“
The weapon gave a rusty croak. ‘I don’t normally do weather reports anymore,’ the gun informed him politely.
‘Why is that?’
‘Ever since the demise of the old metropolis, there has been no control of the weather systems. Anyone who would have appreciated a weather forecast perished an awful long time ago. Besides, every time I started to inform my potential victims of the current cloud formations, or wind velocity, or barometric pressure, or potential precipitation, they simply ran away.
”
”
A.R. Merrydew (Our Blue Orange (Godfrey Davis, #1))
“
There was something horribly depressing, she felt, about watching the weather report. That life could be planned like the perfect summer picnic drained it of spontaneity.
”
”
Galt Niederhoffer (The Romantics)
“
Eagles ignore weather reports because they can fly above any storm.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
We get a lot of the sky is falling on the weather reports, so when something big does hit, people never expect it. If it's not as bad as the reports predicted, we complain. If it's worse than expected, we complain. If it's just as bad as predicted, we complain about that, too, because we'll say that the reports are wrong so often, there was no way to know they'd be right this time. It just gives people something to complain about.
”
”
Nicholas Sparks (Safe Haven)
“
The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years.
All business and politics is personal in the Philippines.
If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump.
They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on.
I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged.
I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy.
You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn.
Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race.
After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself.
It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up.
He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather.
The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up.
You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points]
Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse.
You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow.
In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil.
There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country.
Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us.
The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys.
The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time.
I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality.
The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent.
Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins.
Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it.
Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds.
Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising.
A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't.
Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill.
It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most.
Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold.
Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink?
She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.
”
”
John Richard Spencer
“
I get the news I need on the weather report
And I have nothing to do today but smile
”
”
Paul Simon
“
My life outlook isn’t cloudy. That’s just the weather report for the rest of my life.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book Has No Title)
“
I'm the guy who checks the weather report every day hoping for a thunderstorm.
”
”
J. Tonzelli (The End of Summer: Thirteen Tales of Halloween)
“
Sometimes I wish there were a weather report for your life. Tomorrow’s forecast is for routine high school shenanigans in the morning, but with dramatic parental betrayal by late afternoon, ending with wild emotional despair by nightfall. Details after the next commercial break.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (Instructions for Dancing)
“
People never pay attention to weather reports; this, I believe, is a constant factor in man's psychological makeup, stemming probably from an ancient distrust of the shaman. You want them to be wrong. If they're right, then they're somehow superior, and this is even more uncomfortable than getting wet.
"This Moment of the Storm
”
”
Roger Zelazny (The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth)
“
Weather Report: 3 murders allowed, if someone stands too close to you in public gatherings.
”
”
Nitya Prakash
“
The weather service reported that there weren't any atmospheric conditions present that might have led to fish raining from the sky.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
“
through. Top coat might have to wait, though. This morning’s weather report showed more
”
”
Melinda Leigh (She Can Tell (She Can #2))
“
What? Have I stunned you into silence? Shocked you with my
forwardness, maybe?”
“Nah, I was just searching for the weather report from hell. I’m guessing it must have frozen
over down there.
”
”
Norah Wilson (Needing Nita (Serve and Protect, #3.5))
“
Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle.
”
”
Michael Chabon (Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands)
“
What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?
”
”
Louise Erdrich (The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse)
“
If we knew everything about the future with certainty, our lives would be drained of emotion. No surprise and pleasure, no joy or thrill—we knew it all along. The first kiss, the first proposal, the birth of a healthy child would be about as exciting as last year’s weather report. If our world ever turned certain, life would be mind-numbingly dull. The
”
”
Gerd Gigerenzer (Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions)
“
The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn’t need to be read. You don’t have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don’t even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here’s every word I spoke for a week. Here’s a year’s worth of weather reports... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.
”
”
Kenneth Goldsmith
“
The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole..." Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that. On the wall, he painted a long, tightly knotted rope with a dripping yellow sun at the end of it, as if you could dive right into it. On the ropy cloud, he drew two figures-a thin girl and a withering Jew-and they were walking, arms balanced, toward that dripping sun.
”
”
Markus Zusak
“
The sun doesn’t live in England; it comes here on holiday when we’re all at work.
”
”
Benny Bellamacina (Piddly Poems for Children: Volume 1)
“
I try never to speak until people have finished with the weather reports.
”
”
Ashley Warlick (The Arrangement)
“
But some men can only read their internal weather report and have no concept that another human might not want the same things they want.
”
”
Lisa Lutz (The Passenger)
“
I loved your father, but he’s dead,” Mom says, as if giving the weather report. “I doubt he wants much these days.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1))
“
...as far as tomorrow is concerned, even the weather report isn’t very reliable, you know.
”
”
Kōbō Abe (The Face of Another)
“
Phones were originally seen as providing services—weather reports, stock market news, fire alarms, musical entertainment, even lullabies to soothe restless babies. Nobody saw them as being used primarily for gossip, social intercourse, or keeping in touch with friends and family. The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd.
”
”
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
“
The conference is geared to people who enjoy meaningful discussions and sometimes "move a conversation to a deeper level, only to find out we are the only ones there." . . . When it's my turn, I talk about how I've never been in a group environment in which I didn't feel obliged to present an unnaturally rah-rah version of myself. . . .
Scientists can easily report on the behavior of extroverts, who can often be found laughing, talking, or gesticulating. But "if a person is standing in the corner of a room, you can attribute about fifteen motivations to that person. But you don't really know what's going on inside." . . .
So what is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren't very pleased about it? . . .
The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive . . . . They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions--sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.
Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments--both physical and emotional--unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss--another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly. . . .
[Inside fMRI machines], the sensitive people were processing the photos at a more elaborate level than their peers . . . . It may also help explain why they're so bored by small talk. "If you're thinking in more complicated ways," she told me, "then talking about the weather or where you went for the holidays is not quite as interesting as talking about values or morality."
The other thing Aron found about sensitive people is that sometimes they're highly empathic. It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. They tend to have unusually strong consciences. They avoid violent movies and TV shows; they're acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior. In social settings they often focus on subjects like personal problems, which others consider "too heavy.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day.
C'est la vie? Our predictably totalitarian lives are an insult to the human spirit.
”
”
Gündüz Vassaf (Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life)
“
Spring is well underway, and the wild cherry trees are in full bloom. The fields are filled with darling violets and buttercups, and the sides of the road lined with the blossoms that will become berries in the summer heat. I know from the weather report that a crisp spring light is shining down on the navy blue water of Saratoga Passage, and my view, whether I can see it or not, will remain unchanged. I wrote to you once about the comfort I find in that. This remains true.
