out of balance and chances are they’ll attribute their unpleasant affect to the defendant: “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.” Or permit family members of the deceased to describe how the crime has hurt them, a practice known as a victim impact statement, and the jury will tend to recommend more severe punishments. Crank up the emotional impact of a victim impact statement by recording it professionally on video and adding music and narration like a dramatic film, and you’ve got the makings of a jury-swaying masterpiece.45 Affective realism intertwines with the law outside the courtroom as well. Imagine that you are enjoying a quiet evening at home when suddenly you hear loud banging outside. You look out the window and see an African American man attempting to force open the door of a nearby house. Being a dutiful citizen, you call 911, and the police arrive and arrest the perpetrator. Congratulations, you have just brought about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as it happened on July 16, 2009. Gates was trying to force open the front door of his own home, which had become stuck while he was traveling. Affective realism strikes again. The real-life eyewitness in this incident had an affective feeling, presumably based on her concepts about crime and skin color, and made a mental inference that the man outside the window had intent to commit a crime.

There have been other incidents throughout my life that have caused me grief, and now I can't stop wondering how bad they truly were,' she said. 'In the carriage, I kept thinking, I kept thinking about how a part of me has wallowed in sorrow for years. How many decisions have I made because I was afraid of some dreadful thing that in the end would have never come to pass ? How often have I said yer or no to something just to avoid a certain type of pain ? I don't think I'm a coward; sometimes I even think I'm brave. But now I looke at myself and I think, who would I be, today, had I never been so needlessly afraid ? I'm... pathetically sensitive.

it contains no copy of the Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing. A singular book. Not a sincere line in it, and not a character that invites respect; a book which is one long waste-pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a book which is full of pathos which revolts, and humor which grieves the heart. There are few things in literature that are more piteous, more pathetic, than the celebrated "humorous" incident of Moses and the spectacles.

Indeed," Arthur said. "But ... no one has said I'll be a good king. It would be a relief to know I don't go mad or bad before the end." Alex sighed, but with a smile. She knew Arthur was prying information out of her just to tease her, but two could play this game. "You're a good king, don't worry," she said, and then looked sadly to the ground. "At least you are once you heal from ... the incident." "What incident?" Arthur asked. Alex shook her head somberly. "Well, if Merlin hasn't told you, then I probably shouldn't." "Oh, right - the incident," he said, pretending to know. "Old Merlin's told me about that plenty of times." "Good," Alex said. "So you know all about the leeches." Arthur gulped. "Yes ... I do," he said nervously. "Luckily by then you've already been captured by the Saxons and your legs have been ripped off," Alex said. "So there aren't too many leech wounds." Arthur gulped. "It's the definition of luck," he said. "It's a shame you lose both your arms in the battle before you get captured," Alex said. "But you aren't known as Arthur the Limbless for nothing." "Arthur the Limbless? " "Oh, yes," Alex said. "A lesser king would have let the title belittle him, but you still manage to instill fear in all your enemies. Then again, that could be because of your future wife, Queen Girtha. Of course, Merlin has told you about her ..." "Naturally," Arthur said. "She's that nasty woman, right? So hideous, people are afraid to look at her. Now remind me, how many terrible children do we have?" "Just the one," Alex said. "And who would have expected you to die during childbirth?" "I die in childbirth?" Arthur asked with a quiver in his voice. "How is that possible?" "Isn't that obvious?" Alex asked. "That's why they call your wife Girtha the Strong Handed. Did you never make that connection?" "Oh, that's right," Arthur said. "I made that connection once before, but I forgot about it." "I don't blame you," Alex said. "I would have blocked it out of my mind, too.

SOME PEOPLE WOULD NEVER FORGET certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten. Sometimes it was for the best. Larry Novotny wanted to be forgotten for his dalliance with Amber Ludwig. Tom Mota wanted to be forgotten for that incident involving the paintballs. But did anybody want to be forgotten about completely? We had dedicated years to that place, we labored under the notion we were making names for ourselves, we had to believe in our hearts that each one of us was memorable. And yet who wanted to be remembered for their poor taste or bad breath? Still, better to be remembered for those things than forgotten for your perfect parboiled blandness.

