I have no good theory to account for the very notable increase in the popularity of Christmas decorations in Istanbul. There have been more of them every year since I've been here, but I'm seeing a really notable increase over last year. Christmas trees, Santas, Rudolphs, garlands, Merry Christmas signs--all out in force, and beats me what to make of it. I'd tentatively say that Turks love anything bright and festive, and retailers figure this looks bright and festive.

Shopkeeper downstairs from me: daughter wearing a headscarf, very proud of his nicely-decorated new Christmas tree. Last night up by Taksim I saw a band doing rockabilly covers in Santa suits. Earlier today I saw a truck whiz by stacked high with freshly-chopped firs.

The driver was in a serious hurry. Obviously a lot of people were waiting impatiently for those trees.

I think we will see more of the same in 2011 in Mexico. The drug cartel killing spree raises a number of less discussed considerations. We are told the huge American demand for drugs, both grown and manufactured, creates the problem; perhaps in part, but note that we have a longer, more porous border with Canada and we are not seeing a shoot 'em up culture arising in Calgary or Toronto over meth or heroin exporting to the U.S. Something else is going on as well. We were also told that the continuation of massive illegal immigration from Mexico to the U.S. at least had a 'safety valve' effect that lessened tensions in Mexico while earning it nation-saving foreign exchange; but after 11-16 million Mexican nationals have fled to the United States the last 20 years, exactly how has that mass flight and ensuing  remittances of an estimated $30 billion per annum made things any better in Mexico?

In short, everything from the drug industry to illegal immigration is symptomatic of a larger pathology in the sense that Mexico has not embraced open markets, truly consensual government, respect for private property, transparency, and an independent judiciary—in the style of the reformist agendas in Chile and Brazil—and thus cannot provide security and prosperity for its own people. We could legalize drugs, let in another 20 million illegal aliens, allow $100 million to be sent back to Mexico from nationals here—and there would still be violence and instability in Mexico.

The answer is not to intervene in Mexico, but in polite and friendly fashion to distance ourselves a bit from Mexico, by securing the border and ending illegal immigration. America's drug appetite, and an open border between two vastly different societies, coupled with the disruptive effect of draining Oaxaca and other provinces of working-age males, are only force multipliers of Mexico's more fundamental unwillingness or inability to fully westernize. In a larger sense, America has never been honest about American-Mexican relations of the last half-century, and the result is that millions here and in Mexico do not dare ponder exactly why millions risk their lives to come northward to a country that is constructed as some sort of exploiter in the Mexican mental landscape, and as not much better here at home in elite multicultural circles. There will be no real progress until those on both sides of the border begin the painful discussion of why America works and why apparently millions of Mexicans want to be part of it rather than of their own native Mexico. Blaming America or creating an Orwellian situation in which millions of illegally residing Mexican nationals are hyper-critical of or indifferent to the U.S., while wanting amnesty from it, is sadly illustrative of the our shared inability to address the problem.

Political observations from the Caribbean: none.

Social observations from the Caribbean: when  a brief shower passes through, those little umbrellas in the drinks don't provide much protection.

We need tie-breaking votes. The five copies of Andy McCarthy's broadside go to the authors of the best five comments on this thread. Right now we have more winners than broadsides.

We also need a deadline for voting, so I'm issuing one. The winners will be announced at midnight tonight. Ah, but which time zone? Midnight, central and mountain. Who says we never acknowledge the flyover states? 

Never a dull moment in Turkey. The Sledgehammer trial began this week. Point to note, for those in a hurry: The chief judge was reassigned just two days before the trial began. Reassigned!

The Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors justified the move by pointing to Ministry of Justice allegations that the previous chief judge had ties to defendants in another politically sensitive trial, as well as connections to a drug ring and prostitution activities.

But the timing of the reassignment drew criticism from the defendants' lawyers -- one of whom noted that the case involves more than 100,000 pages of evidence, which the previous judge had been studying for four months.

