So you thought that just because the sun is finally out in New York for the first time in weeks, the kids should go outside to play. Well, get them inside right away and have them play more video games - and not just any games, but specifically the "first-person shooter" games parents love to hate! Their visual attention skills depend on it:

Researchers are reporting today that first-person-shooter video games — the kind that require players to kill or maim enemies or monsters that pop out of nowhere — sharply improve visual attention skills.
Experienced players of these games are 30 percent to 50 percent better than nonplayers at taking in everything that happens around them, according to the research, which appears today in the journal Nature. They identify objects in their peripheral vision, perceiving numerous objects without having to count them, switch attention rapidly and track many items at once.
Nor are players simply faster at these tasks, said Dr. Daphne Bavelier, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Rochester, who led the study. First-person action games increase the brain's capacity to spread attention over a wide range of events. Other types of action games, including those that focus on strategy or role playing, do not produce the same effect.
..."We were really surprised," Dr. Bavelier said, adding that as little as 10 hours of play substantially increased visual skills among novice players. "You get better at a lot of things, not just the game," she said.

And buried in the article is a disquieting finding about an emerging gender gap:

The professor and her student decided to study the connection between video game playing and visual attention. They carried out four experiments on undergraduates, all of them male because no female shooter game fans could be found on campus. (Emphasis added.)

Why isn't NOW agitating about this? Isn't it important to stop a gender gap from emerging between the visual attention skills of Americans? This calls for governmental action to encourage the women of America to play first-person shooter games. Which Democratic presidential candidate will show his (or her, if you count Carol Mosley-Braun) ability to design innovative, progressive reforms for the important problems affecting the lives of American women?

As Yogi Berra might have said: "If she were alive, she'd be turning over in her grave."
Apparently Steve Case is bowing to reality and leaning towards spinning off AOL, thus undoing the oh-so-successful AOL-Time Warner merger.
All together now - "Nevermind!"

Michael Lewis’ best books have always been morality plays. Whether his subjects are the misanthropic mortgage traders of Salomon Brothers from Liar’s Poker or the frighteningly precocious investor Jonathan Lebed from Next, Lewis has been our best chronicler of those outsiders who have invented better mousetraps and forced the world to beat paths to their door.
What if that story was transferable to baseball? What if the story could be told primarily from the perspective of an insider groomed for stardom, who only achieved a different kind of success by embracing the theories and worldview of a previously invisible group of outsiders (and who came with a wonderfully volatile personality)? And what if that story was combined with an intellectual history of a mass movement, which was invisible to the larger baseball world for almost two decades before forcing a reluctant industry to yield to its insights? And finally, what if, instead of having to resort to statistics and abstractions about how the resulting efficiencies enrich a larger public, the morality play could be completed by showing individuals getting a chance to dream a little longer (and make plenty of money as well) who would have been barred from doing so under the old, prejudicial ways of doing business?
If you had all those things, you would have Michael Lewis’ new book Moneyball. And we do.
The book is a combination of a business case study, an intellectual history and a morality play. And as Rob Neyer notes, it is the story of an idea - "the notion that objective knowledge does have an important role in baseball, an industry that's long resisted this notion." It is a story of how the Oakland Athletics, primarily (though not solely) through the leadership of general manager Billy Beane, dared to think for themselves and learned the lessons of two decades’ worth of baseball scholarship that was viewed condescendingly by the baseball establishment – on those rare occasions when it was viewed at all, that is. In doing so, the team has built a very successful organization and overturned several decades of conventional wisdom, creating competitive pressures that are forcing the rest of the industry to adapt or die – or, even worse, become the Detroit Tigers. And thanks to the A’s new way of doing things, certain players who would have languished in the minor leagues or never even been drafted by professional baseball are getting the chance to play baseball for a living – and do very well (both on the field and at the bank). Few writers could have told any of those stories as well as Michael Lewis, and no one can tell them all together as well. This book should become a staple of MBA syllabi and any list of great baseball books. (I have suggested to friends who are Met fans that the most productive thing they could do for their team is to mail a copy of the book to the team’s owners.)
The book arose out of a question: Virtually everyone who wrote or spoke about baseball from an official or publicly authoritative standpoint argued that a team without lots of revenue had no hope to compete for a championship. Yet as those arguments grew louder, the A’s, whose revenues and payroll ranked virtually last in baseball, kept winning more and more games even as they kept losing many of their best players to other teams for financial reasons. After making the playoffs three straight years, it was hard to argue with a straight face that their success was an aberration (though that never stopped baseball commissioner Bud Selig). How were the A’s doing it?
The answer is explained through the book’s main subject, Billy Beane. Beane was a spectacular athlete who was drafted by the Mets out of high school in 1979 and expected to be a star, but was temperamentally unsuited for the game and never became more than a fringe major leaguer. He entered the front office of the Athletics, which was already in the middle of an organizational revolution based on the ideas of a writer relatively well-known among baseball fans but utterly ignored within baseball: Bill James. Lewis explains how and why Bill James is viewed as a Jedi Master for a certain subset of baseball fans, and how Beane and the A’s draw on James’ theories and modes of questioning to rethink just about everything about building a baseball organization.
The centerpiece of the book describes the 2002 amateur baseball draft, where Beane overruled his scouts’ traditional perspectives and drafted a number of prospects whom no other team would deem worthy of consideration. Lewis focuses on one particular player, Jeremy Brown, and notes how he was rocketing through the minor leagues faster than even Beane could have anticipated. Lewis’ account of the draft shows how Beane’s A’s, by daring to do things differently (the cliché “thinking outside the box” would actually be appropriate in this case), are able to unearth talented players that other teams choose to ignore. More importantly, as Lewis notes on page 117:

A revaluation in the market for baseball players resonates in the lives of young men. It was if a signal had radiated out from the Oakland A’s draft room and sought, laserlike, those guys who for their whole career had seen their accomplishments understood with an asterisk. The footnote at the bottom of the page said, “He’ll never go anywhere because he doesn’t look like a big league ballplayer.”