They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit—a unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. It also said that the same treatment would be meted out to all the partisans unless, by a given date, they submitted and gave up their arms to the representatives of General Vitsyn’s army corps. Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn’s investigating and punitive squads. His own sentence of death had been allegedly commuted; instead of hanging him, they had cut off his arm and leg in order to send him into the camp and strike terror among the partisans. They had carried him as far as the outposts of the camp, where they had put him down and ordered him to crawl, urging him on by shooting into the air. He could barely move his lips. To make out his almost unintelligible stammering, the crowd around him bent low. He was saying: “Be on your guard, comrades. He has broken through.” “Patrols have gone out in strength. There’s a big battle going on. We’ll hold him.” “There’s a gap. He wants to surprise you. I know. ... I can’t go on, men. I am spitting blood. I’ll die in a moment.” “Rest a bit. Keep quiet.—Can’t you see it’s bad for him, you heartless beasts!” The man started again: “He went to work on me, the devil. He said: You will bathe in your own blood until you tell me who you are. And how was I to tell him, a deserter is just what I am? I was running from him to you.” “You keep saying ‘he.’ Who was it that got to work on you?” “Let me just get my breath. ... I’ll tell you. Hetman, Bekeshin. Colonel, Strese. Vitsyn’s men. You don’t know out here what it’s like. The whole town is groaning. They boil people alive. They cut strips out of them. They take you by the scruff of the neck and push you inside, you don’t know where you are, it’s pitch black. You grope about—you are in a cage, inside a freight car. There are more than forty people in the cage, all in their underclothes. From time to time they open the door and grab whoever comes first—out he goes. As you grab a chicken to cut its throat. I swear to God. Some they hang, some they shoot, some they question. They beat you to shreds, they put salt on the wounds, they pour boiling water on you. When you vomit or relieve yourself they make you eat it. As for children and women—O God!” The unfortunate was at his last gasp. He cried out and died without finishing the sentence. Somehow they all knew it at once and took off their caps and crossed themselves. That night, the news of a far more terrible incident flew around the camp. Pamphil had been in the crowd surrounding the dying man. He had seen him, heard his words, and read the threatening inscription on the board. His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faces distorted by pain, and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish—to forestall their future sufferings and to end his own—he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys for the two small girls and the boy, who had been his favorite. The astonishing thing was that he did not kill himself immediately afterward.

That night, lying exhausted in my swag, covered with salt water and river mud, I had a single thought running through my mind over and over. Thank God that Steve was there. Wherever I was in the Australian bush, whatever I was doing, I resolved that Steve had to be with me. I felt that as long as he was there, no matter what accident or incident happened, I knew I would be fine. It wasn’t just that I knew Steve would protect me and that his knowledge of the bush was so complete. I was beginning to sense something we would both come to feel and talk about seriously. When we were together, nothing bad would happen. Apart, we might be vulnerable. It was hard to explain, but it was as if the universe had brought us together and now we were as one. Whatever it was, we both felt it.

But, if I was never complete, I never exaggerated. Every one of those articles was an understatement, especially where the conditions were bad, and the proof thereof is that while each article seemed to astonish other cities, it disappointed the city which was its subject.... I cut twenty thousand words out of the Philadelphia article and yet I had not written half my facts. I know a man who is making a history of the corrupt construction of the Philadelphia City Hall, in three volumes, and he grieves because he lacks space. You can’t put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book. This is all very unscientific, but then, I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts.

We all have a limit. What we're willing to put up with before we break. When I married your father, I knew exactly what my limit was. But slowly...with every incident...my limit was pushed a little more. And a little more. The first time your father hit me, he was immediately sorry. He swore it would never happen again. The second time he hit me, he was even more sorry. The third time it happened, it was more than a hit. It was a beating. And every single time, I took him back. But the fourth time, it was only a slap. And when that happened, I felt relieved. I remember thinking, 'At least he didn't beat me this time. This wasn't so bad'. . . . every incident chips away at your limit. Every time you choose to stay, it makes the next time that much harder to leave. Eventually, you lose sight of your limit altogether, because you start to think 'I've lasted five years now. What's five more?

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. ROMANS 12:21 NOVEMBER 22 People talk about the evils of our society—the breakdown of morality, the rising incidence of crime, the growing paganism of our generation, and the dishonesty rampant in human affairs. Sometimes people say, “It’s so bad that you can never do anything about it. These things are so deeply rooted in the wickedness of human nature that you can never eradicate them. It’s an impossibility.” It is my humble judgment that the remedy for these social impossibilities is for individuals to be so stimulated and motivated, to become so identified with God, that they become part of His process of overcoming impossiblilities. “Here I stand; I can do no other,” said Martin Luther. It was he himself, individually, who stood for principles so forcefully that he initiated great changes in the social order. Individuals overcome impossibilities.

About a month before the handover of sovereignty, Joshua Paul, a young CPA staffer, typed up a joke on his computer and sent it to a few friends in the palace. The recipients forwarded it to their friends, who did the same thing. In less than a week, almost everyone in the Green Zone had seen it. QUESTION: Why did the Iraqi chicken cross the road? CPA: The fact that the chicken crossed the road shows that decision-making authority has switched to the chicken in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on, the chicken is responsible for its own decisions. HALLIBURTON: We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost $326,004. SHIITE CLERIC MOQTADA AL-SADR: The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed. U.S. ARMY MILITARY POLICE: We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken-rights violations. PESHMERGA: The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in the future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill. AL-JAZEERA: The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens. CIA: We cannot confirm or deny any involvement in the chicken-road-crossing incident. TRANSLATORS: Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.

