Random

Why Iraq is, and always has been, unwinnable:

In private life, an adult who keeps beating down on a five year old – even such a one as originally attacked him with a knife – will be perceived as
committing a crime; therefore he will lose the support of bystanders and end up by being arrested, tried and convicted.

He who fights against the weak – and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed – and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish.

Can someone say Minski moment?

For years we printed heedless billions of dollars, gave them out virtually for free, and created hundred percent annual inflation in the housing markets. Does anyone doubt this? Our government and central bank and major financial institutions intentionally pursued a policy of hyperinflation in a single sector of the economy, and even as they offered increasingly exorbitant loans to increasingly uncreditworthy rubes, they reassured themselves that it was "the market"--invisible, ineffible, inerrant--that was causing a shoddy three-bedroom in a second-rate subdivision off a highway somewhere in Maryland to catapult from $250,000 to $350,000 to $600,000 in resale value over the course of forty months or so.

And then we come to the parlor game:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times–in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.