Left: "Skat Players," Otto Dix, 1920

Above: Inci Eviner, "Harem," 2009. (This is a still from the original work, which is a video installation--and a masterpiece. You can watch it here.)

It's fascinating to see the way people responded to my question about Weimar cities. I find this question--about the relationship between a certain kind of political instability and a certain kind of creative efflorescence--extraordinarily interesting. Something struck me: People have immediate, instinctive responses to the word "Weimar," and their responses say quite a bit about the way they view the contemporary world. I posted a similar question on my Facebook page, and here were some of the comments people left:

... Vienna, Rome, Paris, Moscow/Petersburg, Constantinople--all connected by the veneer of official and/or artistic displays of prowess that ineffectively mask the real chaos on the streets and in the minds of individuals.

... This is a remarkably fascinating question. I think you've actually hit a kind of universal typology. I think that many of the crises of civilization probably follow this pattern. Their vibrant culture actually intoxicates them from seeing or believing the impending doom. Perhaps Constantinople before the invasion of 1204? Many of the cities of east asia and eastern europe before their fall to communism?

... One word: hypocrisy.

Claire: ... "The veneer of official and/or artistic displays of prowess that ineffectively mask the real chaos on the streets and in the minds of individuals." This could almost be a definition of AKP governance--the proudly renovated Ottoman fountains, very pretty to look at and always adorned with a lavish sign saying "Renovated by your AKP municipality," none of which actually convey water. Or the billion-page, slick "Earthquake preparation" plans that when closely examined are revealed to have nothing to do with any preparations actually made.

... Chilling idea in general; something does seem to be slouching towards Bethlehem.

... This is an interesting dicussion. It is strange that this group seems to see Weimar art and culture as marked by hypocrisy. Of course the right wing saw it that way (decadant, cosmopolitian, international, experimental, not sufficentaly tribal or nationalistic) but many see it and saw it as vibrant. Vienna 1900 was somewhat the same and this is the place that Einstein, Freud, Schnitzler, Klimpt, etc came out of. Perhaps dynamic vibrant culturaly mixed places are heightened by the sense of impeding doom or perhaps they are just very, very vulnerable.

... OK, I'm going to revote for Moscow 1917 and the Gov't of Kerensky. Versailles 1789. Baghdad 1258? Constantinople 1453. Rome 410. Ctesiphon 637. Connect the dots and call it the "end of civilization" I could see it going as a broad historical phenom or as a modern phenom depending on whether you want to focus on the weakness of democratic regimes and the disintegration of culture or whether you want to do the ennui of the rich and civilized in the face of barbarism.

Claire: I'd like to take the discussion further from the (interesting) topic of "Which other cities were like Weimar Berlin" and more toward, "What were the distinguishing characteristic of Weimar Berlin." Thoughts? I'm thinking of the unleashing of social and political imagination, the fascination with sexual adventure, the popular activism, the Utopianism, the feeling of life as something particularly intense and concentrated ... the animation of artistic life by the confrontation with modernity; the death of the old world of princes and emperors; the end of the agrarian economy and peasant farming; the end of rigid class distinctions ... the shift in the political center of gravity to the city, the cacophony of sounds and images, the artistic obsession with industrialization, the tensions and excitements of mass society, the new forms of artistic expression to which this awareness gave rise—abstract art, dissonant music, the architecture of clean lines, the heady enthusiams, the vibrant, kinetic energy ... and obviously anyone who lives in Istanbul now will recognize these themes. More ideas?

... I think of a far less romanticized account: materialistic mobocracy, Bismarckian-statism, daily political assasinations and bombings, Ludendorff smoking a cigar with von Hindenburg as Germany declines, grotesquely vulgar naturalistic novels, compulsory intellectual uniformity, a trillion Marks to buy a slice of bread, meaningful national humiliation, as well as a grinding impoverished existence. I also think of the American Dawes and Young plans which saved the Germans from their awful economic calamity as well as at long last sanctioned their economy to breathe once more. Intense Anti-Semitism also comes to mind when I think of Weimar Berlin.

Interesting, no? This has me wondering: Was Weimar art in fact decadent, as the Nazis claimed? Can we predict the doom of a culture by looking at its artistic life? Or is the condemnation of Weimar culture the mark of the modern reactionary, in the full negative sense of the word?

I'm a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who has written beautifully about the business of understanding financial risk. His most recent book, The Black Swan, has been talked about to death in the wake of 2008's financial collapse, but for my money his earlier book, Fooled By Randomness is a lot more accessible.

In an interview in the current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Taleb offers a very basic strategy for personal financial management:

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

People should have three sources of variation in their income. The first one is their own business that they understand rather well. Focus on that. The second one is their savings. Make sure you preserve them. The third portion is the speculative portion: Whatever you are willing to lose, you can invest in whatever you want.

That second source is tricky, though, especially if you accept Taleb's dark view that massive government debts are going to be trouble:

As an analogy: You often have planes landing two hours late. In some cases, when you have volcanos, you can land two or three weeks late. How often have you landed two hours early? Never. It's the same with deficits. The errors tend to go one way rather than the other. When I wrote The Black Swan, I realized there was a huge bias in the way people estimate deficits and make forecasts. Typically things costs more, which is chronic. Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.

The problem is getting runaway. It's becoming a pure Ponzi scheme. It's very nonlinear: You need more and more debt just to stay where you are. And what broke [convicted financier Bernard] Madoff is going to break governments. They need to find new suckers all the time. And unfortunately the world has run out of suckers.