SN: how’s your day, Ms. Holmes? Me: Not bad. Yours? SN: good. been doing my homework in listicle form, because, you know, anything to make it more interesting. Me: Do you think college will actually be better? For real? SN: hope so. but then again, I just read about a guy who lost a ball in a frat hazing incident. Me: Seriously? What is wrong with people? SN: can you imagine wanting to be liked so badly that you’d give up one of your testicles? Me: I can neither imagine having testicles nor giving one up. SN: you won’t let me use emojis, but an ‘i heart my testes’ one would be appropriate right about now. Me: You know what I heart? Nutella. And pajama pants. And an awesomesauce book. Not necessarily in that order, but together. SN: awesomesauce? 2012 texted and wants its word back. btw, do you eat the Nutella right out of the jar with a spoon? Me: Used to. Now I share a kitchen with the Others, so I can’t. Wanted to label it, but my dad said that would be rude.

No, Faith ain’t gonna get charged with assault. I’m not even sure the incident occurred cause neither are you. You get three days off on the Alpha to get your head back together. Then you decide if you want to help out or go in a hold. Or, hell, I’ll drop you off at a little town and you can fight zombies for supplies and fish for your supper. If you decide you want to help, God knows we need people who can organize and you should be able to do that. But if so, you’re going to have to climb down. And you sure as shit had better figure out a way to apologize to Lieutenant Smith or at some point you’re going to end up shark bait. Because the Marines, with the exception of Captain Milo ‘I’m scared of zombies’ Wilkes, just absolutely hate your fucking guts. And the one group you do not want pissed off at you in this Squadron is the fucking Marines. And of all the Marines, the one you seriously do not want to get on the bad side of is Faith Marie Smith. They call her Shewolf for a reason…

There were clear differences in how the young men responded to being called a bad name. For some, the insult changed their behavior. For some it didn’t. The deciding factor in how they reacted wasn’t how emotionally secure they were, or whether they were intellectuals or jocks, or whether they were physically imposing or not. What mattered—and I think you can guess where this is headed—was where they were from. Most of the young men from the northern part of the United States treated the incident with amusement. They laughed it off. Their handshakes were unchanged. Their levels of cortisol actually went down, as if they were unconsciously trying to defuse their own anger. Only a few of them had Steve get violent with Larry. But the southerners? Oh, my. They were angry. Their cortisol and testosterone jumped. Their handshakes got firm. Steve was all over Larry. “We even played this game of chicken,” Cohen said. “We sent the students back down the hallways, and around the corner comes another confederate. The hallway is blocked, so there’s only room for one of them to pass. The guy we used was six three, two hundred fifty pounds. He used to play college football. He was now working as a bouncer in a college bar. He was walking down the hall in business mode—the way you walk through a bar when you are trying to break up a fight. The question was: how close do they get to the bouncer before they get out of the way? And believe me, they always get out of the way.” For the northerners, there was almost no effect. They got out of the way five or six feet beforehand, whether they had been insulted or not. The southerners, by contrast, were downright deferential in normal circumstances, stepping aside with more than nine feet to go. But if they had just been insulted? Less than two feet. Call a southerner an asshole, and he’s itching for a fight. What Cohen and Nisbett were seeing in that long hall was the culture of honor in action: the southerners were reacting like Wix Howard did when Little Bob Turner accused him of cheating at poker.

has taken bankruptcy. Credit is a civil right.” “I assume that it does not work but what form does noncompliance take?” “I have not yet investigated, Boss. But I think a deadbeat would be at a disadvantage in trying to bribe a judge. I want to mention some of the obvious symptoms: Violence. Muggings. Sniping. Arson. Bombing. Terrorism of any sort. Riots of course—but I suspect that little incidents of violence, pecking away at people day after day, damage a culture even more than riots that flare up and then die down. I guess that’s all for now. Oh, conscription and slavery and arbitrary compulsion of all sorts and imprisonment without bail and without speedy trial—but those things are obvious; all the histories list them.” “Friday, I think you have missed the most alarming symptom of all.” “I have? Are you going to tell me? Or am I going to have to grope around in the dark for it?” “Mmm. This once I shall tell you. But go back and search for it. Examine it. Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named … but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

I remember a story by a flight instructor I knew well. He told me about the best student he ever had, and a powerful lesson he learned about what it meant to teach her. The student excelled in ground school. She aced the simulations, aced her courses. In the skies, she showed natural skill, improvising even in rapidly changing weather conditions. One day in the air, the instructor saw her doing something naïve. He was having a bad day and he yelled at her. He pushed her hands away from the airplane’s equivalent of a steering wheel. He pointed angrily at an instrument. Dumbfounded, the student tried to correct herself, but in the stress of the moment, she made more errors, said she couldn’t think, and then buried her head in her hands and started to cry. The teacher took control of the aircraft and landed it. For a long time, the student would not get back into the same cockpit. The incident hurt not only the teacher’s professional relationship with the student but the student’s ability to learn. It also crushed the instructor. If he had been able to predict how the student would react to his threatening behavior, he never would have acted that way. Relationships matter when attempting to teach human beings—whether you’re a parent, teacher, boss, or peer. Here we are talking about the highly intellectual venture of flying an aircraft. But its success is fully dependent upon feelings.

Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either hate them or love them, but that’s not how people are. There was an undercurrent of terror that ran through the house, but the actual beatings themselves were not that frequent. I think if they had been, the situation would have ended sooner. Ironically, the good times in between were what allowed it to drag out and escalate as far as it did. He hit my mom once, then the next time was three years later, and it was just a little bit worse. Then it was two years later, and it was just a little bit worse. Then it was a year later, and it was just a little bit worse. It was sporadic enough to where you’d think it wouldn’t happen again, but it was frequent enough that you never forgot it was possible. There was a rhythm to it. I remember one time, after one terrible incident, nobody spoke to him for over a month. No words, no eye contact, no conversations, nothing. We moved through the house as strangers, at different times. Complete silent treatment. Then one morning you’re in the kitchen and there’s a nod. “Hey.” “Hey.” Then a week later it’s “Did you see the thing on the news?” “Yeah.” Then the next week there’s a joke and a laugh. Slowly, slowly, life goes back to how it was. Six months, a year later, you do it all again.

The most servile Negroes are suspect, and every means is used to impress upon them the power of the White Citizens Councils. Even police brutality can be put to good use. An incident in Ruleville, Sunflower County, birthplace of the Council, will illustrate the point. Preston Johns, Negro renter on Senator Eastland's plantation near Blanc, is a "good nigger who knows his place." One day in May 1955, Preston's wife got into a fight with another Negro woman in the Jim Crow section of the Ruleville theater. The manager threw the women out and notified the police. While the police were questioning the women, Preston's daughter came up to see what was happening to her mother. Without warning, a policeman struck her over the head with the butt of his gun. She fell to the pavement bleeding badly. The police left her there. Someone went for her father. When he came up, the police threatened to kill him. Preston left and called Mr. Scruggs, one of Eastland's cronies. After half an hour, Scruggs came and permitted the girl to be lifted from the street and taken to the hospital. When Scruggs left, he yelled to the Negroes across the street: "You'll see who your friend is. If it wasn't for us Citizens Council members, she'd have near about died." One old Negro answered back, "I been tellin' these niggers Mr. Scruggs and Mr. Eastland is de best friends dey got." A few days later, Senator Eastland came to Ruleville to look the situation over. Many Negroes lined the streets and beamed at their "protector.

We lived in a safe, family-friendly area, but parts of London were rough, as you’d expect from any large city. Mark had a knack for attracting muggers. One time, we were in a train station and a little kid--no more than about eight years old--came up to him: “Oi, mate, give me your phone.” We always carried the cool Nokia phones with the Snake game on them, and they were the hot item. It was like inviting trouble carrying one around, but we didn’t care. Mark thought the mini-mugger was crazy: “Are you kidding me? No way.” Then he looked over his shoulder and realized the kid wasn’t alone; he had a whole gang with him. So Mark handed over his phone and the kid ran off. I never let him live down the fact that an eight-year-old had mugged him. I had my own incident as well, but I handled it a little differently. I got off the train at Herne Hill station and noticed that two guys were following me. I could hear their footsteps getting closer and closer. “Give us your backpack,” they threatened me. “Why? All I have is my homework in here,” I tried to reason with them. They had seen me on the train with my minidisc player and they knew I was holding out on them. “Give it,” they threatened. My bag was covered with key chains and buttons, and as I took it off my shoulder, pretending to give it to them, I swung it hard in their faces. All that hardware knocked one of them to the ground and stunned the other. With my bag in my hand, I ran the mile home without ever looking back. Not bad for a skinny kid in a school uniform.

Fatmah Hassan Tabashe Sufian, sixty-one years old, married and a mother of four, was woken up on 6 April 1993 at three o’clock in the morning. Soldiers broke into her house, pushed her up against the wall and asked her where her children were; they are asleep, she replied. They woke up her son Saad, thirty years old, kicking him and beating him with their hands and rifle stocks, until he was spitting blood all over the place. Her other son, Ibrahim, was badly beaten, and the B’Tselem researcher who took Fatmah’s evidence testified that long after the incident he could still see signs of ecchymosis – subcutaneous bleeding – on his back. Both sons were taken out to the yard and put against a wall. The soldiers found two toy guns and began slashing the two men with them until the toys broke. Then they gathered everyone in the complex, twenty-seven people, into one room and threw in a shock grenade. Saad and Ibrahim were ordered to empty the cupboard while they were continuously beaten by the soldiers shouting at them, ‘You are Hamas and we are Golani [the name of the military brigade to which they belonged].’ Nor did they spare Fatmah’s old, blind brother who was a hundred years old. He too was abused by the soldiers, who threw mattresses and blankets at him.25 Thus, every April from 1987 until 1993 this was the routine of the collective punishment. But it was not only these three days that mattered. Collective punishment in March–May 1993 robbed 116,000 Palestinian workers of their source of living, bisected the Occupied Territories into four disconnected areas and barred any access to Jerusalem.26 Seen from that perspective, when the Oslo Accord was implemented as a territorial and security arrangement, it was just official confirmation of a policy already in place since 1987.

