The news this week tells us of floods in Bangladesh: they have denuded the high ground of trees, and now the low ground floods. There is nothing to eat. Food shipments are urgently needed.
Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of population growth on Earth.
We like to believe we have rational control of our lives, but how much history depends on personal accidents? Henry II of England spent many of his evenings getting drunk with his knights. He does not seem to have been an actual alcoholic. He also suffered from chilblains and piles. Were they especially painful the night that Henry drunkenly muttered "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" A week later Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was dead in his cathedral. Henry accepted responsibility for the order he claimed he had never intended to give, and seemed genuinely penitent; but the history of the English church and state was changed forever.
Sometimes, too, what seems coldly rational is not. Robert S. McNamara and his Pentagon "Whiz Kids" attempted to subordinate military strategy and doctrine to a mathematical technique called "systems analysis." The notion was that military judgment was flawed; what was needed was "objective criteria." In practice that meant numbers; and soon a great part of our effort in Vietnam was devoted to collecting statistics. One USAF colonel, examining our efforts against North Vietnam, pointed out a new way to make the attack more effective—and was told "Colonel, you have the wrong idea. We're not trying to destroy targets, we're flying sorties and delivering weapons tonnage." The stories about body counts are too well known to need repeating. Decisions can and should be rational; but those who make the decisions remain human.