LOCAL ARTS REPORT. At the New Yorker, James Surowiecki mulls the effect of high rents and prices on the cultural capital of New York, and comes down on the optimistic side:

Currid’s desire to subsidize creativity is understandable, but her insistence that the culture industry is on the verge of crisis is refuted by her own work. Unless you think that network effects in the art-and-culture business are suddenly going to stop mattering, creative people are still going to find ways to make a living here, because they must, in order to succeed. And, empirically, if you look at the history of New York in the twentieth century there is little evidence that a more expensive New York is a less creative New York. To be sure, there was a tremendous artistic efflorescence in the nineteen-seventies, the worst decade of the century for the New York economy. But, in the twenties and the sixties, cultural booms coincided with economic ones, while the explosion in the number of art galleries, bands, and boutiques in the past decade makes it hard to believe that New York is suffering from too little art and culture. It’s true that clusters of industry can fade away—think of what happened to Pittsburgh steel. But New York has been a cultural mecca in good times and bad, and until we hear otherwise it seems likely that the pilgrims will just keep coming.

I take his points, but "the explosion in the number of art galleries, bands, and boutiques in the past decade" is a little misleading. Certainly there are a lot of galleries, but what's the barrier to entry for young, un-networked artists of the sort who stormed the citadels in the East Village of the 80s? There may be plenty of bands, but the number of entry-level Manhattan clubs seems stuck on repeat, with no physical cluster that I know of evolving into a vital scene.

And "boutiques"? That's a weird but telling inclusion, suggesting that in search of a "rule of three" capstone Surowiecki had to go to the commercial arts, which, as I have suggested, is the predominant mode for arts in the City anymore.

In the arts, as in everything else, New York is heedlessly feeding on its seed corn. Big, bright entertainments swell our coffers, but the cost of living makes it ridiculously hard to launch a dance troupe, a theatre company, or any other group endeavor without a huge investment behind it. We can't keep the balloon aloft indefinitely with prestige productions at the American Airlines Theatre. How long can you expect the ambition of newbies to survive on ancient glamor? How long before the artistic capital flows somewhere else?

Here's a useful counterpoint at Broadway & Me (h/t James Wolcott), about the insane price of Broadway tickets in general and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein in particular:

And it's part of an alarming trend that is turning the cultural world of New York into a gated community. As a kid, poor but culture-crazed, I used to stroll into the Met or MOMA on Sunday afternoons and wander their corridors without paying a cent. Those museums now say that you only have to pay what you wish but the big signs over their ticket booths say you should pay $20 and I can't imagine my younger self daring to walk by them. During one spring college break back in the '70s, I saw seven Broadway shows for $100 bucks. If the price of a single ticket back then had been $100, I wouldn't even have thought of going to one show. And that's the problem. Those of us who love theater want everyone, maybe especially poor theater-crazed kids, to think of theater and art and music as something that is for them.

...In his column last week, New York Post columnist Michael Riedel wrote about how [Mel] Brooks had resigned from the Dramatists Guild rather than pay the 3% of his royalties that all members are assessed (click here to read it). When Brooks brought The Producers to Broadway in 2001, he was hailed as its savior, someone who was leading the musical comedy into a new golden era, who was, as a lyric from the show put it, The King of Old Broadway. As my grandma used to say, you've got to be careful what you wish for.

OKAY -- SO I AIN'T EDUCATED. As Jeff Goldstein is apparently deep into one of those frequent cataleptic trances from which he only emerges to cadge spare change, the Protein Wisdom second stringers try their hand at semioticking. Dan Collins:

Frank Rich: Suicide Is Not Painless

Well, at least the Times are speaking to something they know. Of course, such a thing could never have happened [Vince Foster] under an administration as clean as the Clintons’ [Vince Foster].

The Frank Rich piece is one of his good ones, in which he reports on U.S. servicemembers who felt badly enough about the Iraq boondoggle in which they were enmeshed to kill themselves. One of them left a long note detailing his unbearable situation. Foster, you may recall, left a note naming the Wall Street Journal nuts who hounded him, and who kept up their hounding even after his death. There is surely some semiotextual dimension to this comparison that I cannot grasp.

