WAITING FOR THE ARCHDUKE: Reader Bill Rudersdorf writes:

I have that “waiting for a bunch of shoes to drop” feeling about the current world situation. It’s not going to be nice. It’s not going to be over quickly. It’s like the summer of 1914, but I keep wondering “Where is the Sarajevo? Who will be the Archduke?”. What we now call World War I didn’t just happen without a long run-up, but still few predicted it. This is financial, at least in part, but then again, that was at the root of the beginnings of such conflagrations as the French and Russian Revolutions, whose aftershocks are still with us. So, where will it start this time, and when?

Yeah, our political class has managed things such that we don’t have much safety margin, in a whole lot of areas.