Here's how the LA Times is billing it: TURKEY: Coup trial seen as vital to 'normalization' of military's relationship to government. That sound normal to you?

I say this drily, but I suppose the sad fact is that it is normal in Turkey. Such things happen all the time, and they certainly happened before the AKP came to power. The idea that this represents an advance for democracy and the rule of law is, however--how to put it?--peculiar.

Meanwhile, ten more sacks of supposedly damning documents have been seized from the Gölcük Naval Command, resulting in a classic Today's Zaman headline: Gölcük Naval Base revelations prove all shady plans interconnected. Interconnected how, you wonder? Well, you need a flow chart, really: 

Police officers found a large number of CDs and documents labeled “confidential” under the floor of the intelligence department, which they placed in 10 separate bags and confiscated for examination. Sources said the CDs and documents will provide information for the prostitution investigation. ...

In August this year Seçen initiated an investigation into allegations of a prostitution ring inside the navy which, for the purposes of blackmail, had recorded compromising footage of senior bureaucrats, military personnel and police officers engaging in sexual acts with women. So far, 23 men -- most of them military officers on active duty -- have been arrested on charges of membership in a gang involved in blackmail and espionage. In addition, four Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) cryptology experts are facing charges of “obstructing strategic projects planned by the state and servicing confidential information to foreign centers.”

So, today's development: The generals have signaled that they are, as President Clinton might have it, still relevant:

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey's generals asserted their role as guardians of the secular Turkish state on Friday, a day after the trial began of nearly 200 officers accused of planning a coup seven years ago.

In a statement issued on the armed forces Website, the military's top brass vented its anger over the use of the Kurdish language in parliament this week.

But the timing and tone of its comments on constitutional duty will add to a sense of tension between the military and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government.

"The Turkish General Staff has always been and will continue to be party to the protection of the nation state, the unity and secularism of the state," the statement said.

Those words reflect the sensitivities of a military high command that has lost influence as Erdogan pushed democratic reforms aimed at making Turkey fit to join the European Union.

That last paragraph is of course so many kinds of debatable that it's just astonishing it could be printed like that--not even a nod to the idea that these reforms were aimed at getting rid of the military? But never mind that. The point is that the military is bristling. 

And what's the main opposition CHP doing with itself? It's having a very big, noisy conference and committing suicide, basically. 

Not sure who's going to come out on top here, but smart money isn't on "rule of law." 

Ah, the Golden State, a land that makes even the most stalwart conservative rethink federalism. As Cassandra Sweet reports in the Wall Street Journal:

California regulators late Thursday adopted the first large-scale cap-and-trade program in the U.S., in a move officials say will protect the environment without hurting the state's still-struggling economy.

...

California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 requires the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. In addition to the proposed cap-and-trade program, the state has established an aggressive renewable-energy mandate and a requirement that the carbon content of the state's vehicle fuels be cut by 10% by 2020, as part of efforts to achieve the emissions-reduction goal.

The only problem? The state is expected to have added 15 million people during that 30 year period from 1990 to 2020. This delusion masquerading as ambition calls to mind Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous comparison of American education goals to Soviet grain quotas. But that's what we do in California: fiction, by acclamation.

In the thread on Sen. Mitch McConnell that I started earlier today ("The Hero of the Hour"), Ricochet member Duane Oyen offers a shrewd observation:

I have been pretty supportive of McConnell here in the past; he is not, nor has he ever been, a RINO.  We need to stop using those terms on people who are conservative, but not as [conservative as] Ayn Rand or Ron Paul or the TEA Party caucus thinks they should be....

In Minnesota, there are some bloggers who like to call Pawlenty a RINO because he has to govern realistically in a Blue-Purple state.  Reality: you can't run Minnesota like it was Utah- and you can't manage a caucus that includes the Maine twins as though it was the Utah state senate.  Sometimes you must choose between actual government and pleasing headlines.  

All well-stated and true, although Duane's comment about the "Maine twins," the liberal Republican senators from Maine, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, got me to thinking.  

