Heavy Machinery Quotes

I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.

Now that I'd experienced being a woman to a man I was in love with, I'd become self-conscious about being a woman to the world in general. Of course, being female is always indelicate and extreme, like operating heavy machinery. Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh. Sometimes all you've accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident.

Now, kids…wine is alcohol. That’s a drink for grown-ups. Gee, Mr. Percy Jackson, you say, can’t we have some wine? No, no, kids. Wine is dangerous. I don’t want any of you to drink alcohol until you’re at least thirty-five years old. Even then, you should get a doctor’s note and your parents’ permission, drink responsibly (like one swig a month), and never operate heavy machinery while under the influence! Okay…I think that covers my legal bases. On with the story.

Being a child is horrible. It is slightly better than being a tree or a piece of heavy machinery but not half as good as being a domestic cat.

My grandfather's short employ at the Ford Motor Company marked the only time any Stephanides has ever worked in the automotive industry. Instead of cars, we could become manufacturers of hamburger platters and Greek salads, industrialists of spanakopita and grilled cheese sandwiches, technocrats of rice pudding and banana cream pie. Our assembly line was the grill; our heavy machinery, the soda fountain.

So much rubbish; ... from heavy plant machinery, cars, vans, buses to plastic bottles, magazines, papers, tins, boxes, bags, clothes... ... it is how they have been collected here that is odd... everything neat, clean, ordered and possibly even categorised...

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

The locals tell me that alcoholism and crime increases in fracking areas. Also traffic accidents, because of the heavy machinery using roads not meant to carry the loads and noise.

To distort the letters of the alphabet in “the style of” Chinese calligraphy (sometimes referred to as chop suey lettering), because the subject happens to deal with the Orient is to create the typographic equivalent of a corny illustration. To mimic a woodcut style of type to “go with” a woodcut; to use bold type to “harmonize with” heavy machinery, etc., is cliché-thinking. The designer is unaware of the exciting possibilities inherent in the contrast of picture and type matter. Thus, instead of combining a woodcut with a “woodcut style” of type (Neuland), a happier choice would be a more classical design (Caslon, Bodoni, or Helvetica) to achieve the element of surprise and to accentuate by contrast the form and character of both text and picture.

Occasionally, a tree is harvested with care and removed using horses. And so that old trees can fulfill their destinies, 5 to 10 percent of the area is completely protected. Lumber from forests with such species-appropriate tree management can be used with no qualms of conscience. Unfortunately, 95 percent of the current forest practice in Central Europe looks quite different, with the use of heavy machinery and plantation monocultures.

Now, kids…wine is alcohol. That’s a drink for grown-ups. Gee, Mr. Percy Jackson, you say, can’t we have some wine? No, no, kids. Wine is dangerous. I don’t want any of you to drink alcohol until you’re at least thirty-five years old. Even then, you should get a doctor’s note and your parents’ permission, drink responsibly (like one swig a month), and never operate heavy machinery while under the influence! Okay…I think that covers my legal bases.

So this smart, overpaid, sassy dude goes into his first major meeting with our then-CEO, Mark. He spends a fair amount of time shitting on the efforts of the corporation to date, and making a lot of noises about revamping the entire landscape and not with a spade and shovel, either, no, with some very heavy machinery. In the process, he evinces almost no particular knowledge of our company, and also manages to poop on the parades of everyone sitting around the table, including Mark’s.

Actually, he told me later that I had turned him gay . . . by taking codeine again. And I said, “You know, I never read that warning on the label.” I thought it said heavy machinery, not homosexuality—turns out I could have been driving those tractors all along! Turning

Changing the land is shaping the future. In a sense, a bulldozer is a time machine.

In The Ozarks, where there isn't rock, there is clay. That makes those who use backhoes and dozers to shape the land sculptors.

I'm a sculptor—on an excavator. I'm a Sculptavator. Or am I an Excavulptor?

