IT'S HARD TO BE, HARD TO BE HUMAN AGAIN. Sadlynaut Brad has discovered vintage chatter from the "transhumanist" community -- those forward-looking folks who see the heads-in-jars on "Futurama" and sigh longingly:

If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100.

Your mind is a pattern of activity in your brain. The ability to induce that pattern is encoded primarily in your neurons — in which neurons are of which type, and which neurons are connected together. Freezing a brain today in liquid nitrogen destroys many things, but seems to preserve this type/connection info. By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive...

Go ahead and laugh -- many more will take his place! The TransVision 2007 conference convened in Chicago last week. On the scene, Reason reporter Ronald Bailey found participants "wondering if it is more appropriate to refering to the transfer of your mind to a silicon substrate 'uploading' or 'downloading.'" Cryonics was also on the agenda:

Shannon Vyff, the author of the children's book 21st Century Kids and self-described "proselytizing immortalist"... became interested in cryonics when she was experiencing a high-risk pregnancy when she was 21 years-old. She has signed up her children as well, but Vyff says, "I don't tell them that it will work. I tell them that it's a chance."

Further reportage from New City Chicago:

Finally, a speaker approaches the stage to introduce the man of the hour, and after a short, bizarre video featuring a "Star Trek"/James Bond mash-up to transhumanist lyrics like "We can live forever and make everything better!" [William] Shatner takes the stage.

Another keen follower of the man-machine movement is Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds. A few years back the "transhumanist libertarian" Reynolds told us he found that "the Singularity is something to take seriously" -- the Singularity being a transhumanist re-creation myth -- and foresaw "the creation of many millions (and eventually billions) of individuals with powers that would have been until recently regarded as godlike..." Today he notices that William Gibson has grown leery of predicting the future, given the pace of change, and asks, "Does this mean we're already into the Singularity?... If the next 10 or 15 years is that unpredictable, and it probably is, then I'd say we're already into the singularity. "

There are many different kinds of wishful thinking. Who among us has not at times hopefully surmised, despite what reason and experience have taught us, that our negative actions may yet lead to good because some unrelated event would somehow alter our chances of success? More than once I have foolishly concluded, in matters of relationship and career and even simple physics, that things would go my way this time because of a shift in the zeitgeist or luck or my own personal development; yet the odds always seem to favor history and the house.

Similarly, it would seem the Perfesser expects the burgeoning technology of our time to deliver unto him an exalted android immortality. That he might expect technology to improve his life is only logical, but why would he expect it also to lift him out of the realm of the merely human? Technological revolutions have come and gone, yet man has remained man. Why should the tech advances of the Perfesser's time alter that seemingly deathless formula?

The ancients would call hubris. I, being a damned modern, have a different idea. I have followed the Perfesser's devotion to the war in Iraq as a war on terror, and seen where it has led. I notice also what the war has done to our traditional ideas of humanity. The New Yorker recently reported on the offshore torture operations of the American intelligence community. One example was the interrogation used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who, after months in U.S. custody, confessed to several grave offenses, including both the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Richard Reid's attempted shoe-bombing, the murder of Daniel Pearl, and the 2002 Bali nightclub explosion. The New Yorker reported how these confessions were brought about:

According to sources, Mohammed said that, while in C.I.A. custody, he was placed in his own cell, where he remained naked for several days. He was questioned by an unusual number of female handlers, perhaps as an additional humiliation. He has alleged that he was attached to a dog leash, and yanked in such a way that he was propelled into the walls of his cell. Sources say that he also claimed to have been suspended from the ceiling by his arms, his toes barely touching the ground. The pressure on his wrists evidently became exceedingly painful...

Mohammed is said to have described being chained naked to a metal ring in his cell wall for prolonged periods in a painful crouch. (Several other detainees who say that they were confined in the Dark Prison have described identical treatment.) He also claimed that he was kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room, where he was doused with ice water. The practice, which can cause hypothermia, violates the Geneva Conventions, and President Bush’s new executive order arguably bans it...

The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”

Etc. A human being, of the pre-transhumanist sort, might wonder -- as even some U.S. officials quoted by the New Yorker have -- whether Mohammed's "confessions" were merely an attempt to escape further torture. But one who has left his humanity behind might only be expected to say, "Does anyone besides the liberal media and the Far Left actually care how we treated this murdering bastard? We could tie the sob to a cross and take him around the country to town squares everywhere and give the kiddies a whack at him with a hardball for a quarter a pop, for all I care. And they'd get a stuffed animal if they nail him in the manly bits ... before we hang or shoot him on the National Mall." Or "i can't hear u/i am singing the theme/from green acres."

The Perfesser, whose alleged opposition to torture has always been more potential than kinetic, may have deduced that the best way out of this whole human conundrum might be an upload into a powerful computer with a lifelike silicone shell. Physically he would at least as comfortable as he is in his Toyota Highlander. If he needs adventure, he can have images uploaded from his digital archive. And from there the traditional "bugs" of humanity -- among them conscience, justice, and fellow-feeling -- may be in time forgotten.

UNGAWA, BLACK POWER! I hadn't been to Gates of Vienna for a while, and with fond memories of previous visits in mind I returned today. Much of the current writing is about the dire situation of white people:

It is noticeable how aggressive many Leftists have become against whites, parallel to Muslim immigration. I think the Leftist logic goes something like this: We failed to achieve our Socialist society during the Cold War. The “white,” Western culture blocked our goals. Since a Socialist society is good, those blocking it are evil, hence whites are evil and need to be subdued and destroyed, even if this includes our own sons, daughters and grandchildren. Utopia requires a Villain Class to be smashed and sacrificed. In the global, Multicultural Utopia, this appears to be whites in general.

This causes me to reflect: first, have I been doing my part in the War on Whitey? Being white myself, I have been able to observe Caucasians at close range for some time, yet to my knowledge I have done nothing to dismantle their power structure. Am I a sleeper cell, to be activated on Der Tag? Readers, please advise; in code, it goes without saying.

But I also reflected that the Gateseans write mostly from a European perspective, which is little known to me; it may be that their analysis has more to recommend it than I can judge. So I sought out a passage from a Gates of Vienna U.S. correspondent:

And what about the United States? We, too, have (or had until recently) a common culture, based on a common language, a widely shared religious faith, and shared values. But we are even more loosely connected to it than are our European cousins, since our national founding myth welcomes all newcomers and repudiates traditional aristocratic hierarchies.

At one time each individual state may have approximated a demos. In 1789 Connecticut and South Carolina were quite distinct polities; hence the necessity of a federal structure. But the ensuing centuries have seen the federal behemoth rampage unchecked through the rights and traditions of the individual states. Add to that the customary mobility of the American populace, and the groundwork for the homogenized Multicultural nanny-state has been laid.

Those bastards Lincoln and FDR sold us out, apparently. This may explain the popularity of tanning salons; white Americans might be trying to "pass," and so avoid persecution in homogenized America.

Gates of Vienna is like a worldwide game of Telephone, in which multicultural outrages are transmitted and embellished until the conversation is all about race war.

JUST A FLESH WOUND. The downgrading by some conservatives of the show "24" because of an environmental project its makers are conducting was previously covered here. Now someone at Ace of Spades has treated the subject, and the post is very instructive:

Can a show jump the shark by virtue of something it does off screen? If so, I nominate 24…

This obviously presents a conflict for the left. Sure Jack Bauer is the pop-culture face of torture but on the other hand he’s oh so concerned about global warming. What’s a modern progressive to do?

The "24" news infuriates conservatives, and the AoS author fantasizes the discomfort it will cause liberals.

This shows admirable pluck, or something.

SOFT BIGOTRY. At National Review Jonah Goldberg suggests "lower expectations" in Iraq:

Instead, explained a former administration official, America needs to set its sights lower. We need to keep Iraq from becoming a terror sponsor or safe haven for al Qaeda. The best we can hope for, the consensus seemed to be, is a “Jordan-style” Iraq with a moderate, somewhat reliably pro-American regime that will, on occasion, vote with us in the United Nations. What we need in Iraq is a “strong state” that can assert its will domestically. A Jeffersonian democracy on the Euphrates isn’t in the cards, most agreed.

Refresh my memory: why did we depose Saddam? It sounds like we could have just sent Rumsfeld over to shake his hand a few more times and achieved a similar goal.

SECOND (AND THIRD AND FOURTH ETC.) TIME AS FARCE. Conservative bloggers writing about the Scott Thomas Beauchamp thing have reached the Simon Says stage of analysis. From Confederate Yankee, for example, we get this:

Gavin M. [of Sadly, No!] blasts Charles at LGF for using the phrase, "purported to be written by a soldier." Charles used the "P" word to describe someone hiding behind a pseudonym? Why, that's the exact same thing as directly calling him an impostor, isn't it folks?