For years now, Snowe and Collins have been telling their fellow Republicans that they had to break with the party on one vote after another because they had no choice.  After all, they represented Maine, a blue state.  If they didn't vote with the Democrats as often as not, they'd lose their seats.

Well now.

In the past election, quite a few Maine voters went hunting for more conservative purity.  The result?  A conservative Republican and tea partier, Paul LePage, won the gubernatorial race.  In the state Senate, Republicans picked up five seats, increasing their presence from 15 to 20 in a chamber of 35.  And in the state assembly, the GOP presence rose from 55 to 78, producing, in a chamber of 153, another majority.

From which, I very humbly deduce two lessons.

The first?  That although Duane is quite right about the need to compromise in politics, maybe the supreme skill lies in knowing when to refuse to compromise, instead recognizing and seizing the rare moment when the bold and the principled can achieve a breakthrough.

And the second?  That whereas senate minority leader Mitch McConnell remains, to my mind, a hero--he's the man, after all, who for some two years now has kept all the renegade Republicans in line--Sen. McConnell's job just got a lot easier, at least with the respect to the gentleladies from Maine.  On Election Day, Sens. Snowe and Collins will by now have recognized, the folks back home deprived them of their excuse for voting with the other side.

My.  That last election really was just glorious, wasn't it?

A WikiLeaks cable reveals that -- drumroll please -- Cuba has an inferior, inhumane system of health care.  Not that that comes as a surprise to anyone, except perhaps to Michael Moore and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus.  Speaking of Michael Moore, the cable contains a juicy tidbit describing why his film "Sicko" was banned in Cuba.

[Source] stated that Cuban authorities have banned Michael Moore's documentary, "Sicko," as being subversive. Although the film's intent is to discredit the U.S. healthcare system by highlighting the excellence of the Cuban system, he said the regime knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them. When the FSHP showed Sicko to a group of [Cuban doctors], some became so disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room.

I wonder if Michael Moore will now regret posting bail for Julian Assange.

(h/t Member Nathaniel Wright and BoingBoing)

The question is somewhat rhetorical since I wrote a book about this subject, but current events continue to vindicate my position that liberals are waging war on Christianity. I won't rehash arguments in this post about the absurd degree to which the Establishment Clause has been distorted to suppress religious freedom in the name of protecting it, but consider this case reported in The Hill.

The Federal Reserve issued an order to an Oklahoma bank to remove religious items from public view because they could discourage people from seeking loan applications. The items were a link on the bank's website to a Bible verse of the day and buttons saying "Merry Christmas, God With Us." 

Do you agree with the bank examiners? Or with Sen. James Inhofe and Rep. Frank Lucas, who fired off a letter to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke objecting to this?  Inhofe claims it discriminates against Christians and their freedom to express their faith. I agree.

If these had been references to a religion other than Christianity the examiner probably would have directed the bank to give bonuses to the employees involved. There is a disturbing paranoia about Christianity in our modern culture -- so ironic, given its putative majority status. The story says the Federal Reserve withdrew the order after Inhofe and Lucas complained.

Ok, Dave: I assume you've seen (from behind the wheel) this Reuters report that today the government proposed to prohibit commercial truck and bus drivers from using cell phones while behind the wheel.

The Transportation Department of Ray LaHood -- you know, the guy who wants to coerce you out of your car -- has to allow a 60-day comment period before the rule is finalized. So, LaHood has asked the Ricochet community for comment. Okay, that's not true. But I will ask Dave (and everyone else) whether this is a good thing or unwarranted government intermeddling.

In my ongoing series comparing states to my home state of California while touring with my punk band we come to Arizona. First show in Tempe, it's all Arizona State there. The show went great and I learned from one attendee that Arizona has relaxed its gun carrying laws to the point where you don't need a permit for a concealed weapon. You just need a clean record and stay out of trouble. That's freedom. In this day and age, seeing relaxed gun laws restores my faith in the U.S. a bit. Arizona has cheap drinks too; always has. I used to buy a mixed drink for 60 cents at the Stumble Inn here when this band first started and I was 19. And it was legal. And it was a good drink! Arrgghh!!!

