November 9, 2007

Imagine you could predict the future. With precision. And all you were doing was using a beefed up version of John Nash’s game theory formula. Well, GOOD magazine (whose founder I profiled for an article in next week’s JJ) has a cover story on a guy who can.

His name is a mouthful—Bruce Bueno de Mesquita—and he’s being hailed as the New Nostradamus, making this lead quote oh-so fitting: “Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack.”

The chairman of NYU’s department of politics, Bueno de Mesquita (mmm, I’m hungry) has been more accurate in his predictions than the CIA.

“We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

His method is more psychology than foreign policy. He determines the motivations of the players involved in a specific issue, applies those to a “rational-choice” model, which uses game theory as its backbone, and arrives at an expected outcome. He’s had a lot of amazing gets, but this was my favorite mentioned in the article:

His model predicted that upon Khomeini’s death, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khamenei and an obscure junior cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would emerge to lead the country together. At the time, Rafsanjani was so little known that his name had yet to appear in the New York Times.  Even more improbably, Khomeini had already designated his successor, and it was neither Ayatollah Khamenei nor Rafsanjani. Khomeini’s stature among Iran’s ruling clerics made it inconceivable that they would defy their leader’s choice. At the APSA meeting subsequent to the article’s publication, Bueno de Mesquita was roundly denounced as a quack by the Iran experts—a charlatan peddling voodoo mathematics. “They said I was an idiot, basically. They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed,” he recalls. “It was a very difficult time in my career.” Five years later, when Khomeini died, lo and behold, Iran’s fractious ruling clerics chose Ayatollah Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani to jointly lead the country.

Anyway, with the much-anticipated peace forum at Annapolis coming up between Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, New Nostradamus offered this model for achieving piece in the most contested—and holiest—strip of land in the Middle East.

“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.” 

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

I’m always late to the viral videos. Borats Anonymous is sort of religious, right? At least it has a bunch of Jewish jokes, and “Throw the Jew Down the Well” makes a rousing appearance. As does Rick James. I must say, though, that most these impersonators look more like Casey Affleck than Borat.

WARNING: Each of these videos is offensive in its own way.

A seemingly small-time drug ring busted this week in Los Angeles was actually targeted for funding the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, the Daily News has learned.

Prosecutors left out the terror tie when they announced Tuesday that federal agents and local cops had arrested a dozen people for allegedly peddling cocaine and counterfeit clothing in Bell, Calif.

But several sources familiar with the investigation said the predominantly Arab-American gang was believed to have smuggled its crime cash to the Iranian-backed terror group.

“This was a classic case of terrorism financing, and it was pretty sophisticated how they did it,” a source close to Operation Bell Bottoms told The News.

There’s not much more to the story, but you can read the rest here.

The Forward 50 is out, and guess who again got snubbed after missing the Heeb 100. Seriously, though, there are some surprising picks and even more surprising omissions. No Hebrew Hammer?

The Forward

says this year’s selections indicate a greater chasm separating Jewish innovators.

Pessimists have been warning for decades that as younger generations of Jews continued their acculturation into the American mainstream, those at the leading edge of the drift would float away from Jewish identity, leaving a smaller but more committed core. Optimists, if that’s the right word, predicted that the younger, more acculturated Jews wouldn’t disappear from the scene; rather, their Jewish identities would evolve in new and unpredictable ways, leaving the Jewish community as many small communities, with less and less identifiably in common.

This year’s Forward 50 list shows what look to us, at least, like clear signs of continental drift. When we sat down to take a long look at the community, what we found was not a hardening core surrounded by an evanescent periphery, but numerous pockets of identity taking shape on the landscape, most showing clear signs of solidity, but most quite disconnected from ― even unaware of ― the others.

From Los Angeles only seven (and a half) people made the list:

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow

Henry Waxman

Jimmy Delshad

Roz Rothstein

Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin

Rabbi Laura Geller

Robert Wexler

Well, at least we didn’t have Jack Abramoff on the list again.

A priest has been arrested on charges of stalking late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien by writing him threatening notes on parish letterhead, contacting his parents and showing up at his studio, prosecutors said Wednesday.

“I want a public confession before I ever consider giving you absolution _ or a spot on your couch,” wrote the Rev. David Ajemian, who signed the notes “Padre,” said Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Ajemian, from the Archdiocese of Boston, was arrested last week while trying to enter a taping session of NBC’s “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, near where other NBC shows are taped and the famous Christmas tree is put up, Thompson said.

Court papers say Ajemian referred to himself as “your priest stalker” in one note and complained of not being allowed in to see an earlier taping of the O’Brien show.

“Is this the way you treat your most dangerous fans?” the note said.

Well, at least Ajemian wasn’t arrested for the other crime that in recent years has been attached to Catholic priests.

My GeekHeeb colleague put this up on his blog last night. I’m not sure how two Tesla cables and a fiber-optic cable running from a laptop create the theme to “Mario Bros,” but this is pretty awesome, sort of like “The Prestige.” (The Geek Group did a similar demonstration.)

Can someone explain how this works?

“Are you Jewish?”

With some discomfort, I asked that question repeatedly of the 300-plus picketers in front of CBS Studio Center in Studio City on Monday, the first day of the strike by the Writers Guild of America.

It was an awkward query not because I feared dismissal—after accounting for noses and facial hair and eyeglasses, I was able to reduce uncertainty to about 20 percent—but because I knew these TV and film writers did not see a connection between Yiddishkayt and the failed contract negotiations that spurred some 12,000 members of the WGA to go on strike at 9:01 p.m. Sunday.

“What’s the Jewish angle?” Andrew Jacobson, a co-writer of “Not Another Teen Movie,” asked me. “I don’t see one except in the most stereotypical sense. This is an issue that affects people regardless of religion or race or gender. It’s writers united.”

Indeed, “Hollywood writer” is among the most Jewish job descriptions anywhere, which is why, as this long-anticipated strike approached, my editors asked me to report the news through a Jewish lens. The difficulty, however, is that this really isn’t a Jewish story. It’s a business story that just happens to deal with an industry built largely by Jewish immigrants and sustained by their successors.

This was probably the most challenging story I’ve reported since joining The Jewish Journal six months ago. I could not, for the life of me, find my angle, and then I labored long and hard over the wording of this 700-word story. I know, it doesn’t show.

It just seemed like such an awkward topic, a story with characters so obviously Jewish but a theme and plot that has nothing to do with Judaism. And asking film and TV writers if they are Jewish is like asking someone in Vatican City if they are Catholic. When I asked Marc Alan Levy, who wrote the TV movie “Searching for David’s Heart,” he deadpanned, “Yeah. I’m the only one in line.”