“
I think part of the reason I'm attracted to Foster is because he's such a mess. I mean, the people I have loved in my life have never been easy to love. I'm not used to normal. I'm used to disaster. I don't know, as messed up as he is, he's also sort of exciting, sort of a challenge. I'm accustomed to working for love.
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Augusten Burroughs (Dry)
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Adrian tipped my face up toward his and kissed me. Like always, the world around me stopped moving. No, the world became Adrian, only Adrian. Kissing him was as mind-blowing as ever, full of that same passion and need I had never believed I’d feel. But today, there was even more to it. I no longer had any doubt about whether this was wrong or right. It was a culmination of a long journey . . . or maybe the beginning of one.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him closer. I didn’t care that we were out in public. I didn’t care that he was Moroi. All that mattered was that he was Adrian, my Adrian. My match. My partner in crime, in the long battle I’d just signed on for to right the wrongs in the Alchemist and Moroi worlds. Maybe Marcus was right that I’d also signed myself up for disaster, but I didn’t care. In that moment, it seemed that as long as Adrian and I were together, there was no challenge too great for us.
I don’t know how long we stood there kissing. Like I said, the world around me was gone. Time had stopped. I was awash in the feel of Adrian’s body against mine, in his scent, and in the taste of his lips. That was all that mattered right now.
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Richelle Mead (The Indigo Spell (Bloodlines, #3))
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All that mattered was that he was Adrian, my Adrian. My match. My partner in crime, in the long battle I’d just signed on for to right the wrongs in the Alchemist and Moroi worlds. Maybe Marcus was right that I’d also signed myself up for disaster, but I didn’t care. In that moment, it seemed that as long as Adrian and I were together, there was no challenge too great for us.
”
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Richelle Mead (The Indigo Spell (Bloodlines, #3))
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We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and love!
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Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)
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Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life,the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
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Joseph Campbell (A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living)
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Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth--even if they decide to help the less fortunate--while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible.
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Michael Eric Dyson (Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster)
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I didn’t care that we were out in public. I didn’t care that he was Moroi. All that mattered was that he was Adrian, my Adrian. My match. My partner in crime, in the long battle I’d just signed on for to right the wrongs in the Alchemist and Moroi worlds. Maybe Marcus was right that I’d also signed myself up for disaster, but I didn’t care. In that moment, it seemed that as long as Adrian and I were together, there was no challenge too great for us
”
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Richelle Mead (The Indigo Spell (Bloodlines, #3))
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Don’t worry if you think you’re the only one facing challenges. If the people around you don’t seem to have problems, that just means you don’t know them well enough to see their troubles, or they’re very good at hiding them. Problems are inescapable for all living beings. As Nichiren said: “No one can avoid problems, not even sages.” Living a joyful life, I’ve found, is not about trying to avoid the unavoidable. Joy comes from summoning a strong life force to overcome problems, from the smallest irritation to the biggest disaster
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Tina Turner (Happiness Becomes You: A Guide to Changing Your Life for Good)
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They had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy." on Challenger disaster
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Ronald Reagan
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So let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness. Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts.
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Seneca (On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It (Penguin Great Ideas))
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From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.
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David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
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The witch who claims to forbear her magick for fear of causing the next Indian tsunami is really saying that she is powerful enough to kill thousands of innocent strangers when all she meant to do was water her mugwort. She can't be challenged to produce evidence of this, because doing could provoke earthquakes and Africanized bee attacks.
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Thomm Quackenbush (Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft)
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Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.
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Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
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Each person entering our world brings either a contribution or destruction. Trying to be “always nice” is to invite certain disaster. Those with poisonous attitudes, strange opinions, and caustic conversations love to look for someone nice who will listen to them. They love to dump their verbal garbage into the mental factory of anyone willing to listen. A major challenge in life is for each person to learn the art of standing guard at the doorway of their mind. Carefully examine the credentials and authority of those seeking to enter within that place where your attitudes are formed.
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Jim Rohn (The Seasons of Life)
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Then I thought, a sex change", she says, "a sexual reassignment surgery [...] It was just the biggest mistake I could make. The biggest challenge I could give myself". She says, "You have to jump into disaster with both feet".
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Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)
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When asked what he was thinking about when preparing for launch abroad his Mercury-Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had infamously replied, "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.
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Adam Higginbotham (Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space)
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The challenge of creation reduces us to the inevitable. Our lives are full of tiny disasters.
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Floriano Martins
“
Serial murders are a bit like natural disasters: in the scheme of things they are quite rare, but when they happen they demand our attention. They interest us for several reasons, but especially because they are so dramatically threatening, and they profoundly challenge our sense of our own everyday safety.
[Todd R. Clear, Foreword]
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Eric W. Hickey (Serial Murderers and their Victims (The Wadsworth Contemporary Issues In Crime And Justice Series))
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He skeptically peruses this grammatically challenged little natural disaster. She looks up and her whole face smiles at him.
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Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
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Man is neither unique nor central nor necessarily here to stay. But he is a product of circumstances special to the point of disbelief. And if man in his current predicament seeks a fair mystique to see him through, then I can only suggest that he consider his genes. For they are marked. They are graven by luck beyond explanation. They are stamped by forces that we shall never know. But even so, in the hieroglyph of the human emergence certain symbols must stand for all to read: Change is the elixir of the human circumstance, and acceptance of challenge the way of our kind. We are bad-weather animals, disaster’s fairest children. For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst.
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Robert Ardrey (African Genesis: A Personal Investigation Into the Animal Origins and nature of Man)
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Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too. You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India’s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger—again just one aspect of poverty—is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging—and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.
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Palagummi Sainath (Everybody loves a good drought)
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So is America over? A long time ago we "lost" China, we've lost Southeast Asia, we've lost South America. Maybe we'll lose the Middle East and North African countries. Is America over? It's a kind of paranoia, but it's the paranoia of the superrich and superpowerful. If you don't have everything, it's a disaster.
