You could start with George Will’s column in Wednesday’s National Post asking bluntly: “Negotiations about what?” Israel, he rightly said, is determined not to allow a third Islamic republic in the West Bank to go with those in Iran and now Gaza. And that is the Palestinians’ minimum condition in negotiations.

Let me rephrase that. It is their minimum condition for negotiations. John Thompson, of the Mackenzie Institute, once ridiculed Yassir Arafat’s “impulsive urge for trying to take the pot with a pair of fours and a lot of bluff.” But it wasn’t just him. The Palestinian leadership has catastrophically overplayed its hand at every turn since the 1920s; it is hardly surprising that they should now demand that in return for talking to the stinking Jews they should be permitted to sneak up behind them with murder in their hearts.

What is surprising is that so many in the West overlook or excuse this vicious and delusional attitude while insisting that if only Israel were more reasonable everything would be fine. Pay no attention to that blood libel in front of the curtain.

As Will notes, when the Israelis withdrew from Gaza and Hamas took over and started raining rockets on them, the so-called international community didn’t object. (“The number of UN resolutions deploring this? Zero.”) But world opinion was “theatrically appalled” when Israel retaliated.

So far, so sadly familiar. We say again and again that Israel isn’t just the only place in the Middle East where gays or women have rights, it’s the only place where Muslims do. So why do so many intelligent and, I strive to keep believing, well-intentioned people in the West blame Israel first, last and always or prattle soothing idiocies about an alleged Middle East Peace Process like Hillary Clinton?

Here I’d like to lay aside my usual scorn for social science and cite a story in Saturday’s National Post about a study by Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia on co-operation, altruism and culture. Henrich et al revisited a famous experiment called the Ultimatum Game in which Subject A is given $100 and told that he can offer to divide it with Subject B any way A likes. If B says yes, they each get their agreed-upon share. But if B says no, neither gets anything. And each pair only plays once so there’s no room for strategic decisions about future encounters.

It has long been known that educated Americans, if assigned the role of Subject A, will offer an average of $48. And when assigned the role of B, they tend to reject anything under $40. In other words, Americans, (and other Westerners) expect fairness, value it highly, and resent its absence. But Henrich and his colleagues discovered that elsewhere, starting in the Amazon jungle, people react very differently, usually making smaller offers as A and accepting them as B.

The researchers concluded that Westerners differ from non-Westerners. “Really?,” I’m tempted to say. You discovered the Third World. Way to go. Have you ever been abroad? But better late than never.

What these researchers say is mostly true and important. Including their insistence that we are the weirdos. They call us “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic” or WEIRD for short. I think this admittedly clever terminology puts too much emphasis on post-Industrial Revolution material conditions and too little on cultural factors going back at least to the fateful meeting of Athens and Jerusalem in the Roman Empire. But the brutal fact is that we in the West are unusual.

We are not the world. And what we’re seeing in the Middle East, or trying not to, is a confrontation, one might even say a clash of civilizations, between a Western society and its non-Western neighbours who think very differently about getting along and value fairness far less.

In their paper, Henrich et al suggest that too much emphasis on WEIRD test subjects has misled behavioural scientists. To which I respond that they oughta meet our political and cultural elite. To adapt a jibe from William F. Buckley, our chattering classes are always chattering about different cultures but are always amazed to find that there are other cultures. They assume that because the Palestinians keep rejecting Israeli peace offers, those offers must have been somehow insincere or ungenerous because that’s what it would mean if Hamas, Hezbollah and Fatah were all good bourgeois exurban Westerners.

So yes, there could be difficulties ahead, most of the important ones coming from that obtuse attitude.

The latest inept and expensive flip-flop from the Ontario government, on overpriced rural solar power, has me scratching my head till my scalp hurts on a key question of political economy: Is it in fact possible to be a cunning dunce?

In case you missed it, the McGuinty Liberals just proposed a massive bounty for rural solar power and apparently (I am not making this up) didn’t realize people would come for it … in which case why offer it? Their “microFIT” program offered nearly 20 times the market price for solar-generated electricity, 80.2 cents per kilowatt hour (kW·h) rather than 4.02, to try to get people to put a few panels on their roof. To the government’s astonishment, a gold rush ensued instead.