Of course, the book sparkles throughout with typical examples of Michael Lewis quotations. My favorite example is the description on page 101 of a scout’s entrance:

Billy O doesn’t bother to smile. Too much trouble. He somehow conveys the idea of a smile without moving a muscle. … Billy O is what you’d get if you hammered Shaquille O’Neal on the head with a pile driver until he was six feet two. He’s big and wide and moves only when he is absolutely certain that movement is required for survival.

For what it describes, the book is close to perfect. It is important to note, though, that the book does not discuss two key aspects of what the A’s have done in building their organization: one which is not original to the A’s, and one which may be more original than anything Bill James ever devised or described by Lewis.
The first aspect is the A’s judicious use of multi-year contracts with their young players. In baseball, a player’s salary is generally determined by a mixture of performance and seniority. A player’s rights belong to his team for the first six years of his career – thus, another team cannot bid for his services – limiting competition which could drive up his salary. After that time, any team can bid for a player whose contract has expired (the player becomes a “free agent”), thus driving up his salary through competition for his services. Since the A’s have no money, they generally cannot afford to outbid other teams for players who have become free agents and can sign with any team. By signing their good young players to long-term contracts early in their careers, the A’s accomplish two things. First, the team achieves cost certainty with respect to those players and do not have to risk unanticipated budget increases imposed by salary arbitration – essential for a team whose budget is as tight as the A’s. Second, by showing a commitment to the player, the A’s can often induce a player to agree to extend the contract a year or two beyond the point at which he would become a free agent – thus increasing the length of time the A’s can afford to keep him. This tactic was used to great effect by the Cleveland Indians in the early 1990s, but it is even more essential for the A’s because they have a tighter budget. When business schools teach classes on Billy Beane’s management of the A’s, this aspect will be highlighted as an important cost-saving measure.
The second aspect is the A’s program with their young pitchers. The current centerpiece of the A’s team is the trio of young starting pitchers: Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Mark Mulder. To have developed three young pitchers without having any of them break down is impressive enough; the actuarial statistics on young pitchers are nothing short of gruesome. It is possible that the A’s have merely been lucky to this point, but they don’t think so. They have an extensive program at every level of the organization regarding pitching mechanics and pitch counts, and they have a fascinating program in the lower minor leagues regarding pitcher usage. As Lewis describes in the book, the A’s do not believe in drafting high school pitchers (pitchers aged 18-22 are the worst injury risks in baseball, by several orders of magnitude). The A’s are loaded with pitching prospects in their minor leagues, and they apparently did not have a single major arm or elbow surgery all of last year (the Yankees, by contrast, should have qualified for group discounts on such surgeries). A while ago, I had an e-mail debate with James Suroweicki of The New Yorker about the likelihood that the A’s program truly represented an advancement in the development of young pitchers. The jury is still out on that question, though some of what I’ve read over the last few months has led me to be more optimistic. But the possibility that it may be true is something very newsworthy. Nothing in baseball is tougher than developing a young pitcher, due to the massive rates of injury among the species. If the A’s have really built a better system for doing so, then they should rename the Hall of Fame after Billy Beane. Lewis should have discussed the subject in Moneyball.
Notwithstanding those two omissions, it is difficult to overstate the accomplishment of this book. If anything, I understate. In particular, those of us who have been reading Bill James and his heirs for 15+ years have reacted viscerally to the book. Part of it is due to Lewis’ skill and comprehensiveness in describing the work of James and the sabermetric community (he even describes, quite skillfully, the recent pathbreaking work of Voros McCracken regarding pitching and defense); we have finally found our bard! But Lewis speaks to us as more than a biographer: he provides validation. Virtually every fan of Bill James, every would-be sabermetrician, has raged at his favorite team at some point over the last two decades for some blitheringly stupid personnel move. Virtually every such fan has raged at the cliché-choked ignorance of the sports media on a mostly constant basis over that time. We knew that at our fingertips, available to anyone who cared to approach the subject with an open mind, was information that could easily disinfect the garbage being spewed by the ignorant media. We knew that if our team had only read the same books we did, or had only cared to think about the issues as much as we did, it would have been better off.
And thanks to Lewis and Beane, we know we were right.

“It is a wonderful thing to know that you are right and the rest of the world is wrong,” [Bill James] concluded. “Would God that I might have the feeling again before I die.” He never had a clue – not then, not later – that the world was not entirely wrong. No one ever called James to say that an actual big league baseball team had read him closely, understood everything he had said along with the spirit in which he had said it, and had set out to find even more new baseball knowledge with which to clobber the nitwits who never grasped what Bill James was all about.

- Moneyball, p.96.

Coming tomorrow: a review of, and other thoughts on, Michael Lewis' book Moneyball.