Let's hope there are still some suckers left. Besides us, I mean.

Working my way through Judge Susan Bolton’s 36 page opinion in United States v. Arizona proves once again that dense technical law is often the source of great political struggles. Her opinion spends lots of time on the question of whether there is sufficient irreparable harm to allow for the United States government to get an injunction before the statute goes into effect. She also gave effect to the severability provision of the Arizona statute that let many of its provisions survive, even as others were struck down. I have no question that under the federal law of preemption, if the Arizona statute does frustrate the enforcement of the federal standards it must give way. What preemption says in effect is that under our constitutional order, the lowliest federal statute or regulation takes precedence over any state law, including all constitutional provisions and all legislation.

The World War II case of Hines v. Davidowitz is a powerful weapon for the federal government in this case with respect to the key provisions of the statute that deal with stops, detentions and arrests on the one hand, and with the presentation of papers on the other. If there is any action by the state that increases the burdens on the federal government, there is a credible case for preemption. I do not agree with Judge Bolton’s interpretation of the statute on some key points, and think that it was unwise of the federal government in this case to seek an injunction against the enforcement of the statute before it was put in effect. But as a matter of black-letter law, the U.S. is likely to win on appeal—and face the political consequences of taking a strong stand on a highly popular and highly divisive law.

I dropped my laptop the other day, and that was the end of the hard drive. And almost my foot: the laptop is thin enough to take off a toe. Everything is stored in the cloud, so I lost little work - but the machine went to the shop, leaving me without my favorite little machine. Reminded me how much we get used to certain tools. Maybe it’s an individual matter, but I can’t write on other people’s machines; it’s like using their toothbrush. I’ve rarely been able to write in offices, because the company computers are always boring, locked-down things with an omniscient, unseen Administrator hovering in the firmament like the cartoon God in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," ready to say NO.

My wife is completely unsentimental and agnostic about computers; my daughter is like me, tweaking and customizing all the time. (I’m writing on hers, now, because she’s at camp.) So it’s not a guy thing. I do know that computers are almost like dogs - it’s horrible when you have to say goodbye to one that’s been faithful, but the pain is softened by the immediate joy of getting a new one.

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t posted. (Also, the Ricochet platform doesn’t like iPads: can’t enter text in the comment field.) Anyone else have the same attachment to their machines, or recall certain computers they loved more than others? I still have a soft spot for the Leading Edge Model D on which I wrote my first novel. Amber text on a black screen, baby. You wanted a picture on the screen, you cut it out and taped it to the monitor.

More from James Lileks

Artisanal Sno-Cones

In Defense of Advertising

In Defense of Air Conditioning

Don't miss the great Jim Ceaser's new polemic in The Weekly Standard. Obama, he writes, has "become practitioner-in-chief of what Alexander Hamilton referred to in Federalist 68 as the 'little arts of popularity.'"

These arts, Hamilton well knew, would become an inevitable feature of democratic politics. But their spread from the province of political campaigns into the “normal” conduct of the presidency represents a dramatic reversal of the Founders’ design. The Constitution was crafted to prevent a campaign-style presidency; Obama is in the midst of creating one. [...]

What the president’s supporters add by way of explanation, if excuses for employing the “little arts of popularity” are still necessary, is that Obama is only responding to an unprecedented series of attacks from his detractors. But this explanation misses the main point, which is not the alleged behavior of gatherings of citizens, but the norms and standards of the presidency. [...]

It may be, however, that Obama has created a box for himself from which he cannot escape. He has so monopolized and personalized the public relations aspect of his office that now only his own voice can speak for the presidency. Profligacy in the use of public access—almost a speech a day—has made indirectness impossible. A president who has become his own chief point man puts at risk an asset that is helpful to his standing and vital for the nation’s political system: the dignity of the presidential office.

I worry about the big issues being addressed here on Ricochet, and I pray for the safety of Judith and Claire, our international pioneers/correspondents. But when I turn away from the computer, I worry about little things, too. Really little.

You know what causes me to lose sleep at least once a month? Bed bugs and lice. And it ain’t because I’m a precious girly-girl grossed out by creepy-crawlies. I’ve battled my share of NYC cockroaches (special breed, trust me) and, more recently, my husband wrestled a NYC rat in our former kitchen.

An arrival of bed bugs or lice into our home would cause us near financial ruin if we actually tried to get rid of them. Really.

Bedbugs are all the rage in NYC, where Abercrombie and Fitch, Victoria’s Secret, and Hollister stores all had to close down after recent infestation. I don’t shop at those stores, and we recently left Manhattan for Connecticut. Nevertheless, beg bugs happily travel from place to place on backpacks and clothes, and they are embracing their freedom:

Bedbugs are back, and they're worse than ever. While pesticides kept them under control for most of the twentieth century, the bloodsucking fiends have had a notable resurgence over the last decade. And, between expensive lawsuits and pricey eradication techniques, the bugs are hitting renters, homeowners and companies where they're most vulnerable -- in their wallets … The cost of treating a single hotel room is estimated at $6,000 to $7,000.

Imagine a home, albeit small, with several rooms! Homeowners are urged to throw away all clothes, bedding, rugs, towels, mattresses, bedsprings, and then have a professional come to deal with the bedbug colonies that nest inside impossible-to-reach places like the baseboards and radiators. Immediate bankruptcy, right there.

Lice are also growing heartier.

