Seconds From Disaster Quotes

I clinked my bottle against his. “To being the only girl a guy with no standards doesn’t want to sleep with.” I said, taking a swig. “Are you serious?” he asked, pulling the bottle from my mouth. When I didn’t recant, he leaned toward me. “First of all…I have standards. I’ve never been with an ugly woman. Ever. Second of all, I wanted to sleep with you. I thought about throwing you over my couch fifty different ways, but I haven’t because I don’t see you that way anymore. It’s not that I’m not attracted to you, I just think you’re better than that.” I couldn’t hold back the smug smile that crept across my face. “You think I’m too good for you.” He sneered at my second insult. “I can’t think of a single guy I know that’s good enough for you.

You don’t really think I’m going to let her yell at my wife, do you?” “You’re getting pretty comfortable with that term.” “I guess it’s time I admit it. I knew you were going to be my wife pretty much from the second I met you. I’m not going to lie and say I haven’t been waiting for the day I could say it…so I’m going to abuse the title. You should get used to it, now.” He said this all matter-of-factly, as if he were giving a practiced speech.

We’re both drunk,” “This isn’t right,” he said. “I want you.” “I need you to say it,” he said. “I’ll say whatever you want.” “Then say that you belong to me. Say that you’ll take me back. I won’t do this unless we’re together.” “We’ve never really been apart, have we?” “I need to hear you say it. I need to know you’re mine.” “I’ve been yours since the second we met.” “Say it again,”he said. “I’m yours,” I breathed. Every nerve, inside and out ached for more. “I don’t ever want to be apart from you again.” “Promise me,” “I love you. I’ll love you forever.

I shook my head, sweeping my lips across hers. Not good enough. “I need to hear you say it. I need to know you’re mine.” “I’ve been yours since the second we met,” she said, begging. I stared into her eyes for a few seconds, and then felt my mouth turn up into a half smile, hoping her words were true and not just spoken in the moment. I leaned down and kissed her tenderly, and then she slowly pulled me into her. My entire body felt like it was melting inside of her. “Say it again.” Part of me couldn’t believe it was all really happening. “I’m yours.” She breathed. “I don’t ever want to be apart from you again.” “Promise me,” I said, groaning with another thrust. “I love you. I’ll love you forever.” She looked straight into my eyes when she spoke, and it finally clicked that her words weren’t just an empty promise.

We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull's-eye of disaster.

Certainly, the average fashion magazine gives women ridiculous relationship advice that makes it easy to understand why women are so eager to overcompensate: “Play hard to get, then cook him a four-course meal … bake him Valentine’s cookies with exotic sprinkles shipped from Malaysia (just like Martha Stewart). Don’t forget the little doilies and the organic strawberries that you drove two hours to get. Then serve it all to him on the second date, wearing a black lace nightie.” And what is this a recipe for? Disaster.

Fletch is back from Austin, and turns out what sounded great on paper didn't match up to reality. He says its so hot down there, I'd spontaneously combust the second I stepped off the plane. Plus with humidity turning the air as thick as oatmeal, my hair would always be a disaster. So, Austin's out.

Confronted with the twin disasters of climate change and an impending oil peak, it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion that the need to drive a car which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds (the Audi S4 for example) overrides the Ethiopians' need to avoid recurrent famines, or the whole world's need to avoid the economic catastrophe we'll suffer if petroleum peaks too soon.

We’re going bowling tomorrow. Can’t you wait until then?” “I went from being with you every second of the day to seeing you for ten minutes if I’m lucky.” I smiled and shook my head. “It’s only been two days, Trav.” “I miss you. Get your ass on the seat and let’s go.” I couldn’t argue. I missed him, too. More than I would ever admit to him. I zipped up my jacket and climbed on behind him, slipping my fingers through the belt loops of his jeans. He pulled my wrists to his chest and then folded them across one another. Once he was satisfied that I was holding him tightly enough, he took off, racing down the road.

You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.

You don’t really think I’m going to let her yell at my wife, do you?” “You’re getting pretty comfortable with that term.” “I guess it’s time I admit it. I knew you were going to be my wife pretty much from the second I met you. I’m not going to lie and say I haven’t been waiting for the day I could say it…so I’m going to abuse the title. You should get used to it, now.” I laughed, squeezing his hand. “I don’t mind.” “You don’t?” I shook my head and he pulled me to his side, kissing my cheek. “Good. You’re going to get sick of it over the next few months, but just cut me some slack, okay?

A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California; whereas today, because of equipment problems at O’Hare, you can't get there at all.” Dave Barry

I know I get crazy when it comes to you, but God knows I’m tryin’, Pidge. I don’t wanna screw this up.” “Then don’t.” “This is hard for me, ya know. I feel like any second you’re going to figure out what a piece of shit I am and leave me. When you were dancing last night, I saw a dozen different guys watching you. You go to the bar, and I see you thank that guy for your drink. Then that douchebag on the dance floor grabs you.” “You don’t see me throwing punches every time a girl talks to you. I can’t stay locked up in the apartment all the time. You’re going to have to get a handle on your temper.” “I will. I’ve never wanted a girlfriend before, Pigeon. I’m not used to feeling this way about someone…about anyone. If you’ll be patient with me, I swear I’ll get it figured out.” “Let’s get something straight; you’re not a piece of shit, you’re amazing. It doesn’t matter who buys me drinks, or who asks me to dance, or who flirts with me. I’m going home with you. You’ve asked me to trust you, and you don’t seem to trust me.” He frowned. “That’s not true.” “If you think I’m going to leave you for the next guy that comes along, then you don’t have much faith in me.” He tightened his grip. “I’m not good enough for you, Pidge. That doesn’t mean I don’t trust you, I’m just bracing for the inevitable.” “Don’t say that. When we’re alone, you’re perfect. We’re perfect. But then you let everyone else ruin it. I don’t expect a one-eighty, but you have to pick your battles. You can’t come out swinging every time someone looks at me.” He nodded. “I’ll do anything you want. Just…tell me you love me.” “You know I do.” “I need to hear you say it,” he said, his brows pulling together. “I love you,” I said, touching my lips to his. “Now quit being such a baby.” He laughed, crawling into the bed with me. We spent the next hour in the same spot under the covers, giggling and kissing, barely noticing when Kara returned from the shower.

This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It's a simple case of misuse.

But if we go in for reservations on communal and caste basis, we swamp the bright and able people and remain second-rate or third-rate. I am grieved to learn of how far this business of reservation has gone based on communal considerations. It has amazed me to learn that even promotions are based sometimes on communal or caste considerations. This way lies not only folly, but disaster. Let us help the backward groups by all means, but never at the cost of efficiency.

Introduction to bits. Things are going up on the curb, every few months. Maybe. Bottle of the inside of the lines of the landing, not as we can set of brightness. But the houses get repayed, man. Anywhere. There’s nowhere else to be late at a number of me? But it’s visible from the house. It’s early evening, but it crackles and perhaps they own. It means that perhaps the result of bubbly waiting for a few moments. I have to flinch at the forthcoming disaster strikes. Nathan: He travels. While most of the hoarded seconds of the moon given flesh. Inanna is that they own. That which does the theme afterwards. They become bitter. Not a level on a few moments I see. Thank you. Yeah. Arty stuff.

The RBMK control rods are incredibly slow by Western standards, taking 18-21 seconds to fully insert from their uppermost position.

But what if, after one small change, her life would become much worse than it was? Or unthinkable disasters result from a single step off her path?

Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo's population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.

Naysayers at their polite best chided the rewilders for romanticizing the past; at their sniping worst, for tempting a 'Jurassic Park' disaster. To these the rewilders quietly voiced a sad and stinging reply. The most dangerous experiment is already underway. The future most to be feared is the one now dictated by the status quo. In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world, we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. They come in the form of denuded seascapes and barren forests, ruled by jellyfish and urchins, killer deer and sociopathic monkeys. They come as haunting demons of the human mind. In conquering the fearsome beasts, the conquerors had unwittingly orphaned themselves.

In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neo liberalism is frequently spoken of as "the second colonial pillage": in the first pillage, the riches were seized from the land, and in the second they were stripped from the state.

On the eleventh day, it finally stopped raining. Musashi chafed to be out in the open, but it was another week before they were able to return to work under a bright sun. The field they had so arduously carved out of the wilderness had disappeared without a trace; in its place were rocks, and a river where none had been before. The water seemed to mock them just as the villagers had. Iori, seeing no way to reclaim their loss, looked up and said, “This place is beyond hope. Let’s look for better land somewhere else.” “No,” Musashi said firmly. “With the water drained off, this would make excellent farmland. I examined the location from every angle before I chose it.” “What if we have another heavy rain?” “We’ll fix it so the water doesn’t come this way. We’ll lay a dam from here all the way to that hill over there.” ‘That’s an awful lot of work.” “You seem to forget that this is our dōjō. I’m not giving up a foot of this land until I see barley growing on it.” Musashi carried on his stubborn struggle throughout the winter, into the second month of the new year. It took several weeks of strenuous labor to dig ditches, drain the water off, pile dirt for a dike and then cover it with heavy rocks. Three weeks later everything was again washed away. “Look,” Iori said, “we’re wasting our energy on something impossible. Is that the Way of the Sword?” The question struck close to the bone, but Musashi would not give in. Only a month passed before the next disaster, a heavy snowfall followed by a quick thaw. Iori, on his return from trips to the temple for food, inevitably wore a long face, for the people there rode him mercilessly about Musashi’s failure. And finally Musashi himself began to lose heart. For two full days and on into a third, he sat silently brooding and staring at his field. Then it dawned on him suddenly. Unconsciously, he had been trying to create a neat, square field like those common in other parts of the Kanto Plain, but this was not what the terrain called for. Here, despite the general flatness, there were slight variations in the lay of the land and the quality of the soil that argued for an irregular shape. “What a fool I’ve been,” he exclaimed aloud. “I tried to make the water flow where I thought it should and force the dirt to stay where I thought it ought to be. But it didn’t work. How could it? Water’s water, dirt’s dirt. I can’t change their nature. What I’ve got to do is learn to be a servant to the water and a protector of the land.” In his own way, he had submitted to the attitude of the peasants. On that day he became nature’s manservant. He ceased trying to impose his will on nature and let nature lead the way, while at the same time seeking out possibilities beyond the grasp of other inhabitants of the plain. The snow came again, and another thaw; the muddy water oozed slowly over the plain. But Musashi had had time to work out his new approach, and his field remained intact. “The same rules must apply to governing people,” he said to himself. In his notebook, he wrote: “Do not attempt to oppose the way of the universe. But first make sure you know the way of the universe.

Your initial mistake, my dear F’lar,” and the Harper’s voice was at its drollest, “was in providing salvation from the last imminent disaster in a scant three days by bringing up the Five Lost Weyrs. The Lord Holders really expect you to provide a second miracle in similar short order.

Meridian First daylight on the bittersweet-hung sleeping porch at high summer; dew all over the lawn, sowing diamond- point-highlighted shadows; the hired man's shadow revolving along the walk, a flash of milkpails passing; no threat in sight, no hint anywhere in the universe, of that apathy at the meridian, the noon of absolute boredom; flies crooning black lullabies in the kitchen, milk-soured crocks, cream separator still unwashed; what is there to life but chores and more chores, dishwater, fatigue, unwanted children; nothing to stir the longueur of afternoon except possibly thunderheads; climbing, livid, turreted alabaster lit up from within by splendor and terror -- forded lightening's split-second disaster.

What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare.

My bad mood returns like an unwanted rash. “I got in a fight with Logan. And that’s all I’m saying on the subject, because if I talk about it right now, it’ll just piss me off again and then I’ll be too distracted to produce Dumb and Dumber’s show.” We both glance at the main booth, where Evelyn is using the reflection on her water glass to check her makeup, dabbing delicately at her eye shadow. Pace is engrossed with his phone, his chair tipped back so far that I predict a very loud disaster in the near future. “God, I love them,” Daisy says with a snicker. “I don’t think I’ve ever met two more self-absorbed people.” Morris saunters out of the booth and wanders over to us. He notices Daisy’s shirt and says, “Sweetheart, we’re at work. Show some decorum.” “Says the guy who ripped this shirt off me in the supply closet.” Rolling her eyes, she takes a step away. “I’m going to make myself presentable in the bathroom. I’d do it out here, but I’m scared Dumber might take a picture and post it on a porn site.” “Wait, the names Dumb and Dumber actually correspond to each of them?” Morris says in surprise. “I thought it was more of a general thing. Which one is Dumber?” The second the question leaves his mouth, a muffled crash reverberates from the booth, and we all turn to see Pace tangled up on the floor. Yup, the guy who spent an hour regaling me about his cow-tipping days back in Iowa? Tipped himself right over. From behind the glass, Pace bounces to his feet, notices us staring, and mouths the words, “I’m okay!” Morris sighs. “I withdraw the question

Two things were needed to minimise the risk. First, the pool had to be drained, but its two valves in the basement - which could only be turned by hand - were now submerged under radioactive water from the firemen’s failed attempt to extinguish the reactor fire. Second, the commission decided that the earth beneath the reactor building should be frozen with liquid nitrogen to harden the ground, support the foundations and help to cool the superheated core.

Within 4 seconds, the reactor’s energy output had soared to several times its intended capacity. Runaway heat and pressure deep inside the core ruptured fuel channels, then water pipes, causing the pumps’ automatic safety valves to close. This stopped the flow of coolant, increasing the rate at which steam was forming from the core’s diminishing water supply. The reactor’s own safety valves attempted to vent the steam, but the pressure was too great and they, too, ruptured.

We need Holy Fools in our society, from time to time. They perform a valuable role. That’s why we romanticize them. Harry Markopolos was the hero of the Madoff saga. Whistleblowers have movies made about them. But the second, crucial part of Levine’s argument is that we can’t all be Holy Fools. That would be a disaster. Levine argues that over the course of evolution, human beings never developed sophisticated and accurate skills to detect deception as it was happening because there is no advantage to spending your time scrutinizing the words and behaviors of those around you. The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful. As he puts it, the trade-off between truth-default and the risk of deception is a great deal for us. What we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination. The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison. Sure, we get deceived once in a while. That is just the cost of doing business.

His first term is a model in executive restraint; it turned around an American political system that had deviated widely from the promises that the proponents of the Constitution had made when it was ratified in 1788. Jefferson was not perfect—his second term was a disaster constitutionally—but he set the stage for twenty-four years of executive authority that generally coincided with the way the friends of the Constitution had sold the office to a reluctant population during the state ratifying conventions.

Anxiety isn’t an attack that explodes out of me; it’s not a volcano that lies dormant until it’s triggered by an earth-shattering event. It’s a constant companion. Like a blowfly that gets into the house in the middle of summer, flying around and around. You can hear it buzzing, but you can’t see it, can’t capture it, can’t let it out. My anxiety is invisible to others, but often it’s the focal point of my mind. Everything that happens on a day-to-day basis is filtered through a lens colored by anxiety. That nervousness that makes your palms sweat and your heart race before you get up and make a speech in front of an audience? That’s what I feel in a normal conversation at a dinner table. Or just thinking about having a conversation at a dinner table. The fear that other people feel on rare occasions, reserved only for when they jump out of a plane or hear a strange noise in the middle of the night—that’s my normal. That’s what I feel when the phone rings. When someone knocks on my door. When I go outside. When I’m alone. When I’m in line at a store. Everything feels like I’m on a stage, spotlight on me, all eyes on me, watching, judging. Like I’m one second away from total disaster. It’s invisible, it’s irrational, it’s never-ending. I could be standing there, smiling and chatting like everything is totally fine, while secretly wanting to scream and cry and run away. No one would ever know. In my mind, no one can hear me scream. I hide it because I know it’s not understood or acceptable—because I’m not understood or acceptable.

The country, it seemed, was on the verge of a second civil war, this one over industrial slavery. But Frick was a gambler who cared little what the world thought of him. He was already a villain in the public’s eye, thanks to a disaster of epic proportions three years earlier. Frick and a band of wealthy friends had established the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club on land near an unused reservoir high in the hills above the small Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, 70 miles east of Pittsburgh. The club beautified the grounds around the dam but paid little attention to the dam itself, which held back the Conemaugh River and was in poor condition from years of neglect. On May 31, 1889, after heavy rainfall, the dam gave way, releasing nearly 5 billion gallons of water from Lake Conemaugh into Johnstown and killing 2,209 people. What became known as the Johnstown Flood caused $17 million in damages. Frick’s carefully crafted corporate structure for the club made it impossible for victims to pursue the financial assets of its members. Although he personally donated several thousands of dollars to relief efforts, Frick remained to many a scoundrel, the prototype of the uncaring robber baron of the Gilded Age.

But in that split second I somehow instinctively know that I must rise to the occasion, that he would not bear to see me stammering or in a daze, otherwise everything will crumble to the ground. I figure that a new question might save us from such a disaster. The question that imposed itself: Why me? The image doesn’t fit: my thick glasses, my stretched-out blue Nordic sweater, the student head slaps, the too-good grades, the feminine gestures. Why me? He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

The academician had returned home from Chernobyl for the second time, on May 13, a changed man, his hands and face darkened by a radioactive tan, his ideological confidence shaken.16 With tears in his eyes, he described to his wife how overwhelmed they had been by the accident, how unprepared they were to protect the Soviet people from its consequences: the lack of clean water, uncontaminated food, and stable iodine. An examination at Hospital Number Six revealed the toxic fingerprint of the reactor deep within Legasov’s body: doctors found fission products, including iodine 131, cesium 134 and 137, tellurium 132, and ruthenium 103, in his hair, airways, and lungs.

Major changes were made to the RBMK design, including improving the speed at which control rods entered the core during a SCRAM event, lowering the time for a complete insertion from 18 seconds to 12; reducing the positive steam void coefficient of reactivity, and the effect of reactivity if there was a complete void in the core; installation of a Fast Acting Emergency Protection system, complete with an additional 24 control rods; removing the ability to bypass emergency protection systems while the reactor was at power, and, most importantly, a new control rod layout with a longer boron section and no empty/water section ahead of it. The graphite tip remained.264

Winston Churchill told the House of Commons and the nation that they ‘must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’ He did not deny that being expelled from the Continent was ‘a colossal military disaster’, but he did produce the most sublime passage of all his magnificent wartime oratory when he said: We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

(Corinthian:) Many schemes which were ill-advised have succeeded through the still greater folly which possessed the enemy,and yet more, which seemed to be wisely contrived, have ended in foul disaster. The execution of an enterprise is never equal to the conception of it in the confident mind of its promoter; for men are safe while they are forming plans,but, when the time of action comes, then they lose their presence of mind and fail. We, however, do not make war upon the Athenians in a spirit of vain-glory, but from a sense of wrong; there is ample justification, and when we obtain redress, we will put up the sword. For every reason we are likely to succeed. First, because we are superior in numbers and in military skill; secondly, because we all obey as one man the orders given to us. (Book 1 Chapter 120.5-121.2)

There’s one major shortcoming inherent to using this method of cooling. Unlike in a typical PWR, the water entering the reactor is the same water that passes through the cooling pumps and then as steam through the turbines, meaning highly irradiated water is present in all areas of the system. A PWR uses a heat exchanger to pass heat from the reactor water to clean, lower pressure water, allowing the turbines to remain free of contamination. This is better for safety, maintenance and disposal. A second problem is that steam is allowed to form in the core, making dangerous steam voids more likely, and further increasing the chances of a positive void coefficient. In ordinary boiling water reactors, which use water as both a coolant and moderator like in a PWR, this would not be such a problem, but it is in a graphite-moderated BWR.

By the same token, the failure to control Hitler after he was released from prison looks unreasonable only with the certainty of hindsight. Through the mid-1920s, he was banned from speaking in most German states, but as time passed and memories of the putsch receded, the bans began to be lifted. After all, Hitler was now pledging to abide by the rules of legality, and how, in a democracy, could a politician be denied the right to be heard, no matter how insidious his message, if he stayed within the bounds of the law? Who—and by what authority—had the right to silence him? Saxony, at the start of 1927, was the first large state to lift the speaking prohibition and was followed by Bavaria and others. The last to do so was the all-important state of Prussia, by far the largest in the federation (“whoever possesses Prussia possesses the Reich,” Goebbels said). It held out until after the September 1928 elections, when the Nazis won a paltry 2.6 percent of the vote, but after that dismal showing its prohibition looked untenable, a restriction based on bad faith and sheer partisan politics. Such a feeble electoral result brought the question of free speech in a democratic system into clear focus. In 1928, the Nazis seemed less a threat to democracy than a spent force, while the Weimar Republic seemed to have put down genuine roots. Real wages were rising. Unemployment had dropped dramatically. Industrial production had climbed 25 percent since 1925. “For the first time since the war, the German people were happy,” one journalist wrote. The astute political economist Joseph Schumpeter said in early 1929 that Weimar had achieved an “impressive stability” and that “in no sense, in no area, in no direction, are eruptions, upheavals or disasters probable.” The real threat to democracy during these good times appeared to be not Hitler or his party but any bans on the leaders of political organizations. Of course, two years later, after the Nazis had grown to become the second largest party in the Reichstag, it was too late to outlaw them.

The Air Force has always had more money than sales resistance, and they bought a one-year program (probably for something in the order of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars) and in June of 1961 Hawkins and Summers punched the “start” button and the machine started to shuffle IBM cards. And to print out structures that looked like road maps of a disaster area, since if the compounds depicted could even have been synthesized, they would have, infallibly, detonated instantly and violently. The machine’s prize contribution to the cause of science was the structure, to which it confidently attributed a specific impulse of 363.7 seconds, precisely to the tenth of a second, yet. The Air Force, appalled, cut the program off after a year, belatedly realizing that they could have got the same structure from any experienced propellant man (me, for instance) during half an hour’s conversation, and at a total cost of five dollars or so. (For drinks. I would have been afraid even to draw the structure without at least five Martinis under my belt.)

Many potential readers will skip the shopping cart or cash-out clerk because they have seen so many disasters reported in the news that they’ve acquired a panic mentality when they think of them. “Disasters scare me to death!” they cry. “I don’t want to read about them!” But really, how can a picture hurt you? Better that each serve as a Hallmark card that greets your fitful fevers with reason and uncurtains your valor. Then, so gospeled, you may see that defeating a disaster is as innocently easy as deciding to go out to dinner. Remove the dread that bars your doors of perception, and you will enjoy a banquet of treats that will make the difference between suffering and safety. You will enter a brave new world that will erase your panic, and release you from the grip of terror, and relieve you of the deadening effects of indifference —and you will find that switch of initiative that will energize your intelligence, empower your imagination, and rouse your sense of vigilance in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. Indeed, just thinking about a disaster is one of the best things you can do —because it allows you to imagine how you would respond in a way that is free of pain and destruction. Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Wit­ness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing. Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.

Then the guy in the yard opened the slider and stepped inside, and the back of Reacher’s brain showed him the whole chess game right there, laid out, obvious, like flashing neon arrows, in immense and grotesque detail, the snap pivot left and the round into the meat of the yard guy’s chest, where it was less likely than a head shot to go through-and-through, which was good, given a neighborhood behind them full of wooden fences, but where it was more likely to soak the Lair family with thick pink mist, from behind, hair and all, which wasn’t good, because it would be traumatic, especially during such a week, except on reflection Reacher figured the week was already pretty much a disaster from that exact point onward, given that the chess game said there would be a dead guy at that very moment sliding to the floor of their private house, even as the homeowner-owned Python was snapping right again for two rounds at where the silhouette of the shoulder had been, which two rounds might or might not hit anything, but which would give a second’s cover for the scramble around the sofa and the capture of the dead guy’s Ruger, for a total of three rounds expended and fifteen gained.

Chernobyl’s third reactor was in a precarious situation of its own. Once Unit 3’s Shift Chief Yuri Bagdasarov realised there was no backup water supply to cool the still-operating third reactor, because all water lines from the emergency tanks were connected to its devastated twin, he asked Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin - who had by now arrived at the plant - for permission to shut it down. Fomin, who struggled to cope during the crisis, forbade it. By 5am, justifiably fearing the worst, Bagdasarov distributed respirators and iodine tablets to his staff to prevent radioactive iodine from building up in the thyroid gland, and then disobeyed his superior’s instructions; he shut down Unit 3 himself.160 Along with the firemen, he prevented the possible destruction of a second reactor. The decision to shut down Units 1 and 2 was not made for a further 16 hours. Fomin, meanwhile, ordered a trusted senior physicist to investigate the state of Unit 4. Like the others before him, his report of the reactor’s destruction was ignored and he, too, later died. Time and time again Bryukhanov and Fomin were told that the reactor was completely destroyed, and time and time again they disregarded everyone who warned them.

Suddenly a violent noise leaped at them from no source that he could identify. He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves. “Shush!” said Ford. “Listen, it might be important.” “Im … important?” “It’s the Vogon captain making an announcement on the tannoy.” “You mean that’s how the Vogons talk?” “Listen!” “But I can’t speak Vogon!” “You don’t need to. Just put this fish in your ear.” Ford, with a lightning movement, clapped his hand to Arthur’s ear, and he had the sudden sickening sensation of the fish slithering deep into his aural tract. Gasping with horror he scrabbled at his ear for a second or so, but then slowly turned goggle-eyed with wonder. He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of colored dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses. He was still listening to the howling gargles, he knew that, only now it had somehow taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward English. This is what he heard … * Ford Prefect’s original name is only pronounceable in an obscure Betel-geusian dialect, now virtually extinct since the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758 which wiped out all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford’s father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able satisfactorily to explain. The whole episode is shrouded in deep mystery: in fact no one ever knew what a Hrung was nor why it had chosen to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven particularly. Ford’s father, magnanimously waving aside the clouds of suspicion that had inevitably settled around him, came to live on Betelgeuse Five, where he both fathered and uncled Ford; in memory of his now dead race he christened him in the ancient Praxibetel tongue. Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy. The other kids at school nicknamed him Ix, which in the language of Betelgeuse Five translates as “boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven.

10,000 roentgens per hour is enough radiation to kill you in one minute and was by far the highest level of radioactivity faced by any of the Liquidators. They nicknamed themselves Bio-Robots for the occasion. Nobody had ever worked in such conditions - before or since. “Obviously some people didn’t want to go,” recalls Alexander Fedotov, a former Bio-robot, “but they had to - they were reservists. They had to go. For me there was no question, I had to do my duty. Who was going to do it for me? Who was going to clear up this disaster and stop the spread of radioactivity all over the world? Somebody had to do it.”232 And so it was. Scientists calculated that people could work on the roof for up to 40 seconds at a time without receiving a fatal dose. During the day, terrified men from all walks of life dashed across the roof, hurled reactor graphite weighing up to 40 - 50kg over the precipice, and ran back inside. They wore hand-sewn, lead-plated suits that could only be used once (the lead absorbed too much radiation) as their only protection. At night, scouts - nicknamed Roof Cats - scampered over the ruined roof with dosimeters, mapping pockets of radiation so their daytime counterparts could avoid the most contaminated spots.233

On May 6th, three incredibly courageous volunteers in wet suits dove into the flooded basement together197. The divers were Alexei Ananenko, a senior reactor mechanical engineer who knew the valves’ location, and two colleagues: Valery A Bezpalov, a turbine engineer who would turn the second valve, and Boris Alexandrovich Baranov, a shift supervisor who acted as a backup/rescuer in case of an emergency, and who also carried a flashlight. They were aware of the stakes and what radiation levels were like in the basement, but were apparently promised that their families would be well taken care of if they died.198 “When the searchlight beam fell on a pipe, we were joyous,” Ananenko told the Government-controlled news agency TASS, shortly after his return.199 “The pipe led to the valves.” Their light failed moments later and the poor men had to feel their way along the pipes in darkness. Once the valves were opened, “We heard the rush of water out of the tank. And in a few more minutes we were being embraced by the guys.” With the valves open, the pressure suppression pool was drained of its 3,200 tons of water, but all three heroic men were suffering from radiation sickness symptoms even as they emerged from the water, and each soon succumbed. Or so the tale goes.200

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

Despite international calls for Chernobyl to be decommissioned at once, it endured a very gradual demise. On October 11th, 1991, just five years after the Unit 4 explosion, there was a third major accident at the plant, this time at Unit 2. Prior to the event, the Unit had been taken offline following another accident - this time a fire in its section of the turbine hall, which had broken out during minor turbogenerator repair work. After extinguishing the blaze, the generator had been isolated and its turbine coasted down to about 150 rpm when a faulty breaker switch closed, reconnecting it to the grid. The turbine rapidly sped up to 3000 rpm in under 30 seconds, then, according to a 1993 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “the influx of current to TG-4 overheated the conductor elements and caused a rapid degradation of the mechanical end joints of the rotor and excitation windings. A centrifugal imbalance developed and damaged generator bearings 10 through 14 and the seal oil system, allowing hydrogen gas and seal oil to leak from the generator enclosure. Electrical arcing and frictional heat ignited the leaking hydrogen and seal oil creating hydrogen flames 8 meters high, and dense smoke which obstructed the visibility of plant personnel. When the burning oil reached the busbar of the generator it caused a three-phase 120,000-amp short circuit.”265

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true. Humans everywhere share the same goals when the context is large enough. And the study of the Cosmos provides the largest possible context. Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

When he was gone the men on the bench began to laugh. One of them rose to better see the map. Es un fantasma, he said. Fantasma? Sí, sí. Claro. Cómo? Cómo? Porque el viejo está loco es como. Loco? Billy stood looking at the map. No es correcto? he said. The man threw up his hands. He said that what they beheld was but a decoration. He said that anyway it was not so much a question of a correct map but of any map at all. He said that in that country were fires and earthquakes and floods and that one needed to know the country itself and not simply the landmarks therein. Besides, he said, when had that old man last journeyed to those mountains? Or journeyed anywhere at all? His map was after all not really so much a map as a picture of a voyage. And what voyage was that? And when? Un dibujo de un viaje, he said. Un viaje pasado, un viaje antigun. He threw up one hand in dismissal. As if no more could be said. Billy looked at the other three men on the bench. They watched with a certain brightness of eye so that he wondered if he were being made a fool of. But the one seated at the right leaned forward and tapped the ash from his cigarette and addressed the man standing and said that as far as that went there were certainly other dangers to a journey than losing one's way. He said that plans were one thing and journeys another. He said it was a mistake to discount the good will inherent in the old man's desire to guide them for it too must be taken into account and would in itself lend strength and resolution to them in their journey. The man who was standing weighed these words and then erased them in the air before him with a slow fanning motion of his forefinger. He said that the jovenes could hardly be expected to apportion credence in the matter of the map. He said that in any case a bad map was worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside those instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the map in question was a folly and that the dogs in the street would piss upon it. But man on the right only smiled and said that for that matter the dogs would piss upon their graves as well and how was this an argument? The man standing said that what argued for one case argued for all and that in any event our graves make no claims outside of their own simple coordinates and no advice as to how to arrive there but only the assurance that arrive we shall. It may even be that those who lie in desecrated graves-by dogs of whatever manner-could have words of a more cautionary nature and better suited to the realities of the world. At this the man at the left who'd so far not spoke at all rose laughing and gestured for the two boys to follow and they went with him out of the square and into the street leaving the disputants to their rustic parkbench tertulia.

Chapter 17   I was on my way from Rambam Hospital to Tiberias, when the news first came across the radio about a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Maggie was still at the Hematology  Ward. I tried to imagine how she felt listening to the news. Surely she was as shocked as everyone else. There in the ward, patients were fighting for their lives, and now in another place in the country, people had perished in seconds. The entire country was horrified by the horrible scenes that aired on all the media. Gradually, the magnitude of the disaster started to be known. A suicide bomber detonated a charge inside a bus, while travelers were going up and down the bus at the heart of the city. It was a few minutes before nine in the morning. There were over twenty dead and dozens wounded. At home, sitting in front of the TV, I watched the extensive coverage. This transition from the sick atmosphere of the hospital in the morning, to the atmosphere of the evening suicide bombing, was depressing. The TV coverage was painful and brought an atmosphere of sadness. I had a feeling that the broadcast intended to clarify to all the people who were still healthy  that their health would not help them. That their end could come just as it did to those victims of the terrorism act on the bus. People did not stop thinking about the event, and the harsh images which were shown repeatedly on the television. Reporters broadcasted from the scene in heightened excitement and everything was filmed live. It seemed that someone was afraid, lest, God forbid, there would be a single person in the country who did not watch this horror. It was appalling. It was one of the first suicide bombings in Israel, and perhaps one of the largest ones.

Well,that was fun," she said lightly as he maneuvered out of the lot. "I'm really glad you talked me into going out. My day was a blank page until seven." That long, quiet moment lingered in his mind even as it lingered in Shelby's. Alan shifted, hoping to ease the thudding in the pit of his stomach. "Always happy to help someone fill in a few empty spaces." Alan controlled the speed of the car through force of will. Holding her hadn't soothed him but rather had only served to remind him how much time had passed since he had last held her. "Actually you're an easy man to be with, Alan, for a politician." Easy? Shelby repeated to herself as she pressed the button to lower her window. Her blood was still throbbing from a meeting of eyes that had lasted less than ten seconds. If he was any easier, she'd be head over heels in love with him and headed for disaster. "I mean,you're not really pompous." He shot her a look, long and cool, that boosted her confidence. "No?" he murmured after a humming silence. "Hardly at all." Shelby sent him a smile. "Why,I'd probably vote for you myself." Alan paused at a red light, studying it thoughtfully before he turned to her. "Your insults aren't as subtle today, Shelby." "Insults?" Shelby gave him a bland stare. "Odd,I thought it was more flattery.Isn't a vote what it all comes down to? Votes, and that all-encompassing need to win." The light stayed green for five full seconds before he cruised through it. "Be careful." A nerve,she thought,hating herself more than a little. "You're a little touchy. That's all right." She brushed at the thigh of her jeans. "I don't mind a little oversensitivity." "The subject of my sensitivity isn't the issue,but you're succeeding in being obnoxious." "My,my,aren't we all Capitol Hill all of a sudden.

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

At that moment, remarkably, there was a man in the expansive reactor hall of Unit 4 who witnessed all this.121 Night Shift Chief of the Reactor Shop Valeriy Perevozchenko saw the top of the reactor - a 15-meter-wide disk comprised of 2000 individual metal covers which cap safety valves - begin to jump up and down. He ran. The reactor’s uranium fuel was increasing power exponentially, reaching some 3,000°C, while pressure rose at a rate of 15 atmospheres per second. At precisely 01:23:58, a mere 18 seconds after Akimov pressed the SCRAM button, steam pressure overwhelmed Chernobyl’s incapacitated fourth reactor. A steam explosion blew the 450-ton, 3-meter-thick upper biological shield clear off the reactor before it crashed back down, coming to rest at a steep angle in the raging maw it left behind. The core was exposed.122 A split second later, steam and inrushing air reacted with the fuel’s ruined zirconium cladding to create a volatile mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, which triggered a second, far more powerful explosion.123 Fifty tons of vaporised nuclear fuel were thrown into the atmosphere, destined to be carried away in a poisonous cloud that would spread across most of Europe. The mighty explosion ejected a further 700 tons of radioactive material - mostly graphite - from the periphery of the core, scattering it across an area of a few square kilometers. This included the roofs of the turbine hall, Unit 3, and the ventilation stack it shared with Unit 4, all of which erupted into flames. The reactor fuel’s extreme temperature, combined with air rushing into the gaping hole, ignited the core’s remaining graphite and generated an inferno that burned for weeks. Most lights, windows and electrical systems throughout the severely damaged Unit 4 were blown out, leaving only a smattering of emergency lighting to provide illumination.124

To appreciate the asymmetry between the possibility effect and the certainty effect, imagine first that you have a 1% chance to win $1 million. You will know the outcome tomorrow. Now, imagine that you are almost certain to win $1 million, but there is a 1% chance that you will not. Again, you will learn the outcome tomorrow. The anxiety of the second situation appears to be more salient than the hope in the first. The certainty effect is also more striking than the possibility effect if the outcome is a surgical disaster rather than a financial gain. Compare the intensity with which you focus on the faint sliver of hope in an operation that is almost certain to be fatal, compared to the fear of a 1% risk. The combination of the certainty effect and possibility effects at the two ends of the probability scale is inevitably accompanied by inadequate sensitivity to intermediate probabilities. You can see that the range of probabilities between 5% and 95% is associated with a much smaller range of decision weights (from 13.2 to 79.3), about two-thirds as much as rationally expected. Neuroscientists have confirmed these observations, finding regions of the brain that respond to changes in the probability of winning a prize. The brain’s response to variations of probabilities is strikingly similar to the decision weights estimated from choices. Probabilities that are extremely low or high (below 1% or above 99%) are a special case. It is difficult to assign a unique decision weight to very rare events, because they are sometimes ignored altogether, effectively assigned a decision weight of zero. On the other hand, when you do not ignore the very rare events, you will certainly overweight them. Most of us spend very little time worrying about nuclear meltdowns or fantasizing about large inheritances from unknown relatives. However, when an unlikely event becomes the focus of attention, we will assign it much more weight than its probability deserves. Furthermore, people are almost completely insensitive to variations of risk among small probabilities. A cancer risk of 0.001% is not easily distinguished from a risk of 0.00001%, although the former would translate to 3,000 cancers for the population of the United States, and the latter to 30.

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen. Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist. It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed. So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.

What greater contrast of chiaroscuro is there than that between burning screen and darkened audience? Take any photograph of an intent audience, and it is an image from Fuseli: of pale faces staring out of the night. What medium is so dependent on sensation, with the screen so much larger than life and the constant threat that in a fraction of a second the image we are watching can change unimaginably? And what are the abiding themes of cinema but glamour, sexuality, fear, horror, danger, violence, suspense, averted disaster, true love, self-sacrifice, happy endings, and the wholesale realization of those hopes and anxieties that we are too shy to talk about in the daylight? Why is it dark in cinemas? So that the compulsive force of our involvement may be hidden.

from a distance of 50 miles, were brought down in 10 seconds by demolition explosives, and that was that. The fuel-reprocessing industry in the UK has reported only one criticality accident in which fissile material managed to come together accidentally in a supercritical configuration. Just about every other country that has tried to separate plutonium from uranium in spent reactor fuel has experienced at least one such excursion, and this was Britain’s. This incident at the Windscale Works on August 24, 1970, is described by the criticality review committee at

Hans Kundnani, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and once a journalist in Berlin, seeks to relate Germany’s past to its recent behaviour in the eurozone crisis. He argues that history is in danger of repeating itself — not on the battlefield, but in the economy. His thesis is that today’s European Union is seeing a rerun of “the German question” that emerged after the founding of the Prussian empire. This time, Germany is not a military power but an economic one. Its economy is too dominant to preserve a stable balance with its eurozone and EU partners, yet too weak to enforce economic stability from above, he says. He calls it a “geo-economic semi-hegemon”, with the potential to cause a bitter and possibly disastrous conflict with its closest partners. Kundnani’s thesis is tempting. He believes that even today, Germans still feel they are victims — in the eurozone, suffering from the spendthrift behaviour of the southerners. A fear of Germany’s half-hearted hegemony is certainly shared in countries such as France, Italy and Greece. But this is not how Germans see themselves. The Germany that grew out of Stunde Null — the “zero hour” of 1945 — is a very different place from the insecure empire inaugurated by the Prussian Kaiser. The second world war, that greatest of self-inflicted national disasters, left the country divided and economically devastated. It has been overcome but not forgotten.

Canopus, lure of the dissolute and the anxious, where Hadrian and Antinous, like Cleopatra and Mark Antony before them, amused themselves in 130, and which made sufficient impact on Hadrian for him to give its name to part of his palatial villa at Tivoli, also lay on a tributary of the Nile west of where the river runs today. From the fourth century onwards a series of natural disasters wiped Canopus off the map. The rise of Christianity had long destroyed the temples and removed the treasures of pagan religion, and the depravity against which both ancient and Christian commentators had inveighed came to a truly biblical end.

Putin himself admits, would be most satisfied with the scenario under which the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics rejoin Ukraine as independent subjects accountable to Moscow. First, this would absolve Russia of responsibility for a region in the midst of a humanitarian disaster. Second, this would undermine the Ukrainian state from within. In brief, for the Kremlin, the turn to expansionism is more of a pressure release valve and a way to compensate for its weaknesses in other areas (including the economy), rather than an actual method of territorial acquisition.

From my first stab at second base, I became obsessively concerned for my vaginal upkeep. I began shaving the day after I felt my first tongue down my throat. The first buzz was a disaster, causing horrifically itchy dull razor breakout that made me look like I made love to a poison ivy bush. Whenever I thought there was a chance of unveiling my privates, I smothered every breakout with the same foundation I used for the occasional teenage acne face breakouts.

In 2009 the staid British journal New Scientist published an article with the provocative title “Space Storm Alert: 90 Seconds from Catastrophe,” which opens with the following lines: It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event—a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the Sun. It sounds ridiculous. Surely the Sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) . . . claims it could do just that. (Brooks 2009; see also National Research Council 2008 for the NAS report that New Scientist is referring to) In fact, this scenario is not so ridiculous at all, as the New Scientist article goes on to relate (see also International Business Times 2011b; Lovett 2011; National Research Council 2008). Indeed, if things do not change, it may be inevitable.

Climate change alarmism is a belief system, and needs to be evaluated as such. There is, indeed, an accepted scientific theory which I do not dispute and which, the alarmists claim, justifies their belief and their alarm. This is the so-called greenhouse effect: the fact that the earth’s atmosphere contains so-called greenhouse gases (of which water vapour is overwhelmingly the most important, but CO2 is another) which, in effect, trap some of the heat we receive from the sun and prevent it from bouncing back into space. Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would be so cold as to be uninhabitable. But, by burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and thus, other things being equal, increasing the earth’s temperature. But four questions immediately arise, all of which need to be addressed, coolly and rationally. First, other things being equal, how much can increased atmospheric CO2 be expected to warm the earth? (This is known to scientists as climate sensitivity, or sometimes the climate sensitivity of carbon.) This is highly uncertain, not least because clouds have an important role to play, and the science of clouds is little understood. Until recently, the majority opinion among climate scientists had been that clouds greatly amplify the basic greenhouse effect. But there is a significant minority, including some of the most eminent climate scientists, who strongly dispute this. Second, are other things equal, anyway? We know that over millennia, the temperature of the earth has varied a great deal, long before the arrival of fossil fuels. To take only the past thousand years, a thousand years ago we were benefiting from the so-called medieval warm period, when temperatures are thought to have been at least as warm, if not warmer, than they are today. And during the Baroque era we were grimly suffering the cold of the so-called Little Ice Age, when the Thames frequently froze in winter and substantial ice fairs were held on it, which have been immortalised in contemporary prints. Third, even if the earth were to warm, so far from this necessarily being a cause for alarm, does it matter? It would, after all, be surprising if the planet were on a happy but precarious temperature knife-edge, from which any change in either direction would be a major disaster. In fact, we know that, if there were to be any future warming (and for the reasons already given, ‘if’ is correct) there would be both benefits and what the economists call disbenefits. I shall discuss later where the balance might lie. And fourth, to the extent that there is a problem, what should we, calmly and rationally, do about it?

A classic study, which set the stage for much research to come, was done nine years after Brown and Kulik’s initial publication. It was undertaken by psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch, who were perceptive enough to realize that a personal and national disaster could be important for realizing how memory works.12 The day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, they gave 106 students in a psychology class at Emory University a questionnaire asking about their personal circumstances when they heard the news. A year and a half later, in the fall of 1988, they tracked down forty-four of these students and gave them the same questionnaire. A half year later, in spring 1989, they interviewed forty of these forty-four about the event. The findings were startling but very telling. To begin with, 75 percent of those who took the second questionnaire were certain they had never taken the first one. That was obviously wrong. In terms of what was being asked, there were questions about where they were when they heard the news, what time of day it was, what they were doing at the time, whom they learned it from, and so on—seven questions altogether. Twenty-five percent of the participants got every single answer wrong on the second questionnaire, even though their memories were vivid and they were highly confident in their answers. Another 50 percent got only two of the seven questions correct. Only three of the forty-four got all the answers right the second time, and even in those cases there were mistakes in some of the details. When the participants’ confidence in their answers was ranked in relation to their accuracy there was “no relation between confidence and accuracy at all” in forty-two of the forty-four instances.

While Diana and her mother started planning guest lists, wardrobe requirements and the other details for the wedding of the year, the media vainly attempted to discover her hiding-place. The one man who did know was the Prince of Wales. As the days passed, Diana pined for her Prince and yet he never telephoned. She excused his silence as due to the pressure of his royal duties. Finally she called him only to find that he was not in his apartment at Buckingham Palace. It was only after she called him that he telephoned her. Soothed by that solitary telephone call, Diana’s ruffled pride was momentarily mollified when she returned to Coleherne Court. There was a knock on the door and a member of the Prince’s staff appeared with a large bouquet of flowers. However there was no note from her future husband and she concluded sadly that it was simply a tactful gesture by his office. These concerns were forgotten a few days later when Diana rose at dawn and travelled to the Lambourn home of Nick Gaselee, Charles’s trainer, to watch him ride his horse, Allibar. As she and his detective observed the Prince put the horse through its paces on the gallops Diana was seized by another premonition of disaster. She said that Allibar was going to have a heart attack and die. Within seconds of her uttering those words, 11-year-old Allibar reared its head back and collapsed to the ground with a massive coronary. Diana leapt out of the Land Rover and raced to Charles’s side. There was nothing anyone could do. The couple stayed with the horse until a vet officially certified its death and then, to avoid waiting photographers, Diana left the Gaselees in the back of the Land Rover with a coat over her head. It was a miserable moment but there was little time to reflect on the tragedy. The inexorable demands of royal duty took Prince Charles on to wales, leaving Diana to sympathize with his loss by telephone. Soon they would be together forever, the subterfuge and deceit ended. It was nearly time to let the world into their secret. The night before the engagement announcement, which took place on February 24, 1981, she packed a bag, hugged her loyal friends and left Coleherne Court forever. She had an armed Scotland Yard bodyguard for company, Chief Inspector Paul Officer, a philosophical policeman who is fascinated by runes, mysticism and the after-world. As she prepared to say goodbye to her private life, he told her: “I just want you to know that this is the last night of freedom in your life so make the most of it.” Those words stopped her in her tracks. “They felt like a sword through my heart.

Everett opened his mouth to argue, but before he could utter a single word, Caroline set aside her cup and began rising from her chair, stopping suddenly as she sucked in a sharp breath of air. A mere second later, Everett discovered what was behind her peculiar behavior. The chair was now firmly attached to Caroline’s behind, sticking out at a very awkward angle. One glance to the twins—both of whom were looking far too innocent—proved who was responsible for the latest disaster. A second later, there was an ominous ripping sound, and to his relief, Caroline was no longer attached to the chair, but when she turned around, he discovered that she was also no longer attached to the back of her skirt. As her shrieks of outrage began bouncing around the room, Everett realized what he was going to have to do. He was, much against his better judgment, going to have to seek out Miss Longfellow and beg her—on bended knee and with flowers, no doubt—to come work for him.

Not present at Supreme Headquarters when the news of the Israeli air strikes arrived, Nasser also welcomed the opening of hostilities and believed the tide would soon turn. Nevertheless, by 10:00—the height of the second wave—when the air force claimed to have downed 161 Israeli bombers, Nasser became suspicious. He tried contacting ‘Amer, but received no reply; Sidqi Mahmud was also unreachable. One of the few men who would have told him the truth, Anwar Sadat, had secluded himself at home. Entering headquarters at 11:00, Sadat heard from Soviet ambassador Pojidaev and from other senior officers of the full extent of Egypt’s disaster. “I just went home and stayed in for days,” he wrote, unable to watch the “crowds…chanting, dancing, and applauding the faked-up victory reports which our mass media put out hourly.

I really don’t dance, Davis, but thank you for the offer.” “I don’t actually know the steps, Miss Millie, but it seems a shame that you and Miss Plum are looking so lovely tonight, but haven’t been given the opportunity to waltz.” “It’s a shame indeed.” Millie’s breath left her in a split second as Everett strolled across the terrace, smiling her way and looking remarkably handsome, at least to her, even though his face was still a bit of a disaster. Coming to a stop right in front of her, he nodded to Davis. “Perhaps you could offer Miss Plum a dance instead?” Davis’s eyes widened. He leaned closer to Everett and lowered his voice. “Miss Plum scares me, Mr. Mulberry. That’s why I asked Miss Millie. She’s safer.” “I’m completely safe, Davis,” Lucetta said with a huff before she took the poor man by the arm and grabbed hold of his other hand. “Allow me to teach you the basic steps of the waltz.” With Davis turning bright red, Lucetta sent Millie a wink and then spun Davis around, not giving the man an opportunity to refuse her demand of a waltz. “That’ll be something he’ll be able to talk about for years,” Millie said, catching Everett’s eye, which immediately had all the breath leaving her again. To her confusion, Everett frowned. “I must beg your pardon, Millie. I rather rudely stepped in between you and Davis. It has not escaped my notice that he seems a little . . . keen to be around you, and . . . if you’re, ah, keen to be around him, I won’t stand in your way.” Millie scrunched up her nose. “Davis has been secretly seeing one of the maids, Ann, for over a year now, so any keenness on his part has probably just been a ruse to hide that relationship. But don’t go letting anyone know about that relationship, and don’t even think about letting either Ann or Davis go from their positions.” “Since you told me you’re planning to tell Harriet about Davis and his tailoring skills, I have a feeling he won’t be in my employ long, but of course I won’t let him or Ann go.” “Wonderful, and . . . thank you for that.” “You’re welcome, and since that’s settled . . . shall we waltz?” “I should warn you that what we’re about to do will not remotely be considered a waltz, not given my two left feet.” “We’ll see about that.” Laughter rumbled in Everett’s chest but the rumbling died a sudden death when he pulled her close, his breath fanning her face. “Did I tell you how lovely you look tonight?” “I don’t believe so,” Millie managed to whisper. “Well, now you know, and . . . we’re waltzing.” Millie

The navy took them from all walks of life and winnowed out anyone who showed signs of self-doubt—in other words, anyone who carried the usual baggage of humility that weighed down most of the human race—and retained only those with balls the size of grapefruit and a brain the size of a pea, or so Marty liked to announce after a couple of drinks at the officers’ club. Still, he reflected, Lundeen had a remarkable ability to look disaster in the face, flip it a bird, and go merrily on his way. Tonight the bombardier’s eyes kept swiveling back to the fuel gauge. Greve had not been able to find the target on the first bomb run. Lundeen had insisted on flying a racetrack pattern and making a second attempt. Lundeen was driving, so that is what they did. But as they turned onto the final bearing for the second try, they had run right into a flak trap. Lundeen had cussed and

There was a book called The Twenty-Six Commandments of Irish Dueling. That sounded cool. Nicholas reached for it, but Seiji’s books were packed together so tightly he actually had to force the book out. The bookcase rocked, and a watch in a little case tumbled from the top shelf and hit the floor. A different book fell down and struck Nicholas’s foot. Nicholas, hopping in wild dismay, stepped on the watch. The plastic case cracked. When Nicholas hastily removed his foot, he saw that the watch inside the case had cracked, too. The whole disaster took about five seconds. Seiji sounded calmly pleased to be proven right. “I knew you would do something like this.” “Um,” said Nicholas. “Oops. Sorry. I’ll pay for that! Or I’ll get it fixed or something!” Seiji sighed dismissively, opening his book back up. “All right.” That made Nicholas feel much worse. There were plenty of guys at Kings Row who would’ve got very nasty about Nicholas daring to touch, let alone break, their stuff. Seiji wasn’t like that. Seiji’s words might cut, but he didn’t say them to cut. Seiji wasn’t Aiden, whom Nicholas never paid attention to. When Aiden spoke, all Nicholas heard was: Blah, blah, blah, I’m a snotty rich kid who talks too much. Nicholas had never seen Seiji get any pleasure out of being cruel. That was what made Seiji’s words cut deep. Nicholas knew Seiji meant what he said.

The disaster I’d been anticipating from the second Junie was born. And I had never even seen it coming.

I felt like I'd just asked a child what he wanted to be when he grew up. And a child had answered me, honestly, with no adult filter telling him what was and wasn't possible. "Your own planet," I said. I wanted to laugh but couldn't. In fact, I had goose bumps. This man sitting in front of me had no detectable talent, did everything wrong, wasn't comfortable saying how old he was or where he was from, and seemed to take an hour to learn what most people picked up in five seconds. Still, for that moment I believed him. I believed he could have his own planet. "Yeah," he said, looking up. "I see this big thing and big light and big events with stores and hotel and movie. All these things all together. It will be spectacular." He reached for his glass of hot water but hesitated before lifting it to his mouth. Tommy peered at me from beneath his large protruding brow. "And you can live in my planet, if you decide. Maybe I let you stay for little while." What did I think of living on Tommy's planet? I wasn't sure. What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I'd never seen in anyone else: a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking self-awareness, yet also weirdly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy—an aura of the possible. Stick with him, I thought, and something would happen, even if I had no idea what that something might be. Maybe that was it: Tommy made me listen to the right voices in my head. This big, childish vision of his—what was it if not every actor's secret dream?

Interestingly, outbreaks at Messina form convenient bookends for the second pandemic: it was the first place in the West to suffer in 1347, and the last in 1743. Although, understandably, the demographic disaster so graphically described by contemporary writers and historians at the outset of the second pandemic has captured the imagination, it is clarifying to recognize that the virulence of the plague did not decline over the centuries. Some of the final epidemics of the second pandemic were among the most devastating and dramatic, such as the great disasters in London (1665–1666) and Marseille (1720–1722). What

I don't have a lot of freedom, from the guys or my role, but when I ride my bike, I'm on the verge between control and the bike controlling me. My life wavers between safety and danger, but this time the split second between triumph and disaster is in my hands. And I need more.

I thought how the lives of exiled people are like being on a flight. They are up in the air, between land and sky, not knowing when and whether they will ever land somewhere…I thought how transits are like the lives of many dislocated people like myself. The storyline from my experience often goes like this: a disaster befalls the place you call ‘home.’ You leave for another place hoping it will be just a temporary wait. Sometimes, the second destination is so harsh and unforgiving that you think of it as a ‘temporary transit’ and keep looking for a ‘final’ station that can grant you at least the basic human rights with some dignity. Over time, the temporary becomes permanent. But, deep inside, your feelings, senses, and existence may not cooperate with your new permanent reality. And so, you may find yourself in a state that can be best described as ‘permanently temporary.’ You become divided and torn deep inside constantly hearing two voices: one voice tells you that it is all temporary no matter how long it takes; and a second voice tells you not to believe the first one as this is your permanent destiny.

With a historian’s eye, Archibald Gracie attempted to separate truth from fantasy as he listened to the survivors’ stories, a potential book beginning to form in his mind. Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman regularly stopped by the small cabin Gracie shared with Hugh Woolner to discuss various aspects of the disaster. All agreed that the explosions heard during the sinking could not have been the ship’s boilers blowing up. From the discovery of the severed wreck in 1985 we now know that the “explosions” were actually the sound of the ship being wrenched apart. But Gracie and Lightoller firmly believed that the ship had sunk intact—a view that would become the prevailing opinion for the next seventy-three years. Gracie thought that Norris Williams and Jack Thayer, “the two young men cited as authority … of the break-in-two theory,” had confused the falling funnel for the ship breaking apart. But both Williams and Thayer knew exactly what they had seen, as did some other eyewitnesses. On the Carpathia, Jack Thayer described the stages of the ship’s sinking and breaking apart to Lewis Skidmore, a Brooklyn art teacher, who drew sketches that were later featured in many newspapers. The inaccuracies in Skidmore’s drawings, however, only bolstered the belief that the ship had, in fact, sunk intact. And what of the most famous Titanic legend of all—that the band played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship neared its end? It’s often claimed that this was a myth that took hold among survivors on the Carpathia and captivated the public in the aftermath of the disaster. None of the musicians survived to confirm or deny the story, but Harold Bride noted that the last tune he heard being played as he left the wireless cabin was “Autumn.” For a time this was believed to be a hymn tune by that name, but Walter Lord proposed in The Night Lives On that Bride must have been referring to “Songe d’Automne,” a popular waltz by Archibald Joyce that is listed in White Star music booklets of the period. Historian George Behe, however, has carefully studied the survivor accounts regarding the music that was heard during the sinking and has found credible evidence that “Nearer My God to Thee” and perhaps other hymns were played toward the end. Behe also recounts that the orchestra’s leader, Wallace Hartley, was once asked by a friend what he would do if he ever found himself on a sinking ship. Hartley replied, “I don’t think I could do better than play ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ” The legendary hymn may not have been the very last tune played on the Titanic but it seems possible that it was heard on the sloping deck that night.

Fifteen years after leaving her husband, Frances—who never remarried—found herself in the headlines, accused of being a conniving homewrecker. In a lawsuit filed in March 1922, asking for $25,000 in damages, Mrs. Marion Mehren of 2971 Second Boulevard, Detroit, accused Frances of alienating the affections of her husband, Paul Mehren. According to Mrs. Mehren’s allegations, “the woman lawyer took her husband for automobile rides, permitted him to visit her at her apartment . . . and accepted gifts of groceries from him.” When Mrs. Mehren confronted her husband and “accused him of being too friendly with Mrs. Keusch,” he flew into a rage and “told her to ‘go ahead and get a divorce.’”9 For her part, Frances brushed off the accusations, “declaring that Mehren was nothing more than a chauffeur and a servant.” Six years earlier, while she was recovering from a knee injury, Mehren “scrubbed the floor of her apartment, washed dishes and performed other menial work.” Occasionally, she “employed him to take her for drives while she was convalescing.” She “paid him for everything he did for her,” as well as “for all the groceries.”10 The story took an even juicier turn during Mrs. Mehren’s court appearance that September, when she admitted to physically assaulting her alleged romantic rival. As she told the judge, she and her husband were out in their car when she spotted Mrs. Keusch, who called out “Hello, Paul” as they drove past. “Jumping from the car,” the enraged wife—who had known “her husband was going with another woman” ever since “he left home for three days in July, 1920”—had set upon Frances and badly “scratched her face.”11 Four years later, in August 1926, Frances Kehoe Keusch died of heart disease—chronic myocarditis.12 The scandal she had been involved in might have set tongues wagging at the time. Compared with the enormity perpetrated by another Kehoe sibling just one year later, however, it was a trivial matter indeed.

The superintendent of the new consolidated school, Emory Huyck, had been recommended for the job by his alma mater, Michigan State Agricultural College.1 He was born in 1894 in Butternut, Michigan, not far from Carson City, one of eleven children, all of whom would outlive him, as would both his parents, William and Mary. After graduating from high school at the top of his class, Emory briefly attended the Ferris Institute in Big Rapids, Michigan. Ferris had been founded in 1884 by future Michigan governor and US senator Woodbridge Nathan Ferris as an “industrial school” meant to provide both practical training and a basic liberal arts education “to all young men and women, regardless of their ages, regardless of their mental attainments, regardless of their present conditions, who desire to make themselves stronger and better.”2 In 1917, while teaching at a school in the Montcalm County village of Pierson, Emory registered for the draft. His registration card suggests that he was not merely willing but was keen to serve his country. To the question “Do you claim exemption from draft?” he answered with an emphatic “I do not,” rather than a simple “no,” as most young men did.3 Stationed at Camp Custer near Battle Creek during the war years, he served as a training officer. He would eventually be commissioned second lieutenant of cavalry in the Officers’ Reserve Corps.4

By 1920, he was living back home with his parents while pursuing a degree at Michigan State Agricultural College.5 Specializing in chicken breeding, he proved to be so proficient that, immediately after his graduation, he received a summer school appointment as “instructor in poultry husbandry for federal students”—young veterans attending college with governmental aid.6 In addition to his academic work, the religiously committed Huyck was active in the Student Volunteer Movement, a campaign begun in 1886 to enlist college students for missionary work abroad with the ultimate goal of bringing about (as its watchword put it) “the evangelization of the world in this generation.”7 In April 1922, just prior to his graduation from Michigan State Agricultural College and three months shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Emory accepted the position of superintendent of the Bath Consolidated School at an annual salary of $2,300. Eight months later, two days after Christmas, Emory married Ethel Newcomb of Pierson, Michigan, six years his senior; she would also join the faculty at the newly built school, teaching “vocal music” and second grade.8

General Electric was the largest company in the world in 2004, worth a third of a trillion dollars. It had either been first or second each year for the previous decade, capitalism’s shining example of corporate aristocracy. Then everything fell to pieces. The 2008 financial crisis sent GE’s financing division—which supplied more than half the company’s profits—into chaos. It was eventually sold for scrap. Subsequent bets in oil and energy were disasters, resulting in billions in writeoffs. GE stock fell from $40 in 2007 to $7 by 2018. Blame placed on CEO Jeff Immelt—who ran the company since 2001—was immediate and harsh. He was criticized for his leadership, his acquisitions, cutting the dividend, laying off workers and—of course—the plunging stock price. Rightly so: those rewarded with dynastic wealth when times are good hold the burden of responsibility when the tide goes out. He stepped down in 2017. But Immelt said something insightful on his way out. Responding to critics who said his actions were wrong and what he should have done was obvious, Immelt told his successor, “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.

In the wake of the Great Famine of 1847, nearly one million immigrants fled Ireland for the United States. Among them was a farmer from Wexford County, Patrick Kehoe. Leaving his wife and seven children behind until he could establish himself in the New World, he first settled in Howard County, Maryland, where he found work as a stonemason. In 1850, he sent for his oldest son, Philip, a strapping seventeen-year-old. The rest of the family followed in 1851. By then, Michigan Fever—as the great surge of settlers during the 1830s came to be known—had subsided. Still, there was plenty of cheap and attractive land to be had for pioneering immigrants from the East. In 1855, Philip Kehoe, then twenty-two, left his family in Maryland and journeyed westward, settling in Lenawee County, roughly one hundred miles southeast of Bath. For two years, he worked as a hired hand, saving enough money to purchase 80 acres of timberland. That land became the basis of what would eventually expand into a flourishing 490-acre farm.1 In late 1858, he wed his first wife, twenty-six-year-old Mary Mellon, an Irish orphan raised by her uncle, a Catholic priest, who brought her to America when she was twenty. She died just two and a half years after her marriage, leaving Philip with their two young daughters, Lydia and a newborn girl named after her mother.2 Philip married again roughly three years later, in 1864. His second wife, twenty-nine at the time of their wedding, was the former Mary McGovern, a native New Yorker who had immigrated to Michigan with her parents when she was five. By the time of her death in 1890, at the age of fifty-five, she had borne Philip nine children: six girls and three boys. From the few extant documents that shed light on Philip Kehoe’s life during the twenty-six years of his second marriage, a picture emerges of a shrewd, industrious, civic-minded family man, an epitome of the immigrant success story.

About half of poop-related emissions come from pig manure, and the rest from cow manure. There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation.

But when he got to his office, after dropping Peter off at camp, Dakota wasn’t there. She’d left early the day before. He checked the machine to see if she’d called in sick, but there wasn’t any message. By ten, he was worried and wondering whom to talk to. Just when he picked up the phone to call Pia, Dakota walked in. She looked like hell. Her face was pale, her eyes red and swollen. There was an air of grief and loss about her, as if something important to her had been taken away from her. He was on his feet the second he saw her. “What happened?” he demanded. She shook her head. “Nothing.” “It’s not nothing. Were you in an accident? Did someone hurt you?” If she’d had a boyfriend, he would assume he’d beaten her or slept with her best friend. But as far as he knew, Dakota wasn’t dating. “I’m fine,” she said, her mouth trembling as she spoke. “You have to believe me.” “Then you need to be more convincing.” She forced a smile that was more ghoulish than happy. “How’s that?” “Frightening.” She sighed. “I’m fine. I know I look bad. I’m not hurt, I’m not sick.” She swallowed. “Everything is how it’s always been.” “Dakota, get real. Something happened.” “No, it didn’t.” Tears filled her eyes. “It didn’t.” The tears spilled down her cheeks. Instinctively, he walked toward her, but she shook her head and backed away. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t do this. I can’t be here today. I need a day or two. Sick days, vacation days, whatever you want.” He felt helpless and confused. “Take whatever time you need. Can I call someone? One of your sisters? Your mom?” “No. No one. I’m fine. I have to go.” With that she grabbed her purse and practically ran out of the office. Raoul stared after her, not sure what he was supposed to do now. Let her go? Follow her? Call a friend? She wasn’t physically hurt—he could figure out that much. So what had happened? Had she heard bad news? But if there’d been a disaster in the family, he would have heard about it. News traveled fast in Fool’s Gold. He would give her time, he decided. If she wasn’t back at work in a couple of days, he would go talk to her. If she wouldn’t talk to him, he would insist she talk to someone else.

like the 20th, perched high above Paris. The Parc de Belleville has an unparalleled view of Paris (second only to the view I had from my rooftop apartment), and I could have easily imagined living there amid its rough brick streets and the human scale of the architecture.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed . . . and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of.” Beauvoir looked over and saw the chief, his eyes closed and his head tilted back, but his lips moving, repeating a phrase. “Up, up the long delirious burning blue, I’ve topped the wind-swept heights . . . Where never lark, or even eagle flew.” “Where’s that from?” asked Beauvoir. “A poem called ‘High Flight’ by a young Canadian aviator in the Second World War.” “Really? He must’ve loved flying. Bees love flying. Can cover long distances for food, if they have to, but they stay close to the hive if they can.” “He died,” said Gamache. “Pardon?” “Says here the poet was killed. Shot down. The poem was quoted by President Reagan after the Challenger disaster.” But he’d lost Beauvoir to the bees again.

It is not at all an exaggeration to suggest that the Third World debt crisis was the colonized world’s second historic disaster (after the brutal experience of colonization and the associated slave trade). In fact, it was a disaster from which most Third World countries have never quite recovered.

Great CEOs know this. They don’t surround themselves with sycophants and yes-men who tell them whatever they already think is right. In the best of cases, such a practice lowers performance, because there are fewer ideas in the mix; it explains why one study of CEOs finds they tend to see falling performance in the second half of their tenures. They start relying too much on their own judgment as opposed to the ideas of others.25 In the worst cases, it leads to disasters that could be averted with a little critical feedback. The Harvard Business Review has dispensed this simple piece of advice: “Hire people who disagree with you.

Exposure of either one could spell disaster. He covered the tracks of his double infidelity with precision and care. Every few days, he would send a disguised message to Leila, and commit adultery in a different Copenhagen hotel; every four weeks, he would make his way to an unremarkable flat in a boring Danish suburb, and commit treason. Over the course of a year, he established a system of evasion, eluding both Soviet surveillance and the suspicions of his wife. His relationships, with both Leila and MI6, were deepening. He felt safe. Which he was not. One winter evening, a young Danish intelligence officer was heading home to Ballerup when he spotted a car with diplomatic number plates parked in a side street, far from the diplomatic enclaves. The young man was curious. He was also trained, and mustard keen. On closer inspection, he recognized the car as belonging to the Soviet embassy. What was a Soviet diplomat doing in the suburbs, at 7 p.m. on a weekend? A dusting of snow had fallen, and fresh footprints led away from the car. The PET officer followed them for about 200 yards, to an apartment block. A Danish couple were leaving as he approached, and obligingly held the front door open for him. Wet footprints crossed the marble floor to the stairs. He followed them to the door of a flat on the second floor. From

I had three numbers for the dead in Florida’s hurricane Ian disaster. The first came from the local Sheriff that reported hundreds dead. The second came from the Florida government that reported no confirmed dead. The third came from missing persons reported that was at approximately ten thousand. The eventual death toll will probably be somewhere in the hundreds to thousands dead.

It was a mistake, that’s all. A stupid, stupid mistake. We all make them–it doesn’t matter if it’s a calculated risk or a split-second decision, but sometimes we’re only one step away from disaster.

A couple recently came to my office. Let’s call them Mark and Elizabeth Schuler. They came in for a consultation at Elizabeth’s request. Mark’s best friend was a stockbroker who had handled the couple’s investment portfolio for decades. All they wanted from me was a second opinion. If all went well, they planned to stop working within five years. After a quick chat about their goals, I organized the mess of financial paperwork they’d brought and set about assessing their situation. As my team and I prepared their “Retirement Map Review,” it was immediately apparent the Schulers were carrying significant market risk. We scheduled a follow-up appointment for two weeks later. When they returned, I asked them to estimate their comfortable risk tolerance. In other words, how much of their savings could they comfortably afford to have exposed to stock market losses? Elizabeth laughed at the question. “We’re not comfortable losing any of it,” she said. I had to laugh too. Of course, no one wants to lose any of their money. But with assets housed in mutual funds, 401(k)s, and stocks, there’s always going to be some measure of risk, not to mention fees to maintain such accounts. We always stand to lose something. So how much could they tolerate losing and still be okay to retire? The Schulers had to think about that for a while. After some quick calculations and hurried deliberation, they finally came up with a number. “I guess if we’re just roughly estimating,” Mark said, “I could see us subjecting about 10 percent of our retirement savings to the market’s ups and downs and still being all right.” Can you guess what percentage of their assets were at risk? After a careful examination of the Schulers’ portfolio, my team and I discovered 100 percent of their portfolio was actually invested in individual stocks—an investment option with very high risk! In fact, a large chunk of the Schulers’ money was invested in Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), a utility company that has been around for over one hundred years. Does that name sound familiar? When I met with the Schulers, PG&E stock was soaring. But you may remember the company name from several 2019 news headlines in which the electric and natural gas giant was accused of negligence that contributed to 30 billion dollars’ worth of damage caused by California wild fires. In the wake of that disaster, the company’s stock dropped by more than 60 percent in a matter of months. That’s how volatile individual stocks can be.

Where drugs are concerned “It’s all right in moderation” is like saying “It’s all right to get a tiny bit pregnant” or “By all means go over Niagara Falls, but don’t go down more than 3 feet.” The nature of all drug addiction is to fool you into believing that you are in control, to block your mind from the evil effects, and to drag you further and further down. The only difference between Niagara and alcohol is that with Niagara it takes just a few seconds for all victims to reach rock-bottom and disaster. The dangers are therefore very obvious and so very few people become victims. With alcohol we are actually persuaded that it is a good thing to be a victim.

She couldn’t possibly have seen into my soul in those five seconds, though that’s what it felt like." ~ Derek, from Harbor, Chapter 1

The second major opportunity cost is a reduced focus on existing businesses because of the distraction of a bad acquisition. You can see this in Bayer’s annual reports of 2018, 2019, and 2020, in which a lot of ink was expended on justifying the acquisition and on steps being taken to mitigate the disaster. As usual, numbers tell a better story, as I will explain next.

His arm flings out and his hand buries itself in the front of my shirt, then he’s yanking me hard in front of him. I catch onto his arms with a muffled cry... and it takes a second to see his bemused raised brow, just inches from my face. “Tree.” “What?” He nods his head to the enormous oak—the one looming massively, painfully obvious just an inch from where I’d been walking. That suppressed little smirk twitches his lips again. “Tree.” My cheeks burn. “My eyes,” I say weakly. Eden, you’re officially an obvious, oblivious disaster. “Bad eyesight. Terrible.” That smile becomes dry and too knowing. “Sure, your eyes.” He leans in closer. Half an inch more and we’d be kissing. “Here’s some old Army advice—it helps if you watch where you’re going.

Second Officer Lightoller also served in the Royal Navy during the first war. He returned to White Star after the Armistice and was made Chief Officer of the lumbering Celtic. For a while he had hopes of a transfer to the crack Olympic, but was passed over. He retired from the sea in the early 20’s and tried his hand (not too successfully) at everything from writing columns to raising chickens. But the sea still ran in his blood. He designed and sailed his own yacht Sundowner and had a final taste of peril in 1940. He took Sundowner over to Dunkirk with the great fleet of “little ships,” and rescued 131 British soldiers. At his best in the midst of disaster, he cheerfully wrote his brother-in-law several days later, “We’ve got our tails well up and are going to win no matter when or how.

There are a few phrases you can say to a woman that will send her from zero to bitch in less than a second. The top two being: you’d be prettier if you smiled, and you’re beautiful when you’re angry.

When these ancient parts of your brain are active or rehearsing the next disaster using the DMN, they effortlessly hijack your attention. You try to meditate and repetitive negative thinking takes over. In the cage match between Caveman Brain and Bliss Brain, Caveman Brain always wins. Survival is a more important need than happiness or self-actualization. You can’t self-actualize if you’re dead. In 2015 the US National Institutes of Health estimated that less than 10% of the US population meditates. One of the primary reasons for this is that meditation is hard. Most people who start a meditation program drop out. GETTING THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS When writing my first best-selling book, The Genie in Your Genes, I experimented with many schools of stress reduction and meditation. Heart coherence. Mindfulness. EFT tapping. Neurofeedback. Hypnosis. One day I had a Big Idea: What happens when you combine them all? I began playing with a routine that did just that. Here’s what I came up with: First, you tap on acupressure points to relieve stress. Second, you close your eyes and relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth. This sends a signal to your vagus nerve, which wanders all over your body, connecting all the major organ systems. It’s the key signaling component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs relaxation. 4.8. The vagus nerve connects with all the major organ systems of your body. Third, you imagine the volume of space inside your body, particularly between your eyes. This automatically generates big alpha in your brain, moving you toward the Awakened Mind. Fourth, you slow your breathing down to 6 seconds per inbreath and 6 seconds per outbreath. This puts you into heart coherence. Fifth, you imagine your breath coming in and going out from your heart area, and you picture a sphere of energy in your heart. Sixth, you send a beam of heart energy to a person or place that makes you feel wonderful. This puts you into deep coherence. After enjoying the connection for a while, you send compassion to everyone and everything in the universe. Feeling universal compassion produces the major brain changes seen in fMRI scans of longtime meditators. As we’ll see in Chapters 6 and 8, compassion moves the needle like nothing else. At this point, most people drop into Bliss Brain automatically. They’re in a combination of alpha, heart coherence, and parasympathetic dominance. They haven’t been asked to still their minds, sit cross-legged, follow a guru, or believe in a deity. They’ve just followed a sequence of simple physical steps. After a few minutes of universal compassion, you again focus your beam on a single person or place. You then gently disengage and draw the energy beam back into your own heart. Seventh, you direct your beam of compassion to a part of your body that is suffering or in pain. You end the meditation by returning your attention to the here and now.

Looking back, I equate this stage of enjoying the wilderness with the second glass of wine. Everything is lighter; you can see the funny side of disaster. But things rarely improve with the third, they get dangerous with the fourth, and you better pray to God someone is around to scoop you off the floor after that. It was our second day in the woods, and we were days away from home.