Andrew Sullivan has recently published a couple of interesting pieces in places other than his blog.
First is an article about how Hillary Clinton is expertly positioning herself for a 2008 presidential run:

...[T]he former first lady has been showing signs of ramping up her steely, long-term political ambitions. Republicans are alternately salivating at the prospect and dreading it. Hillary mobilizes the Republican base more effectively than an evangelical rally on an aircraft carrier. But she's also a canny politician, like her husband. And there's always the slight chance that she could prevail.
...She and her husband already exercise strong control over the party, through their cheesy henchman, Terry McAuliffe, who is still party chair despite the Democrats' pathetic showing in last November's Congressional elections. What better strategy than to stay above the fray, while a bunch of ragged and raw aspirants squabble into a loss in November 2008? And so far, alas, the Democratic field looks particularly forlorn.
...So Hillary bides her time, waiting for the kill. She's probably hoping that in a few years' time, her capacity to polarize the country will have abated. Such a hope is probably ill-founded. There's a large swathe of Americans who would rather see Jacques Chirac elected American president than Hillary Rodham Clinton. But the same could have been said about Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, and he still won. So could she. With luck. And in time. And so far, she's been playing her hand very very smoothly.

I think there is little doubt that if Bush is re-elected in 2004, Hillary will run in 2008. Josh Marshall has argued that she has little chance of winning. His points are well taken, but he gives surprisingly short shrift (especially given how connected he is to political tacticians) to an obvious counterargument: that Hillary's power to mobilize the Republican base may turn out to be a Democratic advantage. As shown during her husband's presidency, a divisive figure who stokes rage in the opposition can drive them into self-defeating practices, either through spluttering incoherence or tactical extremism. And we're seeing it during this presidency as well (go to his 5/7 article).
In fact, this bipartisan phenomenon should have a name attached to it. Call it the "Death-Ray Theory of Politics": The ability to drive your opponents stark raving bonkers is a major strategic asset. At a certain point, you can't say that Presidents Clinton or Bush are merely lucky to have such incoherent opponents. As Branch Rickey said, "Luck is the residue of design."
And as long as we're on the subject of those driven mad by President Clinton, check out Sullivan's review of Sidney Blumenthal's book The Clinton Wars. I have no intention of reading Blumenthal's book, but from the reviews I've read it seems unlikely that the book is anywhere near as insightful as Sullivan's review:

...It has the tone and manner and piety of one of those "Lives of the Saints" books most Catholic school kids were once forced to read at some point or other. It’s not a memoir, or a history. It’s a Gospel. Its facts are assembled, as the facts in the Gospels were assembled, for one purpose only: to affirm the faith, to rally the flock, to spread the further glory of the Church. It’s an allegory of eternal good and evil—a passion narrative with a scriptural past and a resurrection at the end, the first-person narrative of one saint who prevailed.
That saint is Bill Clinton. Of all the characters who have graced the office of the Presidency, Sidney picks William Jefferson Clinton as the moral exemplar. There is not a scintilla of a clue anywhere in this book that Mr. Blumenthal sees even a trace of irony in this selection.
...Mr. Clinton is and was a fascinatingly complex, flawed, intelligent, charismatic human being. Few people got as close to him as Sidney did—at moments of extreme tension and drama. The potential for a real and vivid portrait of the man is great. And yet the picture we get of Mr. Clinton from this book is strangely blank. No foibles; no expletives; no tears; no wit; not a single memorable phrase; not even a fresh insight into the man’s psycho-sexual compulsions. That’s what happens when the religious temperament prevails. The need to prove not just that Mr. Clinton’s opponents were evil, wrong, dumb, malign, gob-smackingly corrupt and duplicitous in every single respect, but that the President was noble, grand, progressive, epic and world-historical must, by its very nature, obscure nuance. Nuance, after all, could lead to doubt; and doubt to error; and error to damnation. And beyond damnation, there’s always the danger of becoming a Republican.

Read the whole thing.

Apparently there is a research project to study the motivations of those who read weblogs.
Since the research assistant to one of the professors involved is allegedly a Yankee fan, the project is hereby endorsed by the editorial staff of this site.
Any and all readers are invited to click here for the survey.
Vote early, vote often...

A few noteworthy blogs by those with whom I share tribal loyalty.
First, a certain Hasidic Rebel writes from an unidentified Hasidic community in New York. His perspective and curiosity combine to bring some fascinating diversity to the blogosphere. Read, for example, his account of a Saturday night mini-scandal (but for whom?).
Next, coming from an enterprising group of students (or, as they like to call themselves, "Elders") at Yeshiva University, is the wonderfully named Protocols blog. The writers hope to build upon the success of Paul Wolfowitz's cabal in taking over the Bush Administration, and extend the domination of the Elders of Zion over the whole world. Based on their posts, that should be an easy task. They have the right role models (if the link doesn't work, it's the post from 5/13 at 4:18 P.M.). Seriously, they have far more intellectual curiosity than most of my peers who went to YU - kol ha-kavod!
Finally, my old yeshiva study partner ("chevruta"), who is now an assistant rabbi at a major Manhattan synagogue and was always a born blogger (his old e-mail newsletters earned him a cult following long ago), has finally taken the plunge and started his own blog. As far as I know, this is the first entry by an Orthodox rabbi into the blogosphere. (And if he's reading this, the name "RabbiPundit" is still available.)