… in many cases lice have grown resistant to the active ingredients in these over-the-counter products. You may treat and see no results at all.

If you have money (which we don’t), you go to a salon:

A visit to Hair Fairies, a hair salon dedicated exclusively to lice removal, with locations in Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities, costs an average of $300 a head [emphasis mine]. A middle-of-the-night consultation with a technician from the Lice Treatment Center on the Upper East Side can run $500 or more.

FYI, if one kid gets lice, it’s common for the family to get them, too. There are home remedies, such as covering the hair in mayo or olive oil and making a turban of Saran Wrap for overnight. You are to do this for three straight nights and then you spend 2-3 hours – per child – combing out the suffocated bugs and nits.

And what will my other two children do while I meticulously comb their sibling? Probably burn down the house. At least we have insurance for that.

Via Mark Hemingway: U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton has "blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona’s immigration law from taking effect, delivering a last-minute victory to opponents of the crackdown."

The overall law will still take effect Thursday, but without the provisions that angered opponents — including sections that required officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws. The judge also put on hold parts of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.

The wire report notes that Judge Bolton's hold is in effect "until the courts resolve the issues." It's on now.

A woman walks into a bar -- stop me if you've heard this one -- sees a video camera, walks up the camera and stands before it while another woman pulls down her tank top. The video ends up in Girls Gone Wild, and the woman sues for $5 million in "damages."

The punchline? It takes a jury 90 minutes to throw out the lawsuit. It's a rare bit of sanity in the upside-down world of litigation, but it's not the first lawsuit inspired by GGW. One recent lawsuit included a demand from Ashley Dupre (of Elliot Spitzer fame) for $10 million for damages to her "reputation," and another suit in which a GGW participant (who also happens to be a porn film actress) claims to have been "sexually exploited" by GGW.

Not that I'm trying to elicit sympathy for GGW (run by the apparently very nasty Joe Francis). But really: the fact that these lawsuits ever see the light of day is disturbing news on the personal responsibility front.

I'm a political ad junkie. And right now, it's the perfect season: early on-air skirmishes between the Republicans and the Democrats are starting to hit, as each side tests a lot of different strategies before picking a couple for the full-on autumn campaign.

The first, from the Republican Governor's Association -- helmed by Ricochet's own Governor Haley Barbour -- is a pretty effective spot. It's here -- and it really shouldn't be. It should be on YouTube. I'm not sure why the RGA chose Vimeo for its distribution platform, but it's a big mistake. The key to these ads is to have them go viral, to be embedded as far and wide as possible. YouTube is a much easier platform for that.

The second, from the Democrats' Rapid Response team, is here:

It's not a terribly impressive effort, but it's probably the best possible strategic choice for the Democrats in 2010: paint the Republicans as out of the mainstream. Use the language that the Clinton team used against Dole in 1996: radical, risky, extreme, out of control.

It won't work this time.

My children's babysitter just got a tattoo. It's actually a great one -- a small, simple line representing the craggly Icelandic mountain range she was recently stranded in when she got terribly lost on a morning walk. The experience was harrowing and the tattoo subtle and discreet.

I've considered tattoos before but have always been warned off. I once read that getting a tattoo is like picking out your favorite T-shirt when you're 19 and then having to wear it every day for the rest of your life.

Well then, what to say about this Huffington Post feature of the 19 worst pop culture tats? They're awful. This Clay Aiken one might be the worst. Or this one depicting Britney during her hair shaving episode. Bob Barker? Really?

Last week Claire and Judith told me to calm down. I was happy to comply. All around her in Israel, Judith explained, life was going on normally. Nobody displayed any dread. Nobody betrayed any sense of impending catastrophe. The same, Claire said, went for Turkey. Nobody in Istanbul appeared to be tensing for a crisis—or at least not for any more of a crisis than life in Istanbul already represented. Claire and Judith are sensitive to cultural and political signals—you just couldn’t ask for two more minutely observant or completely alert correspondents. Iran? Nukes? If Claire and Judith were telling me to calm down, I figured, everything in the Middle East was somehow going to be okay.

This worked for about three days. Then a couple of unwelcome thoughts began to intrude on my serenity.

First I recalled a conversation a few years ago with a friend on Wall Street. What separated successful investors from everybody else, he told me—and he had the millions of dollars to prove he knew what he was talking about—was their ability to rid themselves of a nearly universal failing: the tendency to assume that whatever happened today would happen again tomorrow. If markets rise, typical investors assume, they’ll continue rising indefinitely; if they fall, that they’ll continue falling forever. The exceptional investor, my friend explained, sees not stasis but dynamism. By their very nature, he recognizes, markets prove contingent and open-ended. Valuations shift. Trends reverse themselves. The exceptional investor—the investor who is truly good at what he does—never, ever assumes that tomorrow will look like today.

“It’s as easy as that?” I asked. “You can make money just by recognizing that the future is a lot more open-ended than most people think?”

“’Easy?’” my friend replied. “Who said ridding yourself of a turn of mind that’s natural to every human being is ‘easy’?”

Next I made an error. I permitted my mind to wander, free associating. Before I knew it, I had applied my friend’s lesson about Wall Street to a few historical events. During the October Revolution, I recalled, life in most of St. Petersburg went on as normal--or at least as normally as wartime conditions permitted—all but unaffected by the Communist coup. Most residents of the Russian capital remained, simply, clueless.

