The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work; the harder they try, the more captive they are.

Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

For more than a millennium the eastern Mediterranean seaboard called Syria Libanensis, or Mount Lebanon, had been able to accommodate at least a dozen different sects, ethnicities, and beliefs — it worked like magic. The place resembled major cities of the eastern Mediterranean (called the Levant) more than it did the other parts in the interior of the Near East (it was easier to move by ship than by land through the mountainous terrain). The Levantine cities were mercantile in nature; people dealt with one another according to a clear protocol, preserving a peace conducive to commerce, and they socialized quite a bit across communities. This millennium of peace was interrupted only by small occasional friction within Moslem and Christian communities, rarely between Christians and Moslems.