Charles Wheelan - The Rationing

Metropolitan Statistical Area, such as the Chicago metropolitan area.

Unfortunately, the former Chair of the Federal Reserve was also forced to deny that he had stolen two tons of gold, a rumor that dogs him to this day. As anyone who has served in Washington knows, these kinds of rumors can never be fully scrubbed away, no matter how outlandish they may be. I remember a college-educated friend telling me at a bar mitzvah years later, “Of course he denied stealing the gold. What else was he going to say? They never searched his house. Why not? Because all these guys are crooks. They’re in cahoots.” I considered telling him that it’s hard to get a search warrant based on an Internet rumor, but instead I just excused myself and went to the bar.

The Strategist was arrested in D.C. for solicitation eight months ago, and then again for the same offense three weeks later in Buffalo, New York. This made him a target for late-night comics, not merely for the prostitution arrest, but because it happened in Buffalo. He later made a compelling argument that prostitution should be legalized. (You can watch the YouTube video.) Like so many other things he argued, it was eminently sensible once you stripped the emotion away from the issue.

Martin “Bo” McCormick, The Source of My Courage (New York: Little, Brown, Simon & Schuster, 2032).

Sam Williams Wainwright , In Service to My Nation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2031).

Sociologists would later note a sharp reversal in a decades-long trend: Americans were more likely to gather news related to the Outbreak in those early days on television rather than from the Internet. They speculated that the nature of the crisis was such that humans felt an unconscious need to share the news with other people as the situation unfolded.

The President himself described “roaring” at aides throughout the Outbreak: Robert Evan Steans, Leadership in a Time of Crisis (New York: Crown, 2034).

Simran Shankardass, “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There: The Emotional Need for Volition During the Outbreak, Journal of Social Psychology 169, 1 (2033): 123–146.

Perez’s conviction is still winding its way through the courts. He was originally convicted of reckless endangerment, but that conviction was overturned on appeal on First Amendment grounds. Perez continues to maintain that “alternative news” is a form of freedom of expression. Nearly every legal scholar I have spoken with on this topic believes that the Perez case will ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.

Perez told Congress that he came up with this name, the LLL, while waiting for his burrito to heat up in the microwave.

My inner scientist compels me to point out that recent research has found clear gender-based differences in decision making, particularly in life-and-death situations (or the simulation thereof). There is no evidence to substantiate the Secretary of Defense’s assertion that women are less capable military leaders. However, his implicit suggestion that there might be systematic differences between how men and women make battlefield decisions is defensible. Of course, it is entirely possible—and perhaps likely, according to my amateur reading of history—that less testosterone makes for much better military leadership.

Unless you are a policy wonk, you may not have any interest in this: One feature of the South China Sea Agreement was a uniform carbon tax to be implemented in all of the signatory nations ($42 per ton of CO 2emission, to rise at 2 percent annually). Commonly called a “pollution tax,” this was a measure that economists had recommended for years as a tool for discouraging the most carbon-intensive activities. The signatory nations also agreed to impose a “carbon tariff” on countries that did not adopt a similar carbon tax—namely China. The net effect was likely to be a huge reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, albeit at a high cost to Chinese manufacturing.

As a matter of basic geography, Air Force One was still east of Hawaii, so no one was going to see Kiribati or Guadalcanal out the window. But, to paraphrase the iconic twentieth-century film Animal House , she was “on a roll.”

Senator Derek McDowell, “Statement to the Outbreak Inquiry Commission,” 2031.

These are all real examples gathered by the Outbreak Inquiry Commission.

The Strategist was, at the time, considered to be one of the top twenty competitive bridge players in the world. In bridge, players see their cards and then make a “bid” as to how well they will do in the hand. A player can mess up a hand with great cards by bidding too aggressively, or “overbidding.”

He had been a tenured member of the Princeton Economics Department before winning his Senate seat. At the time, he was one of only two members of Congress with a Ph.D.

There had not been sufficient time to do this before the President’s earlier address to the nation.

The NIH Director had briefed the President on my hypothesis.

In her accounts of this conversation, the NIH Director has maintained repeatedly that I asked her, “Who invited Giscard?” That is not what I said. I do not like Giscard personally, and our feud is now public, but I would never have spoken in a way that suggested a scientist of his caliber should be excluded from our efforts to deal with the Outbreak.

You can watch the YouTube clip, which includes not just the remark (in French) but also about five seconds of audience reaction during which the scientists look around in shock.

I am certain that I was the first person in the room to suggest that the virulent form of Capellaviridae was different than the benign form at the molecular level. Several people who were in the room have affirmed this. Giscard, however, maintains that he had always believed this might be the case and that he had traveled to the U.S. to share this hypothesis with us. From this point on, as I will subsequently note in the text, most of the important details from this meeting—in terms of who said what—are still in dispute.

At the beginning of the administration, some observers had suggested—presciently, it would appear—that the President had passed out the military planes to legislative leaders so that he could threaten to take them away, not unlike giving a teenager a car and then using it as leverage.

We know this was the exact language the Strategist used, as the Secretary of State devoted a page and a half to this conversation in her memoir.

Language worked out in the progressive caucus that the Tea Party subsequently adopted as well.

As most readers will recall, the strange feature of this kidnapping—children being released as their parents turned themselves in—provided an opportunity for U.S. and Saudi Special Forces to sneak a soldier into the compound. The still-unnamed female Army Ranger, who posed as the U.S. Deputy Counsel General, was given only a cursory search by the male kidnappers, as the U.S. officials had anticipated. Six of the ten kidnappers were killed; all but two of the hostages were rescued safely. The fact that a woman had foiled a fundamentalist terrorist group with Stone Age views toward women was, of course, a profound irony.