In Germany during the nineteen-thirties, I remembered, many Jews continued to lead normal lives. From WikiAnswers:

[T]he great majority of German Jews were highly assimilated into German society….They were thoroughly German and many were tragically in love with Germany. This only changed as persecution intensified and especially when they were subjected to widespread physical violence in the 'Night of the Broken Glass'.

Hitler become chancellor in 1933. Kristallnacht took place in 1938. For a full five years, then, many Jews in Nazi Germany remained just as clueless as the residents of St. Petersburg during the Communist takeover—or, for that matter, as the management of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers during the collapse of the housing market.

I invite Claire and Judith to tell me once again to calm down—really I do. But does it tell us all that much that life in Israel and Turkey still looks normal? Now I'm not so sure.

Via Matt Yglesias, there's trouble in Temecula, CA:

An e-mail alert sent to area newspapers last week announced that a one-hour "singing – praying – patriotic rally" will begin at 12:30 p.m. July 30 at the Islamic Center’s existing facility. The advisory – sent by a leader of a conservative coalition that has been active with Republican and Tea Party functions – recommended participants "bring your Bibles, flags, signs, dogs and singing voices."

"We will not be submissive," the notice proclaimed. "Our voices are going to be heard!" The alert went on to question what its authors described as Islamic beliefs. It suggested that participants sing during the rally because Muslim "women are forbidden to sing." It suggested that rally participants bring dogs because Muslims "hate dogs."

The advisory asked rally participants to "please bring a pooper scooper" if they are accompanied by a canine companion. The advisory said residents of an unspecified Tennessee community were able to halt the construction of a mosque in that state.

Two things in this Valley News report bear mention. First, in addition to this seemingly completely crackpot protest-in-the-making, there appears to be a second line of attack that may be familiar to Ricochet members and readers: legalism.

Patrick Richardson, the city’s director of planning and redevelopment [...] did not work for Temecula when a similar controversy surfaced over another proposed house of worship. He said he has since learned about the twists and turns that occurred when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints submitted a proposal nearly a decade ago to build a facility along Pauba Road.

The Mormon controversy contains parallels to the mosque proposal. [...] The number of parking spaces proposed for the mosque exceeds the city’s requirements, Richardson said.

Because of traffic, noise and related concerns raised by a nearby pastor and others, the city has examined a range of issues as it has reviewed the development plan, he said.

Second, and more important, the proposed mosque is a new house of worship for local Muslims who have gathered at the local industrial park for over a decade. Only now does that community require an 'anti-submissive' protest? Only now does their development plan, "submitted to city planners about 1½ years ago," trigger "widespread media coverage that has included stories by the Associated Press and newspapers based in Los Angeles and Riverside"?

The timing here relative to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy may be coincidental, and without placing a few phone calls to Temecula I suppose I can't be sure, but I'm suspicious. The strength of the particular critique of Cordoba House is badly diluted by these kinds of abstract -- and, yes, simply anti-Muslim -- shenanigans, isn't it? And this kind of publicity is exactly what the Tea Party doesn't need, isn't it? (It's notable that the protest organizers state that one of their group's missions is to "return the local Tea Party Movement to the people.")

One more point must be raised. The latest LA Times report on the story contains this sentence:

The website calls the Islamic faith "a radically intolerant belief system that is incompatible with the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.’’

Well, if you believe that, suddenly this protest makes a bit more sense. I don't believe that -- as a result of direct and indirect experience -- but at least a few very smart people I know are convinced that Islamic theology really is inimical to constitutional democracy and American-style free society. I'd like to see them proven wrong, but I'm not an Islamic scholar by any stretch. And since this seems to be the issue at the heart of this and other would-be copycat mosque controversies, let's get it out in the open and deal with it.

An absolutely must-read piece in the WSJ this morning by Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen, long-time liberal Democrats and pollsters for, respectively, Carter and Clinton. Read it here. (Or, if the link doesn't work, find it on RealClearPolitics.)

This is unbelievable.

In Michigan, a fake Tea Party group has organized itself as a third party—with the requisite 60,000 signatures--to challenge official GOP nominees specifically in districts where Democrats face tough Republican opponents. The fake Tea Party hopes to divide the conservative vote, leading Democrats to sail into a happy, fraudulent victory.

The Michigan Tea Party swears it's a legit group. But according to Zarko Research, a Michigan-based political marketing and consulting firm, the petition is being circulated on a paid basis through Progressive Campaigns Inc, a liberal organization. The circulators receive about $1 per signature they acquire.

In the past, the Michigan Democratic Party and George Soros have funded Progressive Campaigns. Below is what I imagine may very well be George Soros and fellow partiers having their own "tea party."

No word yet on whether the mainstream media will cover this election fraud.

Rumor is he helped Osama Bin Laden escape a U.S. assassination attempt in 1998. India blames him for the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai. And these days, this former Pakistani spy chief—and mastermind behind Afghanistan’s jihad against the Soviet Union in the 80s—is the link between Pakistani intelligence and the insurgents in Afghanistan who are attacking U.S. troops.

As Canada’s National Post notes, 74-year old Gen. Hamid Gul may be the most dangerous player in the U.S.-led war against Afghanistan:

In his final years in the army, Gen. Gul decorated his desk with a chunk of the Berlin Wall that was presented to him by West Germany’s intelligence agency the BND. It had a small plaque that read, “With deepest respects to General Hamid Gul, who helped deliver the first blow — 1989.”

Nowadays, the 74-year-old former tank commander is regarded by many as one of the world’s most dangerous men.