Barry Rubin details how Yasser Arafat is systematically undercutting any attempts at reform by Abu Mazen.
We have a decade-long track record of what happens when diplomats ignore such facts in the interest of pursuing a "peace process." Will they ever learn?

Jonathan Rauch has yet another outstanding piece (05/09/2003)
in response to the familiar claim that Bush squandered the U.S.' post-9/11 popularity:

Bush's supporters retort that post-9/11 sympathy was ephemeral. At the end of the day, they argue, a strong America will attract more support than a weak one. In any case, France and Russia were determined to play the spoiler; it was the world that squandered America's goodwill, more than the other way around.
Probably, possibly, and maybe. It's all very complicated. But those arguments miss the larger point. The talk of squandering is fundamentally misconceived. Bush did not squander the world's goodwill. He spent it, which is not at all the same thing.
...Perhaps the most awkward and obnoxious of America's Cold War alignments were in the Arab world. Washington supported tyrannies and monarchies that wrecked their economies and stunted their politics. The Arab regimes wallowed in corruption and incompetence. They entrenched poverty and blocked middle-class aspirations. They jailed liberal dissidents and political moderates. They fertilized the soil for militant Islamists who provided the only outlet for dissent. They then attempted to neutralize Islamism by diverting its energies to hating liberalism, Americans, and Jews.
In both Iran and Iraq, Washington supported or tolerated corrupt and brutal regimes, with disastrous results in both places. Saudi Arabia has been a different kind of disaster, propagating anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism all over the world. Syria and Libya are disasters. Lebanon is between disasters. Egypt is a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe Jordan is, too.
In short, the United States has been on the wrong side of Arab history for almost five decades, and it is not doing much better than the Soviets. The old policy had no future, only a past. It was a dead policy walking. September 11 was merely the death certificate.
Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue -- not shared by most sophisticates -- of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. So he gathered up the world's goodwill and his own political capital, spent the whole bundle on dynamite, and blew the old policy to bits. However things come out in Iraq, the war's larger importance is to leave little choice, going forward, but to put America on the side of Arab reform.
...This is a breathtakingly bold undertaking. The difficulties are staggering. Everything might go wrong. But the crucial point to remember is that everything had already gone wrong. No available policy could justify optimism in the Arab world, but the new policy at least offers hope. It offers a path ahead, a future where there had been only a past. It is not dead. It puts America on the right side of history and on the right side of America.
Much of Europe is alarmed by the change, but then, it would be. American troops in Saudi Arabia guaranteed the flow of oil while turning the United States (along with Israel) into the scapegoat of choice for millions of angry Muslims, some of whom live in Europe. From Paris's or Amsterdam's or Bremen's point of view, what's not to like about that deal? Why must Washington go and stir everything up?

Read the whole thing.

I've always been a huge Dante fan:

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to Purgatory!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	Low
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno Test

I'm not sure this is 100% accurate from a Jewish viewpoint, but take it for what it's worth...

Many people love to view George W. Bush’s actions through the prism of his father’s experiences. Many also argue that the Bush administration’s actions are primarily motivated by the desire to do the opposite of the Clinton administration on any given topic. What if there was a neat theorem which combined both theses, in a way which (to my knowledge) nobody in the mainstream media has noted? I think one exists, and it's one which should work for both Bush supporters and opponents.
Here’s my proposed Grand Unified Theory of the George W. Bush Administration:™
“Our opponents aren’t going to support us, whatever we do. Screw ‘em – there’s no point in meeting them halfway.”
I – Lessons from the Father
George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and a massively revamped and expanded Clean Air Act. He wooed reporters as if he actually enjoyed it. Most notably, he warmed the hearts of every Democratic member of Congress and raised taxes, publicly breaking his vow to the contrary.
And it didn’t do him any good, politically speaking. The Democrats lost no opportunity to bash him even in those areas where he had shown the most accommodation. He was called a disaster for the environment, a claim flagrantly at issue with his administration’s record. Despite his capitulation to the Democrats’ demands for higher taxes, he was consistently blamed for not doing more to resuscitate the economy. (And as an aside, I haven’t seen too many Democrats who credit Clinton’s tax increases for lowering the deficit and creating the lower interest rates that fueled the ‘90s boom give any credit for those outcomes to George H.W. Bush’s larger tax increases.) While one could not reasonably have expected the Democrats to go easy on an incumbent in an election year, the mainstream press largely went along with those claims and added their own spin: that he was too out of touch with the country. His schmoozing of reporters was for naught.
People have wondered why George W. Bush is content to push his agenda through Congress with barely an attempt to convince opposing legislators, especially since his practice as governor of Texas was so different. Some have also wondered why the Bush administration campaigned mercilessly against Democrats who supported parts of his agenda. Perhaps the experience of 1992 can provide an answer to those questions; unlike Texas, where Democratic legislators might support the re-election of a conciliatory Republican Governor, Washington Democrats could be expected to offer little succor at election time, regardless of how conciliatory their opposing number in the executive branch had been.
II – Lessons from the Bill
Many have noted that one of Bill Clinton’s signature traits was his belief that everyone could be convinced to support him, if he could only talk to and debate them long enough.
It seems clear that George W. Bush, due to his religious beliefs / habits resulting from giving up drinking, has a more militantly modest outlook: he is a clear believer in the recognizing the difference between what he can change and what he cannot. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bush sees Clinton’s inability to concede that some people are beyond his persuasive powers as a moral failing, as much as the more obvious foibles.
Bush’s viewpoint is probably reinforced by the fact that the results of Clinton’s indiscriminate attempts at persuasion were, obviously, mixed – especially in international relations. As pointed out by a charter member of the “neoconservative cabal,” Robert Kagan:

Although transatlantic tensions are now widely assumed to have begun with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001, they were already evident during the Clinton administration and may even be traced back to the administration of George H.W. Bush. By 1992, mutual recriminations were rife over Bosnia, where the United States refused to act and Europe could not act. It was during the Clinton years that Europeans began complaining about being lectured by the “hectoring hegemon.” This was also the period in which Védrine coined the term hyperpuissance to describe an American behemoth too worryingly powerful to be designated merely a superpower. (Perhaps he was responding to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s insistence that the United States was the world’s “indispensable nation.”) It was also during the 1990s that the transatlantic disagreement over American plans for missile defense emerged and many Europeans began grumbling about the American propensity to choose force and punishment over diplomacy and persuasion.
The Clinton administration, meanwhile, though relatively timid and restrained itself, grew angry and impatient with European timidity, especially the unwillingness to confront Saddam Hussein. The split in the alliance over Iraq didn’t begin with the 2000 election but in 1997, when the Clinton administration tried to increase the pressure on Baghdad and found itself at odds with France and (to a lesser extent) Great Britain in the United Nations Security Council. Even the war in Kosovo was marked by nervousness among some allies — especially Italy, Greece, and Germany — that the United States was too uncompromisingly militaristic in its approach. And while Europeans and Americans ultimately stood together in the confrontation with Belgrade, the Kosovo war produced in Europe less satisfaction at the successful prosecution of the war than unease at America’s apparent omnipotence. That apprehension would only increase in the wake of American military action after September 11, 2001.

Combine the deep fault-lines in interests exposed by the Clinton administration with the popular image of George W. Bush as a gun-toting provincial Christian fundamentalist (which pre-dated his inauguration, much less anything he actually did in office), and it is easy to see how Bush concluded that he never stood a chance with much of Europe.
It is also entirely possible that Bush noticed how in the previous decade, America had gone to war three times to protect Muslims and pushed Israel to the negotiating table with, and to make concessions to, the Palestinians (at Madrid in 1992, at Wye in 1998 and at Camp David in 2000) – events which bought America approximately 2.5 seconds’ worth of goodwill in much of the Arab and Muslim world. Is it any wonder that the Bush administration has been appropriately skeptical of European and Arab claims that particular policy changes (signing Kyoto, pushing Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians, etc.) would suddenly solve all problems between those countries and the U.S.?

Like all good cynical beliefs, the Grand Unified Theory has a lot of truth to it: it is not as if too many congressional Democrats would support Bush’s re-election regardless of what he did between now and then, and it seems clear that France would have been obstreperous on Iraq even if Bush had given his September 12th speech to the UN in French.
This theory is so obvious to me that I’m surprised more people in the mainstream media haven’t put it this way yet. I think media-types may not see it because it potentially implicates the their treatment of George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election cycle (and, by implication, how they’ll treat his son in 2004). What do you think?

Check out this fascinating piece in today's NYT about a search in Iraq:

In one huge room in the flooded basement of the building, American soldiers from MET Alpha, the "mobile exploitation team" that has been searching for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Iraq for the past three months, found maps featuring terrorist strikes against Israel dating to 1991. Another map of Israel highlighted what the Iraqis thought were the locations at which their Scud missiles had struck in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. The strikes were designated by yellow-and-red paper flowers placed atop the pinpointed Israeli neighborhoods.
Team members floated out of the room a perfect mock-up of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, as well as mock-ups of downtown Jerusalem and official Israeli buildings in very fine detail. They also collected a satellite picture of Dimona, Israel's nuclear complex, and a female mannequin dressed in an Israeli Air Force uniform, standing in front of a list of Israeli officers' ranks and insignia.
Of even greater interest to MET Alpha was a "top secret" intelligence memo found in a room on another floor. Written in Arabic and dated May 20, 2001, the memo from the Iraqi intelligence station chief in an African country described an offer by a "holy warrior" to sell uranium and other nuclear material. The bid was rejected, the memo states, because of the United Nations "sanctions situation." But the station chief wrote that the source was eager to provide similar help at a more convenient time.

As Best of the Web points out, this would seem to further disprove commonly-heard claims that Saddam was unlikely to cooperate with Islamic fundamentalists (or that such cooperation would only come about due to the Bush Administration's threats of war; note the May 2001 date). But why were they searching this building in the first place?

What began today as a hunt for an ancient Jewish text at secret police headquarters here wound up unearthing a trove of Iraqi intelligence documents and maps relating to Israel as well as offers of sales of uranium and other nuclear materials to Iraq.
...The search began this morning when 16 soldiers from MET Alpha teamed up with members of the Iraqi National Congress, a leading opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, to search for what an intelligence source had described as one of the most ancient copies of the Talmud in existence, dating from the seventh century. The Talmud is a book of oral law, with rabbinical commentaries and interpretations.
A former senior official of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police, had told the opposition group a few days earlier that he had hidden the ancient Jewish book in the basement of his headquarters. The building had been badly damaged by coalition bombing, said the man, who is now working for the Iraqi National Congress, but he was still willing to take a group there to recover it. MET Alpha hesitated. Its mission was hunting for proof of unconventional weapons in Iraq, not saving cultural and religious treasures. But Col. Richard R. McPhee, its commander, decided that the historic Talmud was too valuable to leave behind.

