A Couple of Saturday Quotes

George Jonas in The National Post:
"Western-style democracies can survive terrorists. Whether we can survive our own security bureaucracies is a different question. We’re stuck in the groove of an obsolete mindset that isn’t helping us in the age of asymmetric warfare. Many security measures, far from defeating terrorism, are doing the terrorists’ job for them."

Nicholas Thompson, reviewing Michael Gordin's Red Cloud at Dawn in The New York Times, on the beginning of the nuclear arms race between the USA and USSR in the 1940s:
"Somehow, rational decision was piled upon rational decision to create something utterly irrational. Four decades later, two countries with few disputes over land had lavished trillions of dollars and rubles on world-destroying weapons."