I asked the promoter if he has problems booking bands because of the immigration controversy. He said he gets a few hems and haws but he's only had one band tell him they refuse to play in the state. That would be a great bunch of guys in a band called Rise Against. Their loss. Must be nice to be so young and stupid and get away with it. They really are great guys too.  Maybe we picked up some of their lost cash at our merch table. Who knows?  The promoter also lamented that other states are in the process of enacting similar laws but no one's punishing them.

For such a racist state there sure was a rainbow of cultures on the golf course the next day at ASU. Haven't they heard? They're not welcome here. I was going to tell them but they wouldn't let me on the course because of the color of my jeans. I had a nice bloody mary in the clubhouse where the bartender didn't judge me.

Next performance was the historic Congress Hotel in Tucson. This is a Western museum piece right across from a train station that would make Gary Cooper nervous. People here love telling me how nice it is to live in Arizona. I never really stick around long enough to doubt them but it all looks like good times to me.

Tonight: San Francisco, tomorrow Anaheim.

All right, Peter, I see your joyful technological seasonal fare...  and raise you THIS:

Hat tip to my Klavan on the Culture producer Justin Folk.

James Lileks may be the Internet's most prolific content producer: he posts at Ricochet, he co-hosts our podcast. He's got a day job writing for a newspaper (it's an aggregation of news printed once a day on paper, kids). He writes a not-to-be missed blog, a Twitter feed, even a Tumblr. But wait, there's more! He recently re-started The Diner, his own podcast that has been around in various forms since --wow--  the early 80's. Make your ears happy and give it a listen. You can thank us later. 

Among a sample of 2,533 scientists who took a Pew Research Center survey in July of 2009, 55% self-identified as Democrats, 32% as Independents, and a paltry 6% as Republicans.

Daniel Sarewitz writing at Slate believes these statistics indicate the growing politicization of science, a major threat to a free and democratic society.  Take the national debate over climate change, for example:

[C]ould it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?

Americans, by and large, tend to trust the institution of science, Sarewitz asserts, but the increasingly partisan nature of scientists could have calamitous effects on the public's confidence down the road.

If that public confidence [in science] is lost, it would be a huge and perhaps unrecoverable loss for a democratic society…[T]he issue here is legitimacy, not literacy. A democratic society needs Republican scientists.

So how do we get more Republicans to enter scientific fields?  Before we can answer that question, we must first address why there are so few Republican scientists to begin with.  The Economist blog “Democracy in America” offers three hypotheses:

The first is that scientists are hostile towards Republicans, which scares young Republicans away from careers in science. The second is that Republicans are hostile towards science, and don't want to go into careers in science. The third is that young people who go into the sciences tend to end up becoming Democrats, due to factors inherent in the practice of science or to peer-group identification with other scientists.

Do one or more of these hypotheses explain the phenomenon of the virtually non-existent Republican scientist, or is there something else going on here?  And what, if anything, should be done about it?  Do we need affirmative action for Republicans?

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Also what Caesar regulates:

A small-town bank in Oklahoma said the Federal Reserve won’t let it keep religious signs and symbols on display.

Federal Reserve examiners come every four years to make sure banks are complying with a long list of regulations. The examiners came to Perkins last week. And the team from Kansas City deemed a Bible verse of the day, crosses on the teller’s counter and buttons that say "Merry Christmas, God With Us." were inappropriate. The Bible verse of the day on the bank's Internet site also had to be taken down.

Federal rules forbid "...the use of words, symbols, models and other forms of communication ... express, imply or suggest a discriminatory preference or policy of exclusion." So the bank has to be yulenfrei. Can’t wait until these guys regulate the internet, eh?

