"Disaster preparedness holiday. In this case, it'd be something like, one in ten thousand people, probably relatively smarter ones than myself, get told that they're part of the evil conspiracy to take over the world. Where it's already pretty improbably that conspiracy got up to 100,000 people and nobody noticed, but you want to test yourself against problems more difficult than the ones you really expect to face. Then those people have mind-control powers, meaning that, if they end up talking to you for five minutes, they get to hand you a card saying you've now been mind-controlled and you should go off and get other people to talk to them, or try to sabotage the company you work for, or cut a communications line, or kill potential leaders for the resistance in their sleep. And then all the key infrastructure people have to make sure their organization goes on working when a bunch of people have been tagged dead and maybe somebody got turned into a saboteur. Other people need to check houses for people who got killed and make sure they get into the deep cold, obviously not for real, just rehearsing that. That sort of thing."
"Civilization doesn't have any serious enemies that we know about. That doesn't mean Civilization wants to let itself get weak. If Nidal opens a gate into our dimension and tries to take over the world using Alter Self and Suggestion spells, we've gamed that out in advance."