Darleen Click seems to think that liberals (also known by our dream name, "schools") are hypocrites because they support birth control for pre-teens but do not support seven-year-olds drawing stick figures with guns. I believe our true position is clear and consistent.

The rest of the page at this writing is completely incomprehensible (which may owe to my lack of grad school training) except for this, which appears to suggest that Randi Rhodes is a fun date.

THE STEYN GAME: EVERYONE'S A WINNER! Mark Steyn has proof that Montreal and great European cities are in a death spiral: the citizens are having a wonderful time.

John O'Sullivan and I occasionally discussed Montreal, and he observed that a big-city heritage without big-city overcrowding can be very pleasant: You've still got all the art galleries and symphony orchestras and so on. You've got tickets for Pavarotti at the Place des Arts. Curtain up, 7.30pm. So you leave at 7.20, park outside the front steps and stroll in. As John put it, societies in the early stages of decline can be very agreeable - and often more agreeable than societries trying to cope with prosperity and rapid growth.

Which brings me to my usual everything-comes-back-to-demography shtick. Precisely because the first stages of decline are so agreeable, it's very hard to accept it as such. Part of the problem in Europe is that, when chaps like yours truly shriek "Run for your lives! The powder keg's about to go up!", etc, the bon vivant enjoying his Dubonnet at the sidewalk cafe thinks: Are you crazy? Life's never been better. Civilized decline can be so charming you don't notice it's about to accelerate into uncivilized decline.

You have to remember that Steyn and his fellow NRO lunatics operate out of, and often vacation in, great cities which are thought by the yokels to whom they peddle this nonsense to be citadels and vice and corruption. Some of these yokels may wonder why Jonah Goldberg, Steyn et alia don't relocate to, or at least spend long weekends in, Fritters, Alabama, and other conservative redoubts. The NROniks couldn't very well tell them that they actually prefer New York or Paris to Fritters, so every now and then they write something like this Goldberg complaint that Burlington, Vermont is full of people who don't like Bush, which presumably spoiled for him the many fine Burlington restaurants through which he no doubt burned a path.

Thus the readers thank the Lord they don't have any contact with these Sodoms, and the writers get to live, work, and play in them. Everyone's a winner!

COME-TO-JESUS MOMENT. Giuliani apparently got through the Value Voters Summit unscathed. His boldest move was to associate tolerance with Jesus Christ ("Christianity is all about inclusiveness. It’s built around the most profound act of love in human history, isn’t it?"), but he made sure to give zero-tolerance its due: he announced to cheers that he had removed pornography from Times Square, and agreed with them that their "values are under assault by a culture that is moving in the wrong direction.” He also pointed out that the New York Times hates him, and that people "stared" at him when he made the sign of the cross at NYU Law School. Having the right enemies is as important to this crowd as anything else.

He may have this thing finessed. His Texas operative, Governor Rick Perry, is telling the folks back home that Giuliani will pack the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has announced that Giuliani will support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. That the candidate himself is more muted on these issues may not matter to evangelical leaders. They know he'll do anything for power, and as they consider themselves an important force in the Party, they may internalize the obvious message: you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Out in the holler, Cletus and Brandine may not get it, but once the word goes out among the preachers and the ward-heelers, they can be brought into line.

END OF THE LINE. Dean Esmay* spreads the good news: electricity up in Iraq --

Little noticed this month was the news that Iraq's electricity production has set a new all-time high in September of around 6,860 MW, including 2,000 MW or more of non-public generation (p40), illegal under Saddam (because like any good national socialist despot, he outlawed private generators). Oil revenue also set a new record of $3.79 billion (p39).

Sounds like paradise. Of course, it's a matter of perspective -- the Detroit Free Press reports:

Four and a half years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it's never certain when the power will arrive, just that one electrified hour will come in the morning, another at night. U.S. reconstruction officials say that on average, electricity is available 10 hours a day, but Akhbal, 48, doesn't know anyone who gets close to that much.

Before the war, Baghdad residents got 16 to 24 hours of power a day, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington research center. Brookings said that in September residents got 7.6 hours...

City blocks often have two or three small operators running generators that power dozens of homes and shops for a few hours a day. Hundreds of multicolored wires from the generators to customers are lashed haphazardly to every available pole and sometimes even trees.

Well, private generators, that's good, right? Magic of the market and all that, especially compared to Saddam's socialist power plan. The Iraq authorities intend to privatize everything, and that will lead to Vegas-bright lights to Mesopotamia soon enough.

Don't be so sure. Iraq gets nine percent of its juice from Turkey -- whose power people indicate they will cut the flow if their government sends troops into Northern Iraq to fight Kurdish terrorists. Still, not to worry -- more electricity is coming via business interests headquartered with our traditional allies, China and Iran.

U.S. authorities still speculate Baghdad will have full power by 2013. This hardly seems an educated guess, given that the presumed sources of energy are as jerry-rigged as the city's private generators.

Meanwhile it seems Iraq's best power consumers are getting all they need, as war fan Matt Sanchez reports:

FOB Sedgwick, in the middle of nowhere and not far from the Syrian border, had running water, electricity, a gym, air-conditioned housing and enough bandwidth to run an encrypted computer network and phone system.

Our troops, I assert patriotically, deserve all this and more. I do spare a thought for the locals, though, who seem to be at the end of a very long line for basic services.

*UPDATE. By which I of course mean Dave Price by way of Dean Esmay -- thanks to Martin Wisse for the clarification.

COLD SHOWERS FOR EVERYBODY! It's Friday -- and at National Review Online, you know what that means: time for sex hatred! The surprising dud in the bunch is Jonah Goldberg, who emits one of those No Guardrails thumbsuckers about how Madonna and Pamela Anderson (!) are turning girls into prostitutes with the help of the Democratic Party. He even writes "What matters is the signal such people send." As usual with Goldberg, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

The hapless K.-Lo. fares little better, submitting what seems to be a synopsis of a botched interview -- maybe the Margarita Hut had a generous buy-back policy -- with the authoress of a book called Girl Gone Mild: Fashionably Long, Overexplanatory Subtitle. From the precis, we may judge that insofar as the book has a point (besides serving as a rightwing front-group party favor), it is that some young women will not wear thongs, dammit, despite what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi may think. "Today, more and more sensible young women are bridling when they hear 'bitches' and 'hos' on the radio," she writes. Very good! How do they react when they hear "bear my baby whether you want to or not, subhuman?"

As often happens in these dimwit competitions, the prize goes to a newbie: legacy pledge Ryan T. Anderson, "an assistant editor at First Things," who says that a skit the Princeton frosh are required to attend "amounts to little more than mandated indoctrination in liberal sexual ideology." Anderson fails to describe the "Sex on a Saturday Night" sketch, so I had to go read another rightwing kid's review, and even through that cloudy prism could see that the skit is a typical bit of agitprop telling the youngsters that date rape is bad. Does Anderson have a different POV? No, he says:

You can tell incoming freshmen that date-rape and other sexual assaults are illegal without subjecting them to an hour of sexual skits, innuendo, “coming-out” scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through.

I hear ya, kid. Similarly, Crest toothpaste didn't have to sell its product by putting commercials on "Will & Grace." They could have just told people how darned good for them Crest was. Turns out people prefer their selling messages to come with racy humor. Who knew?

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable."

One always hears this from young conservatives who were subjected to just such allegedly soul-crushing mockery (Anderson is a Princeton grad), yet somehow managed to retain their contrary opinions into adulthood. How did Anderson do it? Maybe he passed long nights POW-style in his dormitory cell, scratching "God and Man at Yale" on the wall with a piece of purloined charcoal. In any case, is it true the overwhelming majority of students helplessly adopt every piece of nonsense their professors put in their heads? Because if so, I'm going back to college, and looking for a teaching job at an all-girls' school.