Consequently, in 1958 the Chinese government was informed that annual grain production was 50 per cent more than it actually was. Believing the reports, the government sold millions of tons of rice to foreign countries in exchange for weapons and heavy machinery, assuming that enough was left to feed the Chinese population. The result was the worst famine in history and the death of tens of millions of Chinese.3

I’m not normally afraid of things, the way humans are. I’ve been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I’ve been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.

Consequently, in 1958 the Chinese government was informed that annual grain production was 50 per cent more than it actually was. Believing the reports, the government sold millions of tons of rice to foreign countries in exchange for weapons and heavy machinery, assuming that enough was left to feed the Chinese population. The result was the worst famine in history and the death of tens of millions of Chinese.3 Meanwhile, enthusiastic reports of China’s farming miracle reached audiences throughout the world. Julius Nyerere, the idealistic president of Tanzania, was deeply impressed by the Chinese success. In order to modernise Tanzanian agriculture, Nyerere resolved to establish collective farms on the Chinese model. When peasants objected to the plan, Nyerere sent the army and police to destroy traditional villages and forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of peasants onto the new collective farms. Government propaganda depicted the farms as miniature paradises, but many of them existed only in government documents. The protocols and reports written in the capital Dar es Salaam said that on such-and-such a date the inhabitants of such-and-such village were relocated to such-and-such farm. In reality, when the villagers reached their destination, they found absolutely nothing there. No houses, no fields, no tools. Officials nevertheless reported great successes to themselves and to President Nyerere. In fact, within less than ten years Tanzania was transformed from Africa’s biggest food exporter into a net food importer that could not feed itself without external assistance. In 1979, 90 per cent of Tanzanian farmers lived on collective farms, but they generated only 5 per cent of the country’s agricultural output.4

Many critics complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troublingly high levels of black male incarceration, and so forth. So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

The Foundry Man All day, every day; a head that pounds to the rhythm of beating hammers. Feet, numbed from the vibrations of heavy machinery, and skin that glows crimson from the blistering heat of the furnace. Sweat glistens on his furrowed brow, sweat that runs in rivulets to eyes already sore from black, putrid dust. This is the lot of the foundry man. Not for him fresh air, green fields, or the sun on his back. He has a heart of gold, strength of steel. He is a man of iron.

Two nights later, she was out with some work friends at a blue-plate hipster joint near the L train when she spotted Doug. He had a heavy beard and wore overalls. She liked his eyes, the way they crinkled when he smiled. When he came up to the bar for another pitcher, she struck up a conversation. He told her he was a writer who avoided writing by hosting elaborate dinner parties. His apartment was full of obscure food prep machinery, vintage pasta rollers and a three-hundred-pound cappuccino machine he’d rebuilt screw by screw.

Energy is the basis of creating electricity that we can utilize, so how can we harness the power of an earthquake? Obviously, today, if that much energy were being drawn from the Earth through the Great Pyramid, tourists would not be parading through it every day. In order for the system to work, the pyramid would need to be mechanically coupled with the Earth and vibrating in sympathy with it. To do this, the system would need to be "primed"—we would need to initiate oscillation of the pyramid before we could tap into the Earth's oscillations. After the initial priming pulse, though, the pyramid would be coupled with the Earth and could draw off its energy. In effect, the Great Pyramid would feed into the Earth a little energy and receive an enormous amount out of it in return. How do we cause a mass of stone that weighs 5,273,834 tons to oscillate? It would seem an impossible task. Yet there was a man in recent history who claimed he could do just that! Nikola Tesla, a physicist and inventor with more than six hundred patents to his credit—one of them being the AC generator—created a device he called an "earthquake machine." By applying vibration at the resonant frequency of a building, he claimed he could shake the building apart. In fact, it is reported that he had to turn his machine off before the building he was testing it in came down around him. [...] The New York World-Telegram reported Tesla's comments from a news briefing at the hotel New Yorker on July 11, 1935: 'I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound. I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher. Suddenly, all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That's all they ever knew about it.

