Hostage Situation Quotes

If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?

If a person with multiple personalities threatens suicide, is that considered a hostage situation?

Because that’s intimacy, Buckaroos. Somebody who understands exactly how weird you are, and you understand exactly how weird they are, and you’re in a sort of mutually beneficial hostage situation.

The goal with hostages is to gradually lower expectations; in nonhostage crises, it's to lower emotions.

You ever want to negotiate a hostage situation in Quebec, I'm your man. Send me in for a little parley and the francophone miscreants will flee, hands over bleeding ears.

This time, no matter where you want to go, this master will accompany you.

Mark Twain once wrote, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”49 Worry has a way of holding our attention hostage. This is especially true for things we can’t control due to the elevated level of uncertainty. We burn through a lot of resources obsessing over possible outcomes and forming contingency plans, but in reality we’re just fueling our anxiety. Trying to think our way out of situations beyond our control may feel productive, but it’s nothing more than a powerful distraction. Worry baits us with the promise of a solution but usually offers none.

Just five minutes, God, I chant like some hostage negotiator on the brink of a resolution. Five minutes alone. Please, please. Please.

Gary Noesner notes that we could all learn from the successes and failures of hostage negotiation.7 At the beginning of such situations, emotions run high. Efforts to speed matters along often lead to disaster. Staving off natural desires to react aggressively to emotional provocations allows time for the molecules of emotion to gradually dissipate. The resulting cooler heads save lives.

In 1973, Jan Erik Olsson walked into a small bank in Stockholm, Sweden, brandishing a gun, wounding a police officer, and taking three women and one man hostage. During negotiations, Olsson demanded money, a getaway vehicle, and that his friend Clark Olofsson, a man with a long criminal history, be brought to the bank. The police allowed Olofsson to join his friend and together they held the four hostages captive in a bank vault for six days. During their captivity, the hostages at times were attached to snare traps around their necks, likely to kill them in the event that the police attempted to storm the bank. The hostages grew increasingly afraid and hostile toward the authorities trying to win their release and even actively resisted various rescue attempts. Afterward they refused to testify against their captors, and several continued to stay in contact with the hostage takers, who were sent to prison. Their resistance to outside help and their loyalty toward their captors was puzzling, and psychologists began to study the phenomenon in this and other hostage situations. The expression of positive feelings toward the captor and negative feelings toward those on the outside trying to win their release became known as Stockholm syndrome.

You make it sound almost like a hostage situation,” I tease. “It’s love, darling,” he says and then adds, feigning an evil grin, “It takes everyone hostage.

I hate hostage situations. Even when I’m the one with the hostages.

We were in the Safeway parking lot. I couldn’t find my cigarettes. You said, "Hurry up!" but I was worried there would be a hold-up and we would be stuck in a hostage situation, hiding behind the frozen meats, with nothing to smoke for hours. You said "Don’t be silly," so I followed you into the store. We were thumping the melons when I heard somebody say, "Nobody move!" I leaned over and whispered in your ear, "I told you so.

What’s the first rule of the playbook when it comes to hostage situations?” Harris said. “You don’t just give the hostage takers what they want, because it doesn’t guarantee that the hostages will be safe,” Maya said.

Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn't going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.

Eventually the bank robber shouted: “No… ! No, this isn’t a robbery… I just…,” then corrected that statement in a breathless voice: “Well, maybe it is a robbery! But you’re not the victims! It’s maybe more like a hostage situation now! And I’m very sorry about that! I’m having quite a complicated day here!

Members will exchange hostages with each other; you offer your lives to each other, as hostages. In other words, it means, "if you die, I die, too, dammit!" If we agree to this, then we will be unable to act, like nuclear powers, glaring at each other during a cold war. And even if we want to die, we will be unable to. If the situation turns into, "I don't care, even if you die," then this group's system has failed. Let's make sure that it doesn't become that way!

Nothing in life ever prepared me for a situation where I accidentally share a genuine kiss with a woman who’s supposed to be a small step up from ‘hostage’.

The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations.

We are dealing with a genuine Stockholm syndrome on a mass scale - when the hostage becomes the accomplice of the hostage taker - as well as a revolution of the concept of voluntary servitude and master-slave relations. When the entire society becomes an accomplice to those who took it hostage, but just as much when individuals split into, for themselves, hostage and hostage taker.

As a negotiator, Abby could face deranged criminals armed to the teeth, holding numerous hostages, while her voice remained measured, each word de-escalating the situation. But when she talked to the guy she was married to for twelve years, her voice automatically adopted the style of nails dragged on a blackboard, and she couldn’t think of a single word to utter aside from expletives.

There's a lot of talk these days about a thing called resilience. That's the in term at the moment," says Dr. John Leach, a survival psychologist. "You've got built-in resilience, so you can bounce back when you get knocked [down] by a survival situation. My argument with that is that if you've gone through a survival situation, you've gone through a POW camp, or you've been taken hostage, or you've been through sea survival, you will not be bouncing back to what you were before. You will not be bouncing back to who you were before. Because you won't be the same person. If you think you are meant to be the same person, you can have problems. You've had an experience that has changed you. Coupled with that is that the society, the world you're coming back to, has certainly changed in their perception of you. They don't know how to handle you. Normally, most survivors want above all to be treated as normal. But the rest of the world can't treat them as normal.

I whispered into his ear, “Erik...” There was no response from him. “Erik.” My voice was a little bit firmer. I pushed at his shoulders making sure that my hands were well away from his re-opened wound. He weighed more than I did. I couldn’t get out from under him. God, I’m stuck inside of him ...like a dog. “Erik.” I tried to wriggle out from under him. I grew hard. I stilled horrified as my body took pleasure in this situation. I tried to shift his leg over. I thrust into him. Oh... I thrust again. I was hovering around the panic state but lust was driving all thoughts out of my mind. The more I struggled to free myself... I fucked him. I screwed an unconscious man. What kind of man was I? I couldn’t stop. The thwap, thwap sound of me burying my full length inside him hammered at my head. Don’t do this... don’t do.... nnnngghgghhh. I came deep within him.

My attorney general, Eric Holder, would later point out that as egregious as the behavior of the banks may have been leading up to the crisis, there were few indications that their executives had committed prosecutable offenses under existing statutes—and we were not in the business of charging people with crimes just to garner good headlines. But to a nervous and angry public, such answers—no matter how rational—weren’t very satisfying. Concerned that we were losing the political high ground, Axe and Gibbs urged us to sharpen our condemnations of Wall Street. Tim, on the other hand, warned that such populist gestures would be counterproductive, scaring off the investors we needed to recapitalize the banks. Trying to straddle the line between the public’s desire for Old Testament justice and the financial markets’ need for reassurance, we ended up satisfying no one. “It’s like we’ve got a hostage situation,” Gibbs said to me one morning. “We know the banks have explosives strapped to their chests, but to the public it just looks like we’re letting them get away with a robbery.

...perhaps you can see a little more clearly the ways in which you've left the center of yourself in order to get to love. Even more importantly, you might see how you didn't do whatever you did to get love because you are weak, or broken, or wrong. You sought love simply and only for the same reason I did, and still do: because this is how we are wired. As A Course in Miracles states, all human behavior is either love or a call for love...Once I started to look at it this way, it softened my shame about my patterns...It allowed me to see myself as someone who was hurting, instead of someone who was weak. What I am coming to see, very slowly and over time, is that nothing that requires or causes me to abandon myself is really love. Love is a mirror that reflects you back to yourself, not a portal through which you jump into oblivion. It doesn't ask you to be different. IT doesn't secretly wish you were. Yes, a relationship is always going to be compromise, but when you start compromising yourself, it becomes something else. A hostage situation, maybe. An arrangement, A use. An abuse. I have been on both sides of all these scenarios.

Tom Donilon walked in to brief me on a developing situation involving an issue I’d never been asked about during the campaign. “Pirates?” “Pirates, Mr. President,” Jones said. “Off the coast of Somalia. They boarded a cargo ship captained by an American and appear to be holding the crew hostage.

As a result of "love," man is able to hide his cowardly self-deception behind a smoke screen of sentiment. He is able to make himself believe that his senseless enslavement to woman and her hostages is more than an act of honor, it has a higher purpose. He is entirely happy in his role as a slave and has arrived at the goal he has so long desired. Since woman gains nothing but one advantage after another from the situation as it stands today, things will never change. The system forces her to be corrupt, but no one is going to worry about that. Since one can expect nothing from a woman but love, it will remain the currency for any need she might have. Man, her slave, will continue to use his energies only according to his conditioning and never to his own advantage. He will achieve greater goals, and the more he achieves, the farther women will become alienated from him. The more he tries to ingratiate himself with her, the more demanding she will become; the more he desires her, the less she will find him desirable; the more comforts he provides for her, the more indolent, stupid, and inhuman she will become — and man will grow lonelier as a result.

Ryan was complex—he was big-hearted and caring but also resolute and direct. He once e-mailed me an audio clip of a television news interview he gave after a group of Navy SEALs rescued the captain of the Maersk Alabama tanker ship. Pirates had taken the ship and the captain hostage off the coast of Somalia, Africa. The story was later made into the film Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks. A team of Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed all but one of the hostage takers, who had placed themselves and their hostage in a desperate situation. Ryan told the TV reporter, “Despite what your momma told you, violence does solve problems.”1 I understood exactly what Ryan meant—there was no diplomatic or political solution to the crisis, and allowing pirates to take American vessels and crews hostage would set a bad precedent in other parts of the globe. Weeks before, in fact, the pirates had killed other hostages. Ryan’s statement was in no way meant to be bravado; he was merely conveying the fact that many times violence brings about a successful conclusion to a hostage crisis. The SEALs spoke the only language that the Somali pirates understood: violence. Apparently, the SEALs’ response acted as a deterrent, since the Somali pirates have consequently stayed clear of US flagged vessels. Chris Kyle later turned Ryan’s statement into a patch he wore on his hat.

■​Let what you know—your known knowns—guide you but not blind you. Every case is new, so remain flexible and adaptable. Remember the Griffin bank crisis: no hostage-taker had killed a hostage on deadline, until he did. ■​Black Swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage: positive (the ability to give someone what they want); negative (the ability to hurt someone); and normative (using your counterpart’s norms to bring them around). ■​Work to understand the other side’s “religion.” Digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. That’s where Black Swans live. ■​Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners whose job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss. ■​Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone they share a cultural similarity with, so dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground. ■​When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren’t. Faced with this situation, search for constraints, hidden desires, and bad information. ■​Get face time with your counterpart. Ten minutes of face time often reveals more than days of research. Pay special attention to your counterpart’s verbal and nonverbal communication at unguarded moments—at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line.

the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971. The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three-day period in 1970. It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas. By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot. But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI. Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel. But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option. In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed. In the landmark Downs v. United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well-being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.” The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.” The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations. Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed. A new era of negotiation had begun. HEART

The information in this topic of decision making and how to create and nurture it, is beneficial to every cop in their quest to mastering tactics and tactical decision making and are a must read for every cop wanting to be more effective and safe on the street. My purpose is to get cops thinking about this critical question: In mastering tactics shouldn’t we be blending policy and procedure with people and ideas? It should be understandable that teaching people, procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully doesn’t always apply. Procedures are most useful in well-ordered situations when they can substitute for skill, not augment it. In complex situations, in the shadows of the unknown, uncertain and unpredictable and complex world of law enforcement conflict, procedures are less likely to substitute for expertise and may even stifle its development. Here is a different way of putting it as Klein explains: In complex situations, people will need judgment skills to follow procedures effectively and to go beyond them when necessary.3 For stable and well-structured tasks i.e. evidence collection and handling, follow-up investigations, booking procedures and report writing, we should be able to construct comprehensive procedure guides. Even for complex tasks we might try to identify the procedures because that is one road to progress. But we also have to discover the kinds of expertise that comes into play for difficult jobs such as, robbery response, active shooter and armed gunman situations, hostage and barricade situations, domestic disputes, drug and alcohol related calls and pretty much any other call that deals with emotionally charged people in conflict. Klein states, “to be successful we need both analysis (policy and procedure) and intuition (people and ideas).”4 Either one alone can get us into trouble. Experts certainly aren’t perfect, but analysis can fail. Intuition isn’t magic either. Klein defines intuition as, “ways we use our experience without consciously thinking things out”. Intuition includes tacit knowledge that we can’t describe. It includes our ability to recognize patterns stored in memory. We have been building these patterns up all our lives from birth to present, and we can rapidly match a situation to a pattern or notice that something is off, that some sort of anomaly is warning us to be careful.5

Frozen fright develops as the hostage comes out of shock and begins to perceive the reality of the situation. In frozen fright, hostages are effectively paralyzed, enabling them to focus their cognitive and motor functions solely on survival, with concentration centered on the terrorist. In this state the hostage responds to the captor with cooperative, friendly behavior. As this state continues and the hostages are still not rescued, they will feel overwhelmed and develop traumatic psychological infantilism wherein they respond to the captor with appeasement, submission, ingratiation, cooperation, and empathy. As captivity continues and the hostages are still alive, they will begin to perceive the captor as giving their lives back to them. At this point a hostage develops a pathological transference to the terrorist, wherein the terrorist is seen as the "good guy" and authorities, police, and family, because they have not gotten the hostage out of the situation, are seen as the "bad guys". This transference will persist long after hostages are released because they fear that any expression of negativity toward the captors may invite retaliation.

It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality. According to the latter, families are different from nations, profit-making corporations are different from nonprofit corporations, medical institutions are different from school systems, one nation’s infrastructure is different from another’s, and so on. Yet whether we are considering any family, any institution, or any nation, for terrorism to hold sway the same three emotional prerequisites must always persist in that relationship system.    There must be a sense that no one is in charge—in other words, the overall emotional atmosphere must convey that there is no leader with “nerve.”    The system must be vulnerable to a hostage situation. That is, its leaders must be hamstrung by a vulnerability of their own, a vulnerability to which the terrorist—whether a bomber, a client, an employee, or a child—is always exquisitely sensitive.    There must be among both the leaders and those they lead an unreasonable faith in “being reasonable.” From an emotional process view of leadership, whether we are talking about families or the family of nations, these three emotional characteristics of a system are the differences that count.

A few years later, my wife and I were visiting Iran. Why? Because our idea of a vacation is most people’s idea of a hostage situation. If refugees want to get out of a place, we want to go there.

have absolutely no intention of getting caught up in some romantic hostage situation like you’ve gotten yourself entangled in at the mercy of a woman who refuses to let you go.

There would be no reason or compassion without religion.” “Nonsense, sir,” Marta said. “I choose not to harm because I know what it is to be harmed, and I’d rather not inflict it on my kin or friends or society. I don’t have to be commanded to do so. I choose to. If I behaved well just because I’d been told to, with the threat of hell or what have you, that isn’t really good behaviour at all, but a celestial hostage situation.

When I told friends I was going to a hostage negotiation and training session, they immediately imagined banks and a small gaggle of men in ski masks. Though the numbers are not tracked consistently, around 80% of all hostage situations in this country are a result of domestic violence,

Because that’s intimacy, Buckaroos. Somebody who understands exactly how weird you are, and you understand exactly how weird they are, and you’re in a sort of mutually beneficial hostage situation.

I never realized toddlers are literally like dealing with a hostage situation. He can argue, pitch a fit, refuse to do what you ask and then, when he hears something he wants, he caves.

It’s complicated, and I won’t pretend that part of me still feels betrayed by what he did. But once I got home, after a while it dawned on me that I had a choice to make if I wanted to move on with my life. Just because our pasts are part of us, it doesn’t mean they have to define us. I refused to give my past that kind of power over me. So I chose to let it go.” “How could you let that go?” he asked, his tone and expression incredulous. “How could you let that go after what he did to you? What they did to you?” “Forgiveness,” she answered. She knew it sounded overly simplistic and probably cheesy, but that’s exactly what had helped her break from the past. “Hassan saw himself as a patriot, first and foremost. He did what he had to in order to accomplish his mission, and did what he could to protect me at the same time. It’s why he married me, so I was off limits to the others.” She was thankful for that too, in hindsight. The alternative was beyond bearing. “He risked everything to get me out of that hellish situation, and wound up paying for my freedom with his life.” Taya paused to pull in a slow breath. “I’ve forgiven him for the rest of it. I had to, to be able to go on. But I didn’t forgive him for his sake. I forgave him for mine.” She needed Nathan to understand the difference. “Forgiveness was what earned me my true freedom.” He was quiet a moment. “Well then, you’re a better person than me,” he said in a low voice, his eyes burning with emotion.

If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation? Can an atheist get insurance against acts of God?” She paused. “Or why hemorrhoids are not called ass-teroids?

How is Single-Person CQB Different? Single-person CQB tactics are different from tactics developed for teams and multiple teams. The reason for this is the increased risk associated with operating alone. Even if you are very experienced in team-level operations, it may still take time for you to master the specific skills and movements needed for single-person operations. Team-level CQB is generally divided into “immediate entry” and “delayed entry” tactics. Immediate entry methods call for offensive, aggressive movement and were developed by elite military special operations forces for hostage rescue situations. Delayed entry tactics are more common in the law enforcement community and are designed to minimize your exposure and maximize the benefits of cover and concealment. For single-person operations, delayed entry is generally a safer option than immediate entry. If you have a team behind you, it is possible to aggressively rush through a door to dominate a room. However, if you are operating alone with no support, it is dangerous to rush into a fight when the odds might not be in your favor. By employing delayed entry tactics you clear as much of a room or hallway as possible from the outside, before you actually make entry. The tactics in this book are primarily delayed entry tactics. Team-level CQB can also be divided into “deliberate” tactics and “emergency” tactics. The difference has less to do with speed and more to do with the level of care and attention applied to the clearing process. It is possible to execute deliberate tactics very quickly, as long as you are careful to clear each room and danger area completely. Essentially, when conducting a deliberate clear, you will not take any shortcuts.

Spotted on Facebook Student: I don’t understand why my grade was so low. How did I do on my research paper? Teacher: Actually, you didn’t turn in a research paper. You turned in a random assemblage of sentences. In fact, the sentences you apparently kidnapped in the dead of night and forced into this violent and arbitrary plan of yours clearly seemed to be placed on the pages against their will. Reading your paper was like watching unfamiliar, uncomfortable people interacting at a cocktail party that no one wanted to attend in the first place. You didn’t submit a research paper. You submitted a hostage situation.

Marina leaned her head against him and sniffled. It was common in this day and age, when waiting someplace, to look around at your involuntary companions and imagine you were trapped with them someplace more dire: a hostage situation or a building on fire, something requiring teamwork and survival. Could you build the camaraderie promised in movies about such times, or would you fall apart? Phil Needle looked around and realized, quietly but sharply, that he and his wife would not survive this. Gwen's disappearance would slaughter them. YOU WANT IT WHEN? was the caption on the poster. It was talking about office work, and the sad fact, true at the time, that people want things right away and that other people don't care about that. The poster reminded people that it didn't matter what you wanted. Where was she? Where did somebody put her? Where were those ragged thumbs of hers, and her odd, tiny earlobes? Was he about to become one of those guys, clutching a photograph of Gwen, on the news every year in support of an extreme new crime law? Were they becoming one of those families used as a murmured example of the wickedness of the world, as a worst-case scenario to comfort those whose daughter was merely pregnant or paralyzed? Would there be a funeral, everyone sweating in black clothes in the summer and squinting in sunglasses? Oh God, would there be a hasty peer-group shrine, wherever she was found, with cheap flowers and crappy poetry melting in the rain? Would her college fund sit forgotten for a while in the bank, like a tumor thought benign, and then be emptied impulsively on some toy to cheer himself up? He had seen in a magazine a handsome automobile some months ago, shiny as clean water.

now ringing the superintendent at the field command post, and praying that she was in time. * * * Heart beating like a jack hammer, Nikki eased her way along the rough red-brick wall of the old dental block. Ahead of her, and moving fast, but with a light-footed, almost delicate precision, were Joseph, Dave, Vinnie and the two marksmen. Nikki knew that her solo performance was not only hazardous, it was critical to saving Snipe’s hostages. Even so, she’d never felt so well protected. If anyone could defuse the situation safely, she believed that it was Joseph. As she watched, they disappeared beneath the heavy plastic. She saw in her mind’s eye the turning of the key that they had obtained

London, where in the hell are you?” Jerry Allemand’s voice was laced with excitement—unusual for him—and I heard sirens screaming in the background. “We’ve got a hostage situation with shots fired at the First Gold Bank off of Highway Three in Gracetown!” “Anyone

This isn’t you holding me hostage, is it?” “You are my hostage.” “I’m your girlfriend.” “Fiancée,” I remind her. “But no, this isn’t a hostage situation. Even if you’re giving me some ideas for what to do with you and my belt later.

And I have absolutely no intention of getting caught up in some romantic hostage situation like you’ve gotten yourself entangled in at the mercy of a woman who refuses to let you go.” Leaning back in his office chair, a slow, lazy grin stretches across his face. “Oh yeah…it’s terrible,” he replies sarcastically.

It starts with that damn bird in the backyard. Actually, no. I guess it starts with the dog, right? Turbo's barking from the living room is what makes me look outside at the bird. I mean, if you want to get particular, it starts last year, during the bank robbery/hostage situation that added a special layer to the bedrock of PTSD all three of us already had. You could get really particular and say it starts in Florida on a tennis court that day Raymond Keane approached me and my mom; or that night, a few years later, when I chopped dear old stepdad's fingers off to break into his safe and guarantee my FBI-bartered freedom. Or, more particular: it really starts the day I was born to a con-artist mom who taught me everything she knew, made me a partner in her schemes as I grew up, only to dump it all to marry a criminal much worse than her and force me to turn snitch to escape before I hit my teens.

If you can't make choices in your life, be it personal or professional, you are in a hostage situation.

Even when our situation looks as dry as desert sand, we can remember that, for generations, God has specialized in doing a new thing in wastelands. Fear should never hold our hope hostage. Our situation will change. God will never abandon us.

I’m in shock, realizing Saint thinks I’m innocent in this situation. He sees me as acting as a hostage to the demon himself when in reality, this was all my devilish plan.

I’m not letting you go anywhere.” “That’s called a hostage situation.” “I’m okay with it. I’ll happily go down for it.” “You’re ridiculous and—” “And you’re madly in love with me like I am you?” “Not even a question. Just facts.

One thing you can say about Twilight is that it is not boring. There are a billion characters, they’re always saying some crazy shit, and they’re SO HORNY! Twilight feels like it was written by an AI that almost gets it. Something is just 2 percent off about every line and every interaction, which, taken cumulatively, is like a window into one of those dimensions where everything is identical to ours except cats and turtles are switched and Prince never died. Twilight took me out of my body in a way that did not give me pleasure but did give me fascination, and when it was over, I couldn’t believe it, but I felt compelled to watch the next one just to continue the satisfying, itchy glitch of it all. Twilight kept me awake, which honestly is more than I can say for Top Gun, peace be upon Tony Scott (I stan Déjà Vu). For instance, this is the opening line of the movie, delivered in sullen voice-over by Bella (Kristen Stewart): “I’ve never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a good way to go.” WHAT???????????????????????????????????????????? How is that a “good way to go”!? There are zero versions of that “way to go” that don’t involve some sort of violent hostage situation and/or dystopian fascist cull... If you’re picking a hypothetical “way to go,” pick something that doesn’t include your life and the life of a dear one being leveraged against each other in some zero-sum villainous endgame! What!?!? You weirdo!

Another simple rule is, when you are verbally assaulted, do not counterattack. Instead, disarm your counterpart by asking a calibrated question. The next time a waiter or salesclerk tries to engage you in a verbal skirmish, try this out. I promise you it will change the entire tenor of the conversation. The basic issue here is that when people feel that they are not in control, they adopt what psychologists call a hostage mentality. That is, in moments of conflict they react to their lack of power by either becoming extremely defensive or lashing out. Neurologically, in situations like this the fight-or-flight mechanism in the reptilian brain or the emotions in the limbic system overwhelm the rational part of our mind, the neocortex, leading us to overreact in an impulsive, instinctive way. In a negotiation, like in the one between my client and the CEO, this always produces a negative outcome. So we have to train our neocortex to override the emotions from the other two brains.

Somebody who understands exactly how weird you are, and you understand exactly how weird they are, and you’re in a sort of mutually beneficial hostage situation.

Minaj subs her alter egos in and out of the verse with the recklessness of a baseball coach on acid, and the result is a hostage situation that happens in the basement of the song’s grindhouse

To hostage takers, victims were the best forms of insurance. As long as the hostages were still alive, they were like pawns protecting them from attack, a way of buying their way to freedom. For that reason, contrary to the popular opinion perpetrated by TV crime series, it was very rare for hostage situations to have fatal consequences. For the perpetrator, a dead hostage was useless

With these dynamics in mind, we will not be surprised to learn from the statistics that 60 percent of German terrorists in recent years have been the children of Protestant ministers. The tragedy of this situation lies in the fact that the parents undoubtedly had the best of intentions; from the very beginning, they wanted their children to be good, responsive, well-behaved, agreeable, undemanding, considerate, unselfish, self-controlled, grateful, neither willful nor headstrong nor defiant, and above all meek. They wanted to inculcate these values in their children by whatever means, and if there was no other way, they were even ready to use force to obtain these admirable pedagogical ends. If the children then showed signs of violent behavior in adolescence, they were expressing both the unlived side of their own childhood as well as the unlived, suppressed, and hidden side of their-parents' psyche, perceived only by the children themselves. When terrorists take innocent women and children hostage in the service of a grand and idealistic cause, are they really doing anything different from what was once done to them? When they were little children full of vitality, their parents had offered them up as sacrifices to a grand pedagogic purpose, to lofty religious values, with the feeling of performing a great and good deed. Since these young people never were allowed to trust their own feelings, they continue to suppress them for ideological reasons. These intelligent and often very sensitive people, who had once been sacrificed to a "higher" morality, sacrifice themselves as adults to another-- often opposite--ideology, in whose service they allow their inmost selves to be completely dominated, as had been the case in their childhood.

booming tone is often seen as either boisterous or confident, while a quiet and softer tone is seen as shy and reserved. This is also important, especially when you are responding to other people. If you tend to shout out your words, you are perceived as a person who lacks control. But if you are too soft-spoken, then you are perceived as someone who generally lacks confidence. As such, your only solution here is to be aware of your tone and voice. If you are not sure what tone to use in a situation, use something calm and collected. This is vital in business meetings and important deals. The FBI has been using the calm and collected voice to diffuse high-tension situations like a hostage-taking. By lowering their voice to something calm and non-threatening, they tend to help in calming the hostage-taker, so they don’t do something drastic. Use this voice when approaching potential contacts

Law enforcement officers sometimes feel that no action in a crisis situation means we are not making progress and that we should do something to elicit a response—for example, to break a window or deploy gas. In fact, what’s most important to understand about the negotiation process is that sometimes we may talk for hours with no response, but that doesn’t always mean that the subject on the other end is not listening and that the process is not working, when indeed it may be. It’s a bit of a cliché, but in negotiating, patience really is a virtue.

avoiding a hostage situation was important to my risk assessment module’s Projected Schedule of Events Leading to a Successful Resolution. (In company terms that’s a PSELSR, which is a terrible anagram.) (I don’t mean anagram, I mean the other thing.)

The basic issue here is that when people feel that they are not in control, they adopt what psychologists call a hostage mentality. That is, in moments of conflict they react to their lack of power by either becoming extremely defensive or lashing out. Neurologically, in situations like this the fight-or-flight mechanism in the reptilian brain or the emotions in the limbic system overwhelm the rational part of our mind, the neocortex, leading us to overreact in an impulsive, instinctive way.

When you let go of all that is causing you pain and distress, you let go of your unhappiness too. Sometimes, it may be people who make you unhappy. So move away from such people. At other times, it may be the choices that you have made that make you unhappy. So let go of the past – it is over, you can’t undo it. There may also be situations where you cannot fix the core issue that is causing all your pain and agony. When you can’t fix a problem yourself, let go of your desire to fix it. When you let go, when you uncling from whatever it is that is holding you hostage, you set yourself free. When you let go, you actually let Happiness in!

It wasn’t exactly on my bucket list to have a contraction in front of everyone in the entire office, much less during a hostage situation, so this is all excellent. Just excellent.

years. “How sophisticated is your security here? To keep the wrong people out of the building?” “It’s probably not tight enough,” she admitted, “but we’ve never had a problem.” “That’s the trouble in security. You don’t have a problem until you have a problem and then it’s too late. With all the crime that happens in Paris, and the trouble in Europe these days, it sounds like you need a better system and procedures. You have a lot of people working here. You need to protect against a hostage situation run by some nutcase. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and your systems at home. What you have relies more on humans than on technology. Sometimes technology is more reliable. I want to give you some suggestions, but I haven’t had time to work on it. We’ve been a little crazy at the office.” She knew he wouldn’t tell her why, so she didn’t ask.

Once you've been through a hostage situation with someone, you might as well be on a first-name basis.

Dr. John Leach, a survival psychologist. “You’ve got built-in resilience, so you can bounce back when you get knocked [down] by a survival situation. My argument with that is that if you’ve gone through a survival situation, you’ve gone through a POW camp, or you’ve been taken hostage, or you’ve been through sea survival, you will not be bouncing back to what you were before. You will not be bouncing back to who you were before. Because you won’t be the same person. If you think you are meant to be the same person, you can have problems. You’ve had an experience that has changed you.

SWAT teams originated in the 1960s and gradually became more common in the 1970s, but until the drug war, they were used rarely, primarily for extraordinary emergency situations such as hostage takings, hijackings, or prison escapes. That changed in the 1980s, when local law enforcement agencies suddenly had access to cash and military equipment specifically for the purpose of conducting drug raids. Today, the most common use of SWAT teams is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home. In fact, in some jurisdictions drug warrants are served only by SWAT teams

As with all fairy tales, a crime was committed. In "Snow White," there was a poisoning. A hostage situation was at the heart of "Beauty and the Beast." "Hansel and Gretel" featured attempted cannibalism. "Cinderella" involved the lesser offense of party crashing. North Carolina began with a trespassing. Not a "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" domestic breaking and entering but an act of large-scale land grabbing.

Recall for a moment the distinct sense of terminal crisis, of things coming apart, in the culture of those years: the endless hostage situation, the powerless president with his somber pessimism, the gasoline shortage, the crumbling cities, and, of course, the deliberately apocalyptic imagery of punk rock, which we in KC only knew from scaremongering news items.

I did what most alcoholics do in this situation: I took a hostage. I got married to Lydia.

Only with our modern civilization did we find ourselves forcibly inducted into this individual existence. Of course, we fight to retain this 'inalienable' right, and we are naturally driven to win it and defend it at all costs. We demand this freedom, this autonomy, as a fundamental human right and, at the same time, we are crippled by the responsibility that ends up making us detest ourselves as such. This is what resounds in the complaint of Job. God asks too much: ''What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thy heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? ' This leaves us subject to a contradictory twofold requirement: to seek an identity by all possible means - by hounding the identities of others or by exploring the networks - and to slough off identity in every possible way, as though it were a burden or a disguise. It is as though liberty and individuality, from having been a 'natural' state in which one may act freely, had become artificial states, a kind of moral imperative, whose implacable decree makes us hostages to our identities and our own wills. This is a very particular case of Stockholm Syndrome, since we are here both the terrorist and the hostage. Now, the hostage is by definition the unexchangeable, accursed object you cannot be rid of because you don't know what to do with it. The situation is the same for the subject: as hostage to himself, he doesn't know how to exchange himself or be rid of himself.

Many people, when they hear about hostage negotiation, shake their heads and say, “Why don’t they just shoot the guy?” But those people don’t know the stats. When police launch an assault during a hostage situation, it’s the police who suffer the bulk of the casualties. Fighting may end things quickly, but the research shows it doesn’t end things well. You and I do the same thing in our personal relationships. Things go sideways and often our first response is to fight. Not physical violence, but yelling and arguing vs. discussing and negotiating. Why is this? Philosopher Daniel Dennett says it’s because a “war metaphor” is wired into our brains when it comes to disagreement. When there’s a war, someone is conquered. It’s not a discussion of facts and logic; it’s a fight to the death. No matter who is really right, if you win, I lose. In almost every conversation, status is on the line. Nobody wants to look stupid. So, as Dennett explains, we set up a situation where learning is equivalent to losing.

The whole room was decorated in various shades of pink, with about two hundred empty chairs arranged in neat rows.  Not many guests wanted to show up to a wedding that was really a hostage situation.

This isn’t a play, it’s a hostage situation. It’s a siege. We’re all trapped by a misplaced faith in the redemptive capacity of art.