BEYOND DEMOCRACY. Umpteen-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters tells us Pakistan proves that most military coups are A-OK, especially as compared to the vile alternative, democracy.

Aficionados of the General's prose will appreciate his opening:

WE simplify the problems of others. It's bad enough when we do it to family and friends, but it can be fatal when we simplify the problems of the developing world.

"Bad enough" to simplify the problems of family and friends! We're in for some very tough love.

The generally accepted line is that all civilian leaders are good, while military coups are always bad. Like most such generalities, it's often wrong.

Our prejudice is on display again as Benazir Bhutto, a feudal landlord posing as a democrat, returns to Pakistan.
In the West, Bhutto is popular because she's a civilian - and that's about it. Her champions merrily overlook the pestilential corruption, social polarization and pandering to extremists that marked her two terms as prime minister.

We and the General have come a long way since he likened the newly-democratized citizens of Iraq to a "kid" who had to "ride the damned bike" of democracy "and fall down a couple of times" without too much U.S. interference, lest we become an "overly protective parent." Now the citizens of Pakistan, who saw a great deal more of the bike before Musharraf put it away than have the Iraqis, cannot even be allowed the presence in their government of a former elected leader. For one thing, she has too much "charisma":

Charisma will always be with us. It's human nature to be drawn to a dramatic speaker who struts artfully upon the political stage, telling us that all of our problems are the fault of others and that, if he receives our vote, we'll all soon live in paradise.

To be fair, the General is prepared to let politicians strut, if not caper nor gambol, in the U.S., where "checks and balances... restrain the worst men who reach the White House." And he is willing to admit that "Most coup-makers then botch the job of governing," but adds, "just as the civilians they overthrew failed before them," in case we were warming toward the idea of elective representation.

Feeling his point made, the General ends with a grand speculative leap:

Given the inability of non-Western societies to build effective government institutions, it may be time to rethink our faith in the state itself as the answer to their needs.

I can't wait for the follow-up. What will replace the state? Surely not the United Nations. Maybe Blackwater, but the General hates them. I guess that leaves space aliens or, more likely, an international brotherhood of military dictators who will erase all meaningless boundaries and continent-hop with arms and instruments of torture, ready to do the business of pacification that feeble politicians messed up in that poorly-remembered age when democracy was thought to be on the march.

I do hope the General will revisit the subject now that Bhutto's return has inspired a deadly public attack. Amateurs! he must be thinking. A few well-trained snipers could have done the job much better.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM. Oh Jesus: the Ole Perfesser thinks he's found video evidence against the evil MSM -- in a clip from Fox fucking News. Text is dismissive of the First Amendment and quotes a reader: "Maybe the media is just trying to make normal people understand how the Haditha Marines feel?"

This goes way beyond the normal COINTELPRO. It's like they used a Klan rally to discredit the SNCC. It's like they used Michelle Malkin to show that the liberal media is against SCHIP. It's...

Shit, I got nothing. Normally when they assault common sense, I can shake off the sting quickly enough to describe it, but I have to admit it will take me a while to adjust to this latest and most spectacular unreason. They have created a perfectly closed system, in which their operatives create outrages under their own aegis and then blame them on their opponents. 2 + 2 = 5 is easy to dispute, but 2 + 2 = 5 and How Dare You Say So outdoes Orwell. I once observed that they treat 1984 as an instruction manual, but I have to admit this latest improvement strains my rhetorical abilities. I'd like to think it's a fluke, but their recent desperation suggests otherwise. Maybe it's time to take up semiotics -- but that way madness lies. So I'll stick with garden-variety logic until something better comes along. I welcome your suggestions.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG. Because why? Because.

Really, that's it. Goldberg's anti-abortion essay is, as usual with him, the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

The "reasonable doubt" bit is my favorite. Leave it to Goldberg to compare the uterus to a gas chamber. But of course the women who would be forced to carry Goldberg's exonerated fetuses to term have only a mechanical function in his imagination. If pro-life panderers "just don't seem as bad" to him as pro-choice ones, it's because he's convinced that with the former no one gets hurt. Those apertures who enable his fantasies just don't count.