After I read that story I walked outside my office, and heard something interesting: the bells of City Hall. Every noon they play tunes. The massive carillon in the tower is connected to a tiny keyboard in the lobby, and a fellow plays simple tunes, one finger at a time. If the tune has a sprightly meter, the music has the grace of someone juggling water balloons, but the bells impart a stately dignity to simple carols. (Digression: I had the opportunity to play the bells at noon once, and treated the downtown crowd to “Smoke on the Water.” Cross that one off the bucket list.) Anyway: to my surprise, the bells were playing “Away in a Manger.” Then came “Silent Night.” Actual religious carols pealing from the bells above, echoing for blocks in the arctic air of Minneapolis.

Years ago, I would have thought, ah, Christmas. Now I think: someone’s going to get in trouble. But probably not. He played for almost an hour, and if anyone in City Hall realized what was going on, they didn't run down to the lobby and bark play Rudolph, if you know what's good for you.

While Rob's using technology to chart the decline of the West, may I use it for somewhat lighter purposes?

Sen. Mitch McConnell.

The defeat of the omnibus spending bill in the senate yesterday represented, as Steve Manacek notes below, an enormous achievement--just enormous.  That achievement belongs to the senior senator from Kentucky.

To be sure, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina did stout service, threatening to demand a reading of the 1,924 omnibus spending monstrosity, while Sen. John McCain appeared on all the talk shows, urging Americans to take to email and Twitter to oppose the outrage.  (And it was good to see John McCain enjoying himself attacking Democrats instead of his fellow Republicans.)  But it was minority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell who held the Republicans together--again.  McConnell lacks the sheer force of personality that made Lyndon Johnson so irresistible in the Senate, but he possesses high intelligence, utter mastery of the Senate's arcane rules and customs, and--this is becoming increasingly clear--a determination to stand on principle.

As Kim Strassel writes in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell accomplished a mini Christmas miracle. The Kentuckian devoted yesterday to making the arguments--both principled and political--to the Spending Nine [the nine Republicans tempted to support the spending bill].  He was ultimately persuasive enough....

And the lesson for Republicans (yet again)?  Unity and principle rule.  Mr. McConnell held his members against ObamaCare, and won an election.  He held them on taxes, and force President Obama to help the economy.  And this week, by holding together on something equally straightforward--a promise of sical responsibility--Republicans turned what could have been a black eye into a bitter humiliation for Mr. Reid [the Senate majority leader] and other supporters of an irresponsible spending blowout.

Since the presidency of John Kennedy--or, perhaps, even that of Franklin Roosevelt--the press has conditioned us to look to the White House for high drama.  Over the next couple of years, though, the highest drama will unfold on Capitol Hill.  And even if he has an undistinguished speaking voice and unprepossessing looks, I don't care.  Mitch McConnell is my hero.

Google Labs has a new cool time-waster called Google NGram Viewer.  Essentially, it's a search engine for the printed word from 1800 to 2000: you key in a few words, and the viewer instantly graphs the occurrence of those words over two centuries of indexed publications. 

Here, for instance, is the NGram Viewer for these words: sin, righteous, and piety:

The word "sin," as you can see, has been on a steep decline since 1840.  

Here's my favorite: the occurrence over the past two centuries of the words empower, multicultural, and homophobia:

It's addictive, and hilarious, and I'm sorry if, like me, your day is now shot.  Go do a couple yourself, and post them here.

Of late I have been very saddened by two suicides that have got some attention. I'll do them in separate posts. The one that has been in the news, and has a special resonance for me, is Lizzy Seeberg. Miss Seeberg was a student at Saint Mary's College in South Bend, IN, the sister school for Notre Dame. She committed suicide earlier this year after reporting that a football player had sexually assaulted (not raped) her.

I won't rehash the details here. I don't know what happened in the room. Here's a good article from a classmate of mine, Melinda Henninberger, a former NYTimes reporter on the opposite aisle from me on politics and most issues.

Yet we each seem to find most disappointing that the President, Father Jenkins, appears to have lawyered up. I'm sure all the lawyers so advise. And though I've had my differences with the man, especially over the honors extended to President Obama last year, I do know he is a good priest. Alas, when this tragedy happened he did not do what I believe he, as president/priest, should have done: personally visited the family of the girl -- many of whom have attended Notre Dame. By contrast, the President of Saint Mary's reached out to the family and gave them a class ring for their daughter, so she could be buried with it.

Again, I'm not taking any position on what happened, or legal guilt, etc. Just the sadness of a young life gone, and what seems to be a cold institutional response.

Though there's been some grim news coming out of China recently, I came upon this must-read article that offers a trace of hope about the country. Writing in The New Republic, professor and essayist Mark Lilla alerts American readers to a fascinating conversation occurring within China's intellectual circles: what can the teachings of political philosopher Leo Strauss offer to China's political future? 

Though the New Yorker has implied that these Chinese readers of Strauss are "the new generation's neocon nationalists," Lilla offers a different take on them:

Strauss and Schmitt are at the center of intellectual debate, but they are being read by everyone, whatever their partisan leanings; as a liberal journalist in Shanghai told me as we took a stroll one day, “no one will take you seriously if you have nothing to say about these two men and their ideas.” And the interest has little to do with nationalism in the nineteenth-century sense of the term. It is a response to crisis—a widely shared belief that the millennia-long continuity of Chinese history has been broken and that everything, politically and intellectually, is now up for grabs.

To Lilla, Strauss is appealing to the Chinese because he lays out the "grand tapestry of Western political theory" before them while providing "a bridge between their ancient tradition and our own."

Over twenty years ago, the intellectuals of another country, Poland, were also reading Strauss at a critical moment in their nation's history. Lilla writes:

I don’t remember if my Polish friends were reading Schmitt at that time, but they did rely on Strauss as a guide to the political-philosophical tradition they were rediscovering outside the confines of the Communist university system. In a sense, they were retracing Strauss’s own steps. Faced with the “crisis of the West” he saw in the weak response to Nazism before World War II, and to Communism after it, Strauss set out to recover and reformulate the original questions at the heart of the Western political tradition, which he did by leading his students and readers on a methodical march back in time, from Nietzsche to Hobbes, then to medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophy (he avoided Christianity), and finally to Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Thucydides. Faced with the poverty, incompetence, and weak tyranny that real, existing socialism had delivered, many Poles I knew had begun a similar intellectual journey. And today, it’s the turn of some young Chinese, who are witnessing not the collapse of Communism but its metamorphoses into a form of despotic state capitalism. Their response has been to learn Greek, Latin, and German.

My conversations in China reminded me of political discussions I used to have in Communist Poland in the mid-’80s, after the coup and while Solidarity’s power was at its nadir. To my surprise, the people I met then—academics, journalists, artists, writers—were more anxious to talk about Plato and Hegel than about contemporary affairs, and not as a means of escape. For them, the classics were just what dark times demanded.

What can this mean for the political future of China? Will the Chinese internalize some of the teachings of Western Political Thought? Lilla offers some hope:

Everyone I spoke with [in China], across the political spectrum, agrees that China needs a stronger state, not a weaker one--a state that follows the rule of law, is less capricious, can control local corruption, and can perform and carry out long-term planning.

If a "stronger state" means one that follows the rule of law and reigns in corruption, then that's a relatively good start, isn't it? As for carrying out "long-term planning"--well, let's hope that the next item on their reading list is this.

Here is how Shiites marked the end of Ashura in Iraq: 

Here's how they marked it in Turkey:

You could argue that there is no Koranic or historic support for blood donation to mark the end of Ashura (and logically you couldn't be on sounder ground, given that blood donation did not exist in the sixth century). And yet these Muslims are indeed--obviously--re-reading and re-interpreting this tradition:

Male Shiites typically commemorate the holy day of Ashura by beating themselves with chains until they bleed, in memory of the pain and bloodshed endured by their ancestors during the Kerbala war. But for four years now, both male and female Turkish Shiites, also known as Caferis, have instead been donating blood to the Turkish Red Crescent, or Kızılay.