U.S. military documents released this week by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks portray Gen. Gul as head of a secret Pakistani intelligence network that arms, supports and directs the Taliban while helping co-ordinate insurgent attacks on U.S. and foreign troops in Afghanistan.

One document, dated mid-December 2006, says Gen. Gul met with “senior members of the Taliban leadership in Nowshara, Pakistan,” and announced he had dispatched three insurgents with improvised explosive devices to Kabul to carry out attacks during the Muslim celebration of Eid.

“Gul instructed two of the individuals to plant IEDs along the roads frequently utilized by Government of Afghanistan and ISAF vehicles,” the report says. “The third individual is to carry out a suicide attack utilizing a suicide vest” against Afghan government and NATO targets.

“Make the snow warm in Kabul,” Gen. Gul told the bombers, the report says. “Set Kabul aflame.”

This fascinating story came to the National Post via the thousands of war documents WikiLeaks made public yesterday. I'm curious about what Ricocheters think about the WikiLeaks leak. If it's true that making this information public weakens our position in Afghanistan, then is such transparency worth it?

I'm personally not convinced that the leak endangers U.S. lives in Afghanistan, as the Pentagon claims. And how will it weaken our position there? After all, do the contents of the documents really reveal anything new--as Bret Stephens asks? They certainly reveal details, that have turned into fodder for news stories in the press, but I'm not sure they expose any groundbreaking facts that imperil our national security.

And, it's nice to put a face on the man who's working tirelessly to kill Americans.

I'm not usually a big Maureen Dowd fan. It's not that I generally disagree with her--although I do generally disagree with her--it's that most of the time she's just not funny, and nothing's more painful than jokes that fall flat. But this piece in Vanity Fair about Saudi Arabia is just superb. It's not only the best piece I've ever read by Maureen Dowd, it's the best piece I've ever read about Saudi Arabia. I've always wondered why she enjoys that cushy sinecure at The New York Times, seeing as I've always thought her talentless. I was wrong. She can be brilliant, as this article shows.

The Kingdom Centre mall has a ladies’ floor on top shielded by high, wavy frosted glass, so that men—with all the maturity of Catholic schoolboys in stairwells—can’t peer up from below. Signs on the ladies’ floor tell women, once inside, to take off their head coverings: that way, a Peeping Abdul can’t disguise himself in female garb and wander lustfully among them. On the ladies’ floor, you’re actually allowed to try on clothes. On floors where the sexes mingle, you often have to buy whatever you want in different sizes and take it all home to try on. The mere thought of a disrobed woman behind a dressing-room door is apparently too much for men to handle. There’s something profoundly poignant about seeing little girls running around the malls in normal clothes, playing with little boys in normal ways—you know what’s in store for them in just a few years. When I reached puberty, my mother gave me a book called On Becoming a Woman. When these girls reach puberty, they’ll have a black tarp thrown over their heads.

I know that poignant feeling well, by the way. I see girls destined for the same fate here all the time.

Like to hear from Peter and other Richocheters on this. As a Notre Dame man, I might be thought to favor Ronald Reagan as George Gipp in "Knute Rockne, All American." Yet I've always preferred "The Winning Team," where Reagan played pitching great Grover Cleveland Alexander -- with Doris Day playing wife Aimee. Last night I saw it again for the first time in many, many years, and found another reason to like it.

As the promo for last night's screening noted, how could you get more American than a Reagan flick that features Doris Day and is about baseball? Though it takes more than a few liberties with Alexander's life -- the guy who came on after said Reagan was disappointed that Warner Brothers would not go for a more realistic film -- Reagan gives a good performance. You see, Alexander had epilepsy, may have suffered lingering effects from the shellshock he experienced in World War II, and caused even more problems for himself when he took to the bottle. Reagan gives a very sympathetic performance of a troubled man.

Now, I come from a long line of what we call practicing alcoholics and nonpracticing alcoholics (we immensely prefer the latter). My dad, who as a child felt the brunt of this, and had every reason to hate boozers, neverthelesss once said to me that in his experience he'd never met an alcoholic who wasn't a very kind and decent man sober. That seems to me how Reagan played Alexander.

And last night I wondered: Was part of the reason for Reagan's very sympathetic performance of this troubled man that he was playing his dad?

Yep, Turkey's got 'em--a lot of them. These are pretty typical young folks for this neighborhood, with pretty typical opinions. I hope one point is really coming through with these videos: This isn't a monolithic country. It is far, far too simplistic to conceive of Turkey as a newly-terrifying enemy state and a hostile Islamic Republic. It's way more complicated than that.

Something I should also stress is that a few people declined to talk to us because they were shy, or out of the natural reaction many people have to journalists with microphones, namely, Go away, you pests. But no one showed any fear. No one appeared to be afraid to speak his or her mind, and as you can see, people are not hesitant to criticize the Turkish government. That's very important to note.

I just stumbled upon this astonishing article describing the results of clinical trials in the use of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for sufferers of post-traumatic stress. The results were published in the very serious Journal of Psychopharmacology, which unfortunately charges $32.00 for access to the full article, a price that exceeds my commitment to closely examining the study's methodological protocols. If the results of the study have been correctly reported, however, it seems that after Ecstasy-therapy,

over [sic] 80% of sufferers from post traumatic stress disorder no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, as compared to only 25% in the control group ... there were no drug-related serious adverse effects, adverse neurocognitive effects, or clinically significant blood pressure increases.

