Who said events dear boy events

We have standard incident management procedures, with agreed command and control, so everyone knows who is responsible for what. We have over 6, of our staff trained and ready to join the response on whom we can draw. We have dedicated facilities at national and local level that we use to manage each incident. We have pre-agreed plans for how we will respond to particular types of incident. We practice, including with the military. And we measure how well we are doing: our capacity to respond well to incidents is one of our Key Performance Indicators.

Since I became Chief Executive in we have put a lot more emphasis on incident response, and more resources into it. We now respond to more incidents, more quickly and in greater numbers than ever before, and we have made incident response a core part of our business as usual.

That is not accidental. Handling incidents well can save lives and livelihoods. As I said, much of what I have learnt about incident management during my career has come as much from making mistakes as it has from getting it right. So I offer the following. Be decisive: be prepared to take big decisions. In an incident the biggest risk is not taking a decision that later proves to be wrong some always will : the biggest risk is not taking a decision at all, or taking it too late.

You will not have all the facts: decide anyway. Flick the switch early to put your organisation into incident mode. So over-resource at the start: people, kit, whatever. You can always scale back later.

Establish your battle rhythm immediately — which meetings when with whom to do what - and clear roles and responsibilities.

The absent are always wrong. Being present and visible at the scene of an incident is as important as what you do when you get there. So get yourself and your team to the scene as soon as possible.

Be clear what your goals are and ensure everyone in your team knows. Be ready to adjust your strategy as the situation changes, because it will. The media battle the air war is as much a part of the incident as your operational response the ground war.

You need to win both. Have a simple message and keep on saying it. It will go away. Not since the Depression. Democrats gained in , , and Republicans gained in , , and How likely are they to gain the six seats needed to produce Speaker Dick Gephardt in ? Charles Cook, one of the most acute political analysts, notes that Republicans cannot count on benefiting from an impulse to rally around the commander in chief's party during a midterm election.

In the only such election during World War I , six days before the armistice , President Wilson's Democratic Party lost six Senate seats and 19 House seats--and control of both houses. In the two midterm elections after the escalation in Vietnam and before the negotiated de-escalation, Johnson's Democrats lost 47 seats in and Nixon's Republicans lost 12 in In , the first election after the last redistricting, there was tremendous churning of the House membership: 65 representatives retired and 43 were defeated.

But in the national mood regarding Congress was unusually dyspeptic--remember that year's scandal surrounding members' overdrafts from the House bank--and the term-limits movement was rapidly gaining strength. This year, only 24 House members 16 Republicans, eight Democrats are retiring, some from politics, others to run for senator or governor.

This year, redistricting, by both parties in the states they control, has been, even more than usual, devoted to protecting incumbents. In most cases that has meant making safe seats even safer. As a result, says Cook, the number of even potentially competitive races in has shrunk "enormously," to perhaps 50, of which perhaps only a dozen now held by each party--will be hotly contested.

Perhaps none of California's 53 races will be really competitive. One event. One short event. Instead, the events themselves are not nearly that concrete. You accept one probable event.

The Unknown Soldier Boy. It seldom occurs to you that the feelings themselves might be primary, and that the particular event was somehow a response to your emotions, rather than the other way around… You are… literally hypnotized into believing that your feelings arise in response to events. Your feelings, however, cause the events you perceive. Secondarily, you do of course then react to those events. As with the case of Lewis Carroll , even relatively recent historical truth can prove remarkably elusive, with hard evidence difficult to find and much apparently robust evidence simply turning out to be a case of everyone quoting everyone else.

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