One day Billy’s kindergarten teacher phoned me at work. In a grave tone of voice she informed me Billy had been involved in a serious incident at school. She refused to elaborate but insisted I come to the school for a disciplinary meeting. My mind raced as I drove to the school. I wondered what type of behavior could possibly land a five-year-old in such hot water. When I arrived at the school, the teacher ushered me into a private office. Billy sat next to me—he looked scared. We both faced the grim faced teacher. She reminded me of the woman in the famous painting, “American Gothic.” She sat rigidly behind her desk, her eyes unblinking. The atmosphere was reminiscent of a criminal court proceeding. “Maybe Billy had accidentally killed someone.” I thought. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. The teacher’s face was stiff and emotionless. Finally, her lips moved and she intoned, “Billy, tell your father what you did.” Under the disapproving gaze of his teacher, Billy began his confession. “Well, I was eating lunch next to Suzy. We had green Jell-O. It was jiggling around. Suzy bent down to look at her Jell-O real close, and I … pushed her face into it.” I barely choked off a belly laugh and quickly looked away, struggling for control. Somehow I sensed that Billy’s straitlaced teacher would frown upon me laughing uncontrollably about this issue. With Zenlike concentration, I mastered my emotions and turned to face my son. My expression was serious, my tone was stern, my acting was impeccable, “Billy, how do you think that made Suzy feel?” “Bad.” said Billy. “That’s right.” I said. “I don’t want you to ever do such a thing again. Do you understand?” “Yes.” Billy meekly replied. I looked at the teacher. She seemed disappointed I hadn’t tortured my son with hot irons. Reluctantly, the she allowed us to leave. This incident was representative of many child-rearing situations I dealt with over the years.

If a man jumped as high as a louse (lice), he would jump over a football field. In Ancient Egypt, the average life expectancy was 19 years, but for those who survived childhood, the average life expectancy was 30 years for women and 34 years for men. The volume of the moon is equivalent to the volume of the water in the Pacific Ocean. After the 9/11 incident, the Queen of England authorized the guards to break their vow and sing America’s national anthem for Americans living in London. In 1985, lifeguards of New Orleans threw a pool party to celebrate zero drownings, however, a man drowned in that party. Men and women have different dreams. 70 percent of characters in men’s dreams are other men, whereas in women its 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Men also act more aggressively in dreams than women. A polar bear has a black skin. 2.84 percent of deaths are caused by intentional injuries (suicides, violence, war) while 3.15 percent are caused by diarrhea. On average people are more afraid of spiders than they are afraid of death. A bumblebee has hairs on its eyes, helping it collect the pollen. Mickey Mouse’s creator, Walt Disney feared mice. Citarum river in Indonesia is the dirtiest and most polluted river in the world. When George R R Martin saw Breaking Bad’s episode called “Ozymandias”, he called Walter White and said that he’d write up a character more monstrous than him. Maria Sharapova’s grunt is the loudest in the Tennis game and is often criticized for being a distraction. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for “kangaroo” translates literally to “bag rat”. The first product to have a barcode was a chewing gum Wrigley. Chambarakat dam in Iraq is considered the most dangerous dam in the world as it is built upon uneven base of gypsum that can cause more than 500,000 casualties, if broken. Matt Urban was an American Lieutenant Colonel who was nicknamed “The Ghost” by Germans because he always used to come back from wounds that would kill normal people.

You’re having a bad day. You mess up a few lines. You’re distracted. You’ve had this look about you all afternoon, like you’re not quite there. “Christ, Cunningham, get it together,” Hastings says, running his hands down his face. “If you can’t handle being Brutus—” “Fuck you.” You cut him off. “Don’t act like you’re perfect.” “I don’t make rookie mistakes,” Hastings says. “Maybe if you weren’t so preoccupied with trying to screw the new girl, you might—” BAM. You shut him up mid-sentence with a punch to the face, your fist connecting hard, nearly knocking him off his feet. He stumbles, stunned, as you go at him again, grabbing the collar of his uniform shirt and yanking him to you. “Shut your fucking mouth.” People come between the two of you, forcing you apart. Hastings storms out, shouting, “I can’t deal with him!” Drama Club comes to a screeching halt. You stand there for a moment, fists clenched at your side, calming down. You flex your hands, loosening them as you approach the girl. She’s watching you in silence, expression guarded. You sit down near her. There’s an empty seat between you today. It’s the first time you’ve not sat right beside her in weeks. You’re giving her space. It doesn’t take long before Hastings returns, but he isn’t alone. The administrator waltzes in behind him. The man heads for you, expression stern. “Cunningham, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t expel you.” “Because my father gives you a lot of money.” “That’s what you have to say?” “Is that not a good reason?” “You punched a fellow student!” “We were just acting,” you say. “I’m Brutus. He’s Caesar. It’s to be expected.” “Brutus stabs him. He doesn’t throw punches.” “I was improvising.” The girl laughs when you say that. She tries to stop herself, but the sound comes out, and the administrator hears it, his attention shifting to her. “Look, it won’t happen again,” you say, drawing the focus back to you. “Next time, I’ll stab him and be done with it.” “You better watch yourself,” the administrator says, pointing his finger in your face. “One more incident and you’re gone for good. Understand?” “Yes, sir.” “And rest assured, your father will be hearing about this

