Emergency Personnel Quotes

He pointed to the burning building as sirens heralded the approach of emergency personnel. “This is your job—this is your life. Blood and death and pain and vengeance and justice. And sometimes it sucks, but it’s worth it.” Caleb sighed, but not in resignation. “I know this is the job, and it is worth it. But I refuse to believe it’s my life. Not only and not forever.” Samuel pinched the bridge of his nose and waved dismissively with his other hand. “F***ing romantic.

As the emergency personnel and squad cars descended on Pier Three that bitter afternoon, the same questions bounced from radio to radio. “What is Superman doing here?” “Why had the Man of Steel taken time to recover the body of a fifty-year-old Costa Rican Newspaper Man who never had been or done anything important?” Because not a single one of us is background noise. Because when one of us disappears… Someone should notice. Every person is a star. A Life. A Heart. A Voice. And when a voice is silenced by darkness another must rise to see that justice is done. Valentin Reyes, survived by his daughter, Maribella, was buried last Saturday at a small service, attended by three.

There is no need to create the capitalist preconditions of communism any more. Capitalism is everywhere, yet much less visible than one hundred or fifty years ago when class distinctions ostensibly showed up. The manual worker identified the factory owner at one glance, knew or thought he knew his enemy, and felt he'd be better off the day he and his mates got rid of the boss. Today classes still exist, but manifested through infinite degrees in consumption, and no-one expects a better world from public ownership of industry. The "enemy" is an impalpable social relationship, abstract yet real, all-pervading yet no monster beyond our reach: because the proletarians are the ones that produce and reproduce the world, they can disrupt and revolutionise it. The aim of a future revolution will be immediate communisation, not fully completed before a generation or more, but to be started from the beginning. Capital has invaded life, and determines how we eat, sleep, love, visit, or bury friends, to such an extent that our objective can only be the social fabric, invisible, all- encompassing. Although capital is quite good at hiring personnel to defend it, social inertia is a greater conservative force than media or police.

Although some scientists questioned the validity of these studies, others went along willingly. People from a wide range of disciplines were recruited, including psychics, physicists, and computer scientists, to investigate a variety of unorthodox projects: experimenting with mind-altering drugs such as LSD, asking psychics to locate the position of Soviet submarines patrolling the deep oceans, etc. In one sad incident, a U.S. Army scientist was secretly given LSD. According to some reports, he became so violently disoriented that he committed suicide by jumping out a window. Most of these experiments were justified on the grounds that the Soviets were already ahead of us in terms of mind control. The U.S. Senate was briefed in another secret report that the Soviets were experimenting with beaming microwave radiation directly into the brains of test subjects. Rather than denouncing the act, the United States saw “great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior pattern of military or diplomatic personnel.” The U.S. Army even claimed that it might be able to beam entire words and speeches into the minds of the enemy: “One decoy and deception concept … is to remotely create noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves.… By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.… Thus, it may be possible to ‘talk’ to selected adversaries in a fashion that would be most disturbing to them,” the report said. Unfortunately, none of these experiments was peer-reviewed, so millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on projects like this one, which most likely violated the laws of physics, since the human brain cannot receive microwave radiation and, more important, does not have the ability to decode microwave messages. Dr. Steve Rose, a biologist at the Open University, has called this far-fetched scheme a “neuro-scientific impossibility.” But for all the millions of dollars spent on these “black projects,” apparently not a single piece of reliable science emerged. The use of mind-altering drugs did, in fact, create disorientation and even panic among the subjects who were tested, but the Pentagon failed to accomplish the key goal: control of the conscious mind of another person. Also, according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, brainwashing by the communists had little long-term effect. Most of the American troops who denounced the United States during the Korean War reverted back to their normal personalities soon after being released. In addition, studies done on people who have been brainwashed by certain cults also show that they revert back to their normal personality after leaving the cult. So it seems that, in the long run, one’s basic personality is not affected by brainwashing.

As she explained to her students, patients often awoke from very bad illnesses or cardiac arrests, talking about how they had been floating over their bodies. “Mm-hmmm,” Norma would reply, sometimes thinking, Yeah, yeah, I know, you were on the ceiling. Such stories were recounted so frequently that they hardly jolted medical personnel. Norma at the time had mostly chalked it up to some kind of drug reaction or brain malfunction, something like that. “No, really,” said a woman who’d recently come out of a coma. “I can prove it.” The woman had been in a car accident and been pronounced dead on arrival when she was brought into the emergency room. Medical students and interns had begun working on her and managed to get her heartbeat going, but then she had coded again. They’d kept on trying, jump-starting her heart again, this time stabilizing it. She’d remained in a coma for months, unresponsive. Then one day she awoke, talking about the brilliant light and how she remembered floating over her body. Norma thought she could have been dreaming about all kinds of things in those months when she was unconscious. But the woman told them she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and had a habit of memorizing numbers. While she was floating above her body, she had read the serial number on top of the respirator machine. And she remembered it. Norma looked at the machine. It was big and clunky, and this one stood about seven feet high. There was no way to see on top of the machine without a stepladder. “Okay, what’s the number?” Another nurse took out a piece of paper to jot it down. The woman rattled off twelve digits. A few days later, the nurses called maintenance to take the ventilator machine out of the room. The woman had recovered so well, she no longer needed it. When the worker arrived, the nurses asked if he wouldn’t mind climbing to the top to see if there was a serial number up there. He gave them a puzzled look and grabbed his ladder. When he made it up there, he told them that indeed there was a serial number. The nurses looked at each other. Could he read it to them? Norma watched him brush off a layer of dust to get a better look. He read the number. It was twelve digits long: the exact number that the woman had recited. The professor would later come to find out that her patient’s story was not unique. One of Norma’s colleagues at the University of Virginia Medical Center at the time, Dr. Raymond Moody, had published a book in 1975 called Life After Life, for which he had conducted the first large-scale study of people who had been declared clinically dead and been revived, interviewing 150 people from across the country. Some had been gone for as long as twenty minutes with no brain waves or pulse. In her lectures, Norma sometimes shared pieces of his research with her own students. Since Moody had begun looking into the near-death experiences, researchers from around the world had collected data on thousands and thousands of people who had gone through them—children, the blind, and people of all belief systems and cultures—publishing the findings in medical and research journals and books. Still, no one has been able to definitively account for the common experience all of Moody’s interviewees described. The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death? Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientific evidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others,

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

Of course, the Kremlin policy is utterly mad. Even with the help of useful fools like Gen. Butler, Moscow’s strategists are bound to fail (in the long run) – especially in Europe; for the natural instincts of sensible people are bound to awaken. However grim the situation may look, however horrific the military disasters to come, the circus clowns will be forced from the stage. Fear of death has a way of focusing the mind, and the threat of enslavement rallies many whose timidity would otherwise be assumed. It does not matter that these people are “late to the party.” As war grows closer, more observers will see the situation for what it is. Shortly before her death last year, a Russian historian wrote to me as follows: “Moscow is performing substantial war preparations. Training both military and civil defense [personnel] including the Moscow Metro, every day; medicine is in full readiness for [the coming] emergency….” J.R.Nyquist

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

A leader’s checklist for planning should include the following: • Analyze the mission. —Understand higher headquarters’ mission, Commander’s Intent, and endstate (the goal). —Identify and state your own Commander’s Intent and endstate for the specific mission. • Identify personnel, assets, resources, and time available. • Decentralize the planning process. —Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible courses of action. • Determine a specific course of action. —Lean toward selecting the simplest course of action. —Focus efforts on the best course of action. • Empower key leaders to develop the plan for the selected course of action. • Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation. • Mitigate risks that can be controlled as much as possible. • Delegate portions of the plan and brief to key junior leaders. —Stand back and be the tactical genius. • Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation. • Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets. —Emphasize Commander’s Intent. —Ask questions and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure they understand. • Conduct post-operational debrief after execution. —Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning.