  The paper contains some musings about the abstractions introduced by Lucien
Le Cam into the asymptotic theory of statistical inference and decision theory.
A short, self-contained proof of a key result (existence of randomizations via
convergence in distribution of likelihood ratios), and an outline of a proof of
a local asymptotic minimax theorem, are presented as an illustration of how Le
Cam's approach leads to conceptual simplifications of asymptotic theory.