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Noam Chomsky (Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (American Empire Project))
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Trials in life help us to grow. They make us better. Challenge yourself to become a better version of yourself as a result of the flood, and to take what you have learned to help others. Focus on tomorrow, not on past mistakes – yours or anyone else’s.
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Dr. Dwan Reed
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The rest of the question-and-answer period was pretty standard stuff, with a few hardballs thrown in just to keep things interesting. Where did the senator stand on the death penalty? Given that most corpses tended to get up and try to eat folks, he didn’t see it as a productive pursuit. What was his opinion on public health care? Failure to keep people healthy enough to stay alive bordered on criminal negligence. Was he prepared to face the ongoing challenges of disaster preparedness? After the mass reanimations following the explosions in San Diego, he couldn’t imagine any presidency surviving without improved disaster planning.
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Mira Grant (Feed (Newsflesh, #1))
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YOU SHOULD NOW be well on your way to using disputation, the prime technique for learned optimism, in your daily life. You first saw the ABC link—that specific beliefs lead to dejection and passivity. Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.
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Martin E.P. Seligman (Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life)
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Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse.
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John D. Barrow (The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe)
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Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster.
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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Disease and distress need to be healed. Yet over a lifetime, the key to well-being is a person's coping skills. With poor coping skills, you become prey to every accident, setback, or disaster. with strong coping skills, you become resilient in the face of misfortune, and resilience has been shown repeatedly to be present in people who survive to great old age with a sense of fulfillment.
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Deepak Chopra (Spiritual Solutions: Answers to Life's Greatest Challenges)
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You would be surprised at how hard it is to be open to new and different good things. Being open to new things that are bad -- disasters, say -- is pretty easy … But new, good things area challenge.
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Kyo Maclear (Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation)
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The United States Department of Defense makes its position clear in a policy statement published in 2014. The document begins: Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe. In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today—from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts.
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Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
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looking on the dark side, in some scenarios, is valuable. In the midst of a disaster, the man who loudly proclaims the coming trouble will surely be more valuable than the optimist who sits dreamily admiring the daisies. It
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Joshua Wolf Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness)
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Dr. Anderson says, “Remember the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Group-think dominated within NASA, and we couldn’t see the forest for all the damn trees—until we lost seven astronauts. A little diversity in decision making is a good thing.
”
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Peter Cawdron (Anomaly)
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Only a miracle would save this dinner. Looking into the flames, something inside taunted of peace. His knees wanted to buckle and force him to kneel and pray, but his military discipline kept him upright, and prepared him to face disaster head-on.
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Vanessa Riley (Unmasked Heart (Challenge of the Soul #1))
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There’s something nice about out-and-out children’s books with no sex and a happy ending—Ransome, Streatfeild, that kind of thing. It isn’t very challenging, and you know what you’re getting, but what you’re getting is a nice wholesome story about children messing about in boats, or learning ballet or whatever, and they’ll have minor triumphs and minor disasters and everything will work out fine in the end. It’s cheering, especially after reading Chekhov yesterday. I’m so glad I’m not Russian. Still,
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Jo Walton (Among Others)
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The management and culture aspects of the Challenger and Columbia disasters were so eerily similar that the investigation board decreed that NASA was not functioning as “a learning organization.” In the absence of cultural cross-pressures, NASA had failed to learn, just like the subjects in Patil’s work who were placed in strongly congruent cultures.
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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As soon as two people have resolved to give up their togetherness, the resulting pain with its heaviness or particularity is already so completely part of the life of each individual that the other has to sternly deny himself to become sentimental and feel pity. The beginning of the agreed-upon separation is marked precisely by this pain, and its first challenge will be that this pain already belongs separately to each of the two individuals. This pain is an essential condition of what the now solitary and most lonely individual will have to create in the future out of his reclaimed life. If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror. When it is a matter of a separation, pain should already belong in its entirety to that other life from which you wish to separate. Otherwise the two individuals will continually become soft toward each other, causing helpless and unproductive suffering. In the process of a firmly agreed-upon separation, however, the pain itself constitutes an important investment in the renewal and fresh start that is to be achieved on both sides. People in your situation might have to communicate as friends. But then these two separated lives should remain without any knowledge of the other for a period and exist as far apart and as detached from the other as possible. This is necessary for each life to base itself firmly on its new requirements and circumstances. Any subsequent contact (which may then be truly new and perhaps very happy) has to remain a matter of unpredictable design and direction. If you find that you scare yourself.
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Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters on Life)
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A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
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A reader once asked me, "Do you only write disaster books?' It was a good question, because my last three offerings could qualify as weather-related disaster books. But it's not the storms or even the ensuing calamity that really interests me so much as the people . . . ordinary people thrust into incredibly difficult situations where they have to rise to the challenge, persevere, and fight against long odds.
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Michael J. Tougias (Overboard!: A True Blue-water Odyssey of Disaster and Survival)
“
In airplane crashes and chemical industry accidents, in the infrequent but serious nuclear plant accidents, in the NASA Challenger and Columbia disasters, and in the British Petroleum gulf spill, a common finding is that lower-ranking employees had information that would have prevented or lessened the consequences of the accident, but either it was not passed up to higher levels, or it was ignored, or it was overridden. When I talk to senior managers, they always assure me that they are open, that they want to hear from their subordinates, and that they take the information seriously. However, when I talk to the subordinates in those same organizations, they tell me either they do not feel safe bringing bad news to their bosses or they’ve tried but never got any response or even acknowledgment, so they concluded that their input wasn’t welcome and gave up. Shockingly often, they settled for risky alternatives rather than upset their bosses with potentially bad news. When I look at what goes on in hospitals, in operating rooms, and in the health care system generally, I find the same problems of communication exist and that patients frequently pay the price. Nurses and technicians do not feel safe bringing negative information to doctors or correcting a doctor who is about to make a mistake. Doctors will argue that if the others were “professionals” they would speak up, but in many a hospital the nurses will tell you that doctors feel free to yell at nurses in a punishing way, which creates a climate where nurses will certainly not speak up. Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do.