Now, this is just one study, and as I said, I haven't read it; I've only looked at the abstract. But if this report is right and these results can be replicated, it would be criminal, it would be absolutely obscene, to deny veterans access to this kind of therapy out of some misplaced scruple about the corrosive effect of Ecstasy on our society's moral fiber--and you just know that objection is coming.

The difference reported between the control and the therapy group is staggering. This is way better than the results usually obtained with even the most widely-lauded and popular psychopharmaceutical drugs. We cannot send men and women into combat to defend our country and then deny them continued research into such a promising treatment for the emotional wounds so many of them have incurred on our behalf--and if it works, they must have access to it if they want it.

As Ricochet's resident drug-culture advocate, I'll also note (in the spirit of combatting hypocrisy and cant) that sure, I've used Ecstasy, and sure, I loved that, too. I didn't have post-traumatic stress disorder, but based on my experiences, I can see why it might help with that. This one's hard to explain, but it has a logic that I assume other people who have used it will understand.

I'll hold off on advocating complete decriminalization until more research on Ecstasy's long-term effects comes through. It's not as widely studied a drug as marijuana, and I wouldn't be as comfortable saying, confidently, "It's basically harmless." The research needs to be done, though, especially given the number of people who use it. And this research on PTSD is amazing: I hope these results are solid, and if they are, I hope everyone who needs this kind of therapy will be able to get it with no insane political obstacles placed in their way.

MEMRI has transcribed an interesting theological debate that appeared last month on the pages of the Saudi highbrow press: are the dark-eyed virgins promised to suicide bombers meant for sexual purposes or not?

Dr. Anwar Bin Majid 'Ishqi, head of the Saudi Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies, says no. He was motivated to speak out, he says, by two things: the incessant use of sexual promises as inducement for teenaged boys to become suicide bombers, and the premise espoused by many religious scholars that actual, physical sex takes place in Paradise.

'Ishqi took issue with those notions in an article published on June 11 in Al-Risala, the weekly supplement of the Saudi daily Al-Madina, called "Paradise Is Above Sex: The Dark-Eyed Virgins Are Not for Sensual Pleasure". In it, he says the suggestion that those who enter Paradise engage in physical sex is a travesty of Islam. In Paradise, he says, people no longer feel sexual desire; they do not, in fact, have any sexual organs. References to sexual pleasure are meant to be taken metaphorically; they refer to spiritual, not physical, fulfillment. Because "human minds cannot grasp the nature of the pleasures of Paradise," he writes, Allah "mention[ed] dark-eyed beauties, wine, milk, and fruit. Allah utters nothing but the truth, which means that there is wine [in Paradise], but it [is] not like the wine of this world, and there is food that is not like the food of this world...these are spiritual pleasures that make the sensual pleasures pale in comparison...Likewise, the pleasure [given] by the dark-eyed beauties is not sexual pleasure. That is why Allah endowed them with [beautiful eyes]: the most beautiful part of the human form is the face, and the most beautiful part of the face is the eyes... This is a spiritual pleasure, the extent of which we cannot grasp with our worldly minds. Those with deviant purposes select from the Koran that which pleases them, and interpret it in a way that serves their purposes. And thus we come to an age in which in we place religion at our service rather than [the other way around]."

'Ishqi was roundly attacked by a number of Saudi clerics who contend that there is, in fact, ample evidence to be found in the Koran to justify a belief in sex in Paradise. They agree with 'Ishqi that those texts are easily exploited, but contend that that exploitation does not alter their essential meaning. Interestingly, sex in Paradise appears to be (among other things) a means of extending the sanctity of marriage beyond the grave. Saudi cleric Khaled Muhammad Al-Nu'man, who published a rebuttal to 'Ishqi in Al-Madina on July 2, cites several scholars who state that not only does sex occur in Paradise between husband and wife, but each time it does, the event concludes with the wife regaining her virginity.

Cleric Muhammad Kamel Al-Khoja came down in the yes-there's-sex-in-Paradise camp a few days later on the pages of the daily Al-Bilad, but clarified that belief as follows: "I and all those who believe in the powers of Allah maintain that the pleasure of sex in Paradise will be higher, sweeter, and more joyous than the pleasure [of sex] in this world." (Inshallah!) He takes issue with 'Ishqi's use of the word "terrorist" to describe those who use the promise of sex to tempt kids to blow people up. He approves terms like "sinful, bloody destructors who spread corruption in the land," but deems it inaccurate to describe such people as terrorists since the spread of terror among the enemies of Islam is fundamentally a good thing.

Cleric Khaled Babtin, a lecturer at Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca and a member of the Saudi Association of Islamic Jurisprudence, took the historical approach in the online magazine Al-Wiam. "The first generations of Muslims used to encourage the mujahideen, in the heat of battle, with mention of the virgins," he wrote. "It is recounted in the [hadith] collection of Ibn Hajar [Al-Asqalani] that in the Battle of Siffin, 'Amar proclaimed, 'Whoever wishes to be embraced by the virgins, let him step forward to face the enemy in order to merit reward in Paradise.' Dr. 'Ishqi, read along with me the verse: 'Surely the dwellers of the Garden shall on that day be [engaged] in a joyful occupation. Together with their spouses, they shall recline in shady groves upon soft couches.' [Koran 33:55-56] Don't you know, doctor, that the occupation in which they are engaged is the deflowering of maidens?"

The debate is notable not only for its almost affectionate back-and-forth tone -- it's easy to imagine these fellows chatting of an evening around a table of baklawa and coffee -- but also for its consistent refrain of censure against those who use the promise of sex to recruit young bombers. There are several examples to choose from, but the following comes from Al-Numan: "If those youths [seduced by the terrorists] had any sense, they would have realized that [the terrorists] are sending them to their death while sparing themselves and their own sons. If they were sincere, would they so altruistically [send other youths] to the virgins and the shady gardens, while depriving their own children of these pleasures? Truly, these deluded youths do not understand that they are instruments in the [hands] of criminals who use them to achieve their goals. Society as a whole should reach out to these youths, each [individual] in his own field, in order to guide them and teach them, lest they fall into the claws those who plan only evil things for them."

If I may quote my grandmother, Mr. Al-Numan: From your mouth to God's ears.

Virginia is hosting the quadrennial Boy Scout Jamboree this week and it's been fun to see troops flood D.C. to visit monuments, museums and government buildings here. The President turned down an invitation to address the Jamboree yesterday as he has some fundraisers to attend. No big deal. He's a busy man. But some critics were upset that he accepted an invite to be on The View the same day.

Addressing the Boy Scouts seems like a public relations dream, but blowing them off to appear on The View does boggle the mind. Admittedly, I have never been able to watch more than about 30 seconds of a show. It's bad enough that the inmates run the daytime talk show asylum. Why is President Obama joining them?

I'm not sure if this says something about Obama or about America. Either way, it's not good.

Since Bill is too modest to mention his column in the Wall Street Journal this morning--and I’ve given the man all day--I'll mention the column myself.

In "Giving Lousy Teachers the Boot," Bill reports on Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the District of Columbia's public schools. Ms. Rhee just fired 241 teachers for scoring too low on an evaluation that measures them according to student achievement. She put another 737 teachers on notice. That's almost a quarter of all the teachers in DC whom Ms. Rhee has either put on notice or shown the door--probably the most dramatic step toward holding teachers accountable that has every taken place in any public school system.

Bill writes:

[W]hy has Ms. Rhee succeeded where others have come up short? One huge reason is the advance of school choice and accountability throughout Washington. Though reform has come fitfully to D.C., today 38% of the district's students are in charter schools. Until the Democrats killed it, there was also a voucher program for a few thousand more. The result of all this ferment is that the teachers union is feeling pressure it has never felt before....

Another way of putting that is this: Ms. Rhee is smart enough to know that when she negotiates with the unions, the shift to charters and choice in the district gives her more leverage for the reforms she needs.

Ponder that. Whereas we hear over and over again that school choice—that is, the creation of charter schools, private schools, and voucher programs—would harm the public schools, the truth is just the reverse. Force the public schools to compete and they’ll do just that. Lousy teachers may pay a price, but students will only benefit.

Keep an eye on Michelle Rhee. If she can hold her ground—her action has provoked a firestorm of protests and legal threats—she’ll be able to bring true reform to DC schools, turning around one of the worst school systems in the country. And if she does that, Michelle Rhee will become a figure of national importance.

China recently played host to a number of hot and happening bloggers on the left, offering a kind of guided tour that differs as much as a safari from a zoo. Virginia Postrel gives us a hint as to why it's more of a lure for influential American audiences than China's big expo:

Compared to the much-derided commercialism of U.S. world’s fairs, the Shanghai exposition actually suffers from a paucity of consumer pleasures, instead emphasizing national pavilions. Segregated on the less-popular western side of the Huangpu, even the corporate pavilions tend toward state-directed infrastructure. Here the Expo betrays another reason Americans gave up on world’s fairs. Their vision of progress started to seem both socially obnoxious and empirically false.

Twentieth-century expositions increasingly embodied fashionable ideas of social planning. They came to stand for a controlled and predictable version of progress: the dream of a civilization built from scratch, designed — or at least rearranged — according to an expert ideal of order. Or as the Century of Progress motto put it, “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

Having participated in a number of Ricochet conversations over the last few days on the decline of the West, the coming conflict in the Middle East--as Michael Barone wrote the other day, "I take it seriously when...non-hawks say Obama might bomb Iran"--and the general sense of economic, strategic, and world-historical gloom, I'd like to pause for a moment to note that summer in America is still pretty marvelous. Here in Northern California we're on our thirtieth or fortieth straight day of cloudless skies and gentle breezes, and the five Robinson children, home for the summer, are busying themselves with tennis lessons (the oldest is teaching lessons, the two youngest, taking them), football, water polo, and studying for the many versions of the SAT. Two or three evenings a week, we've been watching a movie together--last night, "Chariots of Fire" (which, after some three decades, still holds up wonderfully). And--the big news here--I've just stumbled across a solution to the problem of playing chess with my three teenaged sons.

Chess with the boys used to involve two problems: It took too long. And the loser was always sore. (None of the boys likes to lose to Dad. Dad likes losing to the boys even less. We just seem to be built that way.) Speed chess, which I read about on some website or other--I have the feeling I'm the last adult in America to have heard of it--solves both problems. Get a stopwatch, then set a time limit on each move--one minute for games in the middle of the day, two for games in the evening. What happens? Each game moves a lot faster. That's the change you'd expect. What you might not expect--what I certainly didn't--is that each game also becomes a lot more light-hearted. Why? Because the stopwatch provides cover, enabling the loser to say, as my boys and I have all said once or twice now, "Well, okay, you win. But if this had been a real game, things would have been different."