One wonders how Confederate Yankee would react if someone described him as a purported heterosexual.

NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD. Rod Dreher thinks the trouble with religion today is it's not masculine enough. After a quote about how there are too many women at services, Dreher preaches:

I believe one reason so many male Christians responded deeply to Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was because it depicted a masculine Jesus who chose to endure excruciating pain to rescue those he loved. The Christian faith teaches that this is what Jesus did, but somehow the intense physical courage that that act of love required is easy to overlook. Gibson didn't overlook it. The Jesus Christ of his film embodied manliness par excellence: a strong, brave man who was willing to suffer and die to save others. After I saw that film in a press preview, then went to Ash Wednesday services and heard the plush priest give a homily about how Lent is really supposed to be about learning to love ourselves more, I wanted to slug the guy.

This helps me understand the appeal not only of The Passion of the Christ, but also of contemporary action movies in which the hero emerges after numberless beatings and explosions to kick the ass of Evil. This certainly makes The Passion more interesting than I originally thought. Jesus got more savage treatment than even John McClane gets in the Die Hard movies, and in an age before gunpowder. But since the Biblical conventions made it impossible for Gibson's Jesus to go out and beat hell out of his persecutors, The Passion left its audiences to carry a dream of vengeance out of the theatre and into the world. One of Dreher's sources writes that a Mass "must be a certain kind of ritual. It must be majestic, soaring, even martial. It must challenge and call you on." No wonder Dreher hates the happy-clappy stuff: when one's God has been torn to bits, Christian Soldiers go not inward but Onward.

I have generally assumed that the agon of action heroes was something through which fans released the little frustrations of their lives, but I begin to see that for the devout it may actually be an animated version of the Stations of the Cross.

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Pretty much everything Peggy Noonan writes here was written better (naturally) by Gore Vidal in 1960:

MRS. GAMADGE. And your two fine sons. They're very attractive and that was a nice spread of them in Life, at the barbecue. Very, very nice. We'll want more of that. But most important, your wife should be at your side at all time. (Mrs. Gamadge rises and hands the empty glass to Jensen.) She must seem to be advising you. The women must feel that there is a woman behind you (Mrs. Gamadge has maneuvered herself into position behind Russell's chair.) as there has been a woman behind every great man since the world began! (Russell, aware of Mrs. Gamadge's presence, rises and crosses to Jensen at L.)

RUSSELL. Alice plans to campaign with me, if...

MRS. GAMADGE. She's a tremendous asset. I don't need to tell you. The women like the way she doesn't wear makeup and looks like a lady, and seems shy...

RUSSELL. She is shy.

MRS. GAMADGE. She doesn't make the women feel jealous. And that's good. Keep her with you, Mr. Secretary, at all times. It did Adlai Stevenson great harm, not having a wife, and trying to be funny all the time. Great harm...

...(Somewhat nervously, Alice enters and starts to cross to Mrs. Gamadage, who to Alice's alarm, starts backing away with a speculative look, taking in everything.)

ALICE. How very nice to see you...

MRS. GAMADGE. (slowly, deliberately) You... couldn't... look... better! I mean it! I like the whole thing... especially the naturally gray hair, that is such an important point with the women. Of course Mabel Cantwell dyes her hair, but she gets away with it because she does such a bad job the women feel sorry for her... (To Alice, cozily) When you're the First Lady just remember this: Don't do too much... like Mrs. Roosevelt. The women didn't like that. On the other hand, don't do too little... like Mrs. Eisenhower. The women didn't like that either. All in all, Grace Coolidge was really the best, bless her heart. My husband had such a crush on her...

Forgive my taking the Dramatists Play Service style, which includes stage directions from the original prompt book. I would so rather be seeing a good play now than paying attention to these idiots.

UP THE FLAGPOLE WITHOUT A SALUTE. Anyone here see the premiere episode of "Mad Men," about the bullshit kings of old Madison Avenue? I did, and though I have my objections (remarkably similar to those of James Wolcott), I'd like to see more, because the subject fascinates me. I puttered around some ad agencies in my freelance career, and took great pleasure in hearing the old bulls' recollections of the era depicted in the show. While doing newsletters for Ogilvy, I dug through some of their archives, which transmitted some of the impatient energy that "Mad Men" is going for. One finding concerned a board meeting at which a large batch of new vice-presidents had been proposed. That title is ubiquitous in advertising now (as David Ogilvy once observed, it is cheaper to give titles than raises), and one of the bulls at that particular meeting appears to have smelled an unhealthful change coming. "Seems to me," he sniffed, "that we're giving helmets to cheerleaders." If "Mad Men" can capture some of this tonal mix of patrician hauteur and homespun wisdom, I might have to get cable.

If you did see the premiere, you must recall the drama over the Lucky Strike acount, in which the client, a George Washington Hill type played by John Cullum, bitterly lamented all the foolishness about cigarettes being bad for you ("I've never been sick a day in my life"); the nervous ad guys tried to ease him into the new reality, till hero Don Draper tap-danced a new slogan based on one of the few points of difference left to discuss ad-wise: "It's Toasted." What do you think that scene was about? Draper's poise under fire? The situational ethics of mid-century advertising? The shift in the business between prose poetry and a crisper kind of nonsense? The difference between research and inspiration?

Whatever you saw, I can assure you the view of National Review's S.T. Karnick will surprise you:

In responding to 1950s revelations about the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, the cigarette companies had been making claims that each one’s product was healthier than its competitors’. The federal government moved to put a stop to it.

That might seem a reasonable response at first glance, but it certainly runs afoul of the First Amendment, and it exemplifies the twentieth-century trend of government increasingly overriding people’s personal choices. This ham-fisted action by the feds resonates, of course, with the current crusade by all levels of government to eradicate cigarette smoking from the United States altogether.

Something else you have to give the old Madison Avenue guys: they were much smoother than the bullshit artists of today.

LINDSAY LOHAN'S "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger expresses concern -- or is it contempt? It's hard to tell -- for the celebrities who take drugs, whether performance or pleasure-enhancing. At first he seems to think marketing is the culprit:

I now take it as an article of faith that marketing rules the world. Marketing is an ancient business tool, but unlike some other artifacts of the past, product marketing is a perfect fit for the age of electronic mass media. The Web has been marketing's Manhattan Project, and like Iran, everyone wants access to marketing's mysterious, sometimes dark powers...

The players became platforms outside the game for selling shoes, brands "and everything." Like Nascar drivers, the shirts of the Tour de France racers are festooned with product logos. But consumers aren't going to buy stuff promoted by any palooka. Professional athletes were tutored that part of the deal was they had to pump extra hang-time into their personalities. And if they couldn't do that, the guys making the Nike commercials would do it for them. In the early days, journalists derided this as "hype," but even the press eventually signed on, and suddenly lumpen athletes and entertainers had "attitude" and "edge." This was now admirable.

Henninger must have realized at some point that blaming the free market for Barry Bonds is a non-starter in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, so he comes to Jesus -- or, rather, swings Him at the heads of "the thousands of high-IQ people buying all those the God-Is-Dreadful books":

The simple idea that Mr. Bonds and Ms. [Lindsay] Lohan ought to go find something resembling a church to offset the compulsions of modern life drives the no-religion people nuts. If so, they should stop making funny jokes about sprinkling holy water and start proposing an alternative way to learn integrity, self-respect and character that will have a longer shelf-life than "Don't Be Evil."

Our great nation is covered with churches and filled with believers, and ruled by a fundamentalist Christian President, yet Henninger is worried about atheism's deleterious effect on Barry Bonds and Lindsay Lohan.

When I first approached his essay, I assumed that Henninger took movie stars and professional athletes as his subject because people are more inclined to read about them than Johnny Methhead or Jane Crackwhore. Now I think that if he expanded his purview to include ordinary citizens' drug habits among the horrors of atheism, it would too closely resemble a Chick Tract without the saving grace of lurid illustrations to suit the Journal's upscale clientele.

Of course, once Murdoch gets his hands on the Journal, Henninger may never need to be that cautious again.

UPDATE. Flash! Lindsay Lohan, at least, may be closer to redemption than we thought:

Christian pop culture critic Mark Dice insists he knows the cure for Lindsay Lohan’s problems. Jesus.

Dice credits himself for making Paris Hilton find ‘God’ in jail, and is now focusing his prayers on Lindsay Lohan.

“What Lindsay really needs is Jesus. She needs to read the Bible and find out who she is and why she is here. There is a vast black hole in her soul which nothing else can fill. No expensive rehab facility. No jail sentence. No family or friends. Only Jesus can fix what’s wrong” Dice explains.

Maybe Murdoch can just dump Henninger and hire Dice. He certainly has a livelier style.

ANOTHER "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. I have a little cold and was not wont to post, but Kia Pienso has pointed out to me a new essay by Camille Paglia which has lifted my spirits somewhat.

The thing is hard to synopsize, but let me say that toward the beginning Paglia writes:

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts.

Sometime later:

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.

Then:

Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum.

The salutary effect of sacred song on the "the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism" is hinted at in this description of what to unsympathetic readers may appear an outbreak of mass hysteria:

The most influential camp meeting occurred at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1804. For three days and well past midnight, a crowd estimated to be between twenty and thirty thousand sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard for miles around. Worshippers transported by extreme emotion jerked, writhed, fell to the ground in convulsions or went catatonic. This Kentucky Revival, called the Second Great Awakening, spread through the inland regions of the South and eventually reached western Pennsylvania.

(I pause here to add crucial emphasis, which Paglia's famously logorrheic style denies, to the punchline:)

But the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather.

The 6,425-word essay covers a lot of ground, but we might say the key to it is Paglia's account of the attacks on Chris Olfili's The Holy Virgin Mary when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Paglia blames this lunacy not on the people who made the attacks, but to the "the total failure of curatorial support" by the Brooklyn Museum, who presumably erred in failing to properly instruct a no doubt receptive Mayor Giuliani in African fertility symbology.

The whole thing pretty much goes like that. Examples of religious violence and absurdity are given, and the arts community gets the blame for being insufficiently acquainted with the Bible. While the little jihads are mostly described in coolly descriptive language, the irreligious artists and arts supporters are subjected to the kind of editorial attacks ("Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials") that are sure make this essay, like many of Paglia's public explosions, a treasure trove for conservative quote trawlers, who will rejoice that somebody in the Academy is talking their language.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE. James Lileks reports from an Alaskan cruise about some damn kids who sang badly ("'Y.M.C.A' – a song about anonymous sex, incidentally") in a fucking karaoke bar. Later he goes to a tavern populated by waxwork dummies.

He leaves out the part where Rod Serling explains what happened to Lileks when he took the pig mask off.

GOOD OLD BOYS. The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman came to me as a double whammy from a great distance: I haven't watched their films in years, but both made a lasting impression on me. The astute Terry Teachout had a less than optimal experience revisiting Wild Strawberries in 2003, and it may be that either or both of these giants might look punier to me upon reconsideration than they did in my youth. But my memories of both director's films are clear and happy and I more or less trust them. It may be that I am less prone to disappointment than Terry, or more childish about old loves -- I enjoy Jason and the Argonauts on pretty much the same terms today as I did when I was a child; take that for what it's worth.

As for John Podhoretz' bizarre denunciation of Bergman in today's New York Post, I can only assume the 1970s were so traumatic for him that he feels it necessary to bear his grudges into the realm of excruciatingly bad taste. He certainly seems angrier at those of us who enjoyed Bergman's films than he is at the director himself, declaring that we think art "wasn't supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities." Well, The Virgin Spring ain't Star Wars, but there is more than one kind of pleasure, and Bergman's Medieval parable, rough as it may be, is well-built, stunningly photographed by Sven Nykvist, and deeply satisfying in its resolution. I don't think you have to be a snob to enjoy it, or to enjoy Max von Sydow's battle with the optical printer at the end of The Passion of Anna, or the recognizable conjugal truths of the contentious couple in Scenes from a Marriage.

For that matter, Antonioni's famous bleakness can be pretty funny, as in the first scene of The Eclipse, in which the most active member of the menage a trois is a rotating fan. I had many reservations about The Passenger when I saw it in re-release a few years ago, but I was never bored: even the misfired pairing of Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider was fascinating, and that last, long unbroken take at the end is exhilarating whether you think the film has earned it or not.

Rank them however high or low you like, but they applied themselves to their visions energetically and consistently and with undeniable craft. That's no small achievement.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 5,858,351,117. Psst -- liberals are calling themselves progressives because they want to bring back eugenics via global warming and stem cell research. Pass it on! And if anyone asks, you didn't hear it from me!

(Oops -- almost forgot the glibertarian angle.)

MUST-FLEE TV. I finally watched one of those vlog things. Jesus Christ. Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart on comedy? If bongs had floated up into view, that would at least have provided an excuse.

For the record:

Goldberg acknowledged that Jon Stewart is "funny," but "what a lot of liberals are not appreciating is, come a Democratic President, Jon Stewart is going to be pretty funny about Democratic Presidents." Then who'll be laughing, traitors?

Goldberg: "On the whole humor is still much more helpful for conservatives than it is for liberals" because humorists are "equal opportunity guys and I have a couple of friends who are in the comedy business" who are of the fabled "conservative... actually libertarian" tribe, which Goldberg further qualifies as "Giuliani-type."

Goldberg: "People like Michael Moore or Al Franken don't help liberals all that much" because Franken is "dour and dark and kind of nasty," whereas Rush Limbaugh is a big ball of sunshine.

Not content to wait for Jon Stewart to make fun of future Democratic Presidents, Goldberg warns that "Jon Stewart can get into trouble... when he tries too hard to make the left-wing bloggers happy." So when I laugh at Stewart, America scowls? Thank God I don't have cable.

Goldberg says "I don't think it necessarily speaks particularly well for liberals they keep having to recruit comedians to do their arguing for them." I don't know, I thought Slappy White's keynote address at the 1992 Democratic Convention was pretty awesome.

"Humor right now still is in many respects in terms of the way we live our social lives more of an asset for conservatives," reiterates Goldberg, using as examples himself ("I win a lot of points with audiences"), Limbaugh, and noted right-wing funnyman Dave Chappelle.

On the whole Goldberg seems to think liberal humor is creaky and preachy ("going after televangelists and preachers is so old"), while attacks on "political correctness" are as fresh as springtime.

Beinart pretty much gawks at the camera and goes "muh muh muh muh" at intervals.

No wonder Republicans are crapping out of the YouTube debate.

SHUT UP AND SING. TBogg has a lot of fun with this Rockanomics site. I can't say I'm in complete agreement with his assessment. The proprietors are clearly mad, but so what? Music is for everybody, even and perhaps especially the disturbed. Neither the "house band" nor The Right Brothers (whom they closely resemble) are my style, but they don't sound any worse than a lot of other old-fashioned bands. I don't relate to "Open Season," but I don't relate to "Cop Killer," either, and they both rock pretty hard.

The bloggy parts of the site are expectedly tedious, but the parts that have music... have music. My standards are blessedly low, as are the standards of rock and roll itself. Goethe's dictum that there's nothing worse than active ignorance doesn't apply to rock. As a sprat I had my "California Uber Alles" and "Beat on the Brat." These are not works of measured analysis, but cool tunes.

The state of arts education being what it is, I have to applaud anything that motivates people to play. Long-term it may even have a civilizing influence on them. I've seen more than one anti-social type redeemed by immersion in a useful craft. Why might it not work on anti-socialist types?

But that is all to one side; the lively arts need no justification outside themselves. We shouldn't let the odd Horst Wessel Lied sour us on Euterpe. Her charms are for us all.

ATTENTION COMRADES! Previous meme "Scott Thomas does not exist" is no longer operative. Please to substitute "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a bad man" or "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is Oliver Stone" or "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a semiotic construct" or "We'll get Scott Thomas Beauchamp fired" or whatever damn thing you can think of.

UPDATE. Comrades show initiative! Conservative commentator tells Beauchamp to " get busy watching your back." I've heard of dolchstosslegende, but I thought it was supposed to go the other way round.

UPDATE II. "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a bad writer" is apparently the libertarian angle. Armed Liberal quotes a soldier who says if we insist on acknowledging the existence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, our soldiers will never become "a new Greatest Generation" (i.e., useful propaganda for Republicans). Hollywood is blamed. Filmed in der back!

UPDATE III. The libertarian response continues via Jane Galt, who offers a few puzzling restatements of the anti-anti-Beauchamp POV ("Well, everyone who's talking about this is evil"), hems and haws, then, perhaps sensing the quagmire rising about her (and that's another bad thing about us, we use words like "quagmire"), declares:

But as I say, my passing interest in the entire thing, which is animated almost entirely by the fact that I have spied some of the editors involved at cocktail parties, is not very great; somewhere below the neighbour's termite infestation, but above my urgent need for curtain rods and bookshelves. This will almost certainly be my last post on the subject.

Thence, of course, follows another post, in which she talks about famous frauds and the difficulty of fact-checking, which would be a relevant addition if the news were that Beauchamp had been shown not to exist, instead of, well, what actually happened.

This is a customary reframing of events: point out the ridiculous reactions of a number of well-regarding idiots, and you become a "TNR defender." Thereafter, if the New Republic drops a gum wrapper on the sidewalk, so to speak, you will take the fall, at least in the Second Life inhabited by such people.

AFTER THE FARTING: JONAH GOLDBERG CONSIDERED. At National Review, Jonah Goldberg says liberals are hypocrites. Oh, one asks wearily, pre-emptively shielding oneself from the spray of cracker crumbs that will accompany the reply, how so? Because

Liberals in the 1990s argued – sometimes with nuance, sometimes starkly – that the bright line for intervention was genocide... I am open to [John Derbyshire's] prediction that genocide may not be in the offing if we leave Iraq. Ultimately, none of us knows. But what I find fascinating is the growing acceptance among liberals – who are often quite strident about the need to intervene in Darfur, for example – that even if our departure results in genocide, that’s not reason enough to stay... For liberals to have supported Kosovo or who now agitate for intervention in Darfur on the grounds that America should put steel in the words “never again” to suddenly say that genocide largely caused by the US is irrelevant is astounding to me. And it won’t be forgotten. The next time liberals want to stop mass slaughter in country X where we have no interests, it will be pointed out to them that they abetted slaughter in Iraq when our vital national interests were involved.

In other words: liberals like to say they care about genocide, but they obviously don't, because they want to leave Iraq, which stands poised at the brink of genocide (or maybe doesn't, he isn't sure) thanks to the efforts of Jonah Goldberg et alia.

Goldberg is a little like a hostage-taker who, when seized after a ten-hour standoff, wants everyone to know that the hostage negotiator's arguments were really intellectually inferior to his own.

And I'm sorry, but whatever you think of the Kosovo intervention, Iraq makes Kosovo look like we gave everyone in Serbia ice cream and then flew them to heaven in a private jet.

I have a better way of preventing genocide in our client states, and stage one involves the removal of Jonah Goldberg and his colleagues from spheres of government influence via the election to government office of non-retards.

PLEASING THE AFFILIATES. "THINGS ARE JUST AS MUCH FUN AS EVER over at Protein Wisdom," blurbs Ole Perfesser Reynolds. I go over to the recommended site and see a long post by one of the second stringers (PW proprietor Jeff Goldstein being engaged, perhaps, in one of the long bouts of anomie that seem to naturally follow the logorheic fits for which he is known) making jokes about Amanda Marcotte's vagina. I sometimes wonder if the Perfesser and I are seeing the same internet.

I also see one of the Perfesser's pals hauled out to say stuff like "Like some modern opponents of globalization and free trade, the Nazis viewed economics as a zero-sum game between nations." I guess Godwin's Law is just for the little people, or had perhaps been overturned. Now I'm doubly eager for the Second Amendment revival to reach my town, so I can compare my opponents to Hitler while brandishing a gun. Who knows? The Perfesser's life may turn out to have been a net plus in the end.

BABY STEPS. "The Takoma Park city council has unanimously approved a resolution urging Congress to go forward with impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney."

Lotta people working in or for the Federal gummint live in Takoma Park.

One such voter writes:

I’m telling you, it was straight out of Norman Rockwell’s 'Freedom of Speech' in that council meeting tonight. It was really, really good, I was very proud of us.

This looks kinda like an Instapundit post, doesn't it? Hehindeed.

MY YOUTUBE DEBATE. I have a better computer now, and will abuse the privilege by posting YouTube videos.

I've already told you fuckers The Penetrators of Syracuse, New York were gods, and here is the proof:



Whassamatta -- as the janitor told my friend Simon when he recoiled at the taste of angel dust in the joint the janitor had given him -- you don't like it? Okay, down the road I'll provide a Lester Bangs-style essay on the band that will at least confuse you. For now I'll just leave you with a few, harmless words... just a bunch of letters scrambled together, but their meaning is very important...

• The Bobby Fuller Four
• Willie Dixon
• Gunfight at Carnegie Hall
• Metallic K.O.
• Marcel Proust
• Reader's Block
• Andre Breton

But soft, the matin grows nigh! Adieu.

BELIEF SYSTEM. Don Surber reports on Rasmussen reporting that liberal bias rules the news -- sorta:

The current survey finds that 30% of American adults believe the Associated Press has a liberal bias and only 12% believe it leans the other way. Local television news is viewed as having a liberal bias by 30% and a conservative bias by 17%. MSNBC is seen as being a bit more to the left—33% say it has a liberal bias and 13% say the opposite. For CNBC, 29% say it has a liberal bias and 14% say a conservative bias.

Thirty-seven percent (37%) say local television stations deliver news without bias while 36% say the same for the Associated Press.

Hold on: Only 30/30/33/29 percent see AP/local/MSNBC/CNBC news as liberal-biased? After decades of conservative propaganda to that effect? I would have thought the notion would by now have as much support as the existence of angels (79 percent per FOX News), but the current numbers are closer to the 37 percent support FOX found for belief in astrology.

Someone's not getting his money's worth.

In case you're wondering what I mean by propaganda, you can find a good example in Surber's own post:

My pet theory is that as they rise in stature and income, the muckedy-mucks at AP start attending more upscale parties, where the Old Money Socialists and the Scholarly Professors push a political agenda that holds since American institutions are not perfect, they must be replaced.

Who wouldn't be moved by that? I can see it myself: the red velvet curtains, the crystal chandeliers, the mahogany furnishings; the Old Money Socialists in their wide-lapel suits and Pierre Trudeau haircuts sharing a glass of baby's blood with the gowned and mortarboarded Scholarly Professors; and the AP men of rising stature and income (the stature- and income-deprived AP men having been dispatched to comb John Edwards' hair) standing by with steno pads, asking how they might better effect the destruction of American institutions with their wire reports.

And I never get invited to those parties.

UNHINGED. Ann Althouse reacts badly to Greg Sargent's brush-off with a huge, intemperate post that accuses Sargent of quoting her accurately and includes genuinely spooky passages like this:

Now get up off your ass and write a real response to me. I'm sick of these cranked out non-responses that pretend you've suffered no real attack. You have!

Then she demands an apology. How long before Sargent finds a boiled rabbit in his kitchen?

UPDATE. Comments are rather hot. I have to say I cannot endorse cracks on Althouse's appearance. All women are beautiful, for one thing, and Professor Althouse is decidedly not an exception.

I was raised for the most part by a single mother, and am perhaps oversensitive on that account to this sort of thing.

HOT AIR. Roger Scruton makes a case for conservatives as stewards of the environment based largely upon hatred of liberals, represented here by Mao, György Lukács, and other such like. As is typical in such arguments, Scruton uses "little platoon" environmental successes -- like the disposition of a dump in his small Virginia town! -- as an example of how the whole problem can be solved.

It is almost embarrassing to have to point this out, but America's large-scale successes against its large-scale pollution problems have been overwhelmingly won through the use of state power, as with the late-20th-century regulation of air quality in Los Angeles. When people started blowing black snot, LA didn't ask polluters to please think of the children -- county supervisors enpowered pollution control officials to create regulations suggested by scientific research. State officials got in on the act, and eventually so did the Feds. Car and gas companies got the message and began retooling to meet both regulations and regulatory threats. (So much for Scruton's claim that "Environmental movements on the Left seldom pause to consider the question of human motivation.") Neither urban California nor America became as a result unproductive Sovietized wastelands, but healthier places to live.

Scruton wants to portray the effects of industry on the environment as if they were theoretical issues, leading to such humorous sentences as "First, the damage done to our environment is connected in many people’s thinking, and to a great extent in reality, with the activities of business," and to his association of environmentalism with "the cult of the victim." Mises, Burke, and Hayek are mentioned; the current Administration's notorious politicizing of science is not.

The article is merely a pernicious fantasy dressed up with grad-school citations. I wonder if even Scruton thinks it serves any purpose other than filling a need for a "conservative" position on an important issue. They have to have one, I guess, and apparently all it needs to do is criticize what liberals have been doing, not matter how successful they have been.

GET YOUR WAR ON. TBogg sees and raises on the "Generation 9/11 vs. Boomers" narrative that conservatives are starting to push.

I often wonder where such ideas originate, particularly when they relate to absolutely no verifiable facts. I wouldn't be surprised if this one were based upon a stray finding from a recent New York Times poll, which sees the young'uns "leaning left" in many areas, but adds:

But when it came to the war, young Americans were more optimistic about the outcome than was the population as whole. Fifty-one percent said the United States was very or somewhat likely to succeed in Iraq, compared with 45 percent among all adults.

Maybe some ambitious worker in the Ministry of Truth gleaned from this factoid an opening: if the kids are more inclined than their elders, if only by six percentage points, to believe that the Iraq adventure will prove successful, this point of difference might be marketable. Young people famously prefer to dress, rock, and recreate themselves differently than do the old folks: maybe they can be encouraged to see war boosterism, too, as a hallmark of youth.

By this theory, the Weekly Standard and little-read blogs are only a start, and the campaign will follow through in more popular arenas:

• AST Dew Tour Iraq -- the sands of the Mesopotamian desert come alive with the sounds of FMX racing.
• Jackass Baghdad -- Johnny Knoxville walks into an IED.
• And, of course, Qube TV.

If that doesn't work, there's always the draft.

THE NEW MAGISTERIUM. Thers had this first:

Newsbusters discovers that production of the show "24" (heretofore hailed in rightwing circles as double-plus good) is going "carbon neutral," and Kiefer Sutherland is doing a global warming promo.

Newsbusters commenters immediately start downgrading the show.

Thers' analysis is very astute -- their list of beliefs that render one unacceptably "liberal" expands in new and nuttier directions all the time. I would only add, as is my tedious wont, that this is exactly what you can expect when people start thinking about "culture" as something aligned with their political agenda: they recreate little Inquisitions in their minds, and the pleasure centers that should be receptive to such treats as "24" become subject to their review.

Little children are taught right and wrong, and it follows they will learn to disdain certain childish pleasures, such as screaming in public or late at night. But as adults we are expected to evaluate our training; sometimes this means making new rules, alas, but in the main adulthood is about finding sensible exceptions to the strictures of social life (e.g., screaming is acceptable when exhorted by a DJ or orgasm). We don't grow up by sealing off pleasures but by maximizing them intelligently. This development also affords grown-ups the ability to appreciate mixed blessings. Fat Russian novels can be hard to read but rewarding to finish. Disillusionment may deprive us of the joys of childish faith, but we may find new ones in a mature exploration of our beliefs and of the world around us. And we can enjoy the work and even the company of people with whom we happen to disagree.

These guys apparently missed a step.

A heathier approach to the news is found at fansite Blogs.4Bauer's "24 ways that Jack is carbon neutral":

1. Every day he eliminates at least one carbon emitting life form.
2. Cordite is safe for plant life.
3. The Jack Sack, among it’s other amazing properties, absorbs carbon dioxide...

If this be conservative, it's the sort of conservatism I can get behind.

HATE WILL BRING US TOGETHER. Rod Dreher:

In my Dallas Morning News column today, I defend Pope Benedict's recent official statement describing my church as "defective," and Protestant churches as not churches at all...

I end by saying I'd rather be on the side of those Christians and non-Christians who are willing to tell me respectfully that my beliefs about God are wrong, instead of those who would say, for the sake of diplomacy, that nobody can say what's true about God. At least the former know what's really at stake.

This changes my understanding of ecumenicalism: it's about churches united not by common beliefs, apparently, but by a common enemy, the dreaded agnostics -- some of whom aren't even being diplomatic about it -- into a sort of Coalition of the Willing. Though the partners consider each other defective, and even not churches at all, they will yet convene to smite the heathen.

Should these combined forces succeed in overcoming agnosticism, I look forward to their afterparty, which should be very rowdy. (I say "look forward" in a rhetorical sense, of course, since I will thankfully be dead by then.)

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan having a bit of fun in 1972. All the "Last Goon Show" clips at YouTube are well worth it; this one gives Milligan a star turn.

There is no overestimating the Goons' effect on... well, everything.

THE WAR AT HOME. At the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett speaks to some fine young men in the military, and that's always nice. Less nice is the angle of his story, entitled "The 9/11 Generation: Better than the Boomers."

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image...

But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

Huh? What can this possibly mean? That more young people are serving their country now than in the Vietnam era? As has been pointed out by the Heritage Foundation (!), vastly more Americans went to Vietnam than have served thus far in Iraq, and I doubt the age difference between the two populations is so vast as to support Barnett's judgment by volume.

Many of the Vietnam attendees were of course forced to "answer the phone" by the draft. Maybe Barnett counts that against them.

The only Boomer boogeyman cited in the story, besides the unnamed Woodstock hippies, is John Kerry. Non-Boomer Charles Rangel also takes a hit. Both have exemplary service records.

That Barnett couldn't get a story about young servicemen into the Standard without this meretricious frame is -- well, I was going to say hilarious, but as I've been writing about it I've come to think that the better word is creepy. These days the dead-enders can't content themselves with even a simple portrait of courage and valor in the U.S. Armed Forces without a heavy dose of hatred toward their domestic opponents. When they say "Iraq" and "the enemy," they're thinking about Democrats. That's their war now.

ME, OR YOUR OWN LYING EARS? Talking Points Memo has uncovered footage of Rudolph Giuliani stirring up the NYPD at a 1992 rally. This is old news to longtime citizens, but it's nice that outlanders have been treated to this glimpse of Giuliani's approach to group dynamics.

Those fans of reasoned discourse, the Ole Perfesser and Ann Althouse, have leapt to Giuliani's defense. Perfesser Reynolds is typically gnomic, but Althouse goes in for heavy deconstruction:

I've watched it. He's not "screaming" "bullsh*t." Nor has he "come unhinged" (as TPM puts it)...

Shouting is not "screaming."

...it's a normal and useful word. I'm sure cops appreciate it. Using it doesn't make you crazy, and I'm positive TPM doesn't think it does. TPM is simply trying to hurt Rudy's chances with conservatives so he won't get the nomination and get his chance to win over liberals...

First, a report on how the cops "appreciated" Giuliani's speech from Sydney Schanberg:

The police were angry at the first African-American mayor of New York, David Dinkins -- in particular his proposal to create an independent, all-civilian review board to examine citizen complaints about police rudeness and rough behavior. The word "nigger" was heard loudly several times from the crowd. A number of protest signs called Dinkins a "washroom attendant." Giuliani in his remarks at the protest, which was organized by the police union, whipped the crowd to even fiercer heights by reciting a list of Dinkins’ policies and, after each one, starting a chant of "Bullshit! Bullshit!" About 1,500 of the demonstrators eventually stormed onto the Brooklyn Bridge and tied up traffic there for an hour...

As to Althouse's semantic argument, that is best understood within the closed system of modern conservative analysis. In that rarefied field, it is liberals who scream -- or, more classically, "shriek" -- and make other unmanly sounds, while conservatives speak only in a deep voices swathed in homespun, which is why Fred Thompson is Giuliani's primary competition for the Republican nomination.

Their arguments are easier to understand in their own special language. Translation to simple English usually wounds them terribly.

I WISH I WAS IN BAGHDAD! HOO-RAY! HOO-RAY! An inspirational tale from Iraq dead-ender Michael Yon:

An Iraqi Colonel was generous enough to offer that he believed it to be just a mistake that “God is Great” was left off the flag that was used on the slides. But the Iraqis all agreed that nobody was going to sign anything that displayed an Iraqi flag without the phrase “God is Great"...

Seeing “God is Great” written on the Iraqi flag might provoke some to protest “Why did we come here just to stand up a country who would write such things on their flag?” But I sat there in that meeting, which was completely civil and professional, and I thought about another flag, the one flying over South Carolina. Some people call that flag “heritage,” while others call it “hateful,” “painful” and “demeaning.” And today in that meeting, I thought about the descendants of slaves who are now top military commanders in the American Army, and in that moment I knew that Iraq could make it.

I think that Yon has hit upon a winner: selling the Allah Akbar flag to conservatives by comparing it to the Stars and Bars. Will the folks at, say, Little Green Footballs go for it? Well, he's already got a taker at National Review.

RAPER'S DELIGHT. Rod Dreher relates the latest sex-abuse headline story, and declares:

What kind of culture produces such boys? [Answer: a culture where men live by the depraved values celebrated by hip-hop music. You raise generations to venerate that kind of morality, and this is exactly what you can expect.]

Then he relates, by way of back-up, a story about his own near-abuse at the age of 14 (i.e, 1981) while with a "school group on a weeklong summer trip to the beach." I admire Dreher's candor, but I have to ask: what hip-hop song inspired his assault? "The Message"? "That's the Joint"? I doubt Schoolly D made it down to Louisiana in 1981. And Dreher himself describes his '81 tormenters as "preppies and jocks," which class of teen morons were not in my experience early adopters of rap music.

Lots of us were bullied in school long before the emergence of the Sugar Hill Gang. Yet some of us think it all comes down to gangsta rap. You don't suppose race has anything to do with it, do you?

"LET'S ROLL" YOUR OWN. Jason Apuzzo is issuing one of his occasional calls for right-wingers to make their own movies. Regular readers will know that I have endorsed such an approach: I would much rather see a Unification Church production of Petreus: Man of Iron than another silly rant about how Hollywood is engaged in treason. It doesn't matter much what particular belly-fire spurs artists to action; whether they are animated by vanity or a cause, if it gets them to do something constructive, and employs talents, it can't be a total loss. Many otherwise shiftless musicians have been driven to greater productivity by fealty to indie rock or the straight-edge scene or the kids who, once united, would never be divided, or some other tommy-rot, and we got some nice records out of it.

Still, at the risk of killing their buzz, I continue to ask what this is supposed to mean:

You would think conservatives/Republicans would understand this. You would think they would’ve learned by now that what happens on the battlefield isn’t the whole story. You would think they would’ve learned a lesson from World Wars I & II (entertainment industry rallies public support for war = we win) or from Vietnam (entertainment industry undermines public support for war = we don’t win), but apparently not.

I have to side with the conservatives/Republicans on this one. No one has ever explained the mechanism of action for this formula to me. When Hollywood was allegedly losing Vietnam for us with such potent weapons as The Strawberry Statement, Nixon was twice elected President. Which is the more reliable indicator of political will? Despite what Apuzzo apparently sees as a barrage of hippie celluloid bombs, the Silent Majority stood by their man and his Vietnamization plan. And political forces, including Watergate (the actual Watergate scandal, not All The President's Men or any other movie), brought about the end of Nixon and of the war.

In the current war, George W. Bush is standing firm and the Democrats can't get anti-war traction -- so the war goes on, despite the existence of V for Vendetta and Jarhead. What happens in Iraq is determined by Washington, not Hollywood. Apuzzo says, "We need stuff like The Passion, stuff like 300, Team America, whatever. Edgy, in your face films." Well, we've had those films; which battles did they win?

Culture works in mysterious ways, yet these guys constantly mistake it for a simple tool -- something like a sledgehammer for the soul. Still, if it keeps them busy...

ANOTHER REASON TO HATE THE OLE PERFESSER. Glenn Reynolds shore finds global warming a knee-slapper when Al Gore mentions it, but when a fellow nerd says we have to get to Mars in 46 years because the world is a-comin' to an end, the Perfesser grows credulous.

I think the Perfesser is secretly rooting for global warming to make the planet uninhabitable, so the technocrats he expects to be ruling the world in ten years will rocket him and all his nerd friends off to a cool outer-space vivarium, where he will enjoy the attentions of Montana Wildhack.

If that doesn't make my case, consider this:

YOU CAN HATE CROCS ALL YOU WANT, but they're damned comfortable, and they protect your toes in a way that sandals don't. That's why I like to wear 'em on dive boats.

Forget, if you can, that this is eerily close to Dan Ackroyd as Tom Snyder telling Mick Jagger on SNL, "I don't wear 'em 'cause they're ladies' things -- I wear 'em 'cause they're damn comfortable!" Surely you good people agree that any middle-aged man who wears crocs should be buried alive under a giant pile of fanny packs and cargo shorts.

BAD FAITH. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds opens Daniel Brook's The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, finds a passage about a gender studies major, and decides the book is about silly elitists being silly.

Like Reynolds, I haven't read the book, but I have a hunch it has more to do with the following:

"Consumer borrowing posted a hefty increase in May, reflecting the biggest jump in credit card debt in six months."

"Ratio of mortgage debt to housing value hits new record."

"According to the College Board, the volume of private loans taken by students has escalated by 27 percent annually since 2000-01, to a total now of $17.3 billion."

"Nearly half of all workers saving for retirement have savings that fall short of the $25,000 mark, according to the 2007 Retirement Confidence Survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Matthew Greenwald & Associates... A full 25 percent, meanwhile, said they had no savings at all - retirement or otherwise."

I could be wrong, though -- maybe it's all about a small group of wacky artistes who for some reason don't share their fellow citizens' economic confidence. But common sense is usually a reliable guide in these matters.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! Just when, under the numbing spell of his Target travelogues and widdle-girl colloquia, you forget what you had against James Lileks, he comes up with this:

But it was Friday. And that’s pizza night. So I went to the freezer and pulled out the Manhole of Promise, something I’d found at the grimy grocery store the other day: Geno’s East. I don’t want to get into pizza wars here... But for decades Geno’s has been the Ideal, the very definition of pizza. I had my first in 1975 when I visited a friend in Chicago. He was Italian, too, so he’d know about these things.

You blink and stir, roused by the apprehension that he isn't kidding, and then:

It took 50 minutes to cook. It had a pop-up timer. Assuming as we must the diminished standards that apply to the genre, I have to say: worthy of the name. I almost wept after the first bite -- a thick lake of sauce, aggressive sausage, perfect crust. I had a vision of myself weighing 300 pounds after a year-long diet consisting of nothing but three of these a day, fat and sweating and glistening with grease extruded through the pores, shunned by all except the dogs that gather to lick my fingers after I have finished with the first pass, and I thought: it would be worth it.

Good pizza.

The guy who doesn't think Harold Pinter is so great is having an orgasm over frozen pizza.

You can't reason with people like this. Best to pull out of Minnesota now and let their warring tribes (The tribe of Frozen Geno's East versus the tribe of Frozen Tree Tavern, perhaps) fight it out for supremacy.

UPDATE. Gavin at Sadly No says This Shall Not Stand.

SHORTER JAMES G. POULOS. Better people should starve than be helped by unbelievers, who annoy me terribly.

SOCIAL REALIST. I've said previously that I prefer artful documentaries like Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control to overtly propagandistic ones like An Inconvenient Truth. Some of my commenters in that instance made the sound point that there's a place for films that are in essence propaganda for under-acknowledged truths; my only answer to that was and is that whatever the social utility of such films may be, they don't serve the purpose of art. The preservation of the icecaps may take precedence over the preservation of aesthetic standards, but I like to think we can have both.

I think what Michael Moore does is sui generis and has aspects of both documentary forms. Clearly it's propaganda: Moore lets his opinions and prescriptions hang out. And he's not above pulling the gimp string to lead you to his conclusions. But he makes movies, not animated slide-shows. He talks causes, but he shows effects -- human effects that engage viewers on a level beyond the political.

Roger & Me, for example, is a great ground-level portrait of capitalism gone feral and the resulting disintegration of a community. The vignettes of depraved money-men and deprived citizens, and the gulf between them, comprised more than a object lesson; it was a story to break your heart. To say Moore's Flint, Michigan is a filmmaker's creation -- as much as was Capra's Bedford Falls and Pottersville -- is not to deny the reality of what happened there, but to acknowledge the success of Moore's art.

Up till SiCKO, I thought that Moore had been regressing a bit artistically. There's a lot to like in Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911, but the issues in each case are so large that the human consequences tend to get ground up by them. Even as I was moved by the anguish of Lila Lipscomb, and enraged by the obliviousness of Charlton Heston, I resented the use of them as ways of bringing it all back home, so to speak, at the climax of those films. It seemed to me as if American gun culture and the Iraq invasion needed so much explanation -- and they got compelling explanations in both cases -- that the people who suffered from them got short shrift. It was as if the scope of Moore's agenda interfered with his stories.

The American health care mess is another huge subject, and SiCKO takes the time to tell us what's wrong with it. But Moore has found an ingenious way to tell his story -- which turns out to be only coincidentally about health care.

There are the expected hard cases and historical background. We learn about people killed or doomed to poverty by our system, and the perverse financial incentives responsible. (And boy, just when you thought there wasn't anything more to hate about Nixon...)

But there aren't a lot of "gotcha" ambush moments. Instead, halfway through the film Moore seems to abandon the litany of despair to go to other countries where we meet people who are well-served by their systems, because their governments acknowledge that health care is a human right. And hearing their stories, and especially observing their lives outside the hospitals and clinics, we come to realize that health care is only part of the difference. What's remarkable (and sometimes infuriating) about these subjects' attitudes is that they take their superior care for granted. They expect more from their governments than we do -- and, the film implies, that's why they have it and we don't.

Even hostile reviewers seem to pick up on this. The claim by National Review's Rich Lowry that Moore is "the Riefenstahl of socialism" is hysterical but telling. Lowry is acknowledging the power of SiCKO's real story -- the story of a civilized world that, in some important ways, has left America behind, not by dint of socialism but by a different understanding of what the old Labourite Tony Benn calls by its right name: democracy.

SiCKO strikes me an inspired bit of Social Realism -- not my favorite genre (being an old-fashioned American, I prefer "me" stories to "we" stories) but at its best (Clifford Odets and Diego Rivera) it's got the force of true art. As to Moore's policy prescriptions, I leave it to him to defend them -- he clearly doesn't need anyone's help. But he did make a very good movie.

THE STUPIDEST THING EVER WRITTEN UNTIL JONAH GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE. Matthew Yglesias points out, rightly, that it was the actions of liberals, not of libertarians, that got the Civil Rights Act passed. Jonah Goldberg adjusts his toga and responds:

What's refreshing about this is that Yglesias is honestly and correctly admitting that liberals have no problem imposing their morality on others via a powerful and intrusive state. I wish that most liberals were as honest...

Liberals and progressives before them wrote the book on social engineering and even the most comstockish Republicans are pale imitators.

To restate, simply: Goldberg and his cheerleader Glenn Reynolds think that ensuring the voting rights of black people is "imposing morality," before which such conservative ideas as, say, making abortion and contraception illegal "pale" in comparison.

In the immortal words of Woody Allen, I don't think his spinal cord reaches his brain.

NEGROPHOBIA. NAACP invites Republicans to debate, only Tom Tancredo shows up. If they can't face down Tavis Smiley, how're they going to handle Osama?

OUR CHANGING WORLD.Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds on the firefighters who are fighting back against Giulianification:

RUDY GIULIANI: Not so much Swiftboated as Dan Rathered?

Between this and the silly stuff about Fred Thompson, Democrats are looking more nervous about 2008 than you'd expect.

A rightwing college perfesser denounces goddamn liberal firefighters! This is truly an age of marvels.

Neither the Perfesser nor his linkee indicates awareness that New York City firefighters do not need Hillary Clinton's help to hate the son of a bitch Giuliani. Background here and here.

Oh, and if anyone is prevaricating about the love of firefighters, it's Giuliani. As is so often the case, fluffers of conservative bully-boys grow most accusatory when they're chin-deep in their own bullshit.

Still, it is nice to see that just repeating the numbers "nine" and "eleven" won't get you into electoral heaven anymore -- not without a fight, anyway. And that's my positive thinking for the week! Enjoy the mood swing while it lasts!

THEY'RE KIND OF CUTE WHEN THEY'RE MAD, LIKE THAT LOLCAT THAT SEZ "GET OFF MY LAWN"! Dean Esmay pleads with readers to help stock his library of snappy comebacks to anti-war questions:

After five years of repeating these facts, I've completely lost patience with doing it yet again for friends like Ali. Would some kind soul please, please, PLEASE sign up for this wiki and provide the documentation so I don't have to do it yet again???

Because I have a life, and problems of my own, and I just can't make myself do it all yet again. For the umpteenth time.

You've swallowed a bunch of Americaphobic garbage, Ali. Saddam was not our guy. We did not arm him. He was not our tool or our puppet. We didn't give him tons of money. And if you show me one more time (as so many have) how Donald Rumsfeld shook Saddamn's hand on one occasion, I'll give you 50 of Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt shaking Stalin's hand.

Because we didn't have anything to do with Uncle Joe during the Second World War. It was like he never existed. We just woke up one morning and found a receipt for Eastern Europe. WTF?

I'm tired of having to answer the Americaphobes. I really am. My patience for it is at an end.

And yet he goes on writing! That shows dedication, or something.

HMMM, MAYBE I'LL GO SEE THAT MICHAEL MOORE MOVIE AFTER ALL. Andrew Stuttaford (usually described as "The Second-Least-Mad One" in National Review's publicity materials) quotes a tipster's news report that "almost one in ten patients in Scottish hospitals is suffering from an infection such as MRSA, a survey suggested yesterday." Stuttaford titles the post "Sicko" (get it?) and his correspondent says that the socialistic Scottish hospitals compare poorly on this score with those in a privatized hospital chain.

I have an even better idea. Let's compare the Scot Soc hospital to our own free-market germ centers:

Groundbreaking Report Shows Alarming MRSA Infection Rates At U.S. Hospitals...

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 25 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Consumers Union called on hospitals today to take more aggressive steps to protect patients from Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections in light of a new study showing that the superbug is much more common in hospitals than previous estimates had indicated. The consumer group also urged states to require hospitals to report their infection rates, including how many patients are acquiring MRSA during treatment.

(That's the differece between us and the Socialists, I guess: we hide, or don't trouble to find out, our MRSA infection rates -- which course of treatment, studies show, instills a feeling of security and well-being in our health-care industry.)

The report released by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) found that MRSA infections are 8.6 times more prevalent than previous estimates and that the antibiotic-resistant bacteria is found in all wards throughout most hospitals. The APIC study is the first nationwide analysis on the prevalence of MRSA in U.S. healthcare facilities. It is based on data collected from more than 1,200 hospitals in all 50 states...

Hospital-acquired infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus, or "staph," are among the most common and the problem is clearly growing. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 1974, only two percent of staph infections in health care settings were MRSA; by 1995, the percentage was 22 percent; and by 2004, nearly 63 percent of all staph infections in healthcare settings were MRSA...

Good thing Stuttaford didn't see this first, or he'd be telling us that MRSA is really no big deal and that anyone who tells you different is trying to scare you off capitalism.

AND HOW COULD I EVER REFUSE? I FEEL LIKE I WIN WHEN I LOSE. Like all culture warriors, Ross Douhat likes to bitch about smutty pop art ("the next thing you know Aniston is parading naked through the apartment, showing off her waxed . . . well, you know... I think we're crossing a pretty significant threshold with the waxing phenomenon"). But he also has the temperment of a consensus builder, and takes pains to find anti-waxing allies among liberals, as when he praises Thomas Frank and "a left-wing assault on thongs and other pieces of slut-wear."

Working the other side of the street, Douthat is slightly more interesting. To his rightwing brethren, he has even made the sensible suggestion that "cultural conservatives would do well to roll up their sleeves and start writing some entertaining television shows and movies and books of their own. People will watch them, read them, love them, be changed by them..."

Alas, perhaps sensing that such an outcome is unlikely -- at least until the AEI starts giving grants to stand-up comics and playwrights -- Douthat devotes most of his choir-preaching to celebrating signs that the filthy-dirty culture yet contains nuggets of conservative truth, as when he posited "Sex & The City" as a testimony to "the resilience of poor battered old heterosexual monogamy." (One wonders how this revelation would impact Sex & The City tourism. Not much, I expect.)

This is Douthat's approach in his recent essay for the religious-conservative First Things. Rather than summon the faithful to develop conservative cable-TV shows, he tells his readers, first, to admit defeat in the small battle over nudity and obscenity:

Today those battles are all but finished, and the religious side has lost...

The result is the unrestrained and unrestrainable popular culture of today, where every concept, no matter how lowbrow or how vile, can find a platform and an audience...

Small wonder that America’s movies and music and television shows make us enemies in traditional societies around the world—and small wonder, too, that many cultural conservatives, despairing of their country’s future, embrace withdrawal from the world into a narrow, well-defended Christendom, where their families and their faith can be protected from the lowest-common-denominator swill that washes against the walls outside.

But hold, hold, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, for even among the swears and tits Douthat knows that his Redeemer liveth:

For all its profanity and blasphemy, the new culture arguably takes religious issues and debates more seriously than it used to in a more decent, less decadent era...

True, God has to compete with Paris Hilton and Family Guy for attention. But at least He’s in there fighting.

Thence comes -- along with citations of Samuel Huntington and the Holy Bible -- a rundown of TV shows that Douthat expects to please his co-religionists because they are, in his estimation, morally tethered. For example:

The Sopranos dares instead to explore the terrible banality of evil, depicting ordinary people held prisoner by their habits and appetites who choose hell instead of heaven over and over again, not with a satanic flourish but with an all-American sense of entitlement... The show offers a vision of hell as repetition, ultimately, in which the same pattern of choices (to take drugs, to eat and drink to excess, to rob and steal and bully and murder) always reasserts itself, and the chain mail of damnation—in which no sin is an island, and gluttony is linked to violence, sloth to greed, and so on—slowly forges itself around the characters’ souls...

As far as it goes, this analysis is not objectionable. But why, despite Douthat's use of loaded terms such as "heaven," "hell," and "satanic" (why the small "s"? Doesn't Douthat believe in Satan?), could it not be shared by someone who doesn't go to church, but still believes in right and wrong? What makes it an argument against a John Edwards Presidency -- or anyone else's? What is "The Sopranos" position on abortion, evolution, gay marriage, or anything else that interests the readership of First Things?