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Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
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Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures.
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Margaret Lazarus Dean (Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight)
“
One way to get a life and keep it is to put energy into being an S&M (success and money) queen. I first heard this term in Karen Salmansohn’s fabulous book The 30-Day Plan to Whip Your Career Into Submission. Here’s how to do it: be a star at work. I don’t care if you flip burgers at McDonald’s or run a Fortune 500 company. Do everything with totality and excellence. Show up on time, all the time. Do what you say you will do. Contribute ideas. Take care of the people around you. Solve problems. Be an agent for change. Invest in being the best in your industry or the best in the world!
If you’ve been thinking about changing professions, that’s even more reason to be a star at your current job. Operating with excellence now will get you back up to speed mentally and energetically so you can hit the ground running in your new position. It will also create good karma. When and if you finally do leave, your current employers will be happy to support you with a great reference and often leave an open door for additional work in the future.
If you’re an entrepreneur, look at ways to enhance your business. Is there a new product or service you’ve wanted to offer? How can you create raving fans by making your customer service sparkle? How can you reach more people with your product or service? Can you impact thousands or even millions more?
Let’s not forget the M in S&M. Getting a life and keeping it includes having strong financial health as well. This area is crucial because many women delay taking charge of their financial lives as they believe (or have been culturally conditioned to believe) that a man will come along and take care of it for them. This is a setup for disaster. You are an intelligent and capable woman. If you want to fully unleash your irresistibility, invest in your financial health now and don’t stop once you get involved in a relationship.
If money management is a challenge for you, I highly recommend my favorite financial coach: David Bach. He is the bestselling author of many books, including The Automatic Millionaire, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Smart Couples Finish Rich. His advice is clear-cut and straightforward, and, most important, it works.
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Marie Forleo (Make Every Man Want You: How to Be So Irresistible You'll Barely Keep from Dating Yourself!)
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The organic and inorganic structures supporting human life are changing. Breathtaking technological developments, coupled with rapid advances in medicine, supported a dramatic explosion in the human population worldwide. Increases in human population placed pressure upon the habitat. Lack of foresight and commercial ogres fused to a consumptive consumer mentality fostered a radical reduction in habitat for other creatures and spawned a predictable environmental crisis. Commercial enterprises nimbly renamed the “environmental crisis” the “energy crisis,” effectively downplaying the dramatic cost inflicted upon the ecosystem in the name of preserving cheap energy sources for Americans. We live on the brink of impending disaster. Nonetheless, we must carry on. It is humankind’s greatest challenge to place our self-gratification in check in order to ensure that our species and other creatures survive the violent onslaught raging against the ecosystem. Despite the rapid expansion of new technology, which alters how human beings live and communicate with each other, the fundamental challenge of humanity remains consistent. Every generation must address how to live a purposeful life, one filled with joy and contentment.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently.
At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein.
Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms:
1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...]
2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...]
3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.
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James Montier (The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy (Little Books. Big Profits))
“
The truth as I see it is that people can both struggle and remain upbeat simultaneously, through even the most soul-testing of challenges. This doesn’t mean they’re in denial. Rather, it testifies to the remarkable ability of humankind to adapt, to seek meaning and kinship when confronted with adversity. As Rebecca Solnit points out in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, people not only buck up in times of crisis, but do so with a “startling, sharp joy.” It’s possible to undergo hardships that shake our will to endure, while also finding happiness in shared moments, such as sitting around a bonfire with fellow workampers under a vast starry sky.
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Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
“
Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.
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Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
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Why does almost dying have to be the worst?” “Pretty sure the answer’s in the name,” Biana said gently. “So let’s rename it!” Keefe suggested, making his way over to Sophie and draping his arm across her shoulders. “From now on, any time there’s a disaster, we’ll say, ‘Wow, we almost Fostered it!’ ” Sophie rolled her eyes. “I’m serious,” Keefe insisted. “We’ll make it your big claim to fame!” “So, when you challenged King Dimitar to a sparring match and he sliced a huge gash under your ribs…,” Sophie challenged. “I totally Fostered it!” Keefe finished without missing a beat. “And when you projectile vomit all over the Councillors today, you’ll be Fostering it hardcore—” “And some of us are super looking forward to that, by the way!” Ro cut in. “I’m just wishing I’d thought to bring snacks.
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Shannon Messenger (Legacy (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #8))
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Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium.
With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible.
A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines.
Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.
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Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
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We visit the Launch Control building, where on one wall of the seventies-style lobby are hung the mission patches of every human spaceflight that has ever been launched from here, 149 to date. Beneath each mission patch is a small plaque showing the launch and landing dates. Two of them—Challenger’s STS-51L and Columbia’s STS-107—are missing landing dates, because both of these missions ended in disasters that destroyed the orbiters and killed their crews. The blank spaces on the wall where those landing dates should have been are discolored from the touch of people’s hands. This would be unremarkable if this place were a tourist attraction, or regularly open to the public. But with the rare exception of Family Days, this building is open only to people who work here. In other words, it’s launch controllers, managers, and engineers who have been touching these empty spaces with their hands, on their way to and from doing their jobs. After
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Margaret Lazarus Dean (Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight)
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It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA—at least for a while.
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Scott Kelly (Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery)
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In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States. There have been occasional demonstrations against economic disparity, like the Occupy Wall Street protest camp of 2011, but they were generally peaceful and ineffective. (The riots and demonstrations against racial discrimination that later took place in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, led to changes in part because they attained a level of violence that threatened the civil order.) A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
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It is love that believes the resurrection.”16 “Simon, son of John,” says Jesus, “do you love me?” There is a whole world in that question, a world of personal invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster, of the refashioning of epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the new ontology, the question of what reality consists of. The reality that is the resurrection cannot simply be “known” from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death. But that’s the point. To repeat: the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing that involves us in new ways, an epistemology that draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-scientific research but also that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is “love,” in the full Johannine sense of agapē.
