2009: Good Year for Mideast Quagmire

In 2002, at the height of the second Palestinian intifada, a new kind of illegal gambling sprang up in Israel: suicide-bombings roulette.

The rules were simple: People placed bets on where the next attack in Israel would take place. If you got it right, you could make a killing. Naturally, Jerusalem gave the shortest odds. Betting on a bomb going off there seemed like a sure thing. Still, people ruined their lives getting this seemingly solid prediction wrong. Not as many as those whose lives were directly ruined by the bombings themselves, but there were still enough examples to teach us, yet again, that irrational rage is a tough thing to predict. And it's hard to think of another region on Earth that's even half as angry and irrational as the Middle East.