I should be giving Douthat consensus-building credit for expanding the definition of "cultural conservatives" to mean "everyone who likes popular TV shows." Only I expect that Douthat has it backwards -- that he takes "everyone who likes popular TV shows" to be "cultural conservatives," and that he also believes that these shows are part of Divine guidance toward a new Great Awakening.

As I have repeated unto tedium, the problem with ideologues who engage the arts is that they do not know what art is. They're like the Six Blind Men of Hindustan: they "see" it as a hammer for smashing their enemies, a barometer for judging the political climate, etc., and their interpretive ecstasies prevent them from appreciating its simple and essential blessings.

RIGHTWING-NUT-READING-POLITICS-INTO-STUPID-MOVIES OF THE DAY. Lisa Schiffren:

The struggle between good and evil, freedom and enslavement is, of course, an eternal literary theme. Still, one can't help but notice the astonishing manner in which Gordon Brown has taken a page directly from Harry Potter — and the just released film of Book Seven, at that. Specifically, Brown's strong desire not to call Islamic terrorism by name echoes the insistence of the head of the Wizard government, the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge — to refer to their mortal enemy, Voldemort, as "he who must not be named." So, even greater kudos to J.K. Rowling, who understood back in the 90's that the world's youth needed a rousing tale of heroism in the face of evil...

Schiffren, it should be noted, is also the author of this classic 2003 article about Commander Flightsuit subtitled, "Women voters agree: President Bush is a hottie!" In other words, she is stupid for a living.

RAISING THE LEVEL AND TENOR OF DEBATE. The great minds at National Review's The Corner agree: gay people are teh gay. On the Democrats' upcoming GLBT debate, Lisa Schiffren observes that not all of the Party's constituents are down with the gay agenda, and then, seemingly unable to control herself, female-ejaculates: "How do you keep the coalition together when it gets this personal and icky?" One imagines she does not find, say, conflicts over nuclear energy policy "icky," unless the protons are having sex with other protons.

With two (count 'em two) posts Jonah Goldberg outdoes Schiffren, himself, and a think tank working tirelessly for years to develop a new kind of stupid.

First, Goldberg the Political Strategerist:

Whatever the merits of such a debate, isn't the rational hope of every partisan Republican that the candidates pander relentlessly to the audience. If they pander the way they did by at the black debate, there are going to be some precious soundbites left for the general election.

Yeah, folks are already up in arms that the Democrats were nice to black people, and if we get soundbites of them being nice to gay people, that'd be almost as sweet as chock-o-mut ice creams. Maybe one of the gay people should be Muslim! Is Donald Segretti still alive?

Next, Goldberg the Just Plain Asshole:

Not that I'm endorsing it, but how long until some blogger photoshops the Dem candidates into the guys from the Village People? I say it happens by lunchtime, if it hasn't already.

I wonder if, when he sees this sort of thing, William Buckley sighs and thinks of nights at Bohemian Grove with Malcolm Forbes.

UPDATE. Mark Noonan of Blogs for Bush cues the scary music: this debate is all about Dem lust for Chelsea Gold ("greed for the large amounts of ready cash the gay community can dispense for political campaigns"). In a surprising twist, Noonan offers manly man-love to the gay voter:

For my fellow Americans who are gay -- I just advise you how Bill Clinton treated your cause in 1993 after you went flat out for him in 1992. You will be betrayed again, if you are fool enough to back Democrats in 2008. True, we conservative Christians might not seem the logical home for you, but you do know where we stand, we are ready to compromise and we will never, ever betray you. You might want to think about that as you watch the debate, and make your donation and voting choices.

So here's the deal, faggots: you vote Republican, and in return we agree to stun you with a sharp blow to the head before throwing you on the bonfire. You know we're good for it -- whenever we screamed "DIE HOMO" at you, we were always 100% sincere.

NEXT WEEK: THAT JACOBIN BASTARD JEFFERSON AND HIS SO-CALLED "RIGHTS." I see Pejman Yousefzadeh, like many another rightwing idiot in recent days, has become suddenly outraged by that bastard FDR. (Thanks to John Holbo for the tip.) Yousefzadeh's commenters have leapt in, full of Bircher brio ("Roosevelt was good at one thing, political machinations, aided by no limitation on ethics... even before Yalta..."); soon I'm sure the forum will resemble one of those Free Republic President's Day threads where Southrons and other assorted loons traditionally assail that bastard Lincoln.

My instincts tell me that this whole Roosevelt thing has been in the rightwing propaganda pipeline for some time -- that the plan was to start circulating a demonic vision of FDR as soon as there weren't enough Greatest Generation types left alive to refute it, thus removing one more cultural impediment to the corporate glibertarian paradise toward which all their labors are devoted.

But it is surely a tribute to the comic timing of the Universe that this meme was released just as Americans were starting to drift left on social issues, thanks to Republican incompetence. One can only imagine the reaction of citizens who -- having witnessed the unpleasant result of untrammelled conservative approaches to natural disaster, war, and social resources -- open their paper to find the same numbskulls who prescribed that poison medicine now declaring, "You know what was a bad idea? Social Security!"

BTW, I see another homo-hatin', childbirth-forcin', Republican cracker asshole has been caught with prostitutes. O Life Force, keep them cosmic jokes a-comin'!

DREAM FACTORY. I see Reihan Salam has amplified the old "More bad Muslims in thrillers" demand, waving The Sum of All Fears as his bloody shirt. It seems to escape the notice of such people that Hollywood is not a branch of the Federal Government.

No one has been able to explain to my satisfaction why the vast wealth of rightwing moguls cannot address what they imagine to be a crying national need. If Reverend Moon is still averse to moviemaking after Inchon, so much the worse for him. Let the folks who raised $360 million for Bush in 2004 dig a little deeper and finance the movies they want other people to make. Sam Goldwyn used to sell gloves, for crying out loud.

Whatever became of personal responsibility?

UPDATE. I see that Michael Fumento visited World O' Crap and suggested that WOC proprietor Scott, I, and a bunch of others who found him ridiculous "all split a gut laughing when those Twin Towers fell." No, asshole, as a New Yorker I did not find the slaughter of thousands of my fellow citizens humorous. And at first I treated ghouls such as yourself who battened on their deaths as objects of horror. But after a few years I learned to take you less seriously. How long can a man scream epithets in a cemetery before he loses the status of outrage and devolves into a figure of fun?

SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR POPCORN. Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias have already addressed this latest call for "Hollywood" to make propaganda movies for the War on Whatchamacallit. I feel obliged to add that author Michael Fumento is hardly the first conservative to make such demands. And this bit from Fumento's article helps demonstrate the central fallacy of their reasoning:

If I'm mistaken and there have been movies in which Islamists where the bad guys, please let me know. (If so, I'll bet they went straight to video.)

Maybe Fumento believes there's a Hollywood Central Committee that sends all anti-Islamist films straight to video. In real life, films bypass theatrical release when they can't find the backing for it. People who put movies on screens expect to see a return on their investment.

If the wisdom of the marketplace means anything to conservatives -- and they constantly tell us that it does -- you'd think they'd understand that an absence of war propaganda films indicates that few people wish to bet money on them. Fumento notes that "Hollywood went to war" in the Forties, but that was a time of greater centralization in all areas of American life, with the government at the apex -- not generally a conservative idea of Utopia. Would Fumento enjoy a new Office of War Information with a Bureau of Motion Pictures -- or a new version of the Creel Committee of World War I? Not with a Democratic Administration in office, I'll bet.

So, instead of government-issue rah-rah, we get movies based on Disneyland rides and Hasbro toys. That's capitalism, comrade. If you want Fallujah Diary, get Rupert Murdoch or Richard Mellon Scaife to finance it for you.

SHORTER BEN STEIN: George W. Bush may be a friendless failure, but you have to admit that he helped his buddy evade justice.

(Lots of howlers in this piece of shit -- for a good refutation of Stein's absurd portrayal of the Libby case, see here -- but I especially love this part: "In a simple phrase, once again, [Bush] did the right thing regardless of cost." That "cost," as it always is with Bush, being zero.)

THE FUTURE OF GIULIANI MARKETING. Though they forgot to mention what a great husband and father he is.

SPEAKING OF KULTUR KOPS: "Less than a month after the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts is opening a new exhibit on Frida Kahlo. She was, of course, an unrepentant Stalinist... This isn't an art exhibit -- it's a shrine, to a woman in the thrall of a murderous ideology."

This latest hackwork is by National Review's John J. Miller, author of "The Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: for these loathsome people, there is no art -- only propaganda they haven't spun yet.