Mothers, this may strike you as silly. But dads--dads will understand.

No one ever said hope and change would be easy.  Why, even from the 8th hole at a posh vacation spot in Maine, and coming soon to Martha's Vineyard, the president can see the need for shared sacrifice.  It's just as plain as the wings on the jet that flew the president's puppy dog in to vacation with the rest of the First Family.  You've got to hand it to them -- they spare no expense to keep the common touch. 

So where do we start with the serious business of shared sacrifice?  Official perks?  Maybe a Treasury Secretary that pays his taxes?  Too ambitious.  How about breast cancer patients?  There's the ticket.  

The folks at Breitbart's Big Government are breaking the story that the Food and Drug Administration plans to take the anti-cancer drug Avastin "off-label," meaning that most insurance companies and Medicare itself will no longer cover the treatment's cost.  Meaning it will be available only to the sort of people Obama will be sharing sacrifice with at Martha's Vineyard.

A Stage 4 drug, Avastin is the first of its kind that actually blocks the growth of blood vessels that feed tumors.  It isn't a cure, but it can stop the growth of cancer, extending the patient's life by five months on average.  And that's where Avastin runs smack into the Obama Administration's cost / benefit analysis. 

The current leadership of the FDA doesn't look at "endpoints" to evaluate whether a drug is achieving it's targeted results.  Rather, another more amorphous judgement is made as to whether a drug is "Clinically Meaningful."  In this case, extending the life of someone's mother or daughter, wife or grandmother by another few months just isn't "Clinically Meaningful" in the federal government's judgement.  As the President said during the health care debate, give Grandma a pain pill and send her home.  The term "bleeding heart" is starting to taken on a more ominous meaning, wouldn't you say?  Hope and change can be an ugly business.

Inspired by recent higher education posts by Rob and Claire, as well as by a long ago one by Peter regarding appropriate and entertaining books for teens, I wonder if Ricochet can come up with books that American middle and high school students must read in school? We can assume there would be a decent teacher, but not a great one. We should assume students of all backgrounds and of average intelligence.

For starters, I wonder if I’m the only dolt on here who had the following problem: I was asked to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn before I knew anything about slavery, Animal Farm without grasping the most basic forms of government, The Scarlet Letter without really “getting” adultery, and Romeo and Juliet with only a modicum of understanding of my own English, much less that from 400 years earlier.

I was supposed to have digested these, among too many others, before high school. I read them as an adult, so I can appreciate their “classic” status. But I have also had to teach these same works to 12- and 13-year-old students of all abilities, and I feel that these choices for this age quite simply – and quite quickly -- turn students away from reading.

How can we solve this puzzle? What are 5-10 books we should expect middle and high school students to 1) understand, 2) learn some useful history from, and 3) learn a life lesson from?

As Claire might say, please justify your choices.

I love this story. Go, adorable, long-legged, ditzy, totally cool crime-fighting American cheerleader! "I just slammed him to the ground." That's not so easy, you know--trust me.

I know I should wait until it’s official, but I’m too darned excited to keep the news to myself. I have it on very good authority I am about to be named Federal Game Show Czar. When I expressed concern about Senate confirmation hearings to my source, he laughed and said, “What hearings? You’re a Czar!”

My primary duty, if I understand correctly, will be to level the playing field when it comes to television game shows. Each show will be required to file forms with my office (gosh, I like the sound of that) indicating they’ve complied with our yet-to-be-fully-determined ground rules. We will monitor the audition process with an eye toward determining that special efforts have been made to recruit members of all groups, particularly those who have been traditionally underrepresented in the genre. (See, I’m already talking like a Czar!)

We certainly won’t impose quotas, but we will establish minimum percentages that will trigger fines or possible imprisonment if left unmet following sufficient notice of noncompliance. We will also be sure people aren’t discriminated against because they lack certain skills. Is it really fair to eliminate a large portion of the population from Jeopardy!, for example, because they were unable to gain a sufficient education? Why not have expert helpers available to these people who can assist them during the audition process as well as during the show itself? (I think I just came up with my first Czar initiative. This is going to be great!)

While recognizing the competitive nature of game shows, it might also be time to rethink the outdated concept of winners and losers. Why not talk about alternatives such as adding all the winnings together and dividing them among all the players? In addition to appealing to the basic idea of fairness, it will foster a kind of cooperation among people that will be a valuable life lesson to viewers, especially the children. It really is about the children.

I’ve been assured by my source that the idea isn’t for the government to take over TV game shows, but, rather, to be sure all Americans have the opportunity to participate regardless of...well, regardless of anything. My office will not get involved with any of the formats or the rules, unless, of course, we determine such formats or rules are, by their very nature, discriminatory.

As Czar, my responsibility is to all the people, and I plan to take that responsibility seriously. I’m told the official announcement is just days away, and I’ll tell you more when it happens. Meantime, I have to work on the wording of my business cards. I can’t wait to tell the Czarina!

Fashionably late. Welcome to the party, guys.

It's President Obama's birthday next week. He'll be 49. And Michelle Obama wants us all to sign his birthday card.

Well, probably not all of us. She's probably happy not to hear from, say, Ricochet Members. On the other hand, it seems like a good opportunity for us to wish the man a happy birthday, and maybe add a thought or two -- a polite thought or two -- in the box provided. Maybe just a "Happy Birthday, Mr. President. Please stop spending my money so fast," or something.

I'm sure something will come to you. The link is here.