Long Game

The question has now become whether substantial consequences will follow from the incident. Put differently, the question is whether and how it will be exploited beyond the arena of public opinion.

the probability of an effective, as opposed to rhetorical, shift in the behavior of powers outside the region is unlikely. At every level, Israel’s Arab neighbors are incapable of forming even a partial coalition against Israel. Israel is not forced to calibrate its actions with an eye toward regional consequences, explaining Israel’s willingness to accept broad international condemnation.

On one side is Fatah, which dominates the West Bank. On the other side is Hamas, which dominates the Gaza Strip. Aside from the geographic division of the Palestinian territories — which causes the Palestinians to behave almost as if they comprised two separate and hostile countries — the two groups have profoundly different ideologies.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon charged that the mission was simply an attempt to provoke the Israelis. That was certainly the case. The mission was designed to demonstrate that the Israelis were unreasonable and brutal. The hope was that Israel would be provoked to extreme action, further alienating Israel from the global community and possibly driving a wedge between Israel and the United States. The operation’s planners also hoped this would trigger a political crisis in Israel.

The first was to create sympathy in Britain and throughout the world for Jews who, just a couple of years after German concentration camps, were now being held in British camps. Second, they sought to portray their struggle as being against the British. The British were portrayed as continuing Nazi policies toward the Jews in order to maintain their empire. The Jews were portrayed as anti-imperialists, fighting the British much as the Americans had.

The Gipper wasn't the warhound his conservative followers would have you think.

These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan.

He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war -- the 1986 bombing of Libya -- was even briefer.

From obesity to chronique fatigue syndrome, jihadism to urban ennui, the costs of civilization are becoming ever more apparent. Spencer Wells explores adapting to a world where accelerating change is the new status quo.

Everywhere there is a feeling that the world is in flux, that we are on the brink of a historic transition, and that the world will be fundamentally changed somehow in the next few generations.

Humans are incredibly cooperative, but why do people cooperate and how is cooperation maintained? A new research study by UCLA anthropology professor Robert Boyd and his colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico suggests cooperation in large groups is maintained by punishment.

Group members cooperate because they do not want to hurt their friends by not participating in group efforts, and also because they may want help in the future.

in a larger group, like a tribe, those mechanisms for maintaining cooperation are lost. All group members experience the benefits of the large group, even those members who stop cooperating and become "free-riders."

There are three doors with a car and two goats placed behind them at random. The game show host knows which is placed where.You must start off by choosing a door.The game show host opens one of the two doors which you did not choose, revealing a goat. (He or she will always open a door that will reveal a goat. He will never open a door which will reveal the car.)The host then offers you the chance to change your original pick.The question is whether it is better to change or stick with your original choice. The answer — which can be and regularly has been demonstrated by running the scenario over and over — is that you are more likely to win if you change. But many, if not most people simply can’t process this and insist that it cannot make any difference whether or not you switch and that your chances of winning are the same either way.

What is physically behind the doors never changes. That’s why you can’t apply mathematical “logic” after the reveal and call it a 50-50 chance. The prize goes behind one door at the start. Either it’s behind the door you choose first, or it isn’t. What happens with the reveal doesn’t physically change that by making it more or less likely.

The United States thus finds itself in the difficult position of having to choose between its two allies in the Middle East. Washington will try a balancing act, but it has no choice but to lean toward the Turks in the wake of this flotilla crisis. A little animosity with Israel might also help the United States gain some credibility in this part of the world. Israel, on the other hand, finds itself backed into a corner. Turkey means it when it says its relationship with Israel will not go back to what it once was. The two countries will likely maintain relations, but Israel will not be able to rely on Turkey as a regional ally. The United States, meanwhile, cannot afford to prioritize Israel’s interests over Turkey’s. In this geopolitical climate, Israel lacks the luxury of options.

I do not doubt that some of the activists on the ship welcomed a confrontation with Israel, but the Israelis should not have obliged them. In any event, what took place on that deck looks to me like a tragic misunderstanding. Yet there was no reason to think that anything else would have transpired.

I'll also make my usual plea to stop using examples from World War II to justify (or criticize) current policy. The Second World War was arguably the nadir of human ethical conduct. The unimaginably horrific war crimes committed by the Allies only get a pass because of how they contrast with the even-more-incomprehensibly-terrible conduct of the Axis. When "the good guys" are the ones burning civilians to death thousands at a time, committing mass rape and ethnically cleansing whole swathes of conquered territory, maybe it's best to just bracket the whole episode as an unhelpful ethical guidepost.

Discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, when they don't devolve into shouting and threats of violence, have a tendency to get caught in a problem of infinite regress, where two disagreeing parties really disagree on some of the fundamental questions involved (is/was the creation of Israel legitimate, is there such a thing as a Palestinian people, who has a truly defensible claim to territory x, y or z, etc), and then extrapolate from those positions heated arguments over particular policies and tactics.

These are not "targeted" sanctions that mostly affect Hamas. They deliberately reduce an entire civilian population to subsistence-level existence. Given this, I find any argument that the policy distinguishes between civilians and combatants, or that the suffering inflicted upon civilians is proportional to the military objectives achieved, to be pretty absurd.

Near a place called Lake Turkana, archaeologists David Braun found two intriguing groups of items: The bones of fish, turtles, and even crocodiles with the scars of stone tools still showing, and stone fragments that Braun says come from the simple tools these hominins used to carve up the marine animals.

The major difference between Tetris and other games is the simplicity of its construction and complexity of play. Most importantly, it is a game that does not have a goal or end. There is no castle to storm or high score to achieve – the only way to end your game is to lose.

There are many aspects to Confucian thought, but ritual (whether complex or mundane) stands out as a core belief that enables one to transform laborious tasks into care-free instincts. Ritual to a Confucian would include both ceremonial functions and, more importantly, personal routines comprising everyday life.