Jews control the American economy. And we control the European Economy. For that matter, we control all the banks in the world. And, the media. (Which makes me wonder: since not all Jews are Liberals, and since the Liberals supposedly control the media, what do Republican Jews do with their time while the Liberal Jews are busy controlling the media?)

The absurditity of these contentions barely merits a blog post. But at the risk of linking to some people whose thoughts I don’t think much of, no amount of my scorn will stop the likes of this guy, whom you might otherwise know for writing the film score to Zorba the Greek, from continuing to trumpet his theories. Or these people. Or these guys at www.nukeisrael.com. (Wow.)

These and other contentions weren’t exactly at the forefront of my mind this evening as I drove home, but the first of two pieces of the puzzle did fall into place. Terry Gross interviewed Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks on NPR’s Fresh Air today about his new book, Fiasco, which delivers detail both the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq War and the failure of our civilian military oversight to approve appropriate troop levels after the ground war had ended. Apparently, CENTCOM performed repeated “Troop-to-Task” analyses during the early days of the post-invasion period, and repeatedly reached the conclusion that there were far too few troops on the ground to “win the peace.” This wasn’t news. The Goverment Accounting Office (GAO) had said as much in 2003, according to Mark Thompson and Michael Duffy’s September 1, 2003 TIME magazine cover story “Is the Army Stretched Too Thin?”. The concept of a “Troop-to-Task” analysis has been used to analyze the appropriate level of resources required for various tasks–from revisionist Classical Historians rethinking reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Luttwak quoted in Isaiah Wilson III’s Providing for an Uncommon Defense: Attaining a Sustainable U.S. Security Strategy for the 21st Century) to modern military planners. As our ongoing fight against the insurgency in Iraq proves, those who ignore military planners’ Troop-to-Task analyses do so at the peril of their very credibility.

The second piece of the puzzle fell into place later this evening, when I noticed that my friend, colleague, and fellow Aspen Institute Socrates Society “lifer,” Pascal Levensohn, had made a recent post to his excellent blog regarding the actual numbers of Jews in the world. The numbers are about as small worldwide as I think I expected (about 13.3m worldwide), but shockingly low in Spain, where, as Pascal points out, the average Spaniard will tell you there are between 100k and 1m, but in fact there are a mere 12k. All in all, we still make up just 1.9% of the world’s population. (It was 2% when I was growing up. Perhaps they rounded up?) And focusing on the US, where 5.7m Jews live, an amazing 2m live in New York City. Pascal’s numbers, by the way, come from The Jewish Agency for Israel.

Now for the question: if we Jews are busy controlling the economy of the US, and Europe, and all the banks, and the media, and, and, and…, what does the Troop-to-Task analysis say about these duties? Let’s see: That’s One Jew for every 49 others worldwide. We’d better eat our Wheaties! Maybe it’s not just people. How about dollars? The world GDP in 2004 was $41 trillion, according to the World Bank. That means each Jew has to control his $3.1m of annual GDP. And if 35% of Jews are younger than 18 (just a rough estimate), then that’s more like $4.5m for each Jewish adult. Every year. So my wife and I control $9m annually. Somehow. The numbers don’t work. By the way, global GDP per capita is only $9,500, according to the CIA FactBook. (And by the way, there are about $500 billion in banking assets in they Cayman Islands. My “share” of those assets–which I’m supposed to be busy controlling–would be about $38,000. I’m way behind.) So a Troop-to-Task analysis makes the contention that the Jews Control the World all the more ludicrous.

Now, here’s a guy who claims the Jews control the pornography industry. That’s a different sort of Troop-to-Task problem, isn’t it?