Way back in the olden thymes, I worked in the Imperial Capital. I was just a kid and that allowed me access to a lot of scuttlebutt. That may seem odd, but no one has anything to fear from a kid running errands and doing office tasks. Consequently, the young people, mostly interns and pages, used to hear and see more dirt than just about anyone else. In the age of cell phones, that’s probably no longer true, but in the olden thymes, cell phones did not exist.

The thing about people in power is they don’t have a high regard for rich people. We like to think that the rich run the pols, but it is not really that way. The powerful of DC live pretty well by normal standards. The currency of DC is power and influence. Knowing how the system works counts for a lot more than money. Knowing who to call will always trump the ability to stroke a check. Lots of people have money. Few people know the right number to dial.

As a result, there’s a degree of contempt for the rich, in general, amongst the ruling class. The Rodney Dangerfield rich guys who barges in thinking they can buy their way into the right parties are particularly loathed by the Ted Baxter set. Even so, the sophisticated classes that run things in Washington are very good at handling wealthy rubes from the provinces. They want their money, of course. They just don’t want to put up with the bullshit that rich people bring with them.

So, they direct them into harmless endeavors. I once had the task of giving some rich guy and his old lady the tour of a UNICEF office. I knew nothing about UNICEF, but the congressman I worked for was on their board, I think. Maybe it was his wife. I was young and earnest looking so I guess I filled a role in the hustle. It was a long time ago and all I remember is how flattered the rich people looked. A Congressman’s wife and her people doting on the rich people made for a good show.

Later in life I figured out that the game was to guide the rich dumbasses into funding projects that employed friends of the political class. It was a form of patronage. It was also a way to keep the rich people from doing something stupid. Think about all of the Hollywood assholes who get involved in a cause. Most of them can’t count their balls twice and come up with the same number, but they are loaded and they have free time. That’s a dangerous combo if they want to “make a difference.”

That’s what you see with Bill Gates and his gun grabbing efforts. The nitwit who wrote the article is generally clueless, but that’s part of the game. The Left needs to keep tools like Cliff Schecter toiling in the fields.

Somewhere in a large glass tower in Northern Virginia, there’s a guy who runs guns with a French name having a bad day. With good reason.

It was reported Monday that Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and incredibly wealthy guy, and with his wife, Melinda, have given $1 million to Initiative 594 in Washington state. The ballot initiative, if passed by voters on November 4 (and it currently enjoys overwhelming support), will require universal background checks for all firearm purchases in the state.

Gates is only the latest Washington billionaire to give to the effort, with original Amazon investor Nick Hanauer providing crucial early funding, and more recently upping his overall donation to $1.4 million. Additionally, Gates’s Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, has provided $500,000 for the cause.

The ballot issue in question, #594 is largely a nothing initiative. It requires a background check for private transfers of firearms. This is a favorite hobbyhorse issue for the crackpots because they think it will lead to registration and then confiscation.

You see, there’s no way to enforce regulation of private sales without registration. Registration is the precursor to confiscation. The trouble is it will never survive court challenge. Imagine needing a permit to post comments on the Internet. That’s how the courts will treat this measure.

The bigger problem for the gun-grabbers is that another initiative on the ballot would forbid background checks and it has broad support as well. But, some low-level flunkies get a paycheck for a while courtesy of rich suckers like Bill Gates. That’s what counts.

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I’ve mentioned in some of my Ferguson posts that we have given way too much discretion to the cops. So much so they can just make up laws on the fly. Here’s an hilarious example from Pittsburgh.

A young man is facing charges stemming from an unusual incident in Westmoreland County Monday.

Skyler Connor, 18, of New Derry, is facing a disorderly conduct charge for waving a rubber penis at passing motorists.

According to police, the incident happened on Route 30 in Unity Township around 6 p.m.

Connor was a passenger in the back seat of a vehicle at the time.

The people who wrote the disorderly conduct laws never intended to give the cops the power to regulate teenage pranks. The intent of such laws are to prevent people from disrupting the normal functioning of public activities. Someone drunk in public harassing citizens is an example. Tying up traffic with some sort of distraction like a parade float or naked women could be a public nuisance. A kid waving around a rubber dick is not disrupting public order.

This is also a good example of anarcho-tyranny. You can be sure the cop who made the arrest had a few grand worth of battle gear and a squad car kitted out like a starship. The cops are hyper-vigilant about stupid things like this that have no value to society. Yet, these same cops cannot be bothered to look for stolen cars or roust the hobos out of the local library. The cops treat the citizens as a nuisance, rather than the people they serve.

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I found this linked over at ZeroHedge.

Employees with degrees in fields like English, general studies, and graphic design are among the most likely to report feeling “underemployed” at their current jobs. This is according to a recent survey of 68,000 workers by salary information firm PayScale.

Liberal arts majors (I’m one of them!) are used to being the punchline in jokes about un- and underemployment. But more unexpectedly, majorities of graduates with more “practical” degrees in fields like business administration also said their jobs didn’t put their education, training or experience to work as much as they should.

What is left out is the fact there are maybe 1,000 Business majors for every one physics major. According to this paper, physics majors are 0.36% of all undergrad degrees. Frankly, that seems high, but they include minors in the total. The point being the typical business major is wasting his time and money getting a degree in business. Unless he is also getting a degree in accounting, he is learning nothing of value in college.

The sad truth is we turned college into a quasi-IQ test. If you get into Harvard, it means you have a top-5% IQ or your parents are loaded. Young people at state colleges are paying $50K to get a piece of paper that tells future employers they can sit still, follow directions and have basic literacy and numeracy. The private school degree adds the claim of an above average IQ. It also costs $100K for the diploma.

We really would be better off letting employers administer IQ tests again. Blacks would not like it, but employers will still need to have vibrancy. Passing a literacy test freely offered by an employer beats paying a college $50K for it. It certainly beats having a trillion dollar student debt bubble that is about to burst.

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m re-reading Gibbon. One of things that I keep returning to is how the respect for order eroded amongst the ruling classes of Rome. Once the elites lost respect for the laws and customs it was just a matter of time before the whole thing collapsed. The allowances made for ambitious men and the exceptions made for the sake of expediency eventually gutted the rationale for the Republic.

It’s not just that some men saw the laws and customs as obstacles to circumvent. Those people are always a part of the ruling class. What you have to have, to maintain order, is a willingness to hold them to the law and punish them for their transgressions. That’s what is clear from Marius forward. The ruling elite could no longer police itself and respect for the laws and customs of the Republican collapsed.

Anyway, take a look at this story from the Lunatic Times.

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

Just look at the casual disregard for the fundamental tenets of the Constitution. You cannot have a republic if the President can willy-nilly sign treaties with other countries. A treaty binds the people of one nation to those of another. Only the people can consent to this. We do that through our chosen representatives in the legislature. What these people are doing is a direct assault on the foundations of the Republic.

If we had a healthy ruling class, Obama would be swinging from a tree branch by now.

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One of things I find most annoying about modern times is the solipsism. Everyone is convinced that their ignorance is an important counter to whatever it is you’re saying. The typical formulation is something like “I’ve never heard of ….” That is a response to some statement that contradicts the official narrative. My intern, who I immortalized the other day, used to say this a lot.

Megan McArdle had a different take on this the other day. In the middle of her post she has this summary of the phenomenon.

I’m always fascinated by the number of people who proudly build columns, tweets, blog posts or Facebook posts around the same core statement: “I don’t understand how anyone could (oppose legal abortion/support a carbon tax/sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis/want to privatize Social Security/insert your pet issue here).” It’s such an interesting statement, because it has three layers of meaning.

The first layer is the literal meaning of the words: I lack the knowledge and understanding to figure this out. But the second, intended meaning is the opposite: I am such a superior moral being that I cannot even imagine the cognitive errors or moral turpitude that could lead someone to such obviously wrong conclusions. And yet, the third, true meaning is actually more like the first: I lack the empathy, moral imagination or analytical skills to attempt even a basic understanding of the people who disagree with me.

In short, “I’m stupid.” Something that few people would ever post so starkly on their Facebook feeds.

