Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

"In this world no one rules by love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong, and to have dominion you must have a genius for organizing."

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - If you thought Venezuela's political crisis seemed to be dragging for an impossibly long time -- you were right. In a bizarre mass-malfunction, Venezuela's clocks are ticking too slowly due to a power shortage weakening the electric current nationwide. By the end of each day, the sluggish time pieces still have another 150 seconds to tick before they catch up to midnight. "Everything that has to do with time-keeping has slowed down. If it's an electric clock, it's running slow," said Miguel Lara, general manager of the national power grid. "Your computer isn't affected. Your television isn't affected. No other devices ... just clocks," he added. The meltdown has taken a total 14 hours and 36 minutes from Venezuela's clocks over 12 of the past 13 months, he said.

A fascinating illustration of the transience of human power comes through the story of Francisco de Goya's painting Allegory of Madrid. As a court painter, Goya painted for whomever was in power. So in 1810, he began a portrait of King Joseph Bonaparte. Napoleon had conquered Spain and installed his brother Joseph as king. In 1812, Spain was liberated and Goya altered the portrait, putting the new Spanish Constitution where former King Joseph's head had been. Joseph's head reappeared, though, in 1813 when the French retook Madrid. The city fell again, and in 1814 Joseph's head was replaced with that of Ferdinand VII's, the new Spanish monarch. (Footnote 1: Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern (New York, Harper Collins, 1991) 69.) Comically the head illustrates a profound truth: human power is anything but immutable.

Elephants in the Sky Using the Largest Living Land Mammal to Calculate Cloud Mass By Robert Krulwich Sept. 3— Ever wonder how much a cloud weighs? What about a hurricane? A meteorologist has done some estimates and the results might surprise you. Let's start with a very simple white puffy cloud — a cumulus cloud. How much does the water in a cumulus cloud weigh? Peggy LeMone, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, did the numbers. "The water in the little cloud weighs about 550 tons," she calculates. "Or if you want to convert it to something that might be a little more meaningful … think of elephants." Floating Masses Assume an elephant weighs about six tons, she says, that would mean that water inside a typical cumulous cloud would weigh about one hundred elephants. The thought of a hundred elephants-worth of water suspended in the sky begs another question — what keeps it up there? "First of all, the water isn't in elephant sized particles, it's in tiny tiny tiny particles," explains LeMone. And those particles float on the warmer air that's rising below. But still, the concept of so much water floating in the sky was surprising even to a meteorologist like LeMone. "I had no idea how much a cloud would weigh, actually, when I started the calculations," she says. Outweighing Elephant Populations So how many elephant units of water are inside a big storm cloud … 10 times bigger all the way around than the "puffy" cumulus cloud? Again, LeMone did the numbers: About 200,000 elephants. Now, ratchet up the calculations for a hurricane about the size of Missouri and the figures get really massive. "What we're doing is weighing the water in one cubic meter theoretically pulled from a cloud and then multiplying by the number of meters in a whole hurricane," she explains. The result? Forty million elephants. That means the water in one hurricane weighs more than all the elephants on the planet. Perhaps even more than all the elephants that have ever lived on the planet. And that is a lot of water. — ABC News' Justine Schiro and Alex Travelli contributed to this report.

If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world. -- Emmett Fox

There is a certain safeguard that the natural character of intelligent men possesses within itself. It provides benefit and safety to all, especially to democracies against tyrants. And what is it? Mistrust. Guard that, and don't let it go. You can come to no harm if you preserve it.