Bonus fun in the Goldberg's self-congratulation in The Corner:

The conventional wisdom is that being pro-life requires dogmatism and certainty. I don't think that's the case. At least not any more than being pro-choice requires dogmatism and certainty. Rather than analyze and dissect this point — i.e. tell — I thought it would be more honest to simply explain where I'm coming from, i.e. show.

There is something almost touching about this. First, he implies that he could offer a "very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care" if he wanted to. He seems to think his dreary article is some sort of tone-poem expressive of his deep, personal reaction to the subject. Maybe he put on Coldplay and drank half a Zima whilst he composed it. "This is it," we may imagine him whispering to himself, "This is the one I'll be remembered for..."

I'd feel sorry for them if they weren't fucking up our country so badly.

SURROUNDED BY ENEMIES. The Ole Perfesser:

READER PAUL STINCHFIELD WRITES that he's unhappy PC Magazine's list of their 100 favorite blogs includes only political blogs that lean left. Well, he's right unless you count Drudge as a blog (Drudge doesn't) but the PC Mag folks say the list is subjective, and a list of favorites can't be wrong, so long as those blogs really are their favorites. I guess it just tells us where they stand politically.

But hey, it's "PC" Magazine, right?

What a strange, passive-aggressive sentiment. First, the only straight-up liberal politics blogs on the list are Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and (I suppose) Wonkette. Drudge is accompanied on the list by Perfesser fave Buzz Machine, which, like many of the named sites, treats new tech, but also lards in plenty of conservative political ramblings. Not much of an edge there.

There are a few environmental blogs listed, and one of them has at this writing a picture of Al Gore without devil horns photoshopped on his head. Also one of them is about black people. Secret-agenda wise, maybe you could read those in. Overwhelmingly, though, the list is all geekery and screen-sports for young urbanites with disposable income: meta-comics, gizmos, restaurant reviews, fashion and entertainment snark.

Maybe the thinking here is that any blog not overtly conservative is liberal. Rightwing blogs of the sort the Perfesser favors increasingly take the default position that liberals are "Americaphobes," the New York Times is a treason mill, and America is not fighting enough wars. If you subscribe to this dire worldview, you may well believe that bloggers who prefer to engage in fun and games instead of continually sounding the tocsin against leftist perfidy are, in the time-honored phrase, not with you but against you.

As I have observed before, for these people the personal is indeed the political. I wonder why they didn't choose to flip it around, though? Why not claim the tech blogs are conservative, since progress is good and all good things are conservative? Comics blogs could be conservative too, since comics are fun and conservatives are all about fun. Come on, fellas. It's not like this sort of thing hasn't been done

Maybe they aren't feeling as confident as they once did, for some reason.

NO JOB TOO LOW FOR THE KULTURE KOPS. S.T. Karnick, culture scold frequently employed by National Review and occasionally treated here, has his own blog. Despite stiff competition, it may be the most pathetic culture-war specimen in Christendom. While Libertas, for example, occasionally leavens its ravings against godless Hollyweird with useful information about the filmmaking business, Karnick's blog merely judges crappy pop art by the standards of your crabby grandmother: that is, he finds most current TV shows too "gloomy," which he seems to consider a moral failing.

Sometimes he is more ambitious and hilarious. Another of his tropes is "the feminization of the American male," which he finds everywhere, including -- get this -- the Disney boob-baiter The Game Plan starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Quoth Karnick:

The earnest aspect of this film is actually quite interesting and perhaps rather surprising, as it is actually part of the trend of feminization of the American male noted on this site last week. Unlike the similar 2005 film The Pacifier, a delightful comedy in which Vin Diesel plays a superspy action hero who changes a family of spoiled suburban kids (for the better) much more than they change him, in The Game Plan the hypermuscular former wrestler known as The Rock is subjected to a cultural reeducation into the superiority of femininity.

Johnson's character, Joe Kingman, is initially narcissistic, arrogant, egotistical, and selfish both on the field and off. Only after dancing in a ballet and being reeducated by his eight-year-old daughter, his sister-in-law, and the daughter’s dance teacher does he finally win a Super Bowl ring.

In today’s culture, women even make the best football coaches.

The filmmakers make it all as convincing as possible, and as noted earlier the movie is fun to watch, but it is definitely weird to see The Rock crumble in this way. Still, I suspect audiences will enjoy it and it will continue to do well at the box office.

And they will surely assimilate the message without realizing it.

[cue sinister homosexual music, and Roy's annoying redneck caricature] Citizens! Does y'all smell what The Rock is cookin'? Faggification, thass what! Whoever heard of a football player takin' ballet, 'ceptin in real life which don't count! Shoot! Gittin' so's yuh cain't even count on rasslin' stars! I reckoned The Rock were the new Haystacks Calhoun, but he more like a Gorgeous George! Hoo-ey! I'ma get my entertainment from reg'lar fellas like that Tom Cruise fum now on!

Please, folks, don't ever tell Karnick about Sitting Pretty, the 1948 comedy in which Clifton Webb's Mr. Belvedere sissified an entire red-blooded American family ("And chew each mouthful 27 times!"). He'll work a brand-new theory of boomer decadence out of it.

MORE DEEP THOUGHTS. Jonah Goldberg loves the World War III fantasy game too much to quit:

One common — and absolutely correct — response to the suggestion that we should have taken care of the Soviets in 1946 is that we couldn't because the American people were too exhausted from the war. That's true, but it leaves out an important point. The American people were also exhausted by the New Deal, which had kept the American public in a de facto state of war for nearly an entire decade before the real war even started. The relentless exhortations, the scarcity, the propaganda: these things began long, long, before Pearl Harbor and even before Roosevelt was promising voters he would keep America out of another European war.

That bastard FDR! Too bad we can't send Fred Thompson back in Goldberg's time machine to show Americans what real leadership looks like.

Goldberg is clearly trending John Birch. It's only a matter of time before he starts alerting us to the pernicious effects of fluoridated water.

MORE WARGAMES. On the bad decision not to follow World War II immediately with World War III (the hot kind, not the Norman Podhoretz kind): Jonah Goldberg can't let it alone --

Imagine if we could go back in a time machine and explain to Ike & Co. the consequences of containment: The mountains of corpses, the trillions of dollars, the gulags, killing fields, the military industrial complex, the balance of terror. Does it seem unreasonable to think that maybe Ike & Co. might have concluded that a bit more rollback or, conversely, a bit more diplomacy in 1953 (as Churchill recommended) might be the wiser course?

Why stop with a time machine? Why doesn't Goldberg imagine himself, not only transported back to the dawn of the Iron Curtain, but also equipped with superpowers? Then he could beat up Stalin, and wear a fancy costume.

Alas, Goldberg wavers toward the end:

Here's where I am coming from. I think the best possible policy toward Red China is regime change. Ditto North Korea. Ditto Iran. But, right now, the costs are just way too high to even consider forcibly removing those regimes.

I would speculate that, somewhere on the time-space continuum, conservative pundit 3Xreagan665a is bitterly denouncing Goldberg's shortsightedness. But this would assume that we have a future.

UPDATE. Commenter John Emerson breaks the code: Eisenhower was a commie! There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.

IT'S NOT PERSONAL, IT'S JUST BUSINESS. Tigerhawk thinks the quote from Monty Burns on the Lawyers, Guns & Money masthead is a blasphemy against the sacred tribe known as businessmen:

In the entertainment industry's conception of business success you often see this sort of idiocy -- bad guy businessmen are a staple of prime time television -- but then the entertainment industry is famously left wing.

Yeah. No one ever heard of a greedy businessman before Jane Fonda and the Viet Cong took over Hollywood.