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N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
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We were on a family holiday to Cyprus to visit my aunt and uncle. My uncle Andrew was then the brigadier to all the British forces on the island, and as such a senior military figure I am sure he must have dreaded us coming to town.
After a few days holed up in the garrison my uncle innocently suggested that maybe we would enjoy a trip to the mountains. He already knew the answer that my father and I would give. We were in.
The Troodos Mountains are a small range of snowy peaks in the center of the island, and the soldiers posted to Cyprus use them to ski and train in. There are a couple of ski runs, but the majority of the peaks in winter are wild and unspoiled.
In other words, they are ripe for an adventure.
Dad and I borrowed two sets of army skis and boots from the garrison up in the hills and spent a great afternoon together skiing down the couple of designated runs. But designated runs can also be quite boring. We both looked at each other and suggested a quick off-piste detour.
It was all game…age eleven.
It wasn’t very far into this between-the-trees deep-powder detour that the weather, dramatically, and very suddenly, took a turn for the worse.
A mountain mist rolled in, reducing visibility to almost zero. We stopped to try and get, or guess, our directions back to the piste, but our guess was wrong, and very soon we both realized we were lost. (Or temporarily geographically challenged, as I have learned to call it.)
Dad and I made the mistake that so many do in that situation, and plowed on blind, in the vain hope that the miraculous would occur. We had no map, no compass, no food, no water, no mobile telephone (they hadn’t even been invented yet), and in truth, no likelihood of finding our way.
We were perfect candidates for a disaster.
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Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
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A classic study, which set the stage for much research to come, was done nine years after Brown and Kulik’s initial publication. It was undertaken by psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch, who were perceptive enough to realize that a personal and national disaster could be important for realizing how memory works.12 The day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, they gave 106 students in a psychology class at Emory University a questionnaire asking about their personal circumstances when they heard the news. A year and a half later, in the fall of 1988, they tracked down forty-four of these students and gave them the same questionnaire. A half year later, in spring 1989, they interviewed forty of these forty-four about the event. The findings were startling but very telling. To begin with, 75 percent of those who took the second questionnaire were certain they had never taken the first one. That was obviously wrong. In terms of what was being asked, there were questions about where they were when they heard the news, what time of day it was, what they were doing at the time, whom they learned it from, and so on—seven questions altogether. Twenty-five percent of the participants got every single answer wrong on the second questionnaire, even though their memories were vivid and they were highly confident in their answers. Another 50 percent got only two of the seven questions correct. Only three of the forty-four got all the answers right the second time, and even in those cases there were mistakes in some of the details. When the participants’ confidence in their answers was ranked in relation to their accuracy there was “no relation between confidence and accuracy at all” in forty-two of the forty-four instances.
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Bart D. Ehrman (Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior)
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In Mississippi, where I lived from 1967 to 1974, people who challenged the system anticipated menace, battery, even murder, every day. In this context, I sometimes felt ashamed that my contributions at the time were not more radical. I taught in two local black colleges, I wrote about the Movement, and I created tiny history booklets which were used to teach the teachers of children enrolled in Head Start. And, of course, I was interracially married, which was illegal. It was perhaps in Mississippi during those years that I understood how the daily news of disaster can become, for the spirit, a numbing assault, and that one's own activism, however modest, fighting against this tide of death, provides at least the possibility of generating a different kind of "news." A "news" that empowers rather that defeats.
There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of God on his lips. Sojourner Truth baring her breasts at a women's rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed, who, fearing an unknown freedom, looks longingly backward to their captivity, thereby endangering the freedom of all. To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough *to be that* - which is the foundation of activism.
It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame.
This is the tragedy of our world.
For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile.
In this regard, I have a story to tell.
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Alice Walker (Anything We Love Can Be Saved)
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Madison White
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Another dangerous neoliberal word circulating everywhere that is worth zooming in on is the word ‘resilience’. On the surface, I think many people won’t object to the idea that it is good and beneficial for us to be resilient to withstand the difficulties and challenges of life. As a person who lived through the atrocities of wars and sanctions in Iraq, I’ve learnt that life is not about being happy or sad, not about laughing or crying, leaving or staying. Life is about endurance. Since most feelings, moods, and states of being are fleeting, endurance, for me, is the common denominator that helps me go through the darkest and most beautiful moments of life knowing that they are fleeing. In that sense, I believe it is good for us to master the art of resilience and endurance. Yet, how should we think about the meaning of ‘resilience’ when used by ruling classes that push for wars and occupations, and that contribute to producing millions of deaths and refugees to profit from plundering the planet? What does it mean when these same warmongers fund humanitarian organizations asking them to go to war-torn countries to teach people the value of ‘resilience’? What happens to the meaning of ‘resilience’ when they create frighteningly precarious economic structures, uncertain employment, and lay off people without accountability? All this while also asking us to be ‘resilient’…
As such, we must not let the word ‘resilience’ circulate or get planted in the heads of our youth uncritically. Instead, we should raise questions about what it really means. Does it mean the same thing for a poor young man or woman from Ghana, Ecuador, Afghanistan vs a privileged member from the upper management of a U.S. corporation? Resilience towards what? What is the root of the challenges for which we are expected to be resilient? Does our resilience solve the cause or the root of the problem or does it maintain the status quo while we wait for the next disaster? Are individuals always to blame if their resilience doesn’t yield any results, or should we equally examine the social contract and the entire structure in which individuals live that might be designed in such a way that one’s resilience may not prevail no matter how much perseverance and sacrifice one demonstrates? There is no doubt that resilience, according to its neoliberal corporate meaning, is used in a way that places the sole responsibility of failure on the shoulders of individuals rather than equally holding accountable the structure in which these individuals exist, and the precarious circumstances that require work and commitment way beyond individual capabilities and resources. I find it more effective not to simply aspire to be resilient, but to distinguish between situations in which individual resilience can do, and those for which the depth, awareness, and work of an entire community or society is needed for any real and sustainable change to occur. But none of this can happen if we don’t first agree upon what each of us mean when we say ‘resilience,’ and if we have different definitions of what it means, then we should ask: how shall we merge and reconcile our definitions of the word so that we complement not undermine what we do individually and collectively as people. Resilience should not become a synonym for surrender. It is great to be resilient when facing a flood or an earthquake, but that is not the same when having to endure wars and economic crises caused by the ruling class and warmongers.