Lieutenant Smith was asked by Mister Zumwald to get him a drink,” Wilkes said. “She responded with physical violence. I counseled her on conduct unbecoming of an officer and, when she reacted with foul language, on disrespect to a superior officer, sir, and I’ll stand by that position. Sir.” “I agree that her actions were unbecoming, Captain,” Steve said, mildly. “She really should have resolved it with less force. Which I told her as well as a strong lecture on respect to a superior officer. On the other hand, Captain, Mister Zumwald physically accosted her, grabbing her arm and, when she protested, called her a bitch. Were you aware of that, Captain?” “She did say something about it, sir,” Wilkes said. “However… ” “I also understand that you spent some time with Mister Zumwald afterwards,” Steve said. “Rather late. Did you at any time express to Mister Zumwald that accosting any woman, much less an officer of… what was it? ‘The United States Naval services’ was unacceptable behavior, Captain?” “Sir,” Wilkes said. “Mister Zumwald is a major Hollywood executive… ” “Was,” Steve said. “Excuse me, sir?” Wilkes said. “Was a major Hollywood executive,” Steve said. “Right now, Ernest Zumwald, Captain, is a fucking refugee off a fucking lifeboat. Period fucking dot. He’s given a few days grace, like most refugees, to get his headspace and timing back, then he can decide if he wants to help out or go in with the sick, lame and lazy. And in this case he’s a fucking refugee who thinks it’s acceptable to accost some unknown chick and tell him to get him a fucking drink. Grab her by the arm and, when she tells him to let go, become verbally abusive. “What makes the situation worse, Captain, is that the person he accosted was not just any passing young hotty but a Marine officer. He did not know that at the time; the Marine officer was dressed much like other women in the compartment. However, he does not have the right to grab any woman in my care by the fucking arm and order them to get him a fucking drink, Captain! Then, to make matters worse, following the incident, Captain, you spent the entire fucking evening getting drunk with a fucktard who had physically and verbally assaulted a female Marine officer! You dumbshit.” “Sir, I… ” Wilkes said, paling. “And not just any Marine officer, oh, no,” Steve said. “Forget that it was the daughter of the Acting LANTFLEET. Forget that it was the daughter of your fucking rating officer, you retard. I’m professional enough to overlook that. I really am. There’s personal and professional, and I do actually know the line. Except that it was, professionally, a disgraceful action on your part, Captain. But not just any Marine officer, Captain. No, this was a Marine officer that, unlike you, is fucking worshipped by your Marines, Captain. This is a Marine officer that the acting Commandant thinks only uses boats so her boots don’t get wet walking from ship to ship. This is a Marine officer who is the only fucking light in the darkness to the entire Squadron, you dumbfuck! “I’d already gotten the scuttlebutt that you were a palace prince pogue who was a cowardly disgrace to the Marine uniform, Captain. I was willing to let that slide because maybe you could run the fucking clearance from the fucking door. But you just pissed off every fucking Marine we’ve got, you idiot. You incredible dumbfuck, moron! “In case you hadn’t noticed, you are getting cold-shouldered by everyone you work with while you were brown-nosing some fucking useless POS who used to ‘be somebody.’ ‘Your’ Marines are spitting on your shadow and that includes your fucking Gunnery Sergeant! Captain, am I getting through to you? Are you even vaguely recognizing how badly you fucked up? Professionally, politically, personally?

redemptive ending, glossing over the darkness and struggle that precedes it.1 We’ve got a cultural narrative that says bad things happen in order to help you grow, and no matter how bleak it seems, the end result is always worth the struggle. You’ll get there, if only you believe. That happy ending is going to be glorious. Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity. If you don’t “transform,” if you don’t find something beautiful inside this, you’ve failed. And if you don’t do it quickly, following that narrative arc from incident to transformation within our collective attention span, you’re not living the right story. There’s a gag order on telling the truth, in real life and in our fictional accounts. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there are things that can’t be fixed. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there is some pain that never gets redeemed.