Avarice has been a staple of comedy from the days of Plautus, and when a business class began to emerge in the West, writers such as Ben Jonson and Moliere saw no reason to exempt them from portrayals of greed and prevarication -- after all, they were after money, weren't they? By the time Mark Twain got around to lampooning shysters and Gilded Age grifters, the criminal possibilities of "legitimate" business were already well-established subjects of mockery.

This may be news to Tigerhawk, who in the comments can only trace the lineage of this trope back to "The evil business man, from the nefarious banker in 'It's a Wonderful Life' to J.R. Ewing to some virtually every other episode of 'Boston Legal'..." (That hippie bastard Frank Capra!)

The state of arts education in this country is truly pathetic. And some of our fellow-citizens understand human nature still less than that. Tigerhawk says that "the vast majority of people I know [in business] think deeply about the rights and wrongs of the tough decisions they have to make literally every day." Yeah. Maybe after a massive layoff or offshore move, a CEO will think about its impact on his (former) employees -- preferably while he's helping his Communications Director draft a statement about it, so that his feelings of sorrow might seep evocatively into the prose, and convince the business press and company officers that he has "agonized" -- a cleansing ritual that gestures respect for the old moral codes. Then it's porterhouse at Ruth's Chris, baby! Because old what's-his-name's loss, and that of all the other what's-his-nameses, is the company's gain, which is why the deed was done. Because businesses don't thrive on random acts of kindness nor on Christian love -- they thrive on profits and growth. If it can be done the easy way, well and good. If not -- (traditional guttural sound accompanying the slow drawing of one's finger across one's neck)

If "thinking deeply" were all you needed to be a decent human being, this world would be a fucking paradise.

These facts are so stunningly obvious to those of us who have been alive more than a couple of seasons, you'd think even a rightwing blogger would know them.

LIBERTARIANISM EXPLAINED. "I've always wondered why someone doesn't buy cheap wood furniture and glassware by the cargo container, rent out safety outfits, and let people whack the hell out of stuff with big hammers."

Have you been reading Megan McArdle lately? There's a lot of stuff like this. It may be time to subject her blog to the Old Grey Perfesser Test, starting from the bottom of the current page:

09 October 2007 9:10 am: Reporters shouldn't go on junkets. They might see something that will change their minds.

09 Oct 2007 09:40 am: Bryan Kaplan calls out critics of multiculturalism, and I agree: liberals who do not approve of the status of blacks, women, and gays in that period before the 1960s known as the Victorian era are very silly.

09 Oct 2007 01:32 pm: Here's a cool oddity!

09 Oct 2007 03:58 pm: I don't like to pick fruit! What's wrong with people!

09 Oct 2007 05:12 pm: I understand conservatives are harassing a little boy. Well. I guess it's okay if Graeme Frost gets some health care, but he certainly shouldn't be able to leave a Park Avenue mansion to his children.

09 Oct 2007 06:41 pm: Here's another weird thing!

09 Oct 2007 09:04: Angry Bear points out that American homeowners' share of the equity in their homes is decreasing, and does so reliably under Republican Administrations. I agree that government housing subsidies are the problem.

09 Oct 2007 10:45 pm: City dwellers don't want to be crowded by ugly buildings. Tragically, they use regulations to achieve this, when they should be using the magic of the market to allow themselves to be crowded by ugly buildings.

10 Oct 2007 12:27 am: Democrats exploited Graeme Frost by using him to promote the cause of health care for people like Graeme Frost.

10 Oct 2007 07:54 am: I like Radiohead.

10 Oct 2007 08:52 am: Drivers and pedestrians do not understand me and my bicycle.

10 Oct 2007 09:05 am. Glenn Reynolds has shamed me: when it comes to Graeme Frost, I guess I'm just a big softy.

10 Oct 2007 09:40 am: How do you eat your Reese's Peanut Butter Cup?

10 Oct 2007 10:01 am: Cool science post!

10 Oct 2007 11:56 am: "Take Your Husband to Work Day." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

10 Oct 2007 12:16 pm: I'm not done fighting with that home equity guy, which gives me a chance to show off my econ chops.

