For us, we're very facile around electricity.

A widespread view is that Russia is simply reverting to type freedom was never more than a fleeting vowel in its historical alphabet. But this is a facile explanation.

What we call terrorism has many causes, and one must beware of facile explanations. However, the politics of frustration, of ambitions raised and then thwarted, is clearly one such cause.

And facile claims that renewable sources can boost energy security look a lot less convincing after the crisis in Ukraine Europe now understands that only large and stable energy supplies matter.

Libya s new leaders suffer from something worse than foot dragging. They are falling back on the same facile, prefabricated responses that Qaddafi used to demonize his domestic and international opponents for four decades.

A principal means by which people are being diverted onto a terrorist path is the Internet, through which they are offered facile solutions to complex problems and are seduced by ideas of martyrdom and glory.

This changing nature of the battlefield essentially means that war as a conclusive event in an international conflict has become obsolete. The facile Clausewitzian wisdom that military action ultimately leads to a political solution is no longer convincing.

Nor is the fact that the PBOC s interventions in the foreign exchange market over the last year have aimed to dampen the renminbi s depreciation, not add to it. Given this, it is facile to blame China s problems on government intervention.

Europe s experience has shown that the subordination of society to economic theories is politically untenable. Social vulnerability and frustration at the political system s failure to provide solutions are the grounds upon which radical movements have always emerged to offer facile solutions.

Moreover, Hu has fomented nationalism, not by taking understandable pride in China s impressive economic growth, but by demonizing Japan. He has become increasingly reliant on the facile notion that state sponsored patriotism and nationalism can hold China s disparate groups together.

There is no denying that short term measures to address acute problems such as debt relief for Greece threaten the eurozone s long term stability. If the European Monetary Union is to survive and ultimately thrive, its leaders must not be tempted by facile solutions.

While populists might be particularly prone to advocating facile solutions, they hardly have a monopoly on that tactic. Moreover, impugning populists intelligence and seriousness only plays into their hands See how the arrogant, entrenched elites, they will counter, dismiss the common sense of the people.

But that is facile inadequate attribution affects inter state deterrence as well, yet it still operates. Even when the source of an attack can be successfully disguised under a false flag, governments may find themselves sufficiently enmeshed in symmetrically interdependent relationships such that a major attack would be counterproductive.

Rather than offering facile answers such as just let markets work or just get governance right, it rightly emphasizes that each country must devise its own mix of remedies. Foreign economists and aid agencies can supply some of the ingredients, but only the country itself can provide the recipe.

As for power transition, much attention nowadays is lavished on a supposed American decline, often with facile historical analogies to Britain and Rome. But Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the apogee of its power, and, even then, it did not succumb to the rise of another state, but suffered a death by a thousand cuts inflicted by various barbarian tribes.

Because Spain and France defaulted so much in the early modern period, and because Greece, from the moment of its political birth in 1830, was a chronic or serial defaulter, some assume that national temperament somehow imbues countries with a proclivity to default. But that search for long historical continuity is facile, for it misses one of the key determinants of debt sustainability the identity of the state s creditor.