Sobakevich inclined his head slightly, preparing to hear what the little business was about. Chichikov began somehow very remotely, touched generally on the entire Russian state, and spoke in great praise of its vastness, saying that even the most ancient Roman monarchy was not so big, and foreigners are rightly astonished… Sobakevich went on listening, his head bent. And that according to the existing regulations of this state, unequaled in glory, the souls listed in the census, once their life’s path has ended, are nevertheless counted equally with the living until the new census is taken, so as not to burden the institutions with a quantity of petty and useless documents and increase the complexity of the already quite complex state machinery… Sobakevich went on listening, his head bent—and that, nevertheless, for all the justice of this measure, it was often somewhat burdensome for many owners, obliging them to pay taxes as if for the living object, and that he, feeling a personal respect for him, would even be ready to take this truly heavy responsibility partly upon himself. […] “And so…?” said Chichikov, waiting not without some anxiety for an answer. “You want dead souls?” Sobakevich asked quite simply, without the least surprise, as if they were talking about grain.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, how much simpler our lives would be if we could date each other. That delousing kit cost eleven dollars! “Do you ever think it would be easier if we could go out with girls?” I said aloud. Svetlana didn’t answer right away. “I find most of the lesbians I know a bit intimidating,” she said, finally. “And I don’t really share their aesthetic sense—or they seem not to value aesthetics that much. I just don’t think I’d fit in. Especially since I’m always lusting after boys.” That was something I thought about, too: the physical response I felt to Ivan, the dull electric jolt, some heavy, slow machinery starting to turn in my chest and between my legs. I had never felt those things with relation to a girl. On the other hand, I usually hadn’t felt them in Ivan’s presence, either; it was more when he wasn’t there. And how much was that physical feeling worth? Was it really enough to counterbalance all the disadvantages? You couldn’t just talk to Ivan like he was a normal person; he didn’t hear, or he didn’t understand, or he went off somewhere and you couldn’t find him. Also, all his friends thought I was crazy. Instead of dealing with those people, how much more fun and relaxing it would be to pet Svetlana’s shining golden hair, to tell her how pretty she was and to watch her get more pretty, as she always did when someone complimented her. Her body wanted to be complimented, and I knew just what to tell her, so why couldn’t I? “But girls are more beautiful, and so much easier to sort of negotiate with. And the lust for boys never seems to work out well for me. So it just feels like girls are at least something to think about.” Again, Svetlana didn’t answer right away. “I would feel squeamish with anything beyond kissing and playing with each other’s breasts,” she said after a moment. I realized that I, too, had only been thinking about kissing and playing with each other’s breasts. What else did lesbians even do? Other than oral sex, which was apparently horrible. The way people talked about it on sit-coms: “Does he like . . . deep-sea diving?” You had to be altruistic to do it—a generous lover. That said, oral sex with a boy also seemed likely to be disgusting. Guys themselves seemed to think so. Wasn’t that why they went around yelling “cocksucker” at people who cut them off in traffic? “Do you not feel squeamish when you think about sex with a guy?” I asked. “I do, but it feels exciting. The idea of being penetrated and dominated.

Young men need to be kept away from guns, bombs, women, cars, hard alcohol and heavy machinery.

Bills Tool Rental has been providing heavy equipment and tool rentals to Colorado Springs locals for over 3 generations No matter the project, Bills has the right tool for the job. Our expert staff is here to help, consult and advise on best uses of equipment and make sure you leave with everything needed to get the job done right the first time. Customers can find everything from basic hand and power tools to heavy machinery like Bobcats, skidsteers, backhoes, dump trailers and more.

