Sublime

The United States must expect hostile attacks. Its power will generate hatred, and it should expect neither sympathy nor gratitude. Great, global powers don’t get either. The expectation that the United States will be loved as it was after World War I is the expectation of an immature power.

was a dead British orator and writer who was on my mind. Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them.

outflows

large numbers of people behave in a fundamentally different way than do small numbers.

Securitization had produced the most toxic financial assets in the world – Fabrice Tourre was just one of an army of financial engineers manufacturing them – and had spread them far beyond the originating banks; revealingly, the near-total collapse of securitization in the course of 2008 was a key feature of the crisis.

result of our successful execution of threat perception reduction.

Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves into fragmented, overlapping sovereignties.