The other stuff about the wrongness of calling people stupid is whatever you want to make of it. I happen to think pointing out the stupid is useful. If we’re not going to let the stupid eliminate themselves from society, we better do what we can to identify them. The stupid are always a danger to others.

Anyway, way back in the olden thymes when Al Gore, peace be upon him, was still working on the details of his contrivance, solipsism changed from a character flaw into a weird defense against uncomfortable facts or opinions. I recall having e-mail exchanges with friends where they would insist on links to back up some point. If you could not furnish a link, then it was assumed your point was invalid.

The simplification of Al Gore’s contrivance through networking platforms like message boards, Facebook and now Twitter has gifted this idiocy to the masses. Maybe before the information barrage, it was easy to avoid people and words that were unwanted. The response to this change in the human condition is to pretend their can be no thoughts, feeling or ideas that are not your own. The more we crowd together, the more we become isolated.

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The former Half Sigma posted this today.

The Middle East is going to hell, and the reason is Obama’s withdrawal from activist foreign policy, allowing things to just happen, because under Obama’s anti-neo-colonialist belief system, American involvement is always bad for the native people.

The Middle East is a bad neighborhood in the global community, just like within the United States there are bad neighborhoods like Ferguson. Although the people in Ferguson hate the cops, without cops they rob and kill each other and go on looting and pillaging rampages. (Which never happens in good neighborhoods. Did anyone riot on the Upper West Side when Bush beat Gore by a handful of votes?) If anything, knowing that they really need white racist cops in order to keep law and order only makes them hate the cops more. But when the cops withdraw and let stuff happen, the result is riots where the people destroy their own neighborhood.

Obama’s Middle East “strategy” was to let Syria and Iraq deal with their own problems, and the result of this non-intervention (which is the foreign policy endorsed by Ron and Rand Paul and the Paulites who leave comments on my blog) is that the region goes to hell and the Islamic State arises. The Islamic State is far more powerful than al-Qaeda ever was. Al-Qaeda was able to pull off a few terrorist attacks, but the Islamic State controls an army that may number in the tens of thousands and they are winning a war against “real” armies like those of Syria and Iraq.

I can still hear those Paulites thinking “so how is this our problem?” Well eventually, the Islamic State will export their ideology outside of Iraq and Syria. An estimated 12,000 of the fighters of the Islamic State are outsiders from other countries, many even from the West. There are hundreds of citizens from Western countries fighting for the Islamic State, and when they return home they will become an Islamic fifth column.

Just as bad neighborhoods like Ferguson needs cops, the world also needs a cop to keep order, and only the United States is able to fulfill that role.

The underlying argument here is that some people and some parts of the world need constant supervision. Someone has to be the game warden and police these people and places. Otherwise, they get out of control. That’s not an irrational position. I don’t necessarily agree, but I don’t think it is crazy either.

The question, as is true of all public policy, is what are the trade offs to the policy choices? Doing nothing, as libertarians prefer, has costs. Big parts of the world and big swaths of America would slip from the grasp of civilization. The Reason Magazine crowd would never set foot in my neighborhood even under ideal conditions. Take away the cops and that weirdo who wears the leather jacket on TV is not getting within 100 miles of my little slice of heaven.

On the other hand, the cost of being the world’s cop is steep. The citizens have a right to wonder if it makes sense to pay for keeping Iraq or Libya under control. Today, a lot of white people are wondering if it makes sense to even bother policing the ghetto. All they get is a bunch of grief and a bill for higher property taxes.

The problem with the comparison is I have no moral obligation to safeguard the wellbeing of Libyans or Syrians. I do have a moral obligation to do what I can to safeguard the wellbeing of my fellow citizens. Just because they live in the ghetto and like to burn their neighborhood down does not relive me of that obligation. Not all of them are rioting, not even most. They are my people and as a citizen I have duty to them.

The thing no one likes to discuss in either realm is when is it enough? At what point have I done enough to fulfill my duties to my country? Where’s the limit to what we can do for the people of Syria or Libya? A politician that stands up and says, “The blacks have generous welfare programs, easy access to drugs and alcohol and plenty of food. That’s all we are obligated to supply them” is not going to be around long. Whether you agree with him or not, you prefer not to look that bit of reality in the eye. You’d rather not answer the phone than tell your brother you won’t lend him any more money.

It is the free rider problem. If we sealed off the Middle East, stopped shipping them food, technology and culture, the resulting riots, mayhem and bloodletting would make Ferguson look like Utopia. In other words, without the West, a few billion people in tumbledown parts of the world die within a few months. Similarly, without the American tax payer, about a third of the American public falls back into the 19th century. Mississippi and West Virginia don’t become Iraq, but they get a lot poorer.

The trouble is we have no good way of saying no to those who want to ride in the cart. Religion used to make that easy. Riding in the cart was immoral for the able bodied. Religion allowed us to be quite harsh with those who would not pull their weight. Just as important, good people felt good telling the able bodied to get off their ass and get a job. Similarly, Americans had no trouble bringing the hammer down on dependent foreign populations when they got out of line. Being the world’s cop is easy when you think God is on your side.

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If you’re a gun nut, you probably know about the Don Lemon flap over his preposterous claims about buying machine guns in Colorado. Frankly, I would not know Don Lemon if I drove over him with my truck. I’m not even sure I have CNN on my television system. Plus, there have been so many foolish claims by the media regarding guns, I no longer pay attention.The only reason I’m aware of this story is it has been bouncing around the 2A community.

The striking thing about gun grabbers is how little they know about guns, gun laws and gun statistics. It’s just another example of how America is a foreign country to the typical media member. I think that’s why these types of stories get so much traction in the gun owning community. The lies are intended to dismiss gun owners as cranks.

Charles Cooke, a British import at National Review, has been all over it. Like a lot of Europeans who move here, Mr. Cooke has become a gun nut. I’ve known a few of them. It’s not that other countries restrict firearms so much as they don’t have a gun culture. The first time I traveled to Texas for business, my host took me to a range after work. Americans like shooting guns. You just don’t run into that everywhere. Heck, I’ve been on dates to the gun range. Mr. Cooke has embraced that part of his new country with gusto.

The question I asked in the comments is if there’s any proof Lemon ever bought a gun of any type. It is a huge pain to buy a gun in another state. Most states have laws against transferring firearms to non-residents. The FFL dealer will work with another dealer in your home state, but the home state controls the purchase. That way, they can make sure you’re not dodging local laws. You can buy from a private seller, but that’s not the claim Lemon made on TV.

As an endowment level member of the NRA, I naturally went to the NRA-ILA site to see the local laws in Colorado. It seems to me that Colorado is like any other state. They would have forced Lemon to go through a local FFL in his home state to complete the transfer. I’m also skeptical about his confusion over full auto versus semi-auto. How do you not know that after having bought an AR-15?

I think Don Lemon is probably lying about all of it. He would not be the first nitwit from the media to get caught like this. These people know so little about firearms and firearms laws, they don’t know how ridiculous their lies sound to people who do know the facts. The comparison I make is to guys who lie about their military service. The whopper works only if you know nothing about the military.

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I have a twitter account for the blog. I don’t have much interest in social media as it is mostly stupid people aping one another in a ritualized fashion. My first look at MySpace years ago told me it was a fun thing for women and kids. Facebook confirmed it. Twitter, built on a technology popular with ten year old girls, always looked like fly paper for the stupid. Morons grunting at one another. Then all the hipsters decided it was the cool thing and you can’t do anything without being beat over the head with Twitter.

Anyway, I had this exchange with someone who turned up in my twitter feed:

Colin Daileda is probably a nice young man, but I bet my goldfish knows more about the world. Hiring young people as writers is a cheap way to fill column inches, but no one cares what young people have to say about pretty much anything. The reason is they don’t know anything. In modern times, they are stunningly obtuse due to living such sheltered lives. Unless you were in the service or prison, the typical 20-something is clueless about the realities of the world.

But, the public debate these days is designed to cater to Colin. My sarcastic quip is answered with a link to a second generation race hustler. Poor Colin’s self-beclownment is made all the better by the fact he is blind to it. In the moronverse, it does not matter. The young skulls full of mush just fling crap at one another thinking it makes them seem clever. It is too soon to know, but my sense is it just intensifies the dullness of the participants.

A few years back I had an intern about the same age as Colin. Nice kid who wanted to be a lawyer. I gave him a research task that I thought would be perfect for an internet savvy young person. Google would do the heavy lifting. He just had to catalog the results for me. Yet, he struggled mightily. Working with him, it struck me that all the “critical thinking” and “approaches to learning” had produced a young man who knew nothing of any value.

Yet, he was constantly clicking away on his phone. He was either texting, on Facebook or twitter. I’d sit here imagining what sort of inanities he and the other dimwits were sharing so fast and furious with one another. The worst part of it was he thought he was a smart guy. His teachers all said he was a smart guy. His friends probably thought they were smart too. Yet, I found it nearly impossible to teach him anything. It was that obtuseness that got in the way.

This blend of moral preening and staggering ignorance is best explained by way of example. We wanted to do a small mailing. We do these in-house. We print the letter. Someone signs them and then we run them through a folding machine that then prepares them for stuffing into an envelope. This is a devise a child can master. I gave the intern a basic lesson on how it all worked and he appeared to get it. I left him alone and went about my business.

A half hour later, he is in my office telling me the folder is broken. We go to take a look and I see that he got paper jammed into it some how. I begin to show him how to unjam the thing and I note that he is looking at me like I’m doing magic tricks. He had messed the thing up so bad I had to take off the cover. I sent him to my office to get a screwdriver. He did not know what a screwdriver was, apparently, so I had to explain that to him. To this day I can’t understand how you make it to adulthood not knowing such a thing.

I decided to be the fatherly type and explain to him how the machine worked and how you fix it when it breaks. The look of amazement on his face was incredible. You would have thought I was splitting atoms right in front of him. He asked me how I knew such things and I pointed to the instructions taped to the side of it. That’s when it hit me. His generation has a near total lack of curiosity. When confronted with a puzzle, they expect someone to supply the answer. When none is forthcoming, they move on never having solved the puzzle.

That’s what makes the moronverse work. No one has to know anything or learn anything. They just pass around links, hashtags and pics to one another in the same way monkeys fling poo at one another. It’s a world where everyone is shaking their piety bracelets at each other all the time, jostling for seats on the branches of the tree.

Here and many other places, I’ve made the point that the Israeli – Arab fighting is a forever thing. It is what they do and that’s never going to change. I recall reading an old newspaper from the 40′s that had a headline about hopes for peace in the Levant. It was ridiculous then and it is ridiculous now.

Every president in my lifetime has taken a crack at making peace over there and all of them have failed. My bet is I live long enough to see the Jews and Persians exchange nukes. The Persians lob a small nuke into Tel Aviv and the Jews wipe out Tehran. The Arabs will quietly applaud, then go back to fighting the Jews.

As far as which side to take, I’m fine with backing the Jews. The Israelis are a civilized people with many connections to the West. While we are nominally Christian, a great many Americans have strong feelings toward Israel and the Jewish people for religious reasons. The support should be limited, of course, but the Jews don’t need a lot of support to defend themselves.

I’ve never bought into the argument that our support for Israel is why the Muslims hate us. The Muslims were a pain in our side as far back as the Barbary Wars. The people of that region have been hostile to their neighbors for as long as they have had neighbors.The best best way to deal with Arabs is to leave them alone, as much as possible.

There’s a brand of crank that can’t accept this. It used to be a paleo thing, but it manifest all over these days. On the Left it is driven by hatred of Evangelicals, who have a deep affection for Israel. Blacks like President Obama just hate Jews for historic reasons and that results in an anti-Israel bias. Libertarians with their child like view of the world think the world will just go away if we go away.

For reasons I don’t know Ron Unz seems to featuring a lot of Israel bashing. Maybe Unz hates Jews, I don’t know. Really smart guys often fall for crackpot theories. High IQ combined with very broad mindedness can be dangerous. I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m just seeing some patterns in the Israel-bashing.