You know what, Jiyoung? Let me tell you something I’ve known for a while that you haven’t noticed: he likes you.” Jiyoung was so aghast that she stopped crying. “He hates me,” she said. “I thought you said you’ve seen how he’s been treating me.” “Boys are like that,” the teacher laughed. “They’re meaner to girls they like. I’ll give him a talking-to. Why don’t you take this incident as an opportunity to become friends instead of changing desk-mates on unfriendly terms?” He likes me? He picks on me because he likes me? Jiyoung was confused. She went over the series of incidents that she had suffered because of him, and still couldn’t make sense of what the teacher was saying. If you like someone, you’re friendlier and nicer to them. To friends, to family, to your pet dogs and cats. Even at the age of eight, this was common sense to Jiyoung. The desk-mate’s pranks made school life so difficult for her. What he’d put her through was awful enough, and now the teacher was making her out to be a bad child who misunderstood her friend. Jiyoung shook her head. “No, miss. I really, really don’t want to.” The next day at school, the class was assigned new desk-mates. Jiyoung’s new desk-mate was a boy who always sat at the back by himself because he was the tallest, and they did not argue once.

Still, she did not allow self-pity to overcome her. She relied on her ability, since childhood, to chase away bad memories. She did not ponder on all the evil done to her in the village; nor did she recall the fear she had felt on the viaduct. Her mind did not return to the past, and an inner strength blanked out her fears and sorrows. The only bad memory she could not erase was that of her aunt making her cry in front of the locked door, as well as the shame she had felt returning to say good-bye as she walked down the muddy road in the village. Her black plastic shoes reminded her of those incidents.

Franco, Renzo, and Dario also stand up while Dario says, “None of us are missing out on this.” The incident won’t bring bad blood between Damiano and me, but I can’t promise Vito will live to see another day.

Daily news reports of various crimes actually affirm and support the humanistic insistence that humans are essentially good. It is, paradoxically, the fact that we read of horrific things in the news on a daily basis that bolsters an abiding faith in humanity. Indeed, there is no greater evidence for the veracity of humanism than the daily news. How so? Simple: it is because the news reports on what is rare, what is unusual, what is out of the ordinary. That’s why murder and rape are headlines: because they are notable exceptions to otherwise decent, everyday human behavior. If humanity were naturally, intrinsically evil—if people’s default position were bad, immoral, unethical—then the newspaper would look very different. It would be replete with shocking, unbelievable headlines such as: ...“Couple Takes Morning Walk Every Day Around Their Neighborhood Without Incident!” … But we don’t see such headlines, because they are the mundane, all-too-expected stuff of cooperative, communal, daily human life.

Richard found a job at the Holiday Inn, keeping the place clean, carrying luggage, and doing light maintenance work. The money wasn’t bad and there were lots of women for him to look at. He had become acutely aware of women and sex; he would masturbate frequently as he imagined different scenarios—most involving bondage—with the attractive women he saw around the hotel. His first problems at the Holiday Inn occurred when he was in the hotel elevator with two girls in their teens. He smiled at one of them and told her he thought she was pretty. She said thank you and promptly told her parents Richard had made a pass. Her parents complained to the assistant manager, who told the manager, who promptly summoned Richard to the office. Richard was told he was not to flirt with the guests’ daughters and was warned that if another such incident happened he’d be fired. He promised it wouldn’t. The manager made him apologize to the girls’ parents and the incident was forgotten. After being employed at the Holiday Inn for three months, Richard was given a master key to the hotel’s rooms. He says he got it from his friend, who had worked at the hotel but had been fired for being late and not showing up. By now Richard was 5′10″ with taut, sinewy muscles. He was very well coordinated, the fastest runner in his class. He was still enrolled in Jefferson High, but for the most part he didn’t attend classes. From the very first, Richard had gone back to the hotel at night to look in the windows. The hotel had curtains of stiff fabric, and there was frequently an inch or two where someone could look in. The unsuspecting guests had no idea he was there, spying on them, fantasizing about them. He began testing himself, becoming bolder and entering the rooms with his pass key while the guests were sleeping. That’s when the most valuables were there, he realized.

Though the danger was great, it would not have justified suspending or canceling the election. In remarking on the bitter canvass, Lincoln added: “The strife of the election is but human-nature practically applied to the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case, must ever recur in similar cases. Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.

EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.” CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.” OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.

Apparently, the incident where I’d informed another first grader that I intended to disembowel him the next time he tripped me on my way to class was frowned upon by my parents and my private school.

We need to talk.” “Good talk or bad talk?” “The kind that will make me glad you don’t have access to your power so you don’t spew flames everywhere.” “That was one incident, and if you ask me, your absolutely wonderful former lover deserved it.” Aelin’s new favorite nickname—fire-breathing bitch-queen—had been fairly accurate during that dinner.

