In the 400+ years since the birth of modern statistics, data has been collected on everything from life expectancy and planetary motion to little league batting averages and micro-loans in rural Bangladesh. As technology catches up with the world’s desire to better predict the future and understand the past, applications have expanded to include dynamic models of the global economy and more recently the probability of a terrorist attack. The danger with relying on this methodology, of course, is that the same statistical biases that contributed to the recent financial chaos may cause more harm in the real world than they ever did on Wall Street…

If there’s any doubt remaining among global power-brokers that short-term foreign policy objectives are fundamentally flawed, recent events in the Levant have provided ample evidence. Such tribal conflict has played out in the Garden of Eden since northern Neanderthals and southern proto-human colonies first crossed paths during the last major Ice Age. Since that time, control over the region has changed hands a number of times, from Semetic tribes to Egyptian pharaohs to Roman Catholics to Muslim traders to Christian crusaders to Muslim Turks, and so forth. For every fence that was built and every line that was drawn, rivals always built a bigger ladder or dug a deeper tunnel. And so the feud was passed from generation to generation,…

Prescient words from Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran in 1934…

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave,
eats a bread it does not harvest,
and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity the nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Sober words from one of this primary’s lesser known Democratic candidates, on the benefits of bipartisan, international negotiation with Iran and the power of assertive compromise. As Atticus Finch might suggest, reconciling “The Axis” and “The Great Satan” may take little more than stepping inside the other guy’s skin and “walk[ing] around for a little”, and as Governor Richardson himself asserts, the taboo of Persian engagement must be overcome before any meaningful progress will ever take place…

Words of worldly wisdom from the Commander in Chief at the Coast Guard Academy this past May. 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq are discussed in what feels more like a rally for some of the President’s biggest fiscal beneficiaries than a speech to send off America’s freshest military talent to the front lines of the war on terror…