[From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]
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Louis Yako
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Earlier disaster scholars tended to imagine that in natural disaster, all parties share common interests and goals, but contemporary sociologists see disasters as moments when subterranean conflicts emerge into the open. Tierney said, “Elites fear disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy.” Disasters provide both, lavishly.
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Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster)
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during some geopolitical turmoil or some big natural disaster, India lost the links between the ancient and the modern. It sounded like vainglory now to mention the accomplishments of India in the past.
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Ravi Ranjan Goswami (THE NEW CHALLENGE)
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The space shuttle Challenger disaster was a classic example of what happens when engineers are overruled by incompetent managers.
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Steven Magee
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But epidemic diseases are an ineluctable part of the human condition, and modernity, with its vast population, teeming cities, and rapid means of transport between them, guarantees that the infectious diseases that afflict one country have the potential to affect all. The public health disaster of West Africa was founded on the failure to make decisions regarding health from the perspective of the sustainable welfare of the human species as a whole rather than the unsustainable interests of individual nations. To survive the challenge of epidemic disease, humanity must adopt an internationalist perspective that acknowledges our inescapable interconnectedness.
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Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
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First and foremost, if you’re going to plant your flag, solve a real problem. My story was resonating because I was solving a real problem many people had—really, a global problem. I had real-world experience with this, so there was a level of authenticity to everything that I was saying. I wasn’t just making stuff up—I had done the work, I had the experience to share. I was humble about it. I shared the wins and I shared the losses. I talked a lot about the things we tried that didn’t work, some real disasters, and what we learned from them. And when we won, we were thrilled that we won. I shared those wins as well. I provided practical and tactical advice for people to use. I always gave my audience something to try—something they could actually put into practice today, tomorrow, next week, next month. I made sure that this advice wasn’t overwhelming and that it clearly communicated how readers were supposed to do it. This approach is part of the reason why my book Lean UX was so successful. I forged an authentic connection with the audience that I was starting to build. People were actually paying attention because this was a real-world person talking about how to solve a challenge that they themselves had. I wasn’t just someone vying for their attention to sell them something. I had gone through the same challenges they had, and I was openly sharing what I learned in a humble way. That creates the kind of authenticity that you can’t fake. And it captures people when you tell your story.
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Jeff Gothelf (Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You)
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Wise people treasure knowledge, but the babbling of a fool invites disaster. PROVERBS 10:14
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Tony Dungy (The One Year Uncommon Life Daily Challenge)
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Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves.
Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.'
As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.'
The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.
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Ira Berlin (Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves)
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The investigation after the Challenger disaster had especially harsh words for NASA’s organizational practices, but the subsequent, efficiency-focused program ushered in during the 1990s, called “Faster, Better, Cheaper” (FBC), took NASA further down the path of carelessness, reducing the “inefficient” ties that had defined the Apollo approach.
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Stanley McChrystal (Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World)
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The Challenger disaster was an accident, the result of a mistake. What is important to remember from this case is not that individuals in organizations make mistakes, but that mistakes themselves are socially organized and systematically produced. Contradicting
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Diane Vaughan (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA)
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Leadership is shown through difficult and challenging times. If people face hardship or difficult , challenging times and there is no one to lead them. People tend to lead themselves to disaster, because everyone thinks they are right by what they doing and they are only thinking about themselves.
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D.J. Kyos
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Thinking probabilistically can be hard. As Howard Kunreuther, emeritus professor and codirector of Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, puts it: “I now believe that even if people understand probability theory, it is challenging to learn how to apply these concepts when making decisions, particularly when dealing with extreme events, such as natural disasters, few people think probabilistically when deciding whether to protect themselves against future losses.
