Every other animal is stronger than we are they have fangs, they have claws, they have nimbleness, they have speed.

Nevertheless, Putin is trying to spend his way out of the crisis. But such efforts are unlikely to be enough, because the heavy handed state dominated economy with ex KGB agents now embedded at the top of most state companies lacks both the nimbleness and the diversification to recover speedily.

Might there be a causal relation between the Bush administration s cavalier, if not hostile, attitude toward law and its dazzling inability to acknowledge mistakes and manage midstream readjustments? Could it be that a willingness to flout the law and circumvent the Constitution tends to produce not nimbleness, but obduracy and intransigence?