Find new and used machines, machine tools and heavy equipment etc, listed for sale at Machine Tool Commerce. Buy or sell your new/used machinery by listing it on our website, for as low as $5.

pyramid searches,” an idea pioneered by MIT’s Eric von Hippel and others. To conduct a pyramid search, begin by identifying people who are well-informed about the topic you’re interested in and asking them who in their field has even more expertise than they do—in other words, who is at the top of the subject-area “pyramid.” Often those at the peak are the kinds of highly curious, knowledgeable people who can refer you to experts in analogous fields. Then work your way to the top of the next knowledge pyramid and so on, ultimately assembling a panel of insightful people from diverse fields. Poetz and colleagues used the pyramid method to find analogous expertise for a forklift maker that needed a better way to mount and unmount forklifts from trucks. They brainstormed starting points, identifying a logistics-firm owner who was a heavy user of truck-mounted forklifts. That led them to a maker of machinery-mounting systems for farm tractors and eventually to someone in the entertainment-events industry with extensive experience quickly mounting stage equipment at concert venues. It turned out that the concert expert’s insights were directly applicable to the forklift problem and provided an innovative solution.

Transforming a car-clogged street into inviting shared space doesn’t always require heavy machinery, complicated reconstruction, or millions of dollars. Planners can reorder a street without destroying a single building, double-decking a street, or building a streetcar, light rail system, or highway interchange. It can be accomplished quickly by using the basic materials that every city has access to—in New York City’s case more than six thousand miles of streets—and the basic stock that all city transportation agencies already have in their supply depots or available through existing contracts. Yes, I mean paint. Hundreds

Put those national institutions under the magnifying glass, I challenged the class. Take a closer look, not just because those institutions have denied illegal activities of which we now have clear evidence, but also because the bodies unearthed from supposedly different conflicts have told such similar stories. For example, Rwanda has been described as having experienced “spontaneous tribal violence” in 1994, while the former Yugoslavia was said to have experienced “war” between supposedly discrete “ethnic and religious” groups from 1991 to 1995. How could such different conflicts produce dead who tell a single story—a story in which internally displaced people gather or are directed to distinct locations before being murdered there? How could “spontaneous violence” or “war” leave physical evidence that reveals tell-tale signs of methodical preparation for mass murder of noncombatants? I’m thinking about countrywide roadblocks to check civilians’ identity cards, supplies of wire and cloth sufficient to blindfold and tie up thousands of people, bodies buried in holes created by heavy earth-moving machinery during times when fuel alone is hard to come by.

Take another example. There was an assumption in the industrial age that the manual workers need to travel physically to the respective processes used in heavy machinery, and vice versa was not possible. But Henry Ford doubted this assumption and the result was the invention of the assembly line in the automobile industry.

be gone. Single use. Do not use Doctor Béchamp’s Cleanse All Disinfectant and Floor Cleaner with alcohol or healing potions. Do not operate heavy machinery after use. Or heavy-bladed weaponry. Do not use on summoned creatures, imps, devils, demons, extra-planar entities, celestials, fiends, familiars, or Darby O’Gillis. In rare cases, side effects may occur, including but not limited to: headaches, body aches, imaginary aches, unreal aches, obsessive truth telling, explosive diarrhea, loss of the ability to see the color puce, hair loss, hair growth, incorporeality, aura discharge, and mild stomach upset. In some rare cases damnation and eternal suffering may occur. Please discuss with your doctor, sage, witch, witchdoctor, haruspex, or personal hag before use. Use at your own risk.

Essentially, GE operates its own social network for heavy industrial machinery. It’s sort of like all these power grids and oil refineries and MRI machines have their own Instagram accounts, but instead of pictures of beaches or food, they’re sharing fuel consumption, hydraulic pressure, usage hours, decay rates. “First there was the consumer internet, and then the enterprise internet,” as Barzdukas said, “and now we’re moving into the third generation: the industrial internet. It’s not just about having our phones connected or our enterprise applications connected and operating on subscriptions models. Now it’s the big machines.” So far GE has built more than 600,000 of these digital twins. And just as social networks changed our world, this third-generation industrial internet is going to transform manufacturing.

The very machinery upon which many white Americans had the chance to build their lives and assets was forbidden to African-Americans who were still just a generation or two out of enslavement and the apartheid of Jim Crow, burdens so heavy and borne for so long that if they were to rise, they would have to work and save that much harder than their fellow Americans.