The first thing you see with the Israel-bashers is an obsession with civilian deaths in the territories. This is a good example Unz published recently.

Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that the Arabs had gotten the better of the Israelis in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and after years of conflict, all that was left of Israel was the Gaza strip.

Assume for a moment that instead of Palestinians, over 1.8 million Jews were crammed into the 11 mile Gaza strip and the state of Palestine, subsidized and supported by a superpower, was administering the calories to the Jews in Gaza, keeping them to a limit of 2,300 a day.

Imagine that instead of Palestinian children, it was Jewish children living under a Palestinian embargo that denied them toys, books, music and until a few years ago, even pasta. How do you think the world would react?

This sort of moral equivalence is common amongst the paleos. They create a framework that is seeded with half-truths and magical assumptions so they can cast the Jews in the worst possible light. In this case, the writer takes the fact the Jews actually provide most of the food to the Palestinians and phrases it as “keeping them to a limit of 2,300 a day.” Just for the record, that’s more calories than Arabs enjoy all over the Arab world.

The bit about denying the Palestinian kid “them toys, books, music and until a few years ago, even pasta” is half the story. The other half has something to do with the Arabs smuggling in rockets and bombs that they use to blow up civilians. The Arabs also like to use children as human shields for their rocket batteries.

But, the whole thing is just an egregious bit of moral obtuseness. We know what would happen if the Arabs ever beat the Jews. They would murder all of the Jews that did not flee to America. We know that because the Arabs have been saying it for fifty years. It is the official goal of Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLA.

These cranks also suffer from the “pushing old ladies” problem. That is, they look at one guy who pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus and another guy who pushed an old lady in front of a bus. They conclude both guys just like to push old ladies. Motivation is important, but not to dim bulbs like this guy.

The most recent fighting in Gaza was in fact started by Israel, which exploited the pretext of a kidnapping on the West Bank that it knew was not carried out by Hamas to use its armed forces to eliminate that group from power. It made mass arrests and killed some Palestinians on the West Bank before the Gazans responded with a barrage of homemade missiles, a weapon so ineffective that to this date it has only succeeded in killing one Israeli civilian. Israel has destroyed hundreds of homes in Gaza, devastated its infrastructure, and has killed nearly two thousand civilians who had no place to flee to.

The Palestinians have had many chances to make peace with Israel. They have refused all of them. Further, groups like Hamas target civilians in order to kill civilians. Israel kills civilians when going after Hamas. Maybe Israel could be more careful, but they are under no obligation to do so.

That’s the key feature of the Israeli bashers. They setup a moral code for one side and a different moral code for the other. Israel, could kill all of the men and sell the women and children into bondage. That’s how tribal warfare works. They at least make some effort to guard the people they are feeding and clothing. Those people make no effort to respond in kind.

Then you have the comparisons to Hitler’s Germany. This is a favorite of the cranks and one they picked up from the Left. Hilariously, they think “fascism’ is an abracadabra word that makes their antagonists disappear. Instead, they come off sounding like idiots.

Fascism is generally linked to ultra-right wing politics or attitudes. A fascist is a totalitarian who supports an all-powerful and centralized state that can do no wrong precisely because it is the government. Fascism views political violence, war, and imperialism as a means to achieve national rejuvenation, and it asserts that stronger nations have the right to expand their territory by displacing weaker nations.

There are common themes that generally surface when one speaks of fascist style states. All fascist regimes have an assertive ultra-nationalism that frequently feeds off a sense of victimhood. This need to assert a frequently mythical notion of national power and greatness, often through war or imperial expansion, generally produces a militarization of society as well as a rewriting of history to support the new agenda. Fascist government frequently evolve into police states to suppress dissent and maintain the regime.

Both Israel and the United States are increasingly characterized as police states where authority trumps liberties. They both claim victimhood from terrorism and have used that as an excuse to maintain aggressive foreign policies that emphasize the use of force as a first option. Both spend far more proportionately on “defense” than other developed countries and both are actively engaged in proxy and shooting wars around the world. Israel exploits its alleged victimhood to occupy Palestinian land and kill Arabs while the United States does the same to justify its continued presence in Afghanistan and its threats to use military force against nations like Iran and Syria.