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Dan Levy (Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser)
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Not all resurrections of Kundalini exhibit events that can be considered divine experience. In addition, certain unfinished risings can be quite complicated because the actions of Kundalini Shakti to enhance her standing may influence subtle processes of the body, creating a variety of experiences, including subtle physical activity that may be painful and emotional. Blocked risings or risings through cul-de-sac routes can give rise to some distressing and unusual symptoms, and thwart further spiritual development until the block or misdirection is corrected. The strain on the subtle body can ultra-sensitive and urgent distress the experiencer, especially if they don't know how to properly support their rising. Individuals may also use or misuse any special abilities that their risings provide for their own worldly purposes, and this may eventuate in some uncomfortable side effects. If the gifts offered by an arisen Kundalini Shakti are harnessed for non-spiritual purposes, the resulting dissipation or misdirection of vital energy and likely ego inflation may postpone further spiritual progress until the diffusion is contained and the inauspicious focus is corrected. Other factors that complicate an upturn are sometimes present. An uncomfortable upsurge can result when Kundalini Shakti emerges spontaneously through non-spiritual catalysts (such as life shock or incorrect intervention) in an unprepared person whose subtle body is weak, toxic, or unbalanced and who may not have a frame of reference for interpreting and responding to the experience as potentially spiritual. The emotional reaction to the rising itself can disrupt the delicate body even further. Kundalini Shakti will work to resolve limitations in the system of the individual, and the experiences produced by her effort may be felt as uncomfortable, and thus the experiencer considers them problematic. Even a "spiritual disaster" or "kundalini syndrome" may be branded. It may be mistakenly pathologized by others who do not recognize spiritual experiences because the phenomenon must satisfy appropriate requirements to be considered a diagnosable disorder or disease. However, the Kundalini process is not a pathology, and it is considered a blessing that spiritual aspirants should seek for. A blocked rising may result in distressing discomforts, and some discomfort may also be associated with the purification and restoration, which follows an improvement in a rising. Yet essentially, these challenges can be changed. A healthy, balanced lifestyle promotes a successful cycle of Kundalini. With the seeker's spiritual understanding and committed right commitment to co-operate with the intent of Kundalini Shakti, grace is conferred by the divine right to promote the spiritual development of the soul. Practicing appropriate spiritual methods allows Kundalini Shakti to fix (divert, unblock, elevate) a stuck rising so that rising problems can be improved over time. Unimpeded risings can eventually impart a gentle process, culminating in full spiritual attainment through a direct route.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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There’s another challenge to building a climate consensus: Global cooperation is notoriously difficult. It’s hard to get every country in the world to agree on anything—especially when you’re asking them to incur some new cost, like the expense of curbing carbon emissions. No single country wants to pay to mitigate its emissions unless everyone else will too. That’s why the Paris Agreement, in which more than 190 countries signed up to eventually limit their emissions, was such an achievement. Not because the current commitments will make a huge dent in emissions—if everyone meets them, they’ll reduce annual emissions by 3 billion to 6 billion tons in 2030, less than 12 percent of total emissions today—but because it was a starting point that proved global cooperation is possible. The U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement—a step that President-elect Joe Biden promised to reverse—only illustrates that it’s as hard to maintain global compacts as it is to create them in the first place.
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Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
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The scope of exploration, and distances, involved in the vehicles’ respective journeys were scarcely comparable: Armstrong and Aldrin’s trip to the lunar surface required them to break entirely free of Earth’s gravity and embark on an eight-day round trip through more than 900,000 miles of outer space; the Space Shuttle would be required merely to travel into low Earth orbit—between 190 and 330 miles above sea level—where it would circle the planet for up to a week before returning home. In some ways, it was as if the sixteenth-century explorer Ferdinand Magellan had proposed to follow up the first circumnavigation of the world by rowing across Lisbon harbor and back.
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Adam Higginbotham (Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space)
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While the newly arrived astronaut candidates were still—briefly—naive enough to believe the agency’s most optimistic forecasts, the veterans in the office had long ago learned that NASA often told the public and Congress one thing, while it quietly made plans to do another. One old hand liked to joke that the letters of the agency’s acronym stood for Never A Straight Answer.
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Adam Higginbotham (Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space)
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Donny Disbro is now the driving force behind Standpoint Construction's National Commercial sales. His 20+ years in property management, including a prominent role at PCM, uniquely position him to tackle the challenges faced by HOAs. Donny's passion lies in aiding communities affected by natural disasters, a commitment reflected in his impressive sales record.
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Donny Disbro
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When I ask her how she is, I am always amazed and inspired by her response. After a deep breath, she will let out a long exhale and say, “Well...pretty good! Yes...we’re doing good over here!” It sounds a bit like a pep talk for herself, but I noticed as the years passed that she never complains. Not one word. Ever. She cries sometimes from exhaustion or frustration, but she never wishes her challenges away or looks at her life as the movement from one disaster to another as any rational person might.
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Mary Davis (Every Day Spirit: A Daybook of Wisdom, Joy and Peace)
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The world we live in today is a complex tapestry of interwoven challenges and opportunities. As we collectively face the reality of an ever-evolving global landscape, the significance of preparedness, adaptability, and resilience has never been more apparent. It is within this context that “Complacency” was born—a story that seeks to shed light on the fragile balance between security and vulnerability, and the consequences of inaction in the face of looming threats.
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Edward Minyard (Complacency: One Man's Story)
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I would have sworn that the leap was going to end in disaster. I had applied the rubrics of fear and tediously calculated the nature of the risk, thereby adamantly determining it to be impossible. Yet, high in the lofty branches of the towering maple tree the squirrel leapt, and in doing so made it look effortless. And I thought, “How many times have I applied the rubrics of fear, overestimated the leap, and have therefore chosen to exist in a forest of one tree?” Therefore, my commitment in the coming year is to live in a forest of many trees.
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Craig D. Lounsbrough
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At the foot of the ladder, he [Gene Cernan Apollo 17] delivered the short speech he had memorized for the occasion. "Is like to just say what I believe history will record: That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return: with peace and hope for all mankind.
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Adam Higginbotham (Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space)
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see rainbows in rainstorms and opportunities in disasters. When life hands me lemons, I whip up a lemon meringue pie. Challenges? Just plot twists in my epic saga, and setbacks are setups for my grand comeback. Where others see roadblocks, I see shortcuts to awesomeness. My glass isn’t just half full; it’s practically overflowing with optimism. So, while the world tosses curveballs, I’m here with my metaphorical bat, ready to hit them out of the park and do a victory dance.
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Life is Positive
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Turner, in Man-made Disasters, notes the tendency for a problem that was ill structured in an organization to become a well-structured problem after a disaster, as people look back and reinterpret information ignored or minimized at the time, that afterward takes on new significance as signals of danger.
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Diane Vaughan (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA)
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When asked what he was thinking about when preparing for launch aboard his Mercury-Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had infamously replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.
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Adam Higginbotham (Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space)
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The problems facing America have become much more complex over time, and the political class lacks the capacity to deal with them. The problems are global, interconnected across many areas of politics and policy, and often highly technical. The climate change challenge, for example, involves agriculture (both as a source of greenhouse gas emissions and as a highly vulnerable sector), electricity generation and distribution, federal and private land use, transportation, urban design, nuclear power, disaster risk management, climate modeling, international financing, public health, and global negotiations. Could one imagine a problem less easily handled by a layman Congress operating on a two-year election cycle? The
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Jeffrey D. Sachs (The Price Of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity)
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When politics degrades itself to political adventurism the nation would be on the calamitous road to inevitable disaster and ruination.
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A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (Turning Points: A Journey Through Challenges)
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Since the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, tens of thousands of their comrades in the urban centers had been working tirelessly to build power stations, steel mills, and manufacturing plants for heavy machinery. As this historic effort unfolded, it would be essential for the country’s grain-producing regions to do their part—by meeting the increased demand for bread in the cities with leaps in agricultural production. But to pave the way for this ambitious effort, it was deemed necessary to exile a million kulaks—those profiteers and enemies of the common good, who also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers. The remaining peasants, who viewed newly introduced approaches to agriculture with resentment and suspicion, proved antagonistic to even the smallest efforts at innovation. Tractors, which were meant to usher in the new era by the fleet, ended up being in short supply. These challenges were compounded by uncooperative weather resulting in a collapse of agricultural output. But given the imperative of feeding the cities, the precipitous decline in the harvest was met with increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint. In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine. (While many of the young loyalists (like Nina) who joined the udarniks in the countryside would have their faith in the Party tested by what they witnessed, most of Russia, and for that matter the world, would be spared the spectacle of this man-made disaster. For just as peasants from the countryside were forbidden to enter the cities, journalists from the cities were forbidden to enter the countryside; delivery of personal mail was suspended; and the windows of passenger trains were blackened. In fact, so successful was the campaign to contain awareness of the crisis, when word leaked out that millions were starving in Ukraine, Walter Duranty, the lead correspondent for The New York Times in Russia (and one of the ringleaders in the Shalyapin Bar), would report that these rumors of famine were grossly exaggerated and had probably originated with anti-Soviet propagandists. Thus, the world would shrug. And even as the crime unfolded, Duranty would win the Pulitzer Prize.)
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Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
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National tragedy is good to memory researchers. In 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Neisser saw an opportunity to remedy this gap in the memory literature, and to find out whether his own mistaken Pearl Harbor recollection was an anomaly. He surveyed his students about their memories of the disaster the day after it happened, and then again three years later. The results spelled the end of conventional flashbulb memory theory. Less than 7 percent of the second reports matched the initial ones, 50 percent were wrong in two-thirds of their assertions, and 25 percent were wrong in every major detail. Subsequent work by other researchers only confirmed the conclusion.
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Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
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Already by 300, Christianity was firmly rooted among ordinary Egyptians, too deeply to be affected very badly by most disasters that might befall, whether by the loss of the Greek language, of all the great cities, or of their elites. When we also realize that after Antony’s time Egyptian Christianity would still have another 350 years of development and tradition before the coming of Islam—at least twelve generations—we can understand just how knotty a task Muslims would have in challenging the older faith.6
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Philip Jenkins (The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died)
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Lady Tosten started angling for an invitation to luncheon in earnest, but that looming disaster was averted when Winnie came pelting around the corner, her smock hiked past her knees, her feet bare, her eyes dancing with mirth, and a carrot clutched in her fist. “Oh!” She skidded to a stop. “Hullo, Rosecroft! I am hiding.” “Not very effectively,” the earl remarked, “at least not from me.” His eyes challenged her to be on her best behavior, and Winnie obediently waited for his cue. “Come here, Winnie, and make your curtsey to our guests.” He extended his hand to her, expecting her to take off in the other direction, but instead she came docilely forward. “Good morning, my ladies.” She curtsied to each woman then turned her gaze to the earl. “Well done, princess. You’ve been practicing. I’m impressed.” “Bronwyn Farnum!” Emmie bellowed as she, too, came pelting around the corner. Her bun was coming loose, she wore no bonnet, and—to the earl’s delight—she was barefoot in the grass, as well. “You cheated, you!” A stunned silence met that pronouncement while Emmie’s cheeks flamed bright red. “I beg your pardon, my lord, my ladies. Winnie, perhaps you’d accompany me back to the stables?” She held out a hand, and at a nod from the earl, Winnie took the proffered hand. “Miss Farnum.” The earl turned a particularly gracious smile on her. “You are to be complimented on Winnie’s manners. We’ll excuse you, though, if Herodotus is pining for his carrots.” “My thanks.” Emmie nodded stiffly and turned, leaving silence in her wake. “Well,
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Grace Burrowes (The Soldier (Duke's Obsession, #2; Windham, #2))
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Did You Know? The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident have all been attributed to human errors in which sleep deprivation played a role.
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Brett Blumenthal (52 Small Changes: One Year to a Happier, Healthier You)
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That summer, Harrison Miller and Bezos butted heads in front of the board of directors over the size of the bet on toys. Bezos wanted Miller to plow $120 million into stocking every possible toy, from Barbie dolls to rare German-made wooden trains to cheap plastic beach pails, so that kids and parents would never be disappointed when they searched for an item on Amazon. But a prescient Miller, sensing disaster ahead, pushed to lower his own buy. “No! No! A hundred and twenty million!” Bezos yelled. “I want it all. If I have to, I will drive it to the landfill myself!” “Jeff, you drive a Honda Accord,” Joy Covey pointed out. “That’s going to be a lot of trips.” Bezos prevailed. And the company would make a sizable contribution to Toys for Tots after the holidays that year. “That first holiday season was the best of times and the worst of times,” Miller says. “The store was great for customers and we made our revenue goals, which were big, but other than that everything that could go wrong did. In the aftermath we were sitting on fifty million dollars of toy inventory. I had guys going down the back stairs with ‘Vinnie’ in New York, selling Digimons off to Mexico at twenty cents on the dollar. You just had to get rid of them, fast.” The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics
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Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
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The subject is salvation, one of the greatest themes that could ever challenge the mind of man. Confusion about salvation means disaster, for the message of the Gospel is a matter of eternal life or eternal death.
