Yet it seems, again and again, that we're hopelessly bad at it.

I want this book to look like it's lying to you, desperately and hopelessly, the way an alcoholic would.

We have experienced many anxious moments when it seemed that the fragile understanding between the parties had been hopelessly destroyed.

A third are damaged beyond repair, another third are hopelessly unprofitable, and the rest are a mismanaged assortment of plants, a few of which could potentially produce something of value, but only with proper management and incentives. Trying to give these hopelessly inefficient enterprises a new lease on life would make Iraqis poorer without reducing the violence.

The opposition is hopelessly divided, and the tribal and military leadership is utterly compromised. Ominously, the south is being taken over by hardcore Islamists, some allied with Al Qaeda.

The EU peace project the original impetus for European integration may have worked too well after more than six decades of success, it had come to be considered hopelessly outdated. Putin has provided a reality check.

This is a real challenge to do this, because animals, when you start to really look inside them how they work appear hopelessly complex. There's no detailed history of the design plans, you can't go look it up anywhere.

So they found this cagoots guy, a 39 year old man who was really hopelessly schizophrenic, who was known, had been known for months, to be literally defecating on himself, talking nothing that made any sense, and they brought him into the hospital.

After all that has happened in the intervening years to demonstrate the dangers inherent in these flaws, and a plethora of summits and conferences, a 2008 guide to financial regulation ought now to be hopelessly out of date. Unfortunately, it is not.

There are four times more people in the world than there were a hundred years ago, producing 40 times as much output and spewing 17 times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is the existential issue confronting the world, to which our response remains hopelessly inadequate.

This is the first time that a sitting head of state has been indicted for war crimes, with reaction around the world mainly divided between those who hailed the move as a great step for international justice and those who condemned it as colonialism. Both positions are hopelessly buried in intellectual and moral fog.

At the other end of the spectrum are technocratic super defenders of regulatory bodies who believe that politicians and electorates are hopelessly confused, uneducated, and often corrupt. Management of the economy should be entrusted to competent and independent experts, a group of Platonic Guardians empowered to act in the state s higher interests, regardless of electoral outcomes or public opinion.

This system would allow those who do not wish to share monetary sovereignty, or engage in the kind of fiscal cooperation that must eventually come with it, to make that choice. At the same time, it would avoid the complications of having multiple Europes an option that may be attractive to veteran Eurocrats from a purely functional perspective, but soon becomes hopelessly complicated.

Just as he dithered over going to war with the US, Hirohito was hopelessly ambivalent about how to end it. The new record reports that Hirohito told his closest adviser, Privy Seal Kōichi Kido, on September 26, 1944 If one could come to a peace without the question of disarmament or war responsibility, I don t care if our conquered territories are taken away .

Consider, first, the lofty market capitalization of Apple and other tech companies, which belies the depiction of US financial markets as hopelessly short term oriented. The ability to appreciate the long term earnings potential of Silicon Valley and firms like Apple, Amazon, and Facebook suggests that more is going on in the US stock market than a relentless focus on short term financial performance.

That sort of responsiveness to popular sentiment in the legislative process gives the lie to the canard that French regulation is inflexible and hopelessly bureaucratic. In fact, the free market Anglo Saxon attitude sounds like nothing so much as the old prejudices about the French that have been around since the novelist Thackeray told English readers The Frenchman has after his soup a dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat.