While Democrats across California were scrambling to avoid a potential cataclysm wrought by the state's top-two primary system, San Franciscans easily navigated a mayoral race in which two candidates, Mark Leno and Jane Kim, teamed up and asked voters to rank them first and second, in either order.
If the debt ceiling is increased, avoiding a potential cataclysm — an outcome cherished by more than a few Tea Party-affiliated House Republicans — the president has a chance to stay on the offensive on the deficit issue, particularly if he offers significant budget cuts and revenue increases now and next year that are supported by the public.
Meanwhile, scores of smaller companies and startups are putting emergency plans into place to avoid a Year 2000 computer cataclysm.
If we are to avoid the cataclysm of war in Korea, in the wider Pacific or even extending toward the continental United States, we'll need to accept the possibility, perhaps even likelihood, of distasteful horse-trading ahead.
Fortunately, this change is occurring slowly enough to avoid cataclysm.
But just avoiding that cataclysm is not enough.
If the Coalition avoids that cataclysm then the liberalism of both options - David Cameron and Ed Miliband - will cancel each other out.
The stakes are high: failure to agree on the former would prompt the government to suspend all but its most basic functions; neglecting the latter would entail defaulting on America's debts.Republican leaders say they want to avoid any such cataclysms, but are also insisting on cuts.
The CATF notes, "It is now well established in climate science that CO2 emissions globally must stop, by the middle of this century, to avoid the worst cataclysms of global warming".
Through this and a series of similar operations, which Salisbury called "sanction-busting", Rhodesia avoided the economic cataclysm predicted by Wilson, and, with the help of South Africa and Portugal, gradually became more self-sufficient.
