Elephantstrunk

A Random Number

A UN resolution that is.
Tony Blair says:
The hostilities on both sides should cease immediately now that the resolution has finally been agreed by the whole of the international community
Sorry Tony. Even Kofi Annan thinks this is pretty pathetic:
This inability to act sooner has badly shaken the world’s faith in this authority and its integrity
Who […]

Reading here about flexible perceptions of reality illustrated a shortcoming of Bayesian updating as a model of learning.
In the Bayesian model learners have prior expectations about the outcome of an event, the event occurs and the probability of the outcome given expectations is used to update the expectations. In this model learners obey a […]

In an abstract sense I believe the very best resoulution of the toils of the West Bank and Gaza is a one state solution. Give all of those in the occupied territories a vote and see what happens.
On the other hand I have also believed that efforts to promote democracy in Iraq were based on […]

Absurdly named Max Boot exhibits genuine extremism in this rapidly aging article. By extremism I mean the automatic assumption that the failure of X to solve a problem is caused by not enough X.
This startling claim:

The problem is not, as so many have it, that President Bush’s “cowboy diplomacy” has unsettled the region’s vaunted […]

War in the Lebanon
It could have gone on for 300 years and not been as bad as it is. (via J. B. Delong)
The IDF is much better funded than Hezbollah but apparently not as efficient. (via Marginal Revolution)
Making this man’s job easy is almost as bad as making it possible for Vladimir Putin to make […]

This Crooked Timber post reminds me of a pet theory, under-googled and probably unoriginal where correct, that the virtues of markets get badly misunderstood.
It goes as follows:
Markets are intrinsically inefficient. For there to be competition there is very likely to be excess capacity and significant effort devoted to suboptimal solutions. It seems therefore that for […]

Georgism is an appealing idea but it looks very different if you apply the thinking to nations than it does if you apply it to individuals.
Would proponents of a land tax for individuals also countenance such a levy on Venezualan oil revenues? The latter seems less intuitively appealing but willingness to intervene in oil rich […]