Bethlehem Hath Opened Eden

My apologies for light blogging this week. Christ is Born! Glorify Him!

Between Nativity on Wednesday and (yet another) computer failure, I am just getting back up to speed today. The story of my many laptops during this year would make for an entertaining post all in itself, but I’ll leave that for another time. It’s amazing how much more reading one can do when not absorbed in following commentary and news every day. Last night I polished off Fleckenstein’s Greenspan’s Bubbles (admittedly, a quick read) and read most of Fooled by Randomness, both of which had been sitting on my shelf mocking me for months, and I definitely recommend reading them together. While they are not that close in subject matter, they share a common theme of how people foolishly confuse information (or noise) for knowledge (signal). Given Taleb’s hostility to actual journalists, the implications of Taleb’s book for blogging are obvious and not encouraging for those of us who do this on a daily basis.

In continuing Gaza coverage, Leon Hadar points us to this extraordinary op-ed from the WSJ (a publication, incidentally, that comes in for a fair amount of abuse in both of the aforementioned books for different reasons). Bisharat’s point that we should not permit border skirmishes to be redefined as legitimate cause for large-scale military escalation is an important one. As far as the two camps that invoke just war theory are concerned, Bisharat is certainly part of what I have called the barrier crowd, and I imagine that his op-ed will generate no end of caterwauling from the loophole crowd.