Avoid heavy equipment whenever possible; big machinery often fakes efficiency. Rain gardens are commonly dug out by backhoes and fine grading is done by skid loaders. Inappropriate or oversized equipment does more damage than good, and it takes years for a site to recover from the compaction and unnecessary disturbance. In the time spent waiting for machinery to be delivered to a site, a team of five could have prepared a planting area with three rakes, two shovels, and no compaction.

Everything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched—some of it even built in inches—so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch. And every desperate day’s work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.

factories are efficient. Starting a factory and filling it with factory workers is a good way to make a profit. By “factory,” I don’t necessarily mean a place with heavy machinery, greasy floors, and a din. I mean any organization that cranks out a product or a service, does it with measurable output, and tries to reduce costs as it goes. I mean any job where your boss tells you what to do and how to do it.

Has anyone seen his Man Friday? That thing is huge. You should need a license to operate that kind of heavy machinery.

Willys Workshop has a fleet of fully qualified mechanics and can service all sizes of equipment! Heavy Machinery, Diesel 4×4 performance, General car logbook servicing & fully maintained fleet service plans, we do it all. We can also attend at short notice for emergency breakdowns of all equipment. We offer a variety of service options and can even complete the work at your location to make it easy for you!

Abnormality departed with a leisurely step. First there was the dry beach, ten days of vacuum. Then the period of the beach and the waves. Then there was Something, that heavy hand of urgent hunches. Then the four- or five-day period when Something demonstrated its frightening and profitable talent for extending. Then the novel-writing days, strangest of all, perhaps, when words from nowhere somehow reached my fingers, ignoring the dry beach altogether. And the pictures, flashing like bright telegrams. The three months of unusual phenomena were as weird in their way as the voices of the Operators. But the anchor remained solidly hooked and, except for a few days when Something seemed to be showing off what it could do in the way of telepathy and precognition if it really tried, I wandered calmly from one stage to another, undisturbed by what was happening, undisturbed by what might lie around the corner. And then abruptly, overnight, the strange equipment was put away in storage, the regular machinery was hauled onto the dry beach and connected. Reason, as I had known reason, returned.

The boys are caught between a private conversation among themselves, a world only they can understand, and their awareness of the artist, the adult observer looking and listening. They remind me of us, of me and my fellow patients, the garments of the adult world not quite fitting us, the jumbled machinery of the day-to-day not quite belonging to us, asked to give an account of ourselves and unsure quite what to say.

I do so love books. I can’t think of many truer pleasures than settling into a fat armchair, letting my mouth fall open, and reading a novel. And I mean really reading one – not just skim-reading it before a live TV interview, or pretending to read Middlemarch while smiling sagely to look more attractive in a departure lounge – genuinely reading. For me, books aren’t just a feast for the eyes. I love the feel of books: the flaps of reformed pulp nestling compliantly in the crook of my hand, my fingers tracing their supple spines; I love the sound of books – I don’t mean audiobooks, I don’t like audiobooks, I’ve never liked audiobooks: If I want to hear Sam West reading Inspector Morse out loud I’ll go to one of his garden parties; no, I’ll only allow audiobooks if you’re operating heavy machinery or are just plain blind (and don’t forget they have been given braille) – I mean the sound of a book: The moth-like thrum of flicked pages, the gedoink of a thudding tome as it lands on a bedside table. But most of all, I love the stench of books; the thick odour that leaps from their pages. If I’m feeling a little low and I’m in a library, I’ve been known to open a book (just a little), slot my nose into its tempting crevice, and inhale a deep whiff of book until my eyes roll back in their sockets and I have to lie down in a section where no-one goes (such as African literature). For me, nothing beats the delight of quietly slipping my nose into the crack of a Brontë or A Few Good Men and letting the aroma tantalise my olfactory nerve endings. Oh, the smell! Oh! The! Smell! The trusty, musty, dusty, fusty, crusty, and (if it’s a Jilly Cooper) busty and lusty smell of literature!