“I am donating blood to help people in need get better,” Ennur Mehmetoğlu, 31, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Thursday, adding that he had also donated blood last year. “Otherwise, I would have beaten myself until I bled, as our religion’s tradition requires.”

Back in November, when I reviewed The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life for The American Interest, I prefaced my discussion of Kenneth Minogue’s analysis of the present discontents with a brief summary of what I had learned from reading Stuart Taylor, Jr. and K.C. Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, which had appeared three years before.

I began by noting that Richard Brodhead, former Dean of Yale College, was President of Duke University “on March 14, 2006 when, not long after midnight, local police picked up a semi-comatose African-American stripper, who worked on the side as a prostitute, and took her for treatment to the Durham Access Center. “ And I went on to report:

There, a nurse, noting the inebriated young woman’s incoherence, broke with established protocol and offered her an opportunity to escape commitment to a detoxification center by asking whether she had been raped. In time it would become clear that nothing of the sort had happened, that the stripper had been hired by a member of the Duke men’s lacrosse team to perform for the team at an off-campus party, that she had arrived in no state to dance, that she had departed unharmed by any of those present, and that to avoid the rigors of rehab she was perfectly ready to lie. But this did not fully become evident until long after an ambitious District Attorney in the midst of a re-election campaign in a city with a substantial black electorate had initiated a concerted attempt to frame three young athletes who were actually guilty of, at worst, poor taste and bad judgment.

There is much that is shocking about this incident: the conduct of the prosecutor, the role played by the African-American community and its leaders in Durham, the demagogic response of the local and national media, and the story’s treatment in the New York Times. But nothing is more remarkable than the comportment of Brodhead and the self-styled progressives on the Duke faculty, who lent the prosecutorial conspiracy a much-needed helping hand.

I will spare you a full recounting, which you can find here. It should suffice to say that I argued that Minogue’s book provides the key to understanding why Brodhead and the Duke faculty conducted themselves in so disgraceful a fashion.

More to the point in this context, if you have not read the book by Taylor and Johnson, you really should. It is testimony to what this country is in the process of becoming.

But here is why I wrote this post. When the book came out, HBO optioned it – and they were right to do so. It would make a terrific movie – To Kill a Mockingbird replayed decades later with all of the roles reversed. But more than three years have passed, no movie has been made, and I fear that none will ever be made.

Perhaps the contributors to Ricochet who hale from Hollywood could explain why the film industry has foregone such an opportunity. Is the story told in the book a truth too politically uncorrect for Tinseltown to swallow? Would it cast unwelcome light on the fact that we have substituted the notion of protected categories for equal protection under the law and that we are now practicing what is euphemistically called affirmative action in the enforcement of criminal law? Or is this what folks in the army used to call snafu?

Our conversation with Andy McCarthy contained an interesting sub-thread about Conor Friedersdorf's review of Andy's book The Grand Jihad. I promised to open a separate thread for this discussion--here it is--but I thought I'd also raise a general question: What, in your view, are the elements of a good book review? A fair one? Your candidates for "best book reviews in history?" 

Ricochet should have book reviews, I declare. (I have made this decree unilaterally and without consulting anyone. If you want teamwork, colleagues, adjust your time zones accordingly.) Perhaps even a book-review section. And given that we're almost in 2011 and books are increasingly obsolete, we should have a website-review section. What would the elements of a good (and fair) website-review section be?

Don't forget that we're giving away five copies of Andy's broadside. They go to the authors of the best five comments on that thread, as measured by the "like" button, and you're on the honor system--one vote, one member, and not for yourself. 

Because, really, who wouldn't want one -- what am I saying; a few -- of these?

J.T. Young has a provocative piece up today at The American Spectator entitled “Capitalism’s Gift of Peace.” While I’ll never hold any author hostage to a title that was probably chosen by an editor, the body of Young’s piece indicates that he genuinely believes that free markets effectively defuse conflict. To wit:

The reason for states' predilection to war or peace goes back to their underlying economic systems. To fully appreciate it, we must understand the economics motivating each. 