”
”
Kim Fay (Love & Saffron)
“
The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole...'
Max, at this moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that.
”
”
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
“
The history of each story, then, should read almost like a weather report: Hot today, cool tomorrow. This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today—explode—fly apart—disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?
”
”
Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)
“
a weather report for your life. Tomorrow’s forecast is for routine high school shenanigans in the morning, but with dramatic parental betrayal by late afternoon, ending with wild emotional despair by nightfall. Details after the next commercial break.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (Instructions for Dancing)
“
The moment you say so-and-so is wise or is cruel or defensive or loving or whatever, you have hardened your perception and become prejudiced and ceased to perceive this person moment by moment, somewhat like a pilot who operates today with last week’s weather report.
”
”
Anthony de Mello (The Way to Love: Meditations for Life)
“
Now, in every city into which I venture, uniforms rush upon me, dust dandruff from my collar, press a brochure into my hand, recite the latest weather report, pray for my soul, throw walk-shields over nearby puddles, wipe off my windshield, hold an umbrella over my head on sunny or rainy days, or shine an ultra-infra flashlight before me on cloudy ones, pick lint from my belly-button, scrub my back, shave my neck, zip up my fly, shine my shoes and smile—all before I can protest— right hand held at waist-level. What a goddamn happy place the universe would be if everyone wore uniforms that glinted and crinkled. Then we'd all have to smile at each other.
”
”
Roger Zelazny (Isle of the Dead)
“
Says O'Sullivan to me, "Mr. Fay, I'll have a word wid yeh?" "Certainly," says I; "what can I do for you?" "Sell me your sea- boots, Mr. Fay," says O'Sullivan, polite as can be. "But what will you be wantin' of them?" says I. "'Twill be a great favour," says O'Sullivan. "But it's my only pair," says I; "and you have a pair of your own," says I. "Mr. Fay, I'll be needin' me own in bad weather," says O'Sullivan. "Besides," says I, "you have no money." "I'll pay for them when we pay off in Seattle," says O'Sullivan. "I'll not do it," says I; "besides, you're not tellin' me what you'll be doin' with them." "But I will tell yeh," says O'Sullivan; "I'm wantin' to throw 'em over the side." And with that I turns to walk away, but O'Sullivan says, very polite and seducin'-like, still a-stroppin' the razor, "Mr. Fay," says he, "will you kindly step this way an' have your throat cut?" And with that I knew my life was in danger, and I have come to make report to you, sir, that the man is a violent lunatic.
”
”
Jack London (The Mutiny of the Elsinore)
“
Worried about the wrong things and not worried about the right things. The tendency to stick to mostly “safe” stories means you’ll see a lot of so-called day-of-air reports on topics that won’t generate pushback from the special interests we care about. Think: weather, polls, surveys, studies, positive medical news, the pope, celebrities, obituaries, press conferences, government announcements, animals, the British royals, and heartwarming features. They fill airtime much like innocuous white noise.
”
”
Sharyl Attkisson (Stonewalled: One Reporter's Fight for Truth in Obama's Washington)
“
I ordered a beer, opened the newspaper, and realized the light was all wrong for reading. Still, if you're a woman sitting alone in a bar, it's always best to look occupied, even if you're faking it. Most men think they're doing you a favor, keeping you company, curing you of the shame of being alone in public. It didn't take long for a fellow traveler to take a seat next to mine. I tensed my shoulders and raised the newspaper in a defensive posture. Some men would have read my body language for what it was - an indisputable DO NOT DISTURB sign. But some men can only read their internal weather report and have no concept that another human might not want the same things they want.
”
”
Lisa Lutz (The Passenger)
“
The most important thing that most people get from the news is the prediction of the following day’s weather, which most people are usually able to predict correctly by themselves.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price.
”
”
Paul Theroux (Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town)
“
My life before the flood was manageable; during the flood it was chaos. The National Weather Service only reported river levels, and at times, crest predictions. It didn't report or predict everything else that could go wrong.
”
”
David J. Kirk
“
I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. "So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios," he mused, "and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on."
"That's the theory," I said.
He said that all he'd been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he'd never heard before.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“
lunchtime. She waited for a minute for Mr. Fox to say what he had come to say. She didn’t think he had come all the way from his office in the snow, a good ten buildings away, to give her a weather report, but he only stood there in the frame of the open door, unable either to enter the room or step out of it. “Are you all right?” “Eckman’s dead,” he managed to say before his voice broke, and then with no more explanation he gave her the letter to show just how little about
”
”
Ann Patchett (State of Wonder)
“
We collect terabytes of information to turn our computers into crystal balls. Yet think of what would happen if our wishes were granted. If we knew everything about the future with certainty, our lives would be drained of emotion. No surprise and pleasure, no joy or thrill—we knew it all along. The first kiss, the first proposal, the birth of a healthy child would be about as exciting as last year’s weather report. If our world ever turned certain, life would be mind-numbingly dull.
”
”
Gerd Gigerenzer (Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions)
“
Pattern recognition is so basic that the brain's pattern detection modules and its reward circuitry became inextricably linked. Whenever we successfully detect a pattern-or think we detect a pattern-the neurotransmitters responsible for sensations of pleasure squirt through our brains. If a pattern has repeated often enough and successfully enough in the past, the neurotransmitter release occurs in response to the mere presence of suggestive cues, long before the expected outcome of that pattern actually occurs. Like the study participants who reported seeing regular sequences in random stimuli, we will use alomst any pretext to get our pattern recognition kicks.
Pattern recognition is the most primitive form of analogical reasoning, part of the neural circuitry for metaphor. Monkeys, rodents, and birds recognize patterns, too. What distinguishes humans from other species, though, is that we have elevated pattern recognition to an art. "To understand," the philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed, "is to perceive patterns."
Metaphor, however, is not the mere detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns, too. When Robert Frost wrote,
"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain"
his brain created a pattern connecting umbrellas to banks, a pattern retraced every time someone else reads this sentence. Frost believed passionately that an understanding of metaphor was essential not just to survival in university literature courses but also to survival in daily life.
”
”
James Geary (I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World)
“
When it comes to the notion of extraterrestrial life,” he began, “there exists a blinding array of bad science, conspiracy theory, and outright fantasy. For the record, let me say this: Crop circles are a hoax. Alien autopsy videos are trick photography. No cow has ever been mutilated by an alien. The Roswell saucer was a government weather balloon called Project Mogul. The Great Pyramids were built by Egyptians without alien technology. And most importantly, every extraterrestrial abduction story ever reported is a flat-out lie.
”
”
Dan Brown (Origin (Robert Langdon, #5))
“
We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions--even to a certainty--as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee's wings. This, too, I suggest, is the weather, and worthy of report.
”
”
Mary Oliver (Long Life: Essays and Other Writings)
“
The ninth is an easy driving hole. Plenty of room. The kind that makes you want to come out of your shoes at the ball. I was feeling a little cocky so as I addressed the ball I looked over at some of the people and said: “I been hittin’ shots for you people all day. I think I’ll hit this one for myself.” I didn’t catch it anywhere but on the screws. The ball looked like it might stay in the air long enough to send back weather reports. The crowd around the tee exploded with a cheer, and above it I heard Grover Scomer. He yelled: “Waxahachie, Nacogdoches!
”
”
Dan Jenkins (Dead Solid Perfect)
“
Did you ever notice that most of us relate to our lives like we have no control or say over them? Especially in areas where we’re not proud. We speak about ourselves like we’re reporting on the weather, making sweeping generalizations...And boy do we ever believe our own ‘forecasts.
”
”
Lauren Handel Zander (Maybe It's You: Cut the Crap. Face Your Fears. Love Your Life.)
“
Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities. Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, “Light, bearing on the starboard bow.” “Is it steady or moving astern?” the captain called out. Lookout replied, “Steady, captain,” which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship. The captain then called to the signalman, “Signal that ship: We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees.” Back came a signal, “Advisable for you to change course 20 degrees.” The captain said, “Send, I’m a captain, change course 20 degrees.” “I’m a seaman second class,” came the reply. “You had better change course 20 degrees.” By that time, the captain was furious. He spat out, “Send, I’m a battleship. Change course 20 degrees.” Back came the flashing light, “I’m a lighthouse.” We changed course.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
Allah’s Apostle said “The Hell Fire complained to its Lord saying, ‘Oh Allah! My different parts eat up each other.’ So, He allowed it to take two breaths, one in the winter and the other in summer, and this is the reason for the severe heat and the bitter cold you find (in weather).
”
”
Bukhari Hadeeth
“
Your brain is programmed to seek out the negative—dwindling resources, destructive weather, whatever’s out to hurt you. So when you switch on that radio on the way to work and get bombarded with all those reports about robberies, fires, attacks, the tanking economy, your brain lights up—it now will spend all day chewing
”
”
Darren Hardy (The Compound Effect)
“
From Flood, Flash, and Pheromones--coming soon:
In the torrential downpour with water swirling that threatened to pull her down, she didn’t see the voice’s owner. The hurricane had blessed the entire city with a surprise drenching. All weather reports had predicted it to pass over with sporadic rainfall but that didn’t happen. The storm settled over Houston as if it had no intention to move on. Cassie flailed in panic as the roof of her car disappeared under the water twenty feet beyond. She prayed once more that the container in it was watertight. And that she’d see her car again. Then she concentrated on living. Where had the voice come from?
”
”
Shelley K. Wall
“
I’d prefer to never witness that again, so a full weather report will be added to Shera’s daily tasks,” Arion chimes in, looking idly around the airplane. “On another note, so long as I learn to land a plane, I’ll already be an exceptionally better pilot than Vance.”
“Do you have any idea how damn fine of a job I just did?” Vance asks Arion with narrowed eyes.
Arion glances over at the smoking wreckage, quirking an eyebrow. “Not really, no,” the vampire quips in a very genuine tone.
“Fuck’s sake, Arion. It wasn’t me who crashed the plane; it was the—fuck it. Never mind,” Vance says, sighing in exasperation as he pulls out his phone. “I’ll have someone come take care of this and pick us up.
”
”
Kristy Cunning (Gypsy Moon (All The Pretty Monsters, #4))
“
We’ve seen what happens with the development of the cell-phone technology that was deployed in Africa faster than any other technology ever in the history of humanity. We see small villages, where they have no running water, wood fires to cook with, and no electricity — yet there’s one little solar panel on top of a mud hut and that solar panel is not there for light. It’s there to charge a Nokia 1000 feature phone. That phone gives them weather reports, grain prices at the local market, and connects them to the world. What happens when that phone becomes a bank? Because with bitcoin, it can be a bank. What happens when you connect 6 1/2 billion people to a global economy without any barriers to access?
”
”
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
“
I looked to Dean to see if he agreed, but he was just sitting there, staring at the silent TV screen. Somehow, I doubted he was enthralled by the weather report.
“Dean?” I said. He didn’t respond.
“Dean.” Lia reached her foot out and shoved him with her heel. “Earth to Redding.”
Dean looked up. Blond hair hung in his face. Brown eyes stared through us. He said something, but the words were garbled in his throat, caught halfway between a grunt and a whisper.
“What did you say?” Sloane asked.
“Bind them,” Dean said, his voice still rough, but louder this time. “Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.” He shut his eyes, and his hands curled into fists.
“Hey.” Lia was beside him in a second. “Hey, Dean.” She didn’t touch him, but she stayed by his side. The look on her face was fiercely protective—and terrified.
”
”
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2))
“
NASA documents from 1966 confirm the United States weather modification programme with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and in the 1990s the US military was publishing papers expounding the war possibilities of weather manipulation, or 'geoengineering' as it is also known. American scientist J. Marvin Herndon described in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2015 how weather modification has been happening for decades and includes the 'make mud, not war' programme named Project Popeye to create monsoon-scale rain during the Vietnam War. US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report published in 1996 explained how artificially-generated floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes 'offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary'.
”
”
David Icke (Everything You Need to Know But Have Never Been Told By David Icke)
“
In the 1980s, the American researcher Roger Ulrich discovered that simply having a room with a view of a natural environment rather than a brick wall helped patients at a Philadelphia hospital recover more quickly from gallbladder surgery. They also reported being less depressed and having less pain. Other studies have shown that being immersed in nature can lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and lessen ADHD symptoms.
”
”
Linda Åkeson McGurk (There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge))
“
I would have offered a somewhat different statement, based upon my familiarity with the assessment reports and literature: The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.
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Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
“
(...)
That winter you left me snow-blind trying to find enough details that would let you know that even though some people have perfect sight,
those same people could try to paint you by numbers and they still wouldn't get you right.
You were Monet number two and Van Gogh number 6,
a mix tape of Hendrix and Leibowitz portraits.
It makes no sense to me that we were ever together.
And my makeshift weather reports were the closest I ever came to telling you how I felt.
But you were a lover of the minuscule,
you dealt best with details.
Weighing our relationship on scales you balanced us out, and always made me feel needed.
You always asked me what to wear,
and I would stare at you as if for a second I wouldn't answer.
Of course, I always did.
Hid my affections, and my response:
"wear that smile" I said.
That one you wear when you see me.
That one you wear to bed.
”
”
Shane L. Koyczan (Remembrance Year)
“
What is the whole of our existence," said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, "but the sound of an appalling love?"
The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.
"What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don't mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given--children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps--we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes--those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God's love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God's love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know? ...
I am like you," said Father Damien to the snakes, "curious and small." He dropped his arms. "Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved."
The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.
"If I am loved," Father Damien went on, "it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.
”
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Louise Erdrich (The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse)
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Word from the outside, whether it arrived in a mail sack or a news report, seldom overshadowed the facts of our lives. We talked in facts -- work and weather, the logistics of this fence, that field -- but stories were how we spoke. A good story rose to the surface of a conversation like heavy cream, a thing to be savored and served artfully. Stored in dry wit, wrapped in dark humor, tied together with strings of anecdote, these stories told the chronology of a family, the history of a piece of land, the hardships of a certain year or a span of years, a series of events that led without pause to the present. If the stories were recent, they filtered through the door to my room late at night, voices hushed around the kitchen table as they sorted out this day and held it against others, their laughter sharp and sad and slow to come. Time was the key. Remember the time...and something in the air caught like a whisper. Back when. Back before a summer too fresh and real to talk about, a year's work stripped in a twenty-minute hailstorm; a man's right hand mangled in the belts of a combine, first day of harvest; an only son buried alive in a grain bin, suffocated in a red avalanche of wheat.
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Judy Blunt (Breaking Clean)
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Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see. "Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye see?" "Not much," I replied—"nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I think." "Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world?
Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh?
Can't ye see the world where you stand?
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
“
A bird does not need to take lessons in nest-building. Nor does it need to take courses in navigation. Yet birds do navigate thousands of miles, sometimes over open sea. They have no newspapers or TV to give them weather reports, no books written by explorer or pioneer birds to map out for them the warm areas of the earth. Nonetheless the bird “knows” when cold weather is imminent and the exact location of a warm climate even though it may be thousands of miles away. In attempting to explain such things, we usually say that animals have certain instincts that guide them. Analyze all such instincts and you will find they assist the animal to successfully cope with its environment. In short, animals have a Success Instinct. We often overlook the fact that man, too, has a Success Instinct, much more marvelous and much more complex than that of any animal. Our Creator did not shortchange man. On the other hand, man was especially blessed in this regard. Animals cannot select their goals. Their goals (self-preservation and procreation) are preset, so to speak. And their success mechanism is limited to these built-in goal-images, which we call “instincts.” Man, on the other hand, has something animals don’t: Creative Imagination. Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. With his imagination he can formulate a variety of goals. Man alone can direct his Success Mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.
”
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Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
“
During his first week on the job, McNamara sat down with the Pentagon’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), which had just completed an intensive study, known as WSEG Report #50, that found that a Soviet surprise attack on only five locations—the White House, the Pentagon, Camp David, Raven Rock, and Mount Weather—would likely destroy all of the nation’s command structure. Even simply hitting the first two would likely wipe out the military command structure, since Raven Rock and Mount Weather weren’t normally manned with senior personnel. “Both the Presidential and the SecDef-JCS levels of command are presently subject to operational incapacitation by the same events,” the report explained. Hitting all the nation’s major military commands and leadership sites would involve attacking just fourteen installations—a
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Garrett M. Graff (Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die)
“
Before I knew anything about church, I'd assumed that most Christians spoke the same language, shared a sense of fellowship, and beyond minor differences had a faith in common that could transcend political boundaries. But if I had imagined that, initiated as a Christian, I was going to achieve some kind of easy bond with other believers, that fantasy was soon shot. Just a few months after I began going to St. Gregory's, I found myself at a restaurant counter in the Denver airport, waiting for a flight home from a reporting trip. A woman—perhaps noticing the silver crucifix I had recently and self-consciously started to wear around my neck—caught my eye and smiled as she took the stool next to me. She had short blond hair and a cross of her own, and was wearing some kind of sexless denim jumper that reeked of piety. I smiled back, and we exchanged small talk about the weather and flight delays, and then she asked me what I was reading. I showed her the little volume of psalms that I'd borrowed from Rick Fabian. “From my church,” I said proudly. “What church is that?” the woman asked. She leaned forward, in a friendly way. “Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in San Francisco,” I said, as her face rearranged itself, froze, and closed. It may have been the “San Francisco,” I realized later, but the city's name was a reasonable stand-in, by that point, for everything conservative Christians had come to hate about the Episcopal Church as a whole: homosexuality; wealth; feminism; and morally relativist, decadent, rudderless liberalism. The church I'd unknowingly landed in turned out to be a scandal, a dirty joke at airport restaurants, a sign—in fact, thank God, a sure bet—that I was going to eat with sinners.
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Sara Miles (Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion)
“
It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA—at least for a while.
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Scott Kelly (Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery)
“
The Sarcophagus needed the strength to withstand Ukrainian weather for an estimated 20 years - time to develop a more permanent solution - and contain the astronomical levels of radiation within. Erecting the enclosure involved a quarter of a million workers, all of whom reached their lifetime maximum dose. In order for the Sarcophagus to be built, the radioactive graphite and reactor fuel first had to be cleared up and buried, so remote control bulldozers were brought in from West Germany, Japan and Russia to dig up the earth. Workers had originally piled up rubble at the base of Unit 4 and poured concrete straight onto it, intending to seal in the radiation, but that didn’t last long. “Geysers are starting to shoot up from the wet concrete. When the liquid falls on the fuel in the pile, there is an atomic excursion or simply a disruption of heat exchange and a rise in temperature. The radiation situation deteriorates sharply”, reported Vasiliy Kizima, chief of the construction project at the time.229
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Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
“
...and the handsome jester, Devil’s Gold, is shaking his bead-covered rattle, making medicine and calling us by name. We are so tired from our long walk that we cannot but admire his gilded face and his yellow magic blanket. And, holding each other’s hands like lovers, we stoop and admire ourselves in the golden pool that flickers in the great campfire he has impudently built at the crossing of two streets in Heaven.
But we do not step into the pool as beforetime. Our boat is beside us, it has overtaken us like some faithful tame giant swan, and Avanel whispers: “Take us where The Golden Book was written.” And thus we are up and away. The boat carries us deeper, down the valley. We find the cell of Hunter Kelly,— . St. Scribe of the Shrines. Only his handiwork remains to testify of him. Upon the walls of his cell he has painted many an illumination he afterward painted on The Golden Book margins and, in a loose pile of old torn and unbound pages, the first draft of many a familiar text is to be found. His dried paint jars are there and his ink and on the wall hangs the empty leather sack of Johnny Appleseed, from which came the first sowing of all the Amaranths of our little city, and the Amaranth that led us here.
And Avanel whispers:—“I ask my heart: —Where is Hunter Kelly, and my heart speaks to me as though commanded: ‘The Hunter is again pioneering for our little city in the little earth. He is reborn as the humblest acolyte of the Cathedral, a child that sings tonight with the star chimes, a red-cheeked boy, who shoes horses at the old forge of the Iron Gentleman. Let us also return’.”
It is eight o’clock in the evening, at Fifth and Monroe. It is Saturday night, and the crowd is pouring toward The Majestic, and Chatterton’s, and The Vaudette, and The Princess and The Gaiety.
It is a lovely, starry evening, in the spring. The newsboys are bawling away, and I buy an Illinois State Register. It is dated March 1, 1920.
Avanel of Springfield is one hundred years away.
The Register has much news of a passing nature. I am the most interested in the weather report, that tomorrow will be fair.
THE END - Written in Washington Park Pavilion, Springfield, Illinois.
”
”
Vachel Lindsay (The Golden Book of Springfield (Lost Utopias Series))
“
The shoot-to-kill order came through at zero one fifteen, relayed over a satellite radio. It’d been just three hours since the two-man reconnaissance team had reported the sighting.
They lay in a shallow dugout on a windblown ridge, the leeward slope falling away steeply to an impassable boulder field. A desert-issue tarp all but covered the hole, protected from view on the flanks by thorny scrub. Shivering, they blew into their bunched trigger-finger mitts. The daytime temperature had dropped twenty degrees or more, and fine sleet was melting on their blackened faces.
Darren Proctor extended the folded stock of his L115A3 sniper rifle. He split the legs of the swivel bi-pod and aligned the swivel cheek piece with the all-weather scope. Flipping open the lens cap, he glassed the terrain cast a muted green by the night vision. The tree line was sparse, a smattering of pines and cedars shuddering in the biting wind. Glimpsing movement on a scree slope fifty metres or so beyond, he focused in. The eyes of a striped hyena shone like glow sticks. He watched as the scavenger ripped at the carcass of an ibex or wild sheep. A second later it sniffed the air, ears pricked, and scampered off.
”
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Gary Haynes (State of Honour)
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Cages of women. Women and girls of all ages. Lining downtown streets behind The Great Barrier Walls. Passersby prodding at them with canes, sticks, and whatever they could find. Spitting on them through the bars, as law and culture required.
“Cages of women who had disobeyed their husbands, or sons, their preachers, or some other males in their lives. One or two of them had been foolish and self-destructive enough to have reported a rapist.
“A couple of them had befriended someone higher or lower than their stations, or maybe entertained a foreigner from outside the community, or allowed someone of a lesser race into their homes. A few may have done absolutely nothing wrong but for being reported by a neighbor with a grudge.
“For the most part they had disobeyed or disrespected males.
“Watching from behind tinted and bullet-proof windows at the rear of his immaculate stretch limo, the Lord High Chancellor of PolitiChurch, grinned the sadistic grin of unholy conquest. A dark satisfaction only a deeply tarred soul could enjoy.” …
… “Caged women and young girls at major street corners in even the worst weather. Every one of them his to do with, or dispose of, as he would.
“In this world – in His world – He was God.”
- From “The Soul Hides in Shadows”
“It is the year 2037. What is now referred to as ‘The Great Electoral Madness of ’16’ had freed the darkest ignorance, isolationism, misogyny, and racial hatreds in the weakest among us, setting loose the cultural, economic, and moral destruction of America. In the once powerful United States, paranoia, distrust, and hatred now rage at epidemic levels.
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Edward Fahey (The Soul Hides in Shadows)
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The Blue Mind Rx Statement
Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans.
The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being.
In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters.
Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history.
Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more.
Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety.
We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points:
•Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies.
•Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits.
•All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy.
•Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both.
•Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support.
•Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.
”
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Wallace J. Nichols (Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do)
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NATO paper: Modification of Tropospheric Propagation Conditions, detailed how the atmosphere could be modified to absorb electromagnetic radiation by spraying polymers behind high flying aircraft. Absorbing microwaves transmitted by HAARP and other atmospheric heaters linked from Puerto Rico, Germany and Russia, these artificial mirrors could heat the air, inducing changes in the weather. U.S. Patent # 4253190 describes how a mirror made of “polyester resin” could be held aloft by the pressure exerted by electromagnetic radiation from a transmitter like HAARP. A PhD polymer researcher who wishes to remain anonymous told researcher William Thomas that if HAARP’s frequency output is matched to Earth’s magnetic field, its tightly beamed energy could be imparted to molecules “artificially introduced into this region.” This highly reactive state could then “promote polymerization and the formation of new compounds,” he explained. Adding magnetic iron oxide powder to polymers exuded by many high flying aircraft can foster the heat generation needed to modify the weather. Radio frequency absorbing polymers such as Phillips Ryton F 5 PPS are sensitive in the 1 50 MHz regime, HAARP transmits between two and 10 MHz. HAARP's U.S. Air Force and Navy sponsors claim that their transmitter will eventually be able to produce 3.6 million watts of radio frequency power. But on page 185 of an October 1991 “Technical Memorandum 195” outlining projected HAARP tests, there is a call by the ionospheric effects division of the U.S. Air Force Phillips Laboratory for HAARP to reach a peak power output of 100 billion watts. Commercial radio stations commonly broadcast at 50,000 watts. Some hysterical reports state that HAARP type technologies will be used to initiate
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Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
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Only recently has it been discovered that sneezes are a much more drenching experience than anyone thought. A team led by Professor Lydia Bourouiba of MIT, as reported by Nature, studied sneezes more closely than anyone had ever chosen to before and found that sneeze droplets can travel up to eight meters and drift in suspension in the air for ten minutes before gently settling onto nearby surfaces. Through ultra-slow-motion filming, they also discovered that a sneeze isn’t a bolus of droplets, as had always been thought, but more like a sheet—a kind of liquid Saran Wrap—that breaks over nearby surfaces, providing further evidence, if any were needed, that you don’t want to be too close to a sneezing person. An interesting theory is that weather and temperature may influence how the droplets in a sneeze coalesce, which could explain why flu and colds are more common in cold weather, but that still doesn’t explain why infectious droplets are more infectious to us when we pick them up by touch rather than when we breathe (or kiss) them in. The formal name for the act of sneezing, by the way, is sternutation, though some authorities in their lighter moments refer to a sneeze as an autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst, which makes the acronym ACHOO (sort of). Altogether the lungs weigh about 2.4 pounds, and they take up more space in your chest than you probably realize. They jut up as high as your neck and bottom out at about the breastbone. We tend to think of them as inflating and deflating independently, like bellows, but in fact they are greatly assisted by one of the least appreciated muscles in the body: the diaphragm. The diaphragm is a mammalian invention and it is a good one. By pulling down on the lungs from below, it helps them to work more powerfully.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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Cedar Capital Group Tokyo Review of Stats Shows Decrease in Mortality Rate in Construction Sites
Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan construction industry is one of the riskiest industries to work with. Not only do they have to deal with falling debris but workers also have to be aware of faulty wirings, defective equipment and weather warnings. Workers even sometimes have to lose their lives in the midst of construction. These circumstances are inevitable and precautions were already implemented even at the start of training.
Yet, it cannot be denied that construction is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world today. Everywhere we go, we see buildings being built and establishments being constructed. We see new structures in developed nations. New York, America, Tokyo, Japan, Beijing, China and Seoul, South Korea are some of the leading cities which feature new construction projects almost everyday.
Singapore is also not left behind. Considered as one of the most flourishing countries in the world, the little island-city has prided itself with new infrastructure projects and promise a thousand more to come. It came no surprise that the country’s journey towards urbanization was held liable for the deaths of hundreds of construction workers in the previous years.
Just recently, though, Singapore has declared their concern on the number of fatalities there are in a construction project. If not of deaths, accidents resulting to fractures and minor and major injuries are also experienced in other neighboring countries.
Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan, one the distributor of heavy capital equipment in the country, reports to have dozens of death in the last 4 years of their operation. This, as they claim, is one of the reasons why there is a large scarcity in job application related to construction. Many companies are also faced with numerous complaints because of these deaths and injuries.
According to further review, approximately one-quarter of the deaths result from exposure to hazardous substances which cause such disabling illnesses as cancer and cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous-system disorders. Analysts even warn that work-related diseases are expected to double by the year 2020 and that if improvements are not implemented now, exposures today will kill people by the year 2020.
Surprisingly, though, while people are being troubled with the number of casualties in the construction sector, recent studies and statistics show fewer deaths in construction sector in the first half of the year.
Specifically in Singapore, Manpower Ministry has announced only 8 death reports compared to the 17 deaths in 2014. Although this is not a reason to celebrate since there are still fatalities, Singapore’s Contractual Association stated that this is an improvement as it shows the effectiveness of the recent awareness programs and training seminars conducted across the island-city. The country aims to clear all fatalities for the next succeeding years.
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Jackie Legaspi
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The first kiss, the first proposal, the birth of a healthy child would be about as exciting as last year’s weather report. If our world ever turned certain, life would be mind-numbingly dull.
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Anonymous
“
Naturally, Liesel hurried up the stairs. She stood a few feet from the spit-stained door and turned on the spot, observing the sky. When she returned to the basement, she told him. “The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole. . . .” Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that. On the wall, he painted a long, tightly knotted rope with a dripping yellow sun at the end of it, as if you could dive right into it. On the ropy cloud, he drew two figures—a thin girl and a withering Jew—and they were walking, arms balanced, toward that dripping sun. Beneath the picture, he wrote the following sentence. THE WALL-WRITTEN WORDS OF MAX VANDENBURG It was a Monday, and they walked on a tightrope to the sun.
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Anonymous
“
Before I could knock on the open door of his office I heard, “Get your ass in here!!” I by-passed the knock and went straight to his desk and stopped front and center. “Christ, what the hell is going on out there this morning. I come in here drop my cover and car keys on my desk, look at the morning availability report and see we got 13 aircraft up. I go down to the ready room to get a cup of coffee, see on the schedules board we got an 8 plane launch going out, look at the weather, shoot the shit with the ODO for a couple minutes and by the time I get back to my office, I got 4 aircraft up out of 18 and the entire launch has been scrubbed, what the FUCK?!” “The thunderstorm got us Sir. Flight line had the aircraft all ready to go, canopies up waiting on pilots and everything got drenched before we could close up and run for cover.” “Oh for Christ’s sake, didn’t anyone notice a huge thunderstorm heading our way?
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W.R. Spicer (Sea Stories of a U.S. Marine Book 4 Harrier)
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I get all the news I need from the weather report.
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Simon & Garfunkel - The Only Living Boy In New York
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It is the charge of us who survive to see another dawn each day that we honor the memory of the kind and brave souls who have pioneered and lived and loved before us. They have taught us how to interpret a melody, or how to play a rhythm, or how to laugh at one of life’s many absurdities. Life lessons. Good deeds. Mistakes. The sum of a man’s or a woman’s life can take years to absorb and understand, but we must always appreciate the sacrifice, wisdom, love, and humor that our fallen comrades have left to us.
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Peter Erskine (No Beethoven: An Autobiography and Chronicle of Weather Report: An Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report)
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According to the temperature records kept by the UK Met Office (and other series are much the same), over the past 150 years (that is, from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution), mean global temperature has increased by a little under a degree centigrade—according to the Met Office, 0.8°C. This has happened in fits and starts, which are not fully understood. To begin with, to the extent that anyone noticed it, it was seen as a welcome and natural recovery from the rigours of the Little Ice Age. But the great bulk of it—0.5°C out of the 0.8°C—occurred during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was then that global warming alarmism was born. But since then, and wholly contrary to the expectations of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who confidently predicted that global warming would not merely continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth of global carbon dioxide emissions, as China’s coalbased economy has grown by leaps and bounds, there has been no further warming at all. To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a deeply flawed body whose nonscientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of—wait for it—0.05°Cs per decade, plus or minus 0.1°C. Their figures, not mine. In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error. And that margin of error, it must be said, is implausibly small. After all, calculating mean global temperature from the records of weather stations and maritime observations around the world, of varying quality, is a pretty heroic task in the first place. Not to mention the fact that there is a considerable difference between daytime and night-time temperatures. In any event, to produce a figure accurate to hundredths of a degree is palpably absurd.
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Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
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Responsible trespassers probably check the weather report before following dead people into the woods, but not me.
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Lyla Payne (Not Quite Cold (A Lowcountry Ghost Story, #2))
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Pentagon.Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run. For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey.Among the travelers were Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari, who arrived at the airport in Portland, Maine. 1.1 INSIDE THE FOUR FLIGHTS Boarding the Flights Boston:American 11 and United 175. Atta and Omari boarded a 6:00 A.M. flight from Portland to Boston’s Logan International Airport.1 When he checked in for his flight to Boston,Atta was selected by a computerized prescreening system known as CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), created to identify passengers who should be subject to special security measures. Under security rules in place at the time, the only consequence of Atta’s selection by CAPPS was that his checked bags were held off the plane until it was confirmed that he had boarded the aircraft. This did not hinder Atta’s plans.2 Atta and Omari arrived in Boston at 6:45. Seven minutes later,Atta apparently took a call from Marwan al Shehhi, a longtime colleague who was at another terminal at Logan Airport.They spoke for three minutes.3 It would be their final conversation. 1 2 THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT Between 6:45 and 7:40,Atta and Omari, along with Satam al Suqami,Wail al Shehri, and Waleed al Shehri, checked in and boarded American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles.The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:45.4 In another Logan terminal, Shehhi, joined by Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al Shehri, Ahmed al Ghamdi, and Hamza al Ghamdi, checked in for United Airlines Flight 175,also bound for Los Angeles.A couple of Shehhi’s colleagues were obviously unused to travel;according to the United ticket agent,they had trouble understanding the standard security questions, and she had to go over them slowly until they gave the routine, reassuring answers.5 Their flight was scheduled to depart at 8:00. The security checkpoints through which passengers, including Atta and his colleagues, gained access to the American 11 gate were operated by Globe Security under a contract with American Airlines. In a different terminal, the single checkpoint through which passengers for United 175 passed was controlled by United Airlines, which had contracted with Huntleigh USA to perform the screening.6 In passing through these checkpoints,each of the hijackers would have been screened by a walk-through metal detector calibrated to detect items with at least the metal content of a .22-caliber handgun.Anyone who might have set off that detector would have been screened with a hand wand—a procedure requiring the screener to identify
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Anonymous
“
Shortly before the business channel launched, a young female Fox Business anchor went to meet with the staff of the New York Post’s business desk to brainstorm story ideas. “What do you know about business?” asked Roddy Boyd, a brash financial reporter who was then on staff at the Post. She told them her experience was in weather, but “I’m reading a lot. I know the Dow is up. I’m reading the blogs.” “Why’d they hire you?” Boyd asked. She smiled and shook her breasts.
”
”
Anonymous
“
And finally, bird-watchers everywhere have reported that the nation’s owls have been behaving very unusually today. Although owls normally hunt at night and are hardly ever seen in daylight, there have been hundreds of sightings of these birds flying in every direction since sunrise. Experts are unable to explain why the owls have suddenly changed their sleeping pattern.’ The news reader allowed himself a grin. ‘Most mysterious. And now, over to Jim McGuffin with the weather. Going to be any more showers of owls tonight, Jim?
”
”
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
“
They have just concluded their business in the latest town, where Itempas nearly drowned trying to help a fishing boat haul in its catch with old fraying nets and a captain who did not heed the dire weather reports. Because other mortals’ lives were at stake, Itempas could use magic to save them, translocating everyone from the boat to the shore just as the mast sank beneath the waves. As a crowd gathers ’round to exclaim over the miracle of survivors, and to shout at the captain who sits ashamed nearby, Glee goes to her father, who stands watching all of this with a sterner-than-usual set to his face. There is more to it than the captain’s negligence, Glee understands. The boat’s nets were frayed because the captain could barely afford to keep his business afloat. His business was in danger because the price of fish is being artificially controlled by the Nobles’ Consortium in order to please several of the wealthier islander merchants, who run large fish distribution enterprises. The same people who curse the captain now have happily bought the cheap fish that made him so desperate for just one more catch. Now the man has lost his livelihood altogether, as have his crew members—but the price of fish will stay low, driving other captains into other storms and causing other wrecks from which there will be no magical rescue. It is painfully clear even to Glee, who has less of a jaded eye toward human foibles, that these people will never believe themselves complicit in the lives lost. They accept that this is the way the world works, in part because it is all they know and in part because it is all they wish to know. They are Itempans, probably, all of them. Comfortable with the status quo.
”
”
N.K. Jemisin (Shades in Shadow (Inheritance, #0.5, 1.5, 2.5))
“
In the 2013 report, the IPCC concluded, 'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal (italics added) and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia ... It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause.' In 2015, the IPCC concluded that they are 'now 95 percent certain that humans are the main cause of current global warming' (IPCC 2015: v; italics added). The IPCC also suggested, on the basis of the existing evidence, a rise in global temperature will have 'severe and widespread impacts on ... substantial species extinctions, large risks to global and regional food security ... growing food or working outdoors,' as well as producing more extreme fluctuations in weather, including droughts, flooding, and storms. The conclusions of the IPCC have been endorsed and supported by over 200 scientific agencies around the globe, including the principle scientific organisations in each of the G8 countries such as the National Academy of Science in the United States and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom.
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Geoffrey Beattie (The Psychology of Climate Change (The Psychology of Everything))
“
Mrs Dursley had had a nice, normal day. She told him over dinner all about Mrs Next Door’s problems with her daughter and how Dudley had learnt a new word (‘Shan’t!’). Mr Dursley tried to act normally. When Dudley had been put to bed, he went into the living-room in time to catch the last report on the evening news: ‘And finally, bird-watchers everywhere have reported that the nation’s owls have been behaving very unusually today. Although owls normally hunt at night and are hardly ever seen in daylight, there have been hundreds of sightings of these birds flying in every direction since sunrise. Experts are unable to explain why the owls have suddenly changed their sleeping pattern.’ The news reader allowed himself a grin. ‘Most mysterious. And now, over to Jim McGuffin with the weather. Going to be any more showers of owls tonight, Jim?’ ‘Well, Ted,’ said the weatherman, ‘I don’t know about that, but it’s not only the owls that have been acting oddly today. Viewers as far apart as Kent, Yorkshire and Dundee have been phoning in to tell me that instead of the rain I promised yesterday, they’ve had a downpour of shooting stars! Perhaps people have been celebrating Bonfire Night early – it’s not until next week, folks! But I can promise a wet night tonight.’ Mr Dursley sat frozen in his armchair. Shooting stars all over Britain? Owls flying by daylight? Mysterious people in cloaks all over the place? And a whisper, a whisper about the Potters … Mrs Dursley came into the living-room carrying two cups of tea. It was no good. He’d have to say something to her. He cleared his throat nervously. ‘Er – Petunia, dear – you haven’t heard from your sister lately, have you?’ As he had expected, Mrs Dursley looked shocked and angry. After all, they normally pretended she didn’t have a sister. ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘Why?’ ‘Funny stuff on the news,’ Mr Dursley mumbled. ‘Owls … shooting stars … and there were a lot of funny-looking people in town today …’ ‘So?’ snapped Mrs Dursley.
”
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
“
The sun still shines on Summer's leaves as Spring's leaves grow old, and Fall's weather grows cold. Fall seasons sweep them up and them out, while Winter communicates with cool winds. Snowflakes break their news release to the Earth, announcing its time to trend the season's way in; while 'mediarologists' report the fact updates & histories about weather's who, what why, how and when.
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Dr Tracey Bond (Out With The Old TREND INTO YOUR NEW)
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Your brain is not designed to make you happy. Your brain has only one agenda in mind: survival. It is always watching for signs of "lack and attack." Your brain is programmed to seek out the negative--dwindling resources, destructive weather, whatever's out to hurt you. So when you switch on that radio on the way to work and get bombarded with all those reports...your brain lights up--it will now spend all day chewing over that feast of fear, worry, negativity.
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”
Darren Hardy (The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success)
“
We’re talking tradition here, for heaven’s sake. Not literary analysis. Do you consider “Good morning” to be a weather report?
”
”
Judith Martin (Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior)
“
I mean, don’t you ever wonder what’s going to happen to the rest of us?” There was a clap of dull, muffled thunder, and a sudden heavy shower. Radio weather reports say today’s rain will be the last of the four-day series of storms. I hope not. “Sure I think about it,” Joanne said. “With people shooting little kids, how can I not think about it?” “People have been killing little kids since there’ve been people,” I said. “Not in here, they haven’t. Not until now.” “Yes, that’s it, isn’t it. We got a wake-up call. Another one.
”
”
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
“
He received nothing but weather reports from the Sassenach females of his acquaintance. One spouting about volcanoes and experiments was certainly novel.
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Alyson Chase (Marked by the Marquess (Lords of Discipline #4))
“
The weather report keeps on
Tossing and turning,
Predicting and warning,
And warning and warning of,
Possibly it could be news publications and,
Possibly it could be news TV stations. That
Very same morning right next to her coffee
She noticed some bleeding and heard hollow coughing and
National Geographic was being too graphic,
When all she had wanted to know was the traffic
The worlds got a nosebleed it said
And we're flooding but we keep on cutting
The trees and the forests!'
And we keep on paying those freaks on the TV,
Who claim they will save us but want to enslave us.
And sweating like demons they scream through our speakers
But we leave the sound on 'cause silence is harder.
And no one's the killer and no one's the martyr
The world that has made us can no longer contain us
And profits are silent then rotting away 'cause
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds.
”
”
Regina Spektor
“
It can get extremely warm around Base Camp on a sunny day in May. A thermometer left out in the afternoon sun by the Hillary expedition reportedly registered a high temperature of about 150 degrees.
”
”
Beck Weathers (Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest)
“
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a businessman from Boise, Idaho, was flying a small plane near Mount Rainier when, according to Associated Press reports, he spotted a chain of nine “saucer-like” objects above and east of the mountain. Brilliant in the sun, these objects darted toward Mount Adams at “an incredible speed” that he estimated to be at least 1,200 miles per hour. Arnold’s story of saucer-shaped objects initiated a UFO craze that has not abated. Analyses by meteorologists and other scientists suggest that Mr. Arnold did not spot a visitor from another world, but rather a mountain wave cloud, a frequent visitor to the mountainous Pacific Northwest.
”
”
Cliff Mass (The Weather of the Pacific Northwest)
“
The FPA, in its 1974 Annual Report, stated that “Studies conducted at Mount Weather involve the control and management of domestic political unrest where there are material shortages (such as food riots) or in strike situations where the FPA determines that there are industrial disruptions and other domestic resource crises.” The report states that the bureaucracy at Mount Weather invokes what it calls “civil crisis management.
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Milton William Cooper (Behold a Pale Horse)
“
Journalism will increasingly play a key role in informing the world's population about the causes and consequences of global warming: analysing the reports of scientists, including the alarmists and sceptics among them; investigating the influence of oil and coal industries on government policies; exploring the measures needed to save future generations from the looming disasters of extreme weather and world food shortages; and above all, as in any war, going to the "conflict zones" to carry out one of the basic tasks of journalism - reporting the impact of great events, in this case climate change, on ordinary people's lives. It will mean chronicling a gigantic struggle with nature, and a force that threatens to destabilise societies across the world in decades to come.
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Conor O'Clery (May You Live In Interesting Times)
“
If he has made us sensible of his Justice, by his Reproof; of his Patience, by his Forbearance; of his Mercy, by his Forgiveness; of his Holiness, by the Sanctification of our Hearts through his Spirit; we have a grounded Knowledge of God. This is Experience, that Speculation; This Enjoyment, that Report. In short, this is undeniable Evidence, with the realities of Religion, and will stand all Winds and Weathers.
”
”
Charles William Eliot
“
If you listen to the conversations of emotionally immature people, you may notice how routine and literal their thinking is. They tend to talk about what happened or what they observed, not the world of feelings or ideas. For example, one man found his mother’s phone conversations draining and boring because she never talked about anything substantive. Instead, she only asked him mundane questions, like what he was doing at the moment or what the weather was like. He told me, “She just reports the facts and never talks about anything other than ‘Here’s what’s happened lately.’ She doesn’t connect with me in the conversation. I get so frustrated and want to say, ‘Can’t we talk about something meaningful?’ But she can’t.
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Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
“
For the computerized, a wide array of weather reports and data banks can be found on the Internet by activating a search for “weather.
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”
Colin Fletcher (The Complete Walker IV)
“
Whether the weather is withering or wuthering; it’s climate change.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Climate Flip - Climate Risk Reporting In Banks)