By July 2, with almost 19,000 people lined up for the free money, the province said it would only pay 58.8 cents per kWh, provoking a wave of rural anger that Wednesday’s Citizen described as “so strong that it reportedly threatened the re-election chances of nearly two dozen Liberal MPPs.” So the government flapped the flip of its flop and will now pay 80.2 cents per kWh for every project registered before July 2 but only 60.4 afterward.

How can you spend your adult life aspiring to govern, relentlessly and shamelessly pursuing political power, and then know nothing about the processes of government even when you’ve been in office for seven years? Did no one see this coming?

It reminds me of an exchange in Yes Minister when the hapless politician Jim Hacker demands to be told what he doesn’t know about an important issue and the ultimate bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby responds, “I don’t know what you don’t know, Minister. It could be almost anything.”

So it seems. But in fact it’s almost always the same thing. Politicians are woefully, even wilfully, obtuse on the fundamental principle of government that if you build it they will come. Politicians just can’t seem to grasp that incentives matter. Politicians are therefore astonished to discover that higher unemployment benefits change people’s attitude toward work, that charging too little for water leads us to waste it, and that allowing bogus refugee claimants to live among us for decades while engaging in procedural shenanigans encourages human traffickers to target Canada — and on and on and on.

How can they be so dumb, I want to shout. “Lots of practice,” replies my wife, without even shouting.

But not so fast.

When they realized this dopey plan to pay way more than it’s worth for politically correct electricity was going to break the bank, the McGuinty Liberals decided to break their promise — which at least suggests a certain primordial instinct for rational self-preservation. And while they botched their initial response by annoying the people already in line for a promised handout, when they saw more than 20 seats in peril they deftly reversed course again, buying off the early adopters while seeking to put a lid on runaway costs. Which is definitely cunning.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One thing I cannot stop myself doing is noting all the press releases the federal government puts out touting the myriad ways it has spent public money trying to buy support. What a lack of monument to democracy. No reasoning, no eloquence, just cash changing hands.

It’s one thing to be obsessed with insider stuff. But as these releases pour into my inbox I wonder in horrified incredulity who on Earth the senders think wants to read them, even among political junkies. Can they even interest their authors?

I mean, what public or partisan interest is served by telling the Parliamentary Press Gallery about your government supporting two affordable housing developments in Burlington, giving over a million bucks to Pneus ABC Tires Inc. of Atholville, N.B., to create “up to 15 new jobs,” $15,763,384 to Francophone communities in Newfoundland and Labrador, $534,820 for “25 arts and heritage projects in Newfoundland and Labrador,” and “more than $48,000″ to visitor services at the Cape Jourimain Nature Centre in Bayfield, N.B.? And that was just Wednesday morning. By 8 minutes past noon they’d added $52,826 in EcoAction Community Funding for Regina and central Sask-atchewan, and before 1:30 Fraser Specialty Products Ltd., Beaulieu Plumbing and Mechanical Inc., and IPL Inc. of Edmundston, N.B., had bagged almost $2 million … and on it went.

I also don’t think I need two press releases on consecutive days telling me Bob Rae would hold a press conference on Wednesday “to discuss Liberal opposition to Conservative census cuts;” I don’t even want to hear him discuss the cuts let alone dwell narcissistically on his opposition to them. “Navel lint in K1A” shouts the headline, or would if anyone covered it. (Plus his colleague Mark Holland had sent two releases threatening to do the same boring thing six days earlier.)

Then why, cries my last remaining reader, do you spend a whole column telling us you don’t care about things we don’t either, in agonizing detail?

Two reasons. First, you need to know this is what the guardians of the public purse (governmental and opposition) consider important. It is where they put their time and energy and while they’re sending dozens of these every week they aren’t doing, or thinking about, anything else. And it is costing you plenty, as the Tories try to buy support from every conceivable constituency and the opposition parties hammer them for not doing so on nearly a lavish or shameless enough scale.

Second, I just started reading a book of Wilfrid Laurier’s parliamentary and public speeches before he was prime minister. Oh, there’s an issue of interest to Canadians, comes a sarcastic shout from the back. Yes but, I shout back. Things used to be genuinely different, and could be again if we grasp what went wrong.

As an 1889 tribute to Laurier put it, “To be a Parliamentary orator, in the genuine sense of the words, one must bring to the discussion not only an agreeable voice and a chaste style, but a rare faculty of organization, a very practical mind, and a great knowledge of facts.” Whereas the modern House is dominated by the likes of John Baird, a master of ersatz outrage and obfuscation who never said anything anyone reading this column can remember. And I think there’s a connection between the two.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]