Making sense of the rush of news

28th October 2026 What events in Serbia and Brazil and perhaps Isreal tell us and don’t tell us * There is a lot of news and there is a lot to take in: Serbia, Brazil, United States, Israel, France, and so on. At home we have a Budget, an event which seemed to once mean more than it does now, but is not yet altogether meaningless. For once the supply of news is keeping up with the demand for news in our current media environment. The attention market is being cleared, as economists would tell us. What can we make of all this data? Is there any general opinion we can form from the all the particular information with which we are now being currently provided? * Here we need to be careful of affirmation bias. There is a strong tendency for any of us to take new information and use it to support views which we already hold. Even news which we did not predict. Even news which is different from which we predicted. “It all goes to show that…” (I like to think that any new news affirms my…