Ms. Morvai said that the pro life vs. pro choice debate on abortion had become sterile and was obscuring a number of other important factors.

It may seem that big problems require big solutions, but ad man Rory Sutherland says many flashy, expensive fixes are just obscuring better, simpler answers. To illustrate, he uses behavioral economics and hilarious examples.

Perhaps the focus on the disruptions caused by the global financial crisis is obscuring a natural shift in developed economies to a lower gear following years of pumped up growth. Moreover, though emerging economies are also experiencing acute growth slowdowns, their share of the global economic pie will continue to grow.

He snips it, throws the tip over his shoulder, and then grabs the scrotum and pushes it upward, and then his head dips down, obscuring my view, but what I hear is a slurping sound, and a noise that sounds like Velcro being yanked off a sticky wall and I am not even kidding.

Many privacy concerns are based on concrete interests, such as preserving financial security or obscuring information that could compromise one s employment or ability to qualify for affordable health insurance. But there is also a more personal aspect the tension between the desire to be known and the desire to protect one s secrets, whether insidious, embarrassing, or intimate.

Propaganda driven nostalgia for the Soviet Union s Cold War era great power status is obscuring the lessons of that time. The Soviet Union was an unsustainable empire if it could not survive at a time when isolation and bipolarity were the order of the day, it certainly could not be recreated within today s interconnected multipolar global system.

In the worst case scenario, the very concept of global climate policy would lose all value, with decades of climate alarmism giving way to fatalism. Given that the UN formally accepted the 2 C limit as the starting point for the top down approach in 2010, the well practiced strategy of obscuring current failures by announcing more ambitious future efforts would become unsustainable.

But it also helps make the world a more dangerous place by obscuring the real reasons for war, and by allowing peoples around the world to justify violence and conflict not as a means to an end, but rather as a holy mission of liberation, freedom, and the eradication of tyranny. Until political leaders reject the rhetoric of evil as a justification for war, war itself is unlikely to disappear.