Can't you see the narrative taking hold? First, the story was that the U.S. military guarded the oil wells while neglecting the National Museum, thus encouraging looting and the loss of Iraqi cultural treasures. Add to that the story that while doing those things, the U.S. was also searching for an ancient copy of the Talmud. (That crazed Jewish neoconservative cabal is at it again...)Somewhere, Noam Chomsky is writing his next book.
(Yes, the links in the previous paragraph will take you to debunkings of those Baghdad-style urban legends, not to the initial peddling of those stories. Think of it as the next generation of Fisking. And as always, technicalities of factual and temporal discrepancies will be easily surmounted in formulating the narrative.)

Joshua Muravchik criticizes the road map on grounds similar to the ones I used in my earlier post - only much more eloquently than I did, which is to be expected (after all, the man does this for a living):

...Postmortems of Oslo, notably by the chief U.S. negotiator, Dennis Ross, have focused on America's failure to insist on full compliance with the terms of the agreement, especially on the part of the Palestinians, a failure that was driven by the pressure to meet predetermined timetables. Precisely to avoid repetition of this mistake, the Bush administration has characterized the road map as "performance driven." But that is scarcely compatible with a breakneck dash around the map's multiple clover leaves.
...The still deeper flaw in the road map's premises is the presumption that with the terms of settlement fairly apparent, all that is needed is a guide for getting there. In the final analysis, however, the missing ingredient for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a blueprint of the destination, nor is it the route. The missing ingredient is a decision by the Palestinians and the other Arabs to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst and to live in permanent peace with it. Despite all the Palestinians have suffered these two and a half years, public opinion polls show that a clear majority of them support continuing the intifada and suicide bombing and that about half say that the goal should be the "total liberation of Palestine," in other words, the elimination of Israel. The other half of the Palestinians say they want a two-state solution. When that half grows and becomes dominant, then and only then, will real peace be possible.
...The simple reality is that the moment the Palestinians make a wholehearted turn toward peace, no road map will be necessary.

During my hiatus, I received a request for an e-mail interview, asking me to expand on certain issues raised in my big Bill James post from a while ago.
I could be nice and respond to the inteviewer directly. But why do that when I can share my answers with the rest of the world? Here are the questions and my answers.

When did you first start reading Bill James?
When I was about 13, with the 1986 Baseball Abstract and the first version of the Historical Baseball Abstract.

How would you say that you have applied his ideas in your life?
Mostly in a generic attempt to apply modes of critical thinking to whatever I do. I was a history major in college, and took every opportunity to trumpet my belief that with respect to "it was better in my day" jeremiads, 9 out of 10 of such laments are utterly bogus, and the 10th example is usually overstated. Bill James' books are an inexhaustible source of good examples for that point.

Other than just the idea of critical thinking, what would you say are the most
important things James has written about that are applicable to areas outside of
baseball?
As noted above, I think his scrutiny of the historical record is remarkably relevant for those who would draw lessons from history - i.e., most of us.

Do you feel that James' ideas are expressed more by conservative writers, or equally by writers across the conservative [I assume my interviewer means "political" - Dr. M] spectrum. If you feel the ideas have
been more embraced by conservatives, why do you feel this is so?
Dan McLaughlin has written on certain similarities between conservative political media and sabermetric analysts. I see his points, and I'd add another: I do think there is a strong revolutionary undercurrent to James' work, and for many of us who grew up in major metropolitan areas and attended elite universities in the "blue" states, the conventional wisdom that attracted our scorn was primarily liberal.
That being said, I'd be surprised if there was a strong political tilt to James' fans. The skepticism that one picks up from James' work is equally applicable to conservative conventional wisdom as to the liberal variety. Even if there are more conservative Bill James fans among bloggers than liberals, that may simply be a function of sample size or a function of what factors drive people to start blogs, of which I have my own theories that I hope to expand into a post later.
I'd prefer to look on the bright side; sabermetrics, and good baseball writing in general, provides fans with areas for debate and potential agreement that have little to do with one's political leanings. You get situations like Eric Alterman (justifiably) rhapsodizing over George Will's baseball writing.

In what other areas do you feel James has had influence, besides baseball and political journalism?
Not systematically, but there are people in every field who would cite James as an influence. Critical thinking skills are pretty transferable.

Is there another influential writer you would compare Bill James to?
It's become a cliche, but Dan McLaughlin nails it: the George Orwell comparison works to an extent.

Do you know of other writers you would recommend that I speak to regarding this article?

Check out the commenters to my earlier post. Given the theme of this interview, I'd particularly recommend Dwight Meredith (he can give a political liberal's perspective) and Derek Lowe (he's a chemist who cites James as an influence in his work). I'd also contact Matt Welch and Doug Pappas, neither of whom is a political conservative.