Platonic, tectonic, animatronic, puritanic, If you can't think of love without thinking heavy machinery, it's neither faith nor facts you lack, what you lack is dignity and decency.

And while not owning assets has been standard practice for heavy machinery and non-mission-critical functions (e.g., copiers) for decades, recently there’s been an accelerating trend towards outsourcing even mission-critical assets.

Some pious books of the “old school” of spirituality (by which I mean warmed-over Jansenism, not ancient monasticism) seem to teach that the way to make a roaring success of your religious life is to become a real glutton for everything your nature abhors and to eschew anything joyous or agreeable like the plague. Superiors, of course, according to such authors, have a sacred duty to make life as unpleasant for their subjects as they possibly can. If they know that Sister Gandulpha is frightened half to death of heavy machinery, then she is the one to put in charge of the laundry. If postulant Marybelle loves music with all her heart and holds a Master’s degree in piano, then she must be kept half a mile from the organ. Novice Libera-nos, who likes nothing better than gardening and has the frame of the athlete she was in the world, should paint illuminations; while Sister Memento-mori, whose delicate fingers make magic with watercolor, should never be allowed to paint.

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.)

WARS,” observed the writer Sebastian Junger during a year that he spent with a small unit of American soldiers in Kunar Province, “are fought with very heavy machinery that works best on top of the biggest hill in the area and used against men who are lower down. That, in a nutshell, is military tactics.

A few years ago, I led an expedition to return to Mount Everest, the mountain I had climbed aged 23, a mountain where I had risked everything and survived - just. I had always held a secret dream to return and attempt to fly over the mountain in a small one-man paramotor - like a paraglider, only with a backpack engine strapped to your body. At the time, the highest altitude that one had been flown was around 17,000 feet (5,180 metres). But being an enthusiast (and an optimist!), I reckoned we shouldn’t just aim to break the record by a few feet, I thought we should go as high as it was possible to go, and in my mind that meant flying over the height of Mount Everest. This in turn meant we needed to build a machine capable of flying to over 29,000 feet (8,840 metres). Most of the people we spoke to about this thought a) we were crazy, and b) it was technically impossible. What those naysayers hadn’t factored in was the power of yes, and specifically the ability to build a team capable of such a mission. This meant harnessing the brilliance of my good friend Gilo Cardozo, a paramotor engineer, a born enthusiast, and a man who loves to break the rules - and to say yes. Gilo was - and is - an absolute genius aviation engineer who spends all his time in his factory, designing and testing crazy bits of machinery. When people told us that our oxygen would freeze up in minus 70°, or that at extreme altitudes we would need such a heavy engine to power the machine that it would be impossible to take off, or that even if we managed to do it, we would break our legs landing at such speed, Gilo’s response was: ‘Oh, it’ll be great. Leave it with me.’ No matter what the obstacle, no matter what the ‘problem’, Gilo always said, ‘We can do this.’ And after months in his workshop, he did eventually build the machine that took us above the height of Everest. He beat the naysayers, he built the impossible and by the Grace of God we pulled it off - oh, and in the process we raised over $2.5 million for children’s charities around the world. You see, dreams can come true if you stick to them and think big. So say yes - you never know where it will lead. And there are few limits to how high you just might soar.

One of these is "trust your instincts". This phrase is pervasive in Mark's culture as a counterfeit badge of greatness. Mark would never consider trying to operate heavy machinery or perform surgery without adequate training. Yet many believe their instincts can serve as an infallible source of wisdom with no training whatsoever.

Now, kids…wine is alcohol. That’s a drink for grown-ups. Gee, Mr. Percy Jackson, you say, can’t we have some wine? No, no, kids. Wine is dangerous. I don’t want any of you to drink alcohol until you’re at least thirty-five years old. Even then, you should get a doctor’s note and your parents’ permission, drink responsibly (like one swig a month), and never operate heavy machinery while under the influence! Okay…I think that covers my legal bases. On with the story.