The only thing this guy does here is prove he knows very little about fascism. Sure, Hitler used anger at the treaty of Versailles as a political tool. That’s a tiny bit of the story. Putting that aside, it leaves out one rather important point. Exactly two Arab countries acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. You get to be the victim in the story when the other guy wants you dead and will not consider another option.

Israel is not blameless for what happens in happens in their fight with the Arabs. Countries are run by people and people do and say dumb things. Often, they do what looks like the right thing and they get a terrible result. You can’t blame Israelis, however, from overlooking their own mistakes and focusing on those of their enemies. That’s human nature.

That’s the key with the Israeli bashers. They don’t allow for normal human failure when it comes to Israel. They have no trouble finding the humanity in the Arabs. They can’t imagine it with the Jews. In the end, they are that which they claim of Israel and Israel’s supporters. Worse, they excuse what the Arabs have done and that moves them into the antisemitism camp.

That’s what makes stories like this one so important. They clarify the differences, but they also expose the Israel-bashers. We don’t have Jews beheading innocent westerners on youtube. There’s a reason for it and it is the same reason Israel is the moral superior in the fight. It’s why good people can overlook the sins of the Jews and come to their aid.

One of the worst things about the fake nerd movement is the belief that statistics is the same as science. Science certainly uses statistics for all sorts of things. Correlations can narrow the search for causal relationships. But, you have to use other tools to reveal those links. That’s no more obvious than in how the sabermetrics crowd completely missed the steroid era. Bill James, the godfather of baseball stat-nerds, was silent on the steroid era. You would think his spreadsheets would have revealed to him what everyone noticed from the stands.

This story on Grantland is another fin example of missing the forest for the trees.

One of the things that makes it such a joy to watch the Chicago Cubs’ rebuilding plan unfold is that the team’s approach is completely transparent. There’s no trickery here, no deceit, no super-secret process that’s inscrutable to everyone outside of the front office.

I don’t simply mean that the Cubs are rebuilding with complete conviction; under the terms of MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, that’s really the only way to go.1 Nor do I mean that the Cubs are nearly the extremists that the Houston Astros are. I’m referring instead to the core principle with which the Cubs have been trying to build a championship roster since team president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer were hired after the 2011 season, a principle that distinguishes this rebuilding project from almost every other one in baseball history: They’re building an offense from within and a pitching staff from spare parts.

This flies in the face of more than a century of conventional baseball wisdom, which states that (1) pitching wins championships, and (2) a team can never have too much pitching. The Cubs’ approach is completely counterintuitive. It’s also completely right.

Again, no mention of steroids. From World War 2 through the eighties, you followed a well known template to build your team. Power at the corners, defense up the middle. Mark Belanger could start at short on a title team with a .228 batting average. Elrod Hendricks could make a career as a catcher, despite a .220 career average. Pitching was a given. It was starts and innings you wanted from the rotation. That 1971 Oriole team had four starters account for 1080 innings.

Then the steroid era happened. Suddenly everyone in the lineup was a masher. Pitchers were getting killed. That changed how teams looked at pitching. Getting hitters was easy. Getting pitchers that could give you 30 starts was rare. Every team shifted resources into getting and developing pitchers. Teams would draft nothing but pitchers some years. Technology was brought to bear to help pitchers compete with hitters who were jacked up on roids.

Now, the steroids have gone away. The stat guys have not noticed, but front offices have noticed. The Red Sox traded four pitchers for hitters at the deadline. They just signed a Cuban slugger. The Cubs are doing the same thing. They traded their two best pitchers for hitters. Those teams that acquired the pitchers, by the way, are now struggling. Oakland has slumped and Detroit is fading. There’s plenty of pitching to be had these days. It is hitting that is rare.

It is why statistics are not science. The over reliance on statistics is good for passing yourself off as a smart guy, like we see with economics. They’re not very good for making decisions unless there is context and an understanding of what drives the statistics.

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