Capitalist countries find war a last resort. War is both expensive and wasteful. It is these states' worst economic investment -- diverting their resources from productive uses to an unproductive one. 

[And later …]

The economic calculation of war is just the opposite for the fettered market nation. The opportunity cost of war to such a nation is less. By definition, their economy is already operating on a suboptimal allocation of its resources. North Korea is the extreme example. Its economy is so bad that conflict is actually its best economic investment. 

There’s a lot going for Young’s general defense of the stability of free-market nations. However, I think it gets the causality wrong. Like the democratic peace theory (democracies don’t wage war against each other), this seems to me to be a confusion of cause with effect.

The existence of capitalism (and/or democracy) in any given nation reflects the government’s decision to liberate its citizenry enough to freely and voluntarily participate in economic and civic life. It’s that willingness to cede power that strikes me as the key metric for understanding a regime’s capacity for hostility on the world stage.

As an example, consider China. While they have substantially freed up their economy (only to the point where it can be considered state capitalism, alas), I don’t think even the biggest Sinophiles in the foreign policy establishment would consider the PRC unambiguously benign. Young might reply that this wouldn’t hold true if China was more authentically capitalist. That, however, underscores my point. A Chinese regime that would be willing to take that step would be qualitatively different than the one we have now. In the end, it’s the leadership and the regime type that matter.

One final note: I think Young’s economic analysis of war (which echoes Bastiat’s “Broken Window Fallacy”) is correct on the merits, but probably doesn’t track with the psychology of many world leaders. Considerations of power are at least as powerful (if not more so) than economic theory in calculating the merits of belligerence.

Harry Reid has just caved on the Omni-pork spending bill, announcing he doesn't have the votes to pass it, and that he will work with Mitch McConnell to draft a continuing resolution to keep the government going past Saturday.  With he exception of a couple of retiring senators like Bennett and Voinovich, it looks like the GOP held pretty firm on this -- which shouldn't be all that surprising, but, alas, is.  Good job, guys!

I hope not.  Larry King's last show is on today--which would be tragic if it also meant the end of Rob's hilariously savage "transcripts" of the show in his Long View column in National Review.  This was some of the funniest satire I ever read and possibly the only thing on the green earth that could ever have made me feel sorry for King.  Here's a snippet of one of my favorites, King interviews Judas Iscariot about the so-called Judas Gospel:

LARRY KING: "Tomorrow night! Remembering Don Knotts! A surprising hour! From Chicago, Illinois, you're on with our guest, Judas Iscariot! Hello!"

CALLER: "Hi, Larry. Hi, Judas. Can I call you Judas?"

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "Of course."

CALLER: "It's just that I feel like I've known you all my life, so I feel like I can call you Judas. I just want to say that I just finished your gospel, which I loved, and I'd like to know if you have any more books planned?"

LARRY KING: "Good question. Is this thing the start of a franchise? I keep thinking Da Vinci Code, I keep thinking Narnia."

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "No, no, Larry. It's just the one gospel. At least for now."

LARRY KING: "But they gotta be after you, right? Phone ringing off the hook? Books, movies, right?"

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "Honestly, Larry, I live a quiet life. You know, when they quote unquote found my gospel — the publishing world is crazy, I wrote the damn thing 2,000 years ago and have been pushing it and pushing it and pushing it, suddenly it's out there and I'm a quote unquote overnight success — anyway, they find it, we make a deal — "

LARRY KING: "Was it a good deal?"

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "You know what, Larry? It was fair. I can't complain about the deal."

LARRY KING: "Thirty pieces of silver, and all that? Kidding!"

JUDAS ISCARIOT: "Listen, Larry, you gotta have a sense of humor about life."

LARRY KING: "Here I am the Jew talking about pieces of silver! Gotta tread careful with this stuff, am I right?"

"I live a quiet life."  Great stuff.  When comes such another?