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Charles C. Ryrie (So Great Salvation: What It Means to Believe in Jesus Christ)
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A guy will begin backing off from a girl and even trying to escape as soon as she seems available. Because then he feels, okay, I don't have to do anything to get her. She is no longer a challenge. He doesn't say this to her face. He doesn't let her figure out that he is in the wrong, no way! He makes her believe she is the one who has problems, not him. Some of them give the girls hints, hoping she will end the relationship herself, but we stupid girls never pick up on them. We go on working on the relationship until it kills us, even if we're pretty sure from the start that it's a total disaster. That's why in the end we make fools of ourselves. We're the one who dnot hold on to our pride from the start to get out with our honor intact.
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Rajaa Alsanea
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There are only a handful of countries that have experienced what Indonesia has endured: financial crisis, political instability, separatism, ethnic conflicts, terrorism and natural disasters. Given the array of challenges that confronted us, what Indonesia has become today is nothing short of remarkable. Indonesia today is a country with a different Islam, democracy and modernity can go hand in hand.
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Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
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Neil Young
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We need a 21st-century international public health movement. Unless this challenge finds its way to the top of the international public health agenda, this century could be a disaster movie without a happy ending.
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Linda Marsa (Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Hurt Our Health -- and how we can save ourselves)
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one cannot legislate, dictate, or veto the laws of physics, and politics has no place in technical decisions. The
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Allan J. McDonald (Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster)
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Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.
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Pope Francis
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Furthermore, things began to go wrong in a way that suggested that positive thinking might not guarantee success after all, that it might in fact dim our ability to fend off real threats. In her remarkable book, Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst, sociologist Karen Cerulo recounts a number of ways that the habit of positive thinking, or what she calls optimistic bias, undermined preparedness and invited disaster. She quotes Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsch and Michael Isikoff, for example, in their conclusion that “a whole summer of missed clues, taken together, seemed to presage the terrible September of 2001.
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Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)
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He’s hot. Better than the sexiest book boyfriend. I blame those elusive fictional men on my failure to find a guy who’s good enough. Turns out, real men aren’t alpha with a beta core. If they’re alpha, they’re usually arrogant and self-absorbed. And the beta guys don’t provide me with enough of a challenge, so I’m destined for dating disasters.
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Nicola Marsh (Did Not Finish)
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The world of paranoid distrust did not arise out of a vacuum. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Challenger disaster, the AIDS crisis—again and again science and government have revealed not only their failure to deliver on basic health and safety, but their steadfast refusal to take ownership. Until they do, conspiracies about government cover-ups will continue, and distrust of the scientific establishment will be widespread and often warranted.
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Colin Dickey (The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained)
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The slopes around Rey were full of life. Sticklike insects regarded her inscrutably as they picked their way through the grass, while birds rode the winds above her head. Many of the rocky outcroppings she passed were rookeries for small, chubby avians. They were curious about the intruder, peering at her with big, liquid eyes and challenging her with fusillades of squawks. Their flying struck Rey as a triumph of determination over ability—they looked like airborne rocks, hurtling themselves off the cliffs and flapping their stubby wings desperately until somehow leveling out centimeters from disaster.
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Jason Fry (Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Star Wars Novelizations, #8))
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The next week, Finian’s Rainbow began a twelve-week filming schedule. Jerry Jackson recalled that when Coppola was unhappy with Pan’s choreography he would ask him (Jackson) to change it rather than approach Pan directly—so poor was the working relationship between director and choreographer. Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise suggest that the tension between them may have had less to do with Pan’s work and more to do with the challenge he presented to Coppola’s authority: “Coppola described Pan as ‘a disaster.’ That probably means that Pan disagreed with him or insisted that the camera serve the choreography, not vice versa, or asked for more rehearsal time for the numbers” (Goodwin 1989, 79). After the filming of “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day” in which Pan makes his final on-screen appearance shining shoes in a barbershop vignette, his twenty-week guarantee was up and he was released from the film. Since Jackson refused to stay on after Pan left, a young choreographer named Claude Thompson was hired to stage the remaining numbers. Even before Pan had been released, his work was subverted by Coppola who continually interrupted the choreography with cutaway shots of vignettes that were neither entertaining nor dramatically effective. The director had no choreographic training or experience and staged musical numbers based on concepts that often had no relationship to the sound of the music or the sense of the lyrics. For example, he filmed “Something Sort of Grandish” on a hill with Petula Clark hanging white bed sheets on a clothesline and conceptualized “If This Isn’t Love” as a series of children’s games. The director’s method of staging was little more than playing the music for a dance routine and telling the actors to “move with
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John Charles Franceschina (Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire)
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The next week, Finian’s Rainbow began a twelve-week filming schedule. Jerry Jackson recalled that when Coppola was unhappy with Pan’s choreography he would ask him (Jackson) to change it rather than approach Pan directly—so poor was the working relationship between director and choreographer. Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise suggest that the tension between them may have had less to do with Pan’s work and more to do with the challenge he presented to Coppola’s authority: “Coppola described Pan as ‘a disaster.’ That probably means that Pan disagreed with him or insisted that the camera serve the choreography, not vice versa, or asked for more rehearsal time for the numbers” (Goodwin 1989, 79). After the filming of “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day” in which Pan makes his final on-screen appearance shining shoes in a barbershop vignette, his twenty-week guarantee was up and he was released from the film. Since Jackson refused to stay on after Pan left, a young choreographer named Claude Thompson was hired to stage the remaining numbers. Even before Pan had been released, his work was subverted by Coppola who continually interrupted the choreography with cutaway shots of vignettes that were neither entertaining nor dramatically effective. The director had no choreographic training or experience and staged musical numbers based on concepts that often had no relationship to the sound of the music or the sense of the lyrics. For example, he filmed “Something Sort of Grandish” on a hill with Petula Clark hanging white bed sheets on a clothesline and conceptualized “If This Isn’t
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John Charles Franceschina (Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire)