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ndrea Diamond of Toronto is used to having squirrels in her backyard, but she did a double take recently when she saw one holding something blue. She looked closer. The squirrel was twirling a paring knife in its front paws. Eventually, it ran away unhurt, and she noticed it had also gotten into some hand sanitizer she'd left out. They're trying to be COVID conscientious, I guess, she said

Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases

Practicing social distancing techniques not only protects you from the crowds, it protects the crowds from you. If one actually falls ill, the best thing to do from a public health standpoint may be to self-quarantine at home to prevent the spread of the virus. Otherwise, you are visiting a potential death sentence on everyone you meet. The extreme lethality of the current strain of HSN1 may actually work in humanity's favor - people may be so ill and succumb so quickly that they are unlikely to get out of bed and spread it to others outside their households. Experts expect the virus may ratchet down its lethality in the interest of being more effectively spread. Of course, if we do become infected, it may be a day or two before we know it, so all but essential personnel should consider preparing for a prolonged "snow emergency"-type isolation at home in the event of a pandemic." Instead of a snow "day," though, Osterholm compares it to preparing for a worldwide "12- to 15-month blizzard." although each wave may only last a matter of weeks in any particular locale. Everyone should also begin getting into the habit of practicing what infectious control experts refer to as proper "respiratory etiquette."

Most people know to cover their nose and mouth when they cough or sneeze, but most people are not doing it right. One should not cough or sneeze into one's hand. The current thinking is one should only cough into the crook of the arm. Covering our nose and mouth can somewhat limit the dispersal of contaminated respiratory droplets, but when we cough into our hand, it becomes coated with virus that can then be transferred to everything from elevator buttons and light switches to gas pump and toilet handles. A recent study found that the virus could be recovered from more than 50% of common household and day care center surfaces during flu season. This is not surprising, given that up to five infectious viral doses have been measured in every drop of nasal secretions. Coughing into the inner elbow area of one's arm or sleeve prevents the contamination of one's hands. This takes practice, so we should all start rehearsing now. The Mayo Clinic has a slogan: "The 10 worst sources of contagion are our fingers."

Fomite is the technical term for a contaminated physical object, like the archetypal doorknob, that can transmit disease among people. It comes from the Latin fomes, meaning "tlnder." This sparking of an infectious blaze can be prevented through disinfection. At room temperature and humidity, influenza virus can survive intact for up to 48 hours on nonporous surfaces like metal or plastic and up to 12 hours on cloth, paper, or tissues. but can be killed easily with a simple solution of household bleach. One tablespoon of chlorine bleach mixed in a gallon of water is a potent disinfectant. This diluted bleach solution can be sprayed on potentially contaminated common surfaces and left to sit for at least five minutes. Frequently used but infrequently disinfected objects, such as refrigerator handles and phone receivers, should not be missed. The bleach solution can also be used to wash contaminated clothes and bedding, as research has shown that a shaken contaminated blanket can release infectious viral particles into the environment. It must be chlorine bleach, meaning it should contain a chlorine-based compound like sodium hypochlorite. So-called "color-safe" bleaches should not be used as disinfectants.

Wrapped in a stolen fatty coat from our cells, influenza viruses like H5N1 can lie in wait for days under the right conditions, patiently twiddling their thumbs until someone grasps the same doorknob. The virus still needs to bypass the skin barrier and find a way into the body, though. This is why we should get into the habit of avoiding touching our eyes, noses, and mouths whenever possible in public until we can wash or sanitize our hands. The power of this simple intervention is illustrated by a study that showed that children aged four to eight taught to not touch their noses and eyes essentially halved their risk of contracting cold infections. Although viruses like influenza can go airborne, studies of outbreaks at nursing homes suggest that this direct physical contact may play a significant role in its spread.

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

No territory-wide census was taken in the Congo until long after the rubber terror was over. But Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who worked in a former rubber area in the 1970s, found persuasive demographic evidence that large numbers of men had been worked to death as rubber slaves or killed in punitive raids - and he discovered the evidence in the regime's own statistics. No other explanation accounts for the curious pattern that threads through the village-by-village headcounts taken in the colony long before the first territorial census. These local headcounts consistently show far more women than men.

At Inongo in 1907, for example, there were 309 children 402 adult women, but only 275 adult men. (This was the very town for which, some ten years earlier, the district commissioner had ordered "absolute submission or complete extermination:') At nearby Iboko in 1908 there were 322 children, 543 adult women, but only 262 adult men. Statistics from numerous other villages show the same pattern. Sifting such figures today is like sifting the ruins of an Auschwitz crematorium. They do not tell you precise death tolls, but they reek of mass murder.

During Leopold's rule, by how much, from all four causes, did the Congo population shrink? Just as when historians chart population loss from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, they can be more confident of the percentage than they are of absolute numbers. They have, after all, no census data. Interestingly, some estimates of population loss in the Congo made by those who saw it firsthand agree with some of those made by more scientific methods today.

An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the population of the territory had "been reduced by half." Major Charles C. Liebrechts, a top executive of the Congo state administration for most of its existence, arrived at the same estimate in 1920. The most authoritative judgment today comes from Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and perhaps the greatest living ethnographer of Congo basin peoples. He bases his calculations on "innumerable local sources from different areas: priests noticing their flocks were shrinking, oral traditions, genealogies, and much more." His estimate is the same: between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was cut "by at least a half."

Half of what? Only in the 1920s were the first attempts made at a territory-wide census. In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.

Burned villages, starved hostages, terrified refugees dying in swamps, orders for "extermination" - even in crass, purely monetary terms, aren't these inefficient means of doing business? Massacring huge numbers of people may frighten the survivors into gathering rubber, but doesn't it destroy the labor force? Indeed it does. Belgian administrators ordered the census taken in 1924 because they were deeply concerned about a shortage of available workers. "We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear;' fretfully declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that year. "So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert."

Why, then, did the killings go on for so long? The same irrationality lies at the heart of many other mass murders. In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed, and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag. So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941

In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like that of Rene de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he ordered a child killed in the nearest village.

Two Force Publique officers, Clement Brasseur and Leon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.

Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: "We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?" When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film, where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

As Ed Rollins, who worked with Reagan for five years. concluded, "The job was whatever was on his desk."

Reagan's former campaign manager, John Sears, attributed this trait to Reagan's first career, as a movie actor in an age when the studios discouraged independent thinking. As such, Sears noted, Reagan had become professionally accustomed to learning his part and "following the prescribed rules - doing what they told you to do." If something went wrong on the set, Sears said, Reagan would most likely think. Hey, I'm just the star. I'm the performer. Others were supposed to worry about the rest of the show.

This complacency was evident in cabinet and staff meetings, where Reagan was a wonderful raconteur - frequently speaking as if he were still governor of California - as well as a good listener But he rarely made substantive points. A staff member who had also served in the Ford White House said, "Ford led the discussion; Reagan followed it." When the public began to learn of Reagan's lack of involvement in meetings, aides explained it by saying the president wanted to hide his thought process in order to avoid leaks or that he was trying to spare the feelings of those with whom he disagreed. But, as Don Regan later admitted, Reagan "sent out no strong signals. It was a rare meeting in which he made a decision or issued an order."

If the president rarely played the leading role in meetings, his aides found he was even less likely to question the paperwork they sent him. Reagan obligingly read whatever he was given - all of it - at least in the early years. One aide early on was surprised to find that the president was staying up until the early hours of the morning trying to read all the materials his staff had sent him. "He read indiscriminately," the aide marveled. "If you gave him eight hundred pages, he read every word. He used no judgment." Nancy Reagan finally stepped in and explained that her husband's workload needed to be reduced. Similarly, the staff had to monitor the amount of information they sent him to prepare for press conferences. As former communications director David Gergen recalled, "If you gave him too many pages, as good as his photographic memory is, he tries so hard to remember what he read that he sometimes gets mixed up." He was particularly susceptible to whatever arguments he had heard most recently White House spokesman Larry Speakes used to joke that "the last thing you put in is the first thing that comes out."

Unlike other presidents, Reagan seldom requested information beyond the briefings and talking points his aides gave him. He enjoyed occasional luncheons with outside experts when they were brought in, but he rarely initiated invitations. He watched what Regan later called "a lot" of television and read a number of newspapers, although he claimed, possibly for effect, that he turned first to the comics.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

In April 2017 Trump told an audience in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he was about to take bold action on foreign guest workers. He promised to end the "theft of American prosperity." Foreign worker visas "should never, ever be used to replace American workers." he said.

But the executive order he signed was not bold, as Trump said, but tepid. It simply directed four cabinet agencies to "suggest reforms" with no deadline for submitting their ideas.

There are also work visas for low-skilled workers like the staff at Mar-a-Lago, which had for years relied on the very workers Trump wanted kept out - foreigners. Trump said during one of the Republican primary debates that Mar-a-Lago, like other local seasonal resort properties, had no choice but to import workers. "People don't want a short-term job," he said. "So, we will bring people in, and we will send the people out. All done legally."

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida broke in. "That's not accurate," he said, because at least three hundred Americans who sought work at Mar-a-Lago were not hired. That, Rubio said, helped Trump push down wages, the very issue Trump complained was caused by too many foreign workers in America.

"When you bring someone in on one of these visas they can't go work for anybody else," Rubio noted. "They either work for you or they have to go back home. You basically have them captive, so you don't have to worry about competing for higher wages with another hotel down the street. And, that's why you bring workers from abroad."

Trump kept interrupting Rubio, making it difficult for those watching to understand the debate unless they read the transcript later.

The public record showed that hundreds of local residents did want jobs but were not hired.

In July 2017 the Trump administration decided to let in more foreign workers, not exactly what Trump promised on inauguration day when he said every decision would be made to promote American jobs and buy American.

American "businesses in danger of suffering irreparable harm due to a lack of available temporary nonagricultural workers" would be able to hire an additional 15,000 foreigners in temporary low-skill, low-paid jobs.

That would increase supply by more than 40 percent for the second half of the year.

This was a prime example of Trump not walking his campaign talk in office, but also of driving down wages, just as Rubio had said was Trump's goal.

In Palm Beach, for example, hundreds of people were willing to work at the wages offered by Mar-a-Lago, roughly $10 to $13 an hour, for the 2016-17 season.

Locally four people wanted work for every low-skill resort job offered.

That means there was no shortage of local labor for the seasonal positions. With so many workers available, hiring locals might not even put upward pressure on wages. When there is so much more demand for work than employers could supply, employers can offer less pay and still recruit people.

But workers who come from overseas on visas are subject to more control. Their employer can arrange pay that depends on their staying until the last day of the season and hold back part of their pay through "bemusing" arrangements. That means anyone who gets out of line, anyone who gets fired, gets shorted on his or her pay and sent home early.

President Trump declared July 24 the start of Made in America Week.

Trump said he would be "recognizing the vital contributions of American workers and job creators to our Nation's prosperity."

The same week a tiny classified ad ran twice in the back pages of The Palm Beach Post. It offered work for "3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club." The jobs paid wages only - "No tips:'

The ads did not identify the employer, but the fax was a Mar-a-Lago number.

A week earlier, Mar-a-Lago had applied to the Labor Department - run by a Trump appointee - for visas to import thirty-five people to wait on tables, twenty cooks, and fifteen chambermaids. All it needed to do was show that it offered work and not enough people showed up to take the jobs. That was easily accomplished. Run a tiny ad with few details. Tell locals to apply via fax, a technology few people seeking such low-paid seasonal work were likely to own. People could mail a letter but letters can get lost or take time being delivered.

Those two ads, and the predictably weak response, met the legal requirement necessary to import foreign workers under the H-2B visa program from October 2017 until June 2018.

There was, perhaps, one positive in these foreign workers being hired at Mar-a-Lago to wait on Trump's paying guests. Unlike Melania Knauss Trump, they wouldn't be violating American law.

Trump often states as fact that illegal immigrants are a drag on the economy. He complains of "Americans losing their jobs to foreign workers."

To stop that he supported the RAISE Act, for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. It would fundamentally change the rules on legal immigration, something Congress did in 1924 and again in 1965. Ostensibly the bill's purpose is to "establish a skills-based immigration points system, to focus family-sponsored immigration on spouses and minor children, to eliminate the Diversity Visa Program, to set a limit on the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States."

That would mean that more people with job skills could enter the country, which in general will tend to depress wages for people with similar skills, but which may also help grow the economy. The focus on spouses and minor children means that grandparents, grandchildren, and cousins are out and the age of minors would be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen.

The bill was analyzed at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the school Trump claims he attended when he went only to its undergraduate program in real-estate economics.

The analysis found that the bill would make wages grow briefly in the short term but that as the years rolled by the new policy would destroy American jobs, resulting in slower economic growth. That certainly is not what Trump claimed he would do with his slogans about America First and Make America Great Again.

The most interesting finding from the Penn Wharton budget model computer program was that simply doubling the number of immigrants from about 800,000 per year to 1.6 million would do the most to increase economic growth per person. The education level of the immigrants did not matter.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

Anyone can get on the ballot in the U.K. if they pay 500 pounds. So while Boris Johnson led his party to a massive election victory in the U.K. against Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, he had other competition.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRIME MINISTER BORIS JOHNSON: I thank my fellow candidates in all their glory - Lord Buckethead, Elmo and others.

MARTIN: Yep. One candidate dressed as "Sesame Street's" Elmo. Also mentioned - Lord Buckethead, who ran for the Monster Raving Loony Party. I mean, hey - these are serious Brexit times. And, clearly, voters are desperate for some comic relief.

Being a decent human being is difficult for everyone from time to time but it seems there are particular challenges for those who become stars in their worlds. In some ways, being decent becomes harder, just at the point when your behavior becomes more noticeable and more important. Harder, because once you enter that bubble of stardom you can lose touch with reality and become demanding, egotistical and unreasonable almost as a way of life. More noticeable, because everyone is watching, all the time. We love to know what famous people are "really" like. Did you lose your rag in an airport queue? Or did you take time out of your day to smile at a little boy, sign an autograph and tell him to be good for his mum? Either way, whoever witnesses it will extrapolate an entire personality for you, and tell all their friends. More important, because the more successful you become, the more your behavior sets the tone for everyone around you.

Stay grounded

Some huge stars completely lose touch with the real world. Frank Sinatra, for example, was an extremely generous member of the secret philanthropists' club of Hollywood - a circle of big stars who took care of less successful actors as they grew older or fell on hard times - and became a great friend of mine. But he was a law unto himself and everything was on his terms. For example, Frank had a Twenty Minute Rule. He would not travel for dinner more than twenty minutes' drive from his house in Beverly Hills. If he had been invited to dinner and had been in the car for twenty minutes he would command his driver to turn around. "I'm twenty minutes," he would call out. "It's too far. We're going home." Mind you, he was also known to fly to Paris for dinner when he was staying in London. And he would always have people fussing around him.

I remember once one of his guys whispered to me conspiratorially, "Frank's in a great mood today."

I said, at normal volume, "What about me? What about my mood?"

And the guy looked at me like I was crazy. "Who cares? No one cares how you feel."

I have known stars who have demanded private planes, drugs, full interior design for their trailers. It goes on.

I was lucky. I always had my family to keep me grounded.

There's nothing like your mum saying she's had enough of LA and wants to go home to London to catch up on her favorite soap, or your wife saying, "You want a cup of tea? Sure, the kettle's over there," to remind you that no matter how much adulation and validation you're getting in your professional world, at home you're just plain old you. Not a star, not a god and quite possibly not the person who has had the hardest day.

The other people who have always kept me grounded are taxi drivers. In fact, I sometimes think Shakira keeps a few cab drivers on retainer just to stop me getting too big-headed. The other day, I got into a cab to go out for dinner and the driver, who must have been about fifty, looked in his mirror and said, "My grandfather loved you. He saw all your films." There was a little pause. "He's dead now."

"Oh" I said "Have you seen any?"

"I don't think so."

On the way back I got into a different cab. I saw the driver clock me in his mirror. "Hey, I know you," he said. I nodded encouragement. I was hoping for something about how brilliant I'd been in Batman. Instead. "Didn't you used to be Michael Caine?"

Alec Guinness, that great British theatre and film actor, perhaps best-known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movies, but also acclaimed for his work with the greatest director of his era, David Lean, in films like Great Expectations. Oliver Twist and The Bridge on the River Kwai, told me he had similar luck with cabbies. He once got into the back of a cab and the driver said, "I know you." Alec opened his mouth to confirm that he was indeed Alex Guinness and the driver said, "No, don't tell me. I'll get it. Before you get out, I'll get your name." As Alec was paying the fare, the driver said with a flourish, "I've got it. Telly Savalas."

So Alec says, "No, that's not it."

"I bet you wish you was, though," says the cabbie. Alec nodded, with a rueful Obi-Wan smile, and walked off into the night.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

The game is up
(Shakespeare - Cymbeline, Act III, Sc. 3)

That is the perfect title for my book. I'm so grateful to you, Jack, for saying it. It's ABSOLUTELY perfect.

You see I was thinking about writing a best-seller. It's cast historically. They all have to be historical really.

And they've all got to be vaguely connected with aristocracy. So my heroine is a love child. It's always terribly sympathetic, you see. And her mother is Lady Caroline Mutton, who's a rather sort of older Caroline Lamb. And the father is a sort of itinerant Grub Street writer. And he had a love affair with Lady Caroline Mutton and his name is Thomas Tupper. That's a joke which will only be appreciated by farmers.

But they have the child, as is usual, she's put out to wet-nurse and eventually they persuade an inn-keeper and his wife to adopt this child. And this inn-keeper was Jabez Harp, who kept a little inn just around the back of Maiden Lane in the City of London. And she grew up a very gay and vivacious child. Extremely gay and extremely vivacious. And like all heroines of light love, she had an oval face. I can't really think of the alternative to an oval face. We'd have a rectangular face. Parallelpipidean face. She has an oval face and hazel eyes. Her eyes look like a nut. And ringlets. And all the time she's laughing and terribly jolly and fun.

So the Harps decide to call her. . . Jabez says one day, "Every time the wind blows and we're sad, she just sings", so they call her Aeolian Harp. It's a beautiful name.

And then she goes on the stage in my story. And she joined a company of a marveous actor called George Frederick Cooke. And she played Sheridan's comedies with George Frederick Cooke. Went on tour in the provinces. It was the first Cooke's Tours. And she had this kind of unremitted gaiety.

And he'd say, "We've only taken four and six."

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. What matters, all the world's a stage."

And he took to drink. He was actually one of the stage's most celebrated drunks, was George Frederick Cooke.

But at the same time there was a man in the company, who was a nobleman, who always wanted to be an actor, called Lord Charles Grenville. And he was very much in love with her but he couldn't STAND this unremitted jollity. For twenty-two hours a day she was happy and laughing and making little jokes. And eventually, although he loved her, and couldn't declare his passion, he went to join the navy.

So they flung her out in the street and she languishes there, this beautiful girl, and nobody will bother with her any more and she really is about to fling herself over what would be the embankment of the embankment which would be built, which it hadn't been, when suddenly there is a man in front of her that she recognizes.

It is Lord Charles. This ending is a bit like Fanny Hill, but I'm cribbing it. It is Lord Charles. And he's come back from the navy stone deaf. He was on the Victory about to go to Trafalgar. And Lord Nelson said to him, "Will you get Lieutenant Farr." (who was the gunnery officer) And he thought he was working with the guns so Lord Charles put his head down the front of a barrel and shouted "FARR!!" And he went stone deaf.

So there he was on half pay and there she is. So they get together and she is the one he's always loved. And with her bright unremitting chatter and this awful glass-shattering laugh, he's the only man who can stand it because he's stone deaf.

That's my story which is absolutely super. And I've got my nom d'plume, which is Barbara Horseland. I want to be ahead of Barbara Cartland.

And up to now I've been stuck for a title for this thing. I was going to call it Aeolian Harp, the Study of a Regency Girl. And Jack gave me the title. I'm just going to call it simply The Gay Miss Harp.

--Frank Muir, "Take My Word For It" (1978)

574a

Don't Need a Hurricane to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.

In the White House Rose Garden press conference that triggered a surge of bird flu media coverage, President Bush addressed the pandemic. "The people of the country ought to rest assured," Bush said, "that we're doing everything we can." Iowa senator Tom Harkin was not assured. " 'Trust us' is not something the administration can say after Katrina," he said in an interview. "I don't think Congress is in a mood to trust. We want plans. We want specific goals and procedures we're going to take to prepare for this."

Hurricane Katrina hit just days after Bush reportedly finished reading the classic historical text on the 1918 pandemic during his August vacation on his ranch. John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History details how the U.S. government, in the words of a 2005 Institute of Medicine report, "badly handled" the situatlon. This combination may have spurred the administration's sudden interest. Redlener calls it the "post-Katrina effect." He said, "I don't think politically or perceptually the government feels that it could tolerate another tragically inadequate response to a major disaster."

As Secretary Leavitt toured hurricane emergency shelters after Katrina and Rita, it hit him how catastrophic the pandemic would be. "What if it weren't just New Orleans?" he recalls thinking. "What if it were Seattle, San Diego, Corpus Christi, Denver, Chicago, New York? Make your own list." "We have learned in the past weeks," Secretary Leavitt told reporters, "that bad things can happen very fast."

He also should have learned the folly of ignoring the warnings of experts. Whether it was the Challenger disaster, 9/11, or Katrina, there were experts who cautioned that these particular tragedies might happen. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been warning about the levees for years. New Orleans' major newspaper ran a five-part series in 2002 accurately predicting not only the inevitable blow from a major storm, but the nightmarish aftermath. "The danger of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was ignored until it was too late," said Senator Kennedy. "We can't make the same mistake with pandemic flu." Though senior public health scientists describe an H5Nl pandemic with soundbites like "Hurricane Katrina a thousand times over," a former FEMA director in October 2005 described the level of federal preparation for the pandemic as "zero."

In the pandemic, there will be no cavalry. During Katrina, the nation's resources were mobilized to aid three states. Imagine every city as New Orleans. Secretary Leavitt told state public health officials, "We could be battling 5,000 different fronts at the same moment. Any community that fails to prepare with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue will be tragically wrong." In Chicago, public health officials have run through a mock influenza pandemic scenario. The simulation showed the public health system breaking down almost immediately. The chief medical officer of the Department of Homeland Security warned, "The federal government will not be there to pick you off your roof in a pandemic." "If the avian flu were to hit here, it would be like having a Category 5 viral hurricane hit every single state Simultaneously," said the director of Trust for America's Health. "We're not prepared. It's the ugly truth."

George Mason University's Mercatus Center has concluded that we must "[r]ealize that the federal government will be largely powerless in the worst stages of a pandemic and make appropriate local plans." Each individual community is responsible for preparing its own pandemic plan; preparation begins with each family, each circle of friends, each neighborhood, each business, each township. To this end, a fledgling "experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health" was launched called The Flu Wiki, available free for anyone to use at www.fluwikie.com, whose explicit purpose is to help local communities prepare for and cope with a pandemic outbreak. It is based on the "wikipedia" model of nonprofit, internet-based collaboration to share knowledge and ideas from around the world. Its success depends on the level and quality of public participation.

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

Stanley's usual two-volume thousand-page best-seller turned out to be only one of many books subsequently written about the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. (In recruiting his officers, Stanley made each one sign a contract promising that no book he wrote would appear until six months after Stanley's "official" account.) But other than benefiting the press and the publishing industry, the expedition proved a disaster for almost everyone involved, except, perhaps, for the New York Yacht Club, which at least had its banner borne across a continent.

Stanley threw his usual temper tantrums. Four times he fired his personal manservant and four times took him back. He had screaming matches with his white officers - several of whom later painted a highly unglamorous picture of Stanley. "The slightest little thing;' one wrote, "is sufficient to work him into a frenzy of rage." He compounded the problems of Henry Sanford's collapsing Congo business venture by commandeering its partly built steamboat as a barge for his troops and returning it several months later badly damaged. Most important, he made the strategic mistake of dividing his eight hundred soldiers, porters, and camp followers into two columns so that he, with a smaller, faster-moving force, would reach Emin Pasha and accomplish the dramatic, headline-catching rescue more quickly.

As always, Stanley bungled his choice of subordinates. The officer he left in charge of the rear column, Major Edmund Barttelot, promptly lost his mind. He sent Stanley's personal baggage down the river. He dispatched another officer on a bizarre three-thousand-mile three-month round trip to the nearest telegraph station to send a senseless telegram to England. He next decided that he was being poisoned, and saw traitors on all sides. He had one of them given three hundred lashes (which proved fatal). He jabbed at Africans with a steel-tipped cane, ordered several dozen people put in chains, and bit a village woman. An African shot and killed Barttelot before he could do more.

Stanley, meanwhile, slogged through the rain forest at the head of the vanguard column, sentencing a deserter to be hanged and ordering numerous floggings, some of which he administered himself. Supply snafus meant that much of the time his porters and soldiers were near starvation. To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley's officers wrote in his diary, "We finished our last plantain to-day the natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. As a last resource we must catch some more of their women." When it seemed that they might be attacked, another recalled, "Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round." Another described the slaughter as casually as if it were a hunt:

"It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day's work. Some women were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing. I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest. He fell like a stone. Immediately a volley was poured into the village."

One member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to London to be stuffed and mounted by his Piccadilly taxidermist.

Of the 389 men in Stanley's vanguard, more than half died as they hacked their way with machetes through the Ituri rain forest, sometimes making only four hundred yards' progress a day. When they ran out of food, they roasted ants. They climbed over giant tree roots and had to pitch camp on swampy ground in the midst of tropical downpours, one of which lasted seventeen hours without interruption. Men deserted, got lost in the jungle, drowned, or succumbed to tetanus, dysentery, and gangrenous ulcers. Others were killed by the arrows and poisoned-stake traps of forest-dwellers terrified by these armed, starving strangers rampaging through their territory.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

They were controlling the press in the television age both by limiting access to the president and by planning no event without imagining the headline, photo. and story that would follow it. This system tried to ensure that every story was advantageous to the White House, no matter what the facts. This practice simply reached its apogee in Reagan's time, when in contrast to the Nixon era, the system served a consummate performer.

The result, as political essayist Leon Wieseltier described it, was that for the Reagan administration. "the truth was a problem to be solved." The solution was an art form known as "spin control," which referred to the "spin" the White House public relations experts put on news to make sure it bounced the desired way. Enterprising reporters tried to detect the spin and dig out the real story. Occasionally they were successful, but not without risking revenge. Press secretary Larry Speakes gave what he called "death sentences" to those reporters he deemed too critical or otherwise uncooperative. He would threaten to "put them out of business" by making sure their phone calls went unreturned and questions unanswered. putting them routinely at a competitive disadvantage. Speakes explained proudly. "The idea was to be subtle. They thought they were being screwed. but they were never quite sure." He froze out some reporters for years, but it is debatable how much they missed. Speakes later confessed to having fabricated several presidential quotes; even before his confession stirred a controversy. he admitted that he misled the public about how disengaged the president was. "As a rule," he said. "I did not think it was lying to suggest that the president might be aware of something when he wasn't."

These strategies shaped not only the written record but the photographic one as well. The official White House staff photographers shot an estimated eight to ten thousand pictures of Reagan every month, the best of which were released to the press. Mrs. Reagan usually determined which images the public saw, particularly when they included her. She personally went through the thousands of pictures. signing "O.K. per N.R." when they could be released and tearing off the comer of each of those she deemed unflattering.

Despite these many protective layers, someone close to the Oval Office would occasionally break ranks, providing a glimpse of a place that sounded quite strange. Terry Arthur, a staff photographer who spent countless hours quietly observing and documenting the president alone and with others, said he took the job partly "to find out who was running the show." After two solid years of traveling with the president, following him through meetings and on his weekend retreats, he concluded, "I never found out." Reagan, he said. "was like a Buddha. People would say, 'He wants this' or 'He wants that,' but you'd never really see him say so. He'd be shown the decisions others had made. and would say. ·Uh-huh.' "

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

In April 2017 Trump told an audience in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he was about to take bold action on foreign guest workers. He promised to end the "theft of American prosperity." Foreign worker visas "should never, ever be used to replace American workers." he said.

But the executive order he signed was not bold, as Trump said, but tepid. It simply directed four cabinet agencies to "suggest reforms" with no deadline for submitting their ideas.

There are also work visas for low-skilled workers like the staff at Mar-a-Lago, which had for years relied on the very workers Trump wanted kept out - foreigners. Trump said during one of the Republican primary debates that Mar-a-Lago, like other local seasonal resort properties, had no choice but to import workers. "People don't want a short-term job," he said. "So, we will bring people in, and we will send the people out. All done legally."

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida broke in. "That's not accurate," he said, because at least three hundred Americans who sought work at Mar-a-Lago were not hired. That, Rubio said, helped Trump push down wages, the very issue Trump complained was caused by too many foreign workers in America.

"When you bring someone in on one of these visas they can't go work for anybody else," Rubio noted. "They either work for you or they have to go back home. You basically have them captive, so you don't have to worry about competing for higher wages with another hotel down the street. And, that's why you bring workers from abroad."

Trump kept interrupting Rubio, making it difficult for those watching to understand the debate unless they read the transcript later.

The public record showed that hundreds of local residents did want jobs but were not hired.

In July 2017 the Trump administration decided to let in more foreign workers, not exactly what Trump promised on inauguration day when he said every decision would be made to promote American jobs and buy American.

American "businesses in danger of suffering irreparable harm due to a lack of available temporary nonagricultural workers" would be able to hire an additional 15,000 foreigners in temporary low-skill, low-paid jobs.

That would increase supply by more than 40 percent for the second half of the year.

This was a prime example of Trump not walking his campaign talk in office, but also of driving down wages, just as Rubio had said was Trump's goal.

In Palm Beach, for example, hundreds of people were willing to work at the wages offered by Mar-a-Lago, roughly $10 to $13 an hour, for the 2016-17 season.

Locally four people wanted work for every low-skill resort job offered.

That means there was no shortage of local labor for the seasonal positions. With so many workers available, hiring locals might not even put upward pressure on wages. When there is so much more demand for work than employers could supply, employers can offer less pay and still recruit people.

But workers who come from overseas on visas are subject to more control. Their employer can arrange pay that depends on their staying until the last day of the season and hold back part of their pay through "bemusing" arrangements. That means anyone who gets out of line, anyone who gets fired, gets shorted on his or her pay and sent home early.

President Trump declared July 24 the start of Made in America Week.

Trump said he would be "recognizing the vital contributions of American workers and job creators to our Nation's prosperity."

The same week a tiny classified ad ran twice in the back pages of The Palm Beach Post. It offered work for "3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club." The jobs paid wages only - "No tips:'

The ads did not identify the employer, but the fax was a Mar-a-Lago number.

A week earlier, Mar-a-Lago had applied to the Labor Department - run by a Trump appointee - for visas to import thirty-five people to wait on tables, twenty cooks, and fifteen chambermaids. All it needed to do was show that it offered work and not enough people showed up to take the jobs. That was easily accomplished. Run a tiny ad with few details. Tell locals to apply via fax, a technology few people seeking such low-paid seasonal work were likely to own. People could mail a letter but letters can get lost or take time being delivered.

Those two ads, and the predictably weak response, met the legal requirement necessary to import foreign workers under the H-2B visa program from October 2017 until June 2018.

There was, perhaps, one positive in these foreign workers being hired at Mar-a-Lago to wait on Trump's paying guests. Unlike Melania Knauss Trump, they wouldn't be violating American law.

Trump often states as fact that illegal immigrants are a drag on the economy. He complains of "Americans losing their jobs to foreign workers."

To stop that he supported the RAISE Act, for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. It would fundamentally change the rules on legal immigration, something Congress did in 1924 and again in 1965. Ostensibly the bill's purpose is to "establish a skills-based immigration points system, to focus family-sponsored immigration on spouses and minor children, to eliminate the Diversity Visa Program, to set a limit on the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States."

That would mean that more people with job skills could enter the country, which in general will tend to depress wages for people with similar skills, but which may also help grow the economy. The focus on spouses and minor children means that grandparents, grandchildren, and cousins are out and the age of minors would be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen.

The bill was analyzed at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the school Trump claims he attended when he went only to its undergraduate program in real-estate economics.

The analysis found that the bill would make wages grow briefly in the short term but that as the years rolled by the new policy would destroy American jobs, resulting in slower economic growth. That certainly is not what Trump claimed he would do with his slogans about America First and Make America Great Again.

The most interesting finding from the Penn Wharton budget model computer program was that simply doubling the number of immigrants from about 800,000 per year to 1.6 million would do the most to increase economic growth per person. The education level of the immigrants did not matter.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

n Victoria, Australia, last week, a few dozen cows escaped their pasture. The farmers rounded them all up except one. A neighbor, Kay Laing, found it trapped on her trampoline. The cow was fine. It just couldn't stand up on the springy surface. So with the help of a tractor, the farmers were able to get the cow onto solid ground, and she walked the mile back home. Maybe we should call her Bouncing Bessie.

Being a decent human being is difficult for everyone from time to time but it seems there are particular challenges for those who become stars in their worlds. In some ways, being decent becomes harder, just at the point when your behavior becomes more noticeable and more important. Harder, because once you enter that bubble of stardom you can lose touch with reality and become demanding, egotistical and unreasonable almost as a way of life. More noticeable, because everyone is watching, all the time. We love to know what famous people are "really" like. Did you lose your rag in an airport queue? Or did you take time out of your day to smile at a little boy, sign an autograph and tell him to be good for his mum? Either way, whoever witnesses it will extrapolate an entire personality for you, and tell all their friends. More important, because the more successful you become, the more your behavior sets the tone for everyone around you.

Stay grounded

Some huge stars completely lose touch with the real world. Frank Sinatra, for example, was an extremely generous member of the secret philanthropists' club of Hollywood - a circle of big stars who took care of less successful actors as they grew older or fell on hard times - and became a great friend of mine. But he was a law unto himself and everything was on his terms. For example, Frank had a Twenty Minute Rule. He would not travel for dinner more than twenty minutes' drive from his house in Beverly Hills. If he had been invited to dinner and had been in the car for twenty minutes he would command his driver to turn around. "I'm twenty minutes," he would call out. "It's too far. We're going home." Mind you, he was also known to fly to Paris for dinner when he was staying in London. And he would always have people fussing around him.

I remember once one of his guys whispered to me conspiratorially, "Frank's in a great mood today."

I said, at normal volume, "What about me? What about my mood?"

And the guy looked at me like I was crazy. "Who cares? No one cares how you feel."

I have known stars who have demanded private planes, drugs, full interior design for their trailers. It goes on.

I was lucky. I always had my family to keep me grounded.

There's nothing like your mum saying she's had enough of LA and wants to go home to London to catch up on her favorite soap, or your wife saying, "You want a cup of tea? Sure, the kettle's over there," to remind you that no matter how much adulation and validation you're getting in your professional world, at home you're just plain old you. Not a star, not a god and quite possibly not the person who has had the hardest day.

The other people who have always kept me grounded are taxi drivers. In fact, I sometimes think Shakira keeps a few cab drivers on retainer just to stop me getting too big-headed. The other day, I got into a cab to go out for dinner and the driver, who must have been about fifty, looked in his mirror and said, "My grandfather loved you. He saw all your films." There was a little pause. "He's dead now."

"Oh" I said "Have you seen any?"

"I don't think so."

On the way back I got into a different cab. I saw the driver clock me in his mirror. "Hey, I know you," he said. I nodded encouragement. I was hoping for something about how brilliant I'd been in Batman. Instead. "Didn't you used to be Michael Caine?"

Alec Guinness, that great British theatre and film actor, perhaps best-known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movies, but also acclaimed for his work with the greatest director of his era, David Lean, in films like Great Expectations. Oliver Twist and The Bridge on the River Kwai, told me he had similar luck with cabbies. He once got into the back of a cab and the driver said, "I know you." Alec opened his mouth to confirm that he was indeed Alex Guinness and the driver said, "No, don't tell me. I'll get it. Before you get out, I'll get your name." As Alec was paying the fare, the driver said with a flourish, "I've got it. Telly Savalas."

So Alec says, "No, that's not it."

"I bet you wish you was, though," says the cabbie. Alec nodded, with a rueful Obi-Wan smile, and walked off into the night.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

Like all mammals, cows can only produce milk after they've had a baby. Most newborn calves in the United States are separated from their mothers within 12 hours - many immediately after birth - so the mother's milk can be marketed for human consumption. Though some dairy farmers still wean calves on whole milk, the majority of producers use milk replacer, which too often contains spray-dried cattle blood as a cheap source of protein. The chief disadvantage of blood-based milk replacer, according to the vice president of product development for the Animal Protein Corporation, is simply its "different color." Milk replacer containing blood concentrate typically has a "chocolate brown" color which can leave a dark residue on the bottles, buckets, and utensils used to feed the liquid. "For some producers," the company official remarked, "the difference is difficult to accept at first, since the product does not look 'like milk.'" But the "[c]alves don't care," he was quick to add.

The calves may not care, but Stanley Prusiner does. Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of prions. He was quoted in The New York Times as calling the practice of feeding cattle blood to young calves "a really stupid idea." The European Commission also condemned the practice of "intraspecles recycling of ruminant blood and blood products" - the practice of suckling calves on cows' blood protein. Even excluding the fact that brain emboli may pass into the trough that collects the blood once an animal's throat is slit, the report concludes, "As far as ruminant blood is concerned, it is considered that the best approach to protect public health at present is to assume that it could contain low levels of infectivity." Calves in the United States are still drinking up to three cups of "red blood cell protein" concentrate every day.


Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

In population losses on this scale, the toll is usually a composite of figures from one or more of four closely connected sources: (1) murder; (2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; (3) disease; and (4) a plummeting birth rate. In the worst period in the Congo, the long rubber boom, it came in abundance from all four.

1. Murder. Although outright murder was not the major cause of death in Leopold's Congo, it was most clearly documented. When a village or a district failed to supply its quota of rubber or fought back against the regime, Force Publique soldiers or rubber company "sentries" often killed everyone they could find. Those times when an eyewitness happened upon a pile of skeletons or severed hands, and a report survives, represent, of course, only a small proportion of the massacres carried out, only a few sparks from a firestorm. But among those scattered sparks are some that burn distinctly:

? In 1896, a German newspaper, the Kolnische Zeitung, published, on the authority of "a highly esteemed Belgian," news that 1308 severed hands had been turned over to the notorious District Commissioner Leon Fievez in a single day. The newspaper twice repeated the story without being challenged by the Congo state. Several additional reports of that day's events, including some from both Protestant and Catholic missionaries, cited even higher totals for the number of hands. On a later occasion, Pievez admitted that the practice of cutting hands off corpses existed; he denied only, with great vehemence, that he had ever ordered hands cut off living people.

? In 1899, a state officer, Simon Roi, perhaps not realizing that one of the people he was chatting with was an American missionary, bragged about the killing squads under his command. The missionary, Ellsworth Faris, recorded the conversation in his diary· "Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given to him. He must bring back all not used; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand! As to the extent to which this is carried on, [Roi] informed me that in six months they, the State, on the Momboyo River had used 6000 cartridges, which means that 6000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6000, for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns."

? The punitive expeditions against the Budja rebels altogether killed more than thirteen hundred Budjas. Reports of this appeared in various Belgian newspapers in 1900, one of which was subsidized by the Congo state. Dozens of other rebellions against rubber-collecting broke out throughout the territory over the next decade. Estimating the death toll caused by suppressing them all is impossible, but sometimes a stray statistic carries appalling implications, when we remember that soldiers were severely punished for "wasting" bullets on nonhuman targets. Among a raft of revealing documents from the A.B.I.R. concession company that Morel got hold of is a register showing that in the year 1903, a single one of the thirty-five rubber-collecting posts in A.B.I.R. territory was sent a total of 159 firearms and 40,355 rounds of ammunition.

The list of specific massacres on record goes on and on. The territory was awash in corpses, sometimes literally. Where a river flows into Lake Tumba, wrote the Swedish missionary E. V Sjoblom, "I saw dead bodies floating on the lake with the right hand cut off, and the officer told me when I came back why they had been killed. It was for the rubber. When I crossed the stream I saw some dead bodies hanging down from the branches in the water. As I turned away my face at the horrible sight one of the native corporals who was following us down said, 'Oh, that is nothing, a few days ago I returned from a fight, and I brought the white man 160 hands and they were thrown into the river.' "

It was not only missionaries and visitors who recorded the mass murders. Many Force Publique officers kept astonishingly frank diaries about the death and destruction they left behind them.

? At the village of Bikoro on Lake Tumba, a Swedish officer of the Force Publique, Lieutenant Knut Svensson, may have been the cause of some of the mangled bodies his countryman Sjoblom had seen. Svensson noted in his diary a death toll of 527 people in four and a half months time, upon the imposition of the rubber regime in 1894-1895. (According to oral tradition in the area today, Svensson would assemble the people of a recalcitrant village, on the pretext of signing a treaty or recruiting porters, and then simply open fire.)

? The diary of another officer, Charles Lemaire, is chilling in its casualness: "28 March 1891 . The village of Bokanga was burned. 4 April 1891 A stop at Bolebo. Since they wanted to meet us only with spears and guns, the village was burned. One native killed. 12 April 1891 Attack on the Ikengo villages. . The big chief Ekele of Etchimanjindou was killed and thrown in the water. 14 june 1891 Expedition against the Loliva who refuse to come to the station. Dreadful weather; attack made in driving rain. The group of villages was large; couldn't destroy them all. Around 15 blacks killed. 14 June 1891.At 5 A.M. sent the Zanzibari Metchoudi with about 40 men to burn Nkole. The operation was successful and everything was burned. 4 September 1891: At 4 A.M. preparations for attacking Ipeko... The whole village was burned and the banana trees cut down. 13 July 1892: The Bompopo villages were attacked 7 July by Lieutenant Sarrazijn; 20 natives killed; 13 women and children taken prisoner."

? From the diary of Louis Leclercq, another Force Publique officer: "21 June 1895. Arrived at Yambisi at 10:20 A.M. Village abandoned. We sent several groups of soldiers to scour the area; they came back several hours later with 11 heads and 9 prisoners. A canoe sent out hunting in the evening also brought back several heads. 22 June 1895: They brought us three prisoners in the morning, three others towards evening, and three heads. A man from Baumaneh running through the forest shouting for his lost wife and child came too close to our camp and received a bullet from one of our sentries. They brought us his head. Never have I seen such an expression of despair, of fear... We burned the village."

The diaries of Lemaire and Leclercq - and others - go on in this vein for day after day, week after week.

Resistance of any kind, or even cutting corners, was fatal. E. D. Morel reprinted a message that a district commissioner, Jules Jacques, sent to one of his underlings after finding that some villagers had severed vines, killing them, to extract the rubber, instead of merely tapping the vines as they were supposed to: "M.le Chef de Poste. Decidedly these people of [Inongo] are a bad lot. They have just been and cut some rubber vines. We must fight them until their absolute submission has been obtained, or their complete extermination. Inform the natives that if they cut another single vine, I will exterminate them to the last man."

Conrad was not making much up when he had Mr. Kurtz scrawl the infamous line "Exterminate all the brutes!"

2. Starvation, exhaustion, and exposure. As news of the terror spread, hundreds of thousands of people fled their villages. In retaliation, soldiers often took their animals and burned their huts and crops, leaving them no food. This pattern of action was established even before the rubber boom, when Leopold's soldiers were looking primarily for ivory and for porters and food for themselves. A Swedish lieutenant describes such a raid in 1885 in the lower Congo rapids district: "When we were approaching there was a terrible tumult in the village. The natives were completely taken with surprise. We could see them gather what they could of their belongings and escape into the deep thick woods. Before I left the place I had the village plundered of the large number of goats, hens and ducks that were there. Then we abandoned the village and retired to a better place for our noon rest."

As they fled these expeditions, villagers sometimes abandoned small children for fear that their cries would give away their hiding places. As a result, many children starved. A small proportion of the population, lucky enough to live near the Congo's borders, escaped from the country. Some thirty thousand refugees, the French colonial governor estimated, had crossed into French territory by 1900. Others fled to British territory, although a number of them drowned in the Luapula River, which formed part of the border with British-owned Northern Rhodesia. But for most people there was nowhere to flee except deep into the rain forest or the swamps, where there was no shelter and little food. The American soldier of fortune Edgar Canisius saw refugees from his scorched-earth raids "living like wild beasts in the forest, subsisting on roots, and ants and other insects." A fellow Presbyterian missionary of William Sheppard's wrote, in 1899, "All the people of the villages run away to the forest when they hear the State officers are coming. To-night, in the midst of the rainy season, within a radius of 75 miles of Luebo, I am sure it would be a low estimate to say that 40,000 people, men, women, children, with the sick, are sleeping in the forests without shelter."

Around the same time, a young English explorer named Edward S. Grogan walked the length of Africa and was shocked at what he saw in crossing a "depopulated and devastated" 3000-square-mile tract in the far northeastern part of the Congo: "Every village has been burnt to the ground, and as I fled from the country I saw skeletons, skeletons everywhere; and such postures - what tales of horror they told!"

Hunger also struck villagers who did not flee into the forest, because if they were near a rubber post they had to give up much of their bananas, manioc, fish, and meat to feed the soldiers. The village of Bumba in the A.B.I.R. concession, for example, had only a hundred families, but it was expected each month to deliver fifteen kilos of yams or similar vegetables, in addition to five pigs or fifty chickens. Furthermore, villages like this one usually had to come up with all the food while their able-bodied men were in the forest, desperately searching for rubber. Without the manpower to clear new garden plots, so essential in farming the fragile soil of the rain forest, the women often replanted worn-out fields. Harvests declined, and in the old A.B.I.R. region the period is remembered today as lonkali, the time of famine.

Untold thousands of people, women, children, and the elderly, died as hostages. Soldiers kept them in dirt compounds, often in chains, feeding them little or nothing until the men of a village brought in the demanded amount of rubber - something that might take weeks. In one stockade in 1899, prisoners were found to be dying at the rate of three to ten a day.

3 Disease. As with the decimation of the American Indians, disease killed many more Congolese than did bullets. Europeans and the AfroArab slave-traders brought to the interior of the Congo many diseases previously not known there. The local people had no time to build up immunities - as they largely had to malaria, for instance. Both new illnesses and old ones spread rapidly, because huge numbers of Congolese were now forced to travel long distances: as men conscripted to be long-haul porters or to work as steamboat crews (a large boat required from twenty to sixty woodcutters) or as soldiers impressed into the Force Publique. The most notorious killers were smallpox and sleeping sickness, although less dramatic lung and intestinal infections also took a high toll.

Smallpox had been endemic in parts of coastal Africa for centuries, but the great population movements of the imperial age spread the illness throughout the interior, leaving village after village full of dead bodies. A Kuba king - the successor to the one who had welcomed William Sheppard to the kingdom - died from the disease. Smallpox inspired a particular terror. The Africans called it "the sickness from above" or "the sickness of heaven," because the terrifying disease seemed to come from no familiar source. One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot boa constrictor was dining on smallpox victims' flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were too heavy to fly.

Sleeping sickness also spread lethally up the rivers. Half a million Congolese were estimated to have died of it in 1901 alone. The disease is caused by a parasite first spread by the bite of the pink-striped tsetse fly, about the size of a horsefly, with a distinctive high-pitched buzz. Once contracted by humans, sleeping sickness becomes highly contagious. It can cause fever, swelling of the lymph glands, a strange craving for meat, and a sensitivity to cold. At last comes the immense lethargy that gives the illness its name.

Faced with undeniable evidence of massive population loss, Leopold's apologists, then and now, blame sleeping sickness. And it is true that sleeping sickness and the other diseases would doubtless have taken many lives even if the Congo had come into the twentieth century under a regime other than Leopold's. But the story is more complicated, for disease rarely acts by itself alone. Epidemics almost always take a drastically higher and more rapid toll among the malnourished and the traumatized: the Nazis and Soviets needed no poison gas or firing squads to finish off many of those who died in their camps. Today, thanks in part to our century of famines and barbed wire, epidemiologists understand all too well the exact mechanisms by which this happens. Even in the Congo, one did not have to be a physician to see that those who were dying of disease were not dying of disease alone. Charles Greban de Saint-Germain, a magistrate at Stanley Falls, wrote in 1905: "Disease powerfully ravages an exhausted population, and it's to this cause, in my opinion, that we must attribute the unceasing growth of sleeping sickness in this region; along with porterage and the absence of food supplies, it will quickly decimate this country. I've seen nowhere in the Congo as sad a spectacle as that along the road from Kasongo to Kabambare. The villages for the most part have few people in them; many huts are in ruins; men, like women and children, are thin, weak, without life, very sick, stretched out inert, and above all there's no food."

4. Plummeting birth rate. Not surprisingly, when men were sent into the forest in search of rubber for weeks at a time, year after year, and women were held hostage and half-starved, fewer children were born. A Catholic missionary who worked for many years in the Lake Mai Ndombe district, a major rubber area, noticed this pattern. When he arrived, in 1910, he was surprised by the almost total absence of children between the ages of seven and fourteen, although there were many of other ages. This pinpoints the period from 1896 to 1903 - just when the rubber campaign was at its height in the district. A witness in a nearby area at that very time was Roger Casement, on his investigative trip. He estimated that the population had dropped by 60 percent and wrote that "the remnant of the inhabitants are only now, in many cases, returning to their destroyed or abandoned villages. A lower percentage of births lessen[s] the population... Women refuse to bear children, and take means to save themselves from motherhood. They give as the reason that if 'war' should come to a woman 'big with child' or with a baby to carry, 'she' cannot well run away and hide from the soldiers." Part of the population loss in the Congo resulted, then, when families, terrorized and torn apart by the rubber campaign, simply stopped having children.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

On that Friday evening, while attention was riveted on the unseemly and irresistible spectacle of Regan's graceless departure, Cannon had quietly slipped into the White House to begin his confidential mission. Baker assumed there would have to be major changes in the staff. But before he made them, he needed to understand how the old White House team had functioned - or not functioned.

At Baker's instruction, Cannon embarked on a series of exhaustive interviews with the members of the White House staff, trying to determine what had gone wrong. It was like interviewing witnesses in a political mystery. For six years, Ronald Reagan had been the most commanding presence in American politics, a president of apparently limitless popularity and success. But for the past four months, ever since the news had broken that he had secretly sold weapons to the government of Iran, his presidency had seemed lifeless, a hollow shell. Reagan had been elected by a forty-nine-state landslide only twenty-seven months earlier, but the polls now showed that his popularity was plummeting. He had been praised for having restored the credibility of the office, but more than half the country thought he was not telling the whole truth about either the arms sales to Iran or the diversion of money to the Nicaraguan contras. More than any recent leader, Reagan had shown an instinctive ability to please the American public, yet he had blundered into a misbegotten set of policies that no one, no matter where they stood on the political spectrum, could support. How, Cannon wanted to know, could this have happened?

Cannon had talked with the president's aides late into Friday evening and through most of Saturday. By the time he returned home quite late on Saturday night, he had been tired, dispirited, and very worried.

Now, in Sunday's early light, he began to draft his report for Howard Baker He looked again at the notes he had taken during the two days of interviews. The picture they presented of Reagan's White House was nothing short of astounding.

Cannon later recalled his impressions: "Chaos. There was no order in the place. The staff system had just broken down. It had just evaporated.

There was no pattern of analysis, no coming together. Individual cabinet members were just doing whatever they wanted to do - the ones who were smart had realized that the White House really didn't matter. They could go around the White House, and no one would retaliate.

"I took a look at some of the staff's paperwork and was stunned at their incompetence. They were rank amateurs."

But more chilling than anything else was the portrait these aides drew of the president they served. They spoke with Cannon in confidence; one by one, he recalled, "they told stories about how inattentive and inept the president was. He was lazy; he wasn't interested in the job. They said he wouldn't read the papers they gave him - even short position papers and documents. They said he wouldn't come over to work - all he wanted to do was to watch movies and television at the residence.

They felt free to sign his initials on documents without noting that they were acting for him. When I asked a group of them, who among them thought they had authority to sign in the president's name, there was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then one answered, 'Well - everybody and nobody.' "

Sifting through his notes, Cannon couldn't shake his astonishment. He was of course an uninitiated outsider; he'd had only a brief glimpse into the inner workings of an enormously complex organization. But he had seen enough to find the situation frightening - for him, for the party, and for the country.

Cannon reopened his copy of the Constitution and found, almost at end, what he had been searching for: Section Four of the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

AMENDDMENT XXV SECTION FOUR. Whenever the vice president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the vice president shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.

Cannon stared hard at the provision. It had never been invoked; deceptively simple, it was a straightforward procedure for removing the president from office if he were no longer competent to govern. All it would take would be the agreement of the vice president and a majority of the cabinet. After a good deal of thought, Cannon reached a conclusion that would seem extreme, maybe even bizarre, to those who only knew the Ronald Reagan they saw on television and who hadn't heard all that he had over the past two days. But Cannon wasn't concerned with public perception; his primary loyalty was to Baker, to whom he felt he owed his unvarnished judgment. So he carefully typed out his first recommendation:

"Suggested priorities, March 1, 1987:

"I. Consider the possibility that section four of the 25th amendment might be applied."

**

That evening Cannon took the finished memorandum - which included several recommendations for immediate action - to Baker's home in a posh wooded enclave of Northwest Washington for a confidential meeting. Two of Baker's other trusted aides had also been asked to attend:

A. B. Culvahouse, a bright young lawyer who had cut short his vacation to take over the next day as the White House counsel, and Thomas Griscom, another transplanted Tennessean who had been Baker's press aide and would soon become the White House's director of communications. Griscom already knew what Cannon thought. He too had been asked to interview the White House staff over the weekend, and he had been similarly appalled. By Friday night, he was so shocked by the stories he was hearing that he kidded Cannon that they should be given medals for even daring to go back to the White House the next morning. The two had exchanged notes on their findings during a late lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill on Saturday, and although they had thought they were starving, by the time they had realized the magnitude of the crisis they were facing, neither had had any appetite left.

In the privacy of Baker's home on Sunday night, Cannon warned Baker and the others that what he was about to say was extremely serious. Baker assumed his practiced poker face and waited. Sparing no details, Cannon then repeated what he had heard from the president's aides. The man they described, he told Baker, had no interest in running the country. In his estimation, and as the only one in the room who had previously worked in the White House, Cannon told Baker that his first decision should be whether to set in motion the involuntary retirement of the president on the grounds that he was no longer fit to discharge the duties of his office. Such a move could cause a constitutional crisis, Cannon realized. But, he said, if the president was as incompetent as his aides indicated, invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment could be the only way to serve the national interest.

There was a long, sober silence. During Watergate, Howard Baker had been a senior member of the Senate's investigating committee, and he understood as well as any politician in the country the implications of Cannon's words. But neither Baker nor his aides dismissed the constitutional remedy as beyond the realm of possibility. Instead, after hearing Cannon out, Baker finally said in his Tennessee drawl, "Well, it doesn't sound like the Ronald Reagan I just saw, but we'll see tomorrow"

On Monday morning, March 2, Cannon, Baker, Culvahouse, and Griscom gathered in the West Wing of the White House. They planned to watch the president closely, to determine whether he appeared mentally fit to serve. First they observed him from across the room as he chaired a formal cabinet meeting. Then they accompanied him to one of the weekly "issues luncheons," a free-flowing discussion with members of the White House staff that was also held in the Cabinet Room.

One of Donald Regan's aides guided them to seats alongside the French doors that lined the side of the room and led out to the Rose Garden. But Cannon insisted on four seats at the table; he wanted a closer look at Reagan. The four men deliberately bracketed the president: Baker on his right side, Griscom on his left, and Culvahouse and Cannon directly across from him, so that they could look into the president's eyes.

Reagan seemed relaxed and animated. He swapped a few familiar jokes with Baker. There was the one about the lady from Tennessee who was a stern teetotaler. A friend had protested, "Even Jesus drank a little wine," to which she had replied, "I would think more of him if he didn't." Everyone laughed. The tension evaporated. Then Reagan reminisced a bit about being governor of California. He seemed so alert and attentive that Cannon began to wonder about everything the White House staff members had told him.

Perhaps Donald Regan's henchmen had exaggerated the president's frailties, he thought. Perhaps they were trying to justify an internal coup, an arrangement whereby the chief of staff would make others believe he had been forced to act as a kind of regent for a disabled president. Could the president they described - the inattentive, incurious man who watched television rather than attending to affairs of state - be the same as the genial, charming man across the table?

What the hell is going on here? Cannon wondered. The old fella looks just dandy

And through it all, Ronald Reagan always did,

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

Really big players got royal treatment from Harrah. He had two private planes to ferry customers. In the early seventies, his casino hosts spent more than one thousand dollars per week on call girls for his best players, charging their services to internal account 619 and sometimes writing on the voucher "customer satisfaction refund." When IRS auditors in 1976 found these expenses taken as business deductions they righteously objected. Harrah's agreed not to ask taxpayers to subsidize the sexual adventures of its high rollers and the IRS dropped the matter.

Some folks remarked how Harrah's Lake Tahoe reported more winnings than even bigger casinos in Las Vegas and wondered how Harrah could do it. Some speculated it was the size of his players' bankrolls. But what mattered was how he counted the money-no skimming allowed.

Harrah's prosperity attracted interest from a lot of places, including a motel chain out of Memphis that had been one of the hot success stories of the fifties and sixties but was now foraging for new profits.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" (1994)

the U.S. Department of Agriculture removed Wakanda from its list of free trade partners. Yes, Wakanda, as in from the movie "Black Panther." There is no trade war looming with this fictional country, but someone found it on USDA's online tariff tracker. For a moment, you could import things from Wakanda, like cows and water chestnuts, tariff-free. Sadly, a spokesperson told NBC it was just a test file that had been mistakenly published.

Being a decent human being is difficult for everyone from time to time but it seems there are particular challenges for those who become stars in their worlds. In some ways, being decent becomes harder, just at the point when your behavior becomes more noticeable and more important. Harder, because once you enter that bubble of stardom you can lose touch with reality and become demanding, egotistical and unreasonable almost as a way of life. More noticeable, because everyone is watching, all the time. We love to know what famous people are "really" like. Did you lose your rag in an airport queue? Or did you take time out of your day to smile at a little boy, sign an autograph and tell him to be good for his mum? Either way, whoever witnesses it will extrapolate an entire personality for you, and tell all their friends. More important, because the more successful you become, the more your behavior sets the tone for everyone around you.

Stay grounded

Some huge stars completely lose touch with the real world. Frank Sinatra, for example, was an extremely generous member of the secret philanthropists' club of Hollywood - a circle of big stars who took care of less successful actors as they grew older or fell on hard times - and became a great friend of mine. But he was a law unto himself and everything was on his terms. For example, Frank had a Twenty Minute Rule. He would not travel for dinner more than twenty minutes' drive from his house in Beverly Hills. If he had been invited to dinner and had been in the car for twenty minutes he would command his driver to turn around. "I'm twenty minutes," he would call out. "It's too far. We're going home." Mind you, he was also known to fly to Paris for dinner when he was staying in London. And he would always have people fussing around him.

I remember once one of his guys whispered to me conspiratorially, "Frank's in a great mood today."

I said, at normal volume, "What about me? What about my mood?"

And the guy looked at me like I was crazy. "Who cares? No one cares how you feel."

I have known stars who have demanded private planes, drugs, full interior design for their trailers. It goes on.

I was lucky. I always had my family to keep me grounded.

There's nothing like your mum saying she's had enough of LA and wants to go home to London to catch up on her favorite soap, or your wife saying, "You want a cup of tea? Sure, the kettle's over there," to remind you that no matter how much adulation and validation you're getting in your professional world, at home you're just plain old you. Not a star, not a god and quite possibly not the person who has had the hardest day.

The other people who have always kept me grounded are taxi drivers. In fact, I sometimes think Shakira keeps a few cab drivers on retainer just to stop me getting too big-headed. The other day, I got into a cab to go out for dinner and the driver, who must have been about fifty, looked in his mirror and said, "My grandfather loved you. He saw all your films." There was a little pause. "He's dead now."

"Oh" I said "Have you seen any?"

"I don't think so."

On the way back I got into a different cab. I saw the driver clock me in his mirror. "Hey, I know you," he said. I nodded encouragement. I was hoping for something about how brilliant I'd been in Batman. Instead. "Didn't you used to be Michael Caine?"

Alec Guinness, that great British theatre and film actor, perhaps best-known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movies, but also acclaimed for his work with the greatest director of his era, David Lean, in films like Great Expectations. Oliver Twist and The Bridge on the River Kwai, told me he had similar luck with cabbies. He once got into the back of a cab and the driver said, "I know you." Alec opened his mouth to confirm that he was indeed Alex Guinness and the driver said, "No, don't tell me. I'll get it. Before you get out, I'll get your name." As Alec was paying the fare, the driver said with a flourish, "I've got it. Telly Savalas."

So Alec says, "No, that's not it."

"I bet you wish you was, though," says the cabbie. Alec nodded, with a rueful Obi-Wan smile, and walked off into the night.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)