Let’s call that your third lesson. Everyone shows more of their internal thoughts on their face than they realize. As a diplomat, you don’t want to show that you think the person you are talking to is an arrogant ass, even when they are. And in regard to the other profession, it can save your life to be able to keep your real emotions hidden. “Right now, I can see your every expression flit across your face. Oh, you aren’t as bad as some—your friend Alina for instance—and not everyone would notice. However, you could get in a spot of trouble or cause an incident if you weren’t careful and completely in control of yourself. Best to avoid that.” Following

First, when we want something really, really badly, it is often because we have unrealistic expectations associated with it. We imagine that it will change our lives in some formidable way, and often, that’s not the case. When we are relying on some goal or life change to “save” us in some unrealistic way, any incident of failure will trigger us to stop trying. For example: If we are absolutely certain that a romantic partner will help us stop being depressed, we are going to be extremely sensitive to rejection, because it makes us feel as though we will never get over depression.

Consider a conversation I had with a white friend. She was telling me about a "white) couple she knew who had just moved to New Orleans and bought a house for a mere twenty-five thousand dollars. "Of course," she immediately added, "they also had to buy a gun, and Joan is afraid to leave the house." I immediately knew they had bought a home in a black neighborhood. This was a moment of white racial bonding between this couple who shared the story of racial danger and my friend, and then between my friend and me, as she repeated the story. Through this tale, the four of us fortified familiar images of the horror of black space and drew boundaries between "us" and "them" without ever having to directly name race or openly express our disdain for black space. Notice that the need for a gun is a key part of this story--it would not have the degree of social capital it holds if the emphasis were on the price of the house alone. Rather, the story’s emotional power rests on why a house would be that cheap--because it is in a black neighborhood where white people literally might not get out alive. Yet while very negative and stereotypical representations of blacks were reinforced in that exchange, not naming race provided plausible deniability. In fact, in preparing to share this incident, I texted my friend and asked her the name of the city her friends had moved to. I also wanted to confirm my assumption that she was talking about a black neighborhood. I share the text exchange here: "Hey, what city did you say your friends had bought a house in for $25,000?" "New Orleans. They said they live in a very bad neighborhood and they each have to have a gun to protect themselves. I wouldn’t pay 5 cents for that neighborhood." "I assume it’s a black neighborhood?" "Yes. You get what you pay for. I’d rather pay $500,00 and live somewhere where I wasn’t afraid." "I wasn’t asking because I want to live there. I’m writing about this in my book, the way that white people talk about race without ever coming out and talking about race." "I wouldn’t want you to live there it’s too far away from me!" Notice that when I simply ask what city the house is in, she repeats the story about the neighborhood being so bad that her friends need guns. When I ask if the neighborhood is black, she is comfortable confirming that it is. But when I tell her that I am interested in how whites talks about race without talking about race, she switches the narrative. Now her concern is about not wanting me to live so far away. This is a classic example of aversive racism: holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs. Readers may be asking themselves, "But if the neighborhood is really dangerous, why is acknowledging this danger a sign of racism?" Research in implicit bias has shown that perceptions of criminal activity are influenced by race. White people will perceive danger simply by the presence of black people; we cannot trust our perceptions when it comes to race and crimes. But regardless of whether the neighborhood is actually more or less dangerous than other neighborhoods, what is salient about this exchange is how it functions racially and what that means for the white people engaged in it. For my friend and me, this conversation did not increase our awareness of the danger of some specific neighborhood. Rather, the exchange reinforced our fundamental beliefs about black people. (p. 44-45)

...clearly Michael Eisner’s most glaring defect, the one quality more than any other that has caused him to leave behind a trail of deeply embittered former colleagues: his dishonesty. Considering the importance Eisner places on honesty in others—dating at least to the childhood incident in which he believes his mother lied about his bedtime—it is extraordinary that Eisner himself has been so reckless with the truth, in ways both large and small, to a degree that suggests he is at times incapable of distinguishing one from the other. Far more than just a personality quirk, Eisner’s tendency to distort, embellish, or forget the truth had direct and costly business consequences for Disney. More than any other single factor, what Steve Jobs and the Weinstein brothers considered Eisner’s dishonesty accounts for the failure of the important Pixar and Miramax relationships. Katzenberg was so angry and bitter—and willing to sue—because he believed he was lied to and felt betrayed.

This is Lieutenant Romley,’ Townsend said, as he introduced the military policeman. ‘How can I be of service, sir,’ Fred said, between breaths. ‘There’s been an incident. Theft of military property. The lieutenant believes the men are from our battalion,’ Townsend replied. ‘I find that hard to believe, sir.’ ‘You’re breathing very hard, sergeant,’ the policeman said. ‘It’s the heat, sir, bad for the lungs,’ Fred replied. ‘Have you seen anything suspicious, sergeant?’ ‘No, sir. I couldn’t have. I’m about to go out with a work party you see. We’re just getting ready to go.’ ‘Have you been near the road?