There is plenty of speculation that the recently unveiled “road map” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents a cynical attempt to curry international favor and/or paper over the conflict, rather than a serious attempt to solve it.
I certainly hope so; that would be the most positive spin on the “road map.” It would be much more disturbing if the administration actually believed that the approach embodied in the road map actually represented the best options for peace.
The last two decades of Arab-Israeli peacemaking has provided policymakers with many examples of what works and does not work. The road map seems like a perfect distillation of what doesn’t work, “uncontaminated” by what does.
One of the biggest pitfalls of the Oslo-based peace process was the prevalence of those two words: the belief that peace can be produced via a negotiating process. Under that view, the two words were conflated: the perfection of the process was viewed as synonymous with the attainment of peace, and the continuation of the process was regarded as the sine qua non of any peace-seeking effort. The process thus became and end in and of itself. Thus, continued Palestinian terrorism, anti-Jewish propagandizing, arming of innumerable “security forces” and other violations of the Oslo accords were minimized so as to keep the process on track. The core issues – Jerusalem, the “right of return,” even settlements – were kicked down the road, lest they intrude on the process before they were ripe for resolution. And when President Bush essentially disavowed the entire Oslo-based approach in his June 24 speech, he was attacked for not putting forth a peace plan – after all, his speech didn’t come with an attached negotiating framework.
The problem was that the Palestinians’ fundamental rejection of Israel’s legitimacy did not vanish due to the negotiating experiences of the 1990s. The problem was that the Oslo-based process did not succeed in removing the incentives for the Palestinians to conduct terrorism, or for the Israelis to fight terrorism. And the proposed “road map,” on its face, does not solve these problems either. More technically, those problems are linked to the parties’ most fundamental strategic decisions, which are beyond the scope of any negotiating process to affect. While the road map is ostensibly “performance-based,” the map itself gives no indication that 3 out of the “quartet’s” 4 members would require stricter performance from the Palestinians than they did throughout the 1990s. Indeed, at certain points the map strains credulity in its insistence on symmetry:

At the outset of Phase I:

Israeli leadership issues unequivocal statement affirming its commitments to the two-state vision of an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside Israel, as expressed by President Bush, and calling for an immediate end to violence against Palestinians everywhere. All official Israeli institutions end incitement against Palestinians.

(Emphasis added.)
I’m not familiar with any Palestinian-leaning equivalent of MEMRI that provides constant examples of anti-Palestinian hatred in Israeli politics, media and schools. So on its face, either the a) such Israeli rare, non-official examples are deemed equivalent to the massively prevalent Palestinian ones, or, more likely, b) the whole thing is a crock, which does not bode well for the allegedly important judging of “performance.” (After all, it’s so unfair to hold the parties to different standards…) Now, I understand that it’s not recommended for diplomats to make a habit of trumpeting the moral superiority of one side in a negotiation. But at the same time, it would seem advisable for a plan supposedly based on performance benchmarks to avoid requirements that are utterly divorced from reality.
And even more fundamentally, the most contentious issues are left for Phase III, in the apparent assumption that they will be easier to solve at that point – in total contravention of the available evidence. If the Palestinians decide to give up terror and reach a genuine peace with Israel, any one of the peace plans on the State Department’s shelves will work – even the road map. If that decision is not made, no peace plan will work, no matter how perfect the negotiating process.
Now, it’s important to note that many of the choices made by international diplomats throughout the 1990s were defensible at the time. They didn’t have the benefit of the hindsight we now possess. But there is no defending a tenacious refusal to learn from mistakes. For the record, I supported the Oslo accords through the Camp David negotiations and until the Palestinian campaign began in October 2000. But I was – along with an awful lot of people who are smarter than I was or am - mistaken about a number of fundamental assumptions that underlay the enterprise. One of the best arguments for the peace process in the 1990s was encapsulated by Franklin Roosevelt’s supposed advice to Raymond Mobley:

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Even if that advice was apocryphal, I’m pretty confident that Roosevelt’s advice was not: “Try something, and if it doesn’t work, keep trying the same damn thing over and over again.”
The infamous “neoconservatives” are often attacked for promulgating grand theories about the Middle East regardless of the empirical evidence. It is remarkable how perfectly that criticism fits many champions of the Arab-Israeli “peace process.” As Colin Powell recently said after a recent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv:

We can't let these sorts of incidents immediately contaminate the road map or contaminate the process that we are now involved in.

As seen from that quote and from the “incitement” point above, it seems that the champions of the “road map” have certain differences with reality. Rather than negotiate those differences, though, they seem to single-mindedly press ahead, sure that the other party will bend to their designs and regardless of the costs…

The preliminary indications for the Quartet's insistence on performance is not encouraging. Ha'aretz recently reported:

With the swearing-in of the new Palestinian cabinet on Wednesday came a presidential order from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat for the establishment of a national security council to oversee all the PA's security mechanisms, including the counter-security apparatus, the uniformed police and the civil guard.
In keeping with the definition of powers of the Palestinian government, these security mechanisms are supposed to fall under the authority of PA Interior Minister Mohammed Dahlan. The move violates one of the clauses of the U.S.-backed 'road map' for Middle East peace, which calls for "all Palestinian security organizations [to be] consolidated into three services reporting to an empowered Interior Minister."

As a colleague of Eugene Volokh commented:

The road map has been public for less than 48 hours, and Arafat has already broken it.
...If the Bush Administration does not respond swiftly and firmly to this direct flouting of the road map, the entire process is dead. US policy should be clear: it will withdraw the road map and refuse to engage in any negotiations unless the Council is immediately terminated. The US should also immediately send a new military and civilian aid package to Israel. Criminologists have long argued that it is the certainty and swiftness of punishment, not its severity, that count. Here's a chance to test the theory with Arafat, the Palestinian arch criminal. Anything less essentially condemns the region to more violence.
The interesting question at this point is not whether Arafat will do all that he can to subvert the road map (and thus subvert Abu Mazen). It is, rather this: is there anything that Arafat can do that will convince his European backers that he isn't interested in peace and is committed to terror? Or is it just that they don't care?

There is an obvious temptation not to scuttle a promising initiative based on a disagreement over the structure of the Plestinian bureaucracy. But the lessons of the last decade are clear: failing to do exactly that will only lead to further violations and further violence, and the initiative will be destroyed anyway.
The answer to the question of Volokh's correspondent is far more important than the structure of any negotiating framework. Naturally, the parties would rather not discuss it.

P.S. I've read an awful lot of pieces on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and here are my picks for the best of the lot: this overview of the real underlying issues by David Brooks, this assessment of the Camp David and Taba negotiations by David Malkovsky and this evisceration of the "peace process" worldview by Jonathan Rauch.

The more closely you read this, the funnier it is.

In an excellent recent post about why religions often have different criteria for membership than the larger society might prefer, Megan McArdle wrote:

There isn't anyone with the authority, as far as I know, to tell you you aren't a member of one of those faiths. You can be expelled from a congregation, to be sure, but no minister can declare that you are not a Presbyterian, no rabbi strip your Jewishness from you. When they hear a bishop telling someone to stop calling themselves Catholic, it sounds like that bishop telling that person to stop proclaiming their beliefs.
It's a little more complicated than that, however. For one thing, unlike most mainline protestant denominations, or any Jewish ones, Catholics are pretty firm on what beliefs you have to embrace to be a member. [Aren't the Orthodox Jews pretty strict? -- ed. Yes, but as far as I know, technically, you don't have to believe in anything they say, as long as you obey the Law.]

Megan is almost completely mistaken about Judaism, especially the Orthodox variety. Yes, we are pretty strict about our requirements.
First, it is true that Judaism views membership as an entrance into a roach motel: you can check in, but you can't check out. (This is, by the way, one reason why Jews historically discourage prospective converts before even beginning to consider them; with respect to those who aren't going to be able or willing to fulfill all their new requirements, we're doing them a favor.) That being said, though, there are two main problems with Megan's points:
1) First, Judaism does recognize that you can do certain things that put you outside the pale and cause you to be considered, in many respects, as being outside the Jewish community. (One example of such exclusion is that such a person, if male, would not be allowed to count towards the quorum required for a public prayer service ("minyan").) What do you have to do in order to achieve this feat? The most common example in the halakhic sources is "violating the Sabbath in public," but public professions of heresy will do nicely as well. For a decent overview of heresy in Judaism, click here and scroll down. From the same source, about which I don't know much, click here for an overview of Jewish priciples of faith.

(Digression #1: Nowadays, do Orthodox Jews apply the status of "public Sabbath violator," with the accompanying communal exclusions, to everyone who doesn't observe the Sabbath in accordance with Orthodox standards - i.e., the overwhelming majority of Jews today? No, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this discussion - we can take it up in the comments. The point for these purposes is that there is something you can do that puts you outside the Jewish communal pale, even if it technically doesn't remove your Jewishness. End of digression.)

2) In general, Judaism does in fact require you to believe certain things. If you missed the link, click here for an overview.
Nevertheless, Megan's misperception is pretty common. Where does it come from? I can think of a couple of reasons:
A) The closest source for the anti-dogmatic view cited by Megan is the work of Moses Mendelssohn. I am not an expert in Mendelssohn's work, but I do know that his views have never gained wide acceptance within Orthodox thought. It is thus misleading to say that, as far as the Orthodox are concerned, Mendelssohn's views on dogma represent "Judaism."
B) Codifications of Jewish dogma (most notably, this one) only became popular in medieval times, as a response to widespread Christian (and Muslim, I think) works of dogma. Those codifications were usually seen as worthy efforts, but were outside the mainstream works of halakhic scholarship - where the intellectual action has been for over 2,000 years. Those codifications' impact on halakhic practice was relatively minimal, and while Maimonides' "13 principles" have become the most commonly accepted codification of Jewish dogma, even those principles have not been universally accepted within Orthodox Judaism.
C) Most importantly, the extreme non-dogmatic view is built on a certain truth, as hinted at above: most of the intellectual energy of Orthodox Judaism is dedicated toward analysis of the system and details of halakha, rather than the fine points of belief. But that doesn't mean that belief is optional; the emphasis instead reflects the following points:
(i) Why, exactly, would you buy into the halakhic system in the first place if you don't believe that it reflects the will of God?
(ii) There is a famous Talmudic statement that says, essentially: "Even if you are not performing [an obligation] for the right reasons, perform it anyway, beacuse one who does so will eventually come to do so for the right reasons." ("Mi-she-lo lishma, ba lishma.") That statement reflects several truths as a guidline for dealing with issues such as a temporary faith crisis, but it is far from a sanction for dispensing with faith altogether.

Debate invited...

It's good to be back. Thanks for sticking with me.

What was supposed to be a short pause due to personal and professional pressures (don't worry - nothing bad) turned into a much-longer break, as those pressures didn't let up for a long while. (They're a little better now.)

I've heard a few things happened while I was away. I'll try to gradually catch up on some of them (and I've promised response posts to a couple of bloggers already on very old topics), but not all at once. If I try to catch up on everything at once, it won't happen and I'll just give up and stop blogging again. And, as I found out, not blogging can be as addictive as blogging. But much less fun.

Sorry for the absence and I'll try to make it up to all of you.