Of course, historical analogies are imperfect.

I don't understand the analogy.

False analogies with the past trivialize history.

But how do we invent analogies?

Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime.

Here the business analogy is simply not sufficient.

The reasoning behind such episodes is based on a flawed analogy.

Governance by analogy can easily lead to muddled governance.

Analogies with pigs, snouts, and troughs fill the pages of British newspapers.

Let us start with the analogy between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hitler.

The analogy to the Internet, the new economy, and the crash of the NASDAQ is straightforward.

PRINCETON Whenever today s economic crisis is discussed, analogies to the Great Depression are never far away.

This is certainly the case with the analogy that Israeli leaders insist on drawing between the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust and the threat posed to the Jewish state by a nuclear armed Iran.

These analogies are important because in both Algeria and South Africa, colonialism failed.

Like all historical analogies, this one may prove flawed, but it is not absurd.

But the Bush administration was careless in its use of historical analogies and reckless in its inadequate preparation for an effective occupation.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, for example, analogies to Pearl Harbor were made frequently.

In front of the building, victims' names are embedded among the cobble stones (similar to the Stolperstein in Germany).

Yet analogies with the Third Reich, although highly effective as a way to denounce people with whose views one disagrees, are usually false.

But Bush missed another lesson implicit in his analogy the importance of using the soft power of culture.

Each analogy contains an element of truth, but none, of course, corresponds to the realities of the challenges Iran represents.

But there is scope for qiyas and ijma (consensus and reconsideration) in Islam.

And so sometimes these analogous experiences, analogous role play, can also be quite valuable.

All the fashionable talk nowadays about computer viruses explains what these culprits do by forging an analogy to their biological namesakes.

To return to the cinema analogy investors know that the exit is not large enough to allow them all to squeeze through at the same time.

Certain bloggers have raised vivid, though not always convincing, historical analogies in their posts about the May 6 protests.

By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark Now metaphor is ubiquitous, yet it's hidden.

Central bankers might argue that we have entered a state of permanent market crisis analogous to the never ending war on terror.

This imagined state of affairs might be called the financial singularity, analogous to the hypothetical future technological singularity, when computers replace human intelligence.

The career of his political mentor, Menachem Begin, demonstrated that distorted analogies between past and present can inspire irresponsible policies.

Loose analogies can easily be regarded at proofs, and a vast array of experiences can be enrolled to support a particular view.

A German company has used the de.tl sub domain to offer free domain names, on a similar basis to de.vu, which uses Vanuatu's .vu domain.

NEWPORT BEACH As we all struggle to comprehend the economic and financial impact of Japan s calamity, it is tempting to seek historical analogies for guidance.

They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest.

In this respect, the contemporary crisis is unlike the historical analogies, in that it looks as if financial innovation was driven by a set of intellectual and even technological innovations.

That is why, throughout this downturn, forecasters and analysts who have tried to make analogies to past post war US recessions have gotten it so wrong.

Thus while their assumptions do not always hold, they can treat game theory as a reasonable scientific ideal akin to the models used by physicists.

People s weak appetite for economic risk may not be the result of pure fear, at least not in the sense of an anxiety like stage fright.

Grohl said that the band at that point often made the analogy of likening their music to children's music, in that the band tried to make its songs as simple as possible.

But analogies are not always wrong, and those that were wrong in the past could prove correct today. One of the arguments for the Vietnam War was the so called domino theory. If South Vietnam was to fall to the Communists, other countries in South East Asia would tumble before Communist insurgency.

These comparisons are not neutral, and one may detect in the analogy between China today and nineteenth century Germany an element of that guilty pleasure in others troubles that the Germans call Schadenfreude.

A pessimist surveying last December's Duma election, with its futile party politics, bitterness, and invective, might compare Russia to Weimar Germany.

The Executive Board should be enlarged by the addition of several (possibly 3 5) independent members (as in the private sector), and the voting principle should be one person, one vote.

When two ideas seem unrelated, but make you feel the same way, you have a basis for connecting them and for inventing a new analogy.

Come August the people s minds will turn to Eric Williams, which invariably means they will turn to the PNM and their thoughts will force comparisons.