10 Oct 2007 06:43 pm: This medical term is weird.

11 Oct 2007 07:59 am: So long as the magic of the market is not involved, I can make jokes about sacred institutions.

11 Oct 2007 10:59 am: Government subsidies are bad except for when they are good to my Mommy.

11 Oct 2007 12:11 pm: Democrats are so superficial, supporting Hillary Clinton like they all do. It must be because she's a woman or something, because her positions are certainly not popular 'round my way.

11 Oct 2007 12:41 pm: I mean I don't support Hillary Clinton and I'm a woman.

11 Oct 2007 02:26 pm: How could people possibly misunderstand my previous posts on Graeme Frost?

11 Oct 2007 02:57 pm: I am one of the 162 people in D.C. who wish even more of my neighbors had guns.

12 Oct 2007 09:50 am: Every conservatarian does at least one column about how conservatives are under-represented on college faculties, and how it's the liberals' fault; I guess it's my turn. But mine has an anecdote!

12 Oct 2007 11:33 am: I'm busy.

12 Oct 2007 11:46 am: Though I was wrong without really being wrong about Iraq, I hold out hope that I will be proved right without really being right.

12 Oct 2007 12:52 pm: Hey, they changed the rules for TiVo! Great, because I have TiVo!

Conclusion: McArdle is Ann Althouse for the youth market.

ALL DELIBERATE SPEED. A novel approach to the claim that Giuliani was responsible for a decline in abortions in New York City, from John Podhoretz:

And there is one way in which it is probably very slightly acceptable — very, very slightly, though — for Rudy Giuliani to make such a claim. And that has to do with the atmospheric change in New York City under his tenure. The alteration of the city from the crime drop and from welfare reform was so profound that it is difficult quite to capture the effect. It was felt everywhere over time, and it wouldn't be too sentimental to describe it as a restoration of normal patterns of life that had been disrupted over decades. To the extent that the disruption helped engender a spirit of hopelessness in many quarters — and a corresponding inability to imagine that there was a future that would be any better or different from the present — it certainly contributed to behaviors of hopelessness and an inability to imagine a future. That is, I think we'd all agree, one of the spiritual causes of abortion...

For 30 years, they've been telling the anti-abortion movement that Republican rule would lead to the end of abortion. No doubt the evangelicals were envisioning something more spectacular than this trickle-down approach. But maybe they'll go for it. If the Giuliani bandwagon gets full traction, their alternative will be to bolt the party and reveal the minority status of their Moral Majority. Let us pause to consider the dilemma of megachurch millionaires forced to choose between God and earthly power. It's Monday and we could all use a laugh.

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY. They do indeed Think Big on the right: From Orrin Judd to Mark Steyn to Peter Robinson, an argument is transmitted as to whether we should have attacked the Soviet Union right after the Second World War. The National Review correspondents seem to lean, albeit grudgingly, toward the conclusion that it would have been a bad idea.

Most of us are grateful that we got through the Cold War without a nuclear cataclysm; these people see it as a missed opportunity. And they are determined not to miss another. Much as they admire George W. Bush's moxie, they think we aren't going fast enough now. A good standard for supporting political candidates would be to pick the ones who will keep these guys as far from power as possible.

UPDATE. As usual, Jonah Goldberg makes everything worse. "The benefit of a hot war is you tend to know when it's over," he says, "and it ends a lot quicker." Yes, he actually thinks global conflagration is preferable to tiresome old diplomacy. He also makes the same connection I made earlier between the right's speculative war with the Soviet Union and their desire to expand the current conflict into World War Whatever -- only he thinks it's a great idea. Can't K-Lo give them an afternoon off to play paintball or something?

BIG AL'S NOBEL. I expect conservatives will grouse and reminisce on the days when Peace Prizes were given to men who had actually put people to the sword. That just makes it more fun. I wish the current laureate were a better writer, but as long as they're giving these things for good intentions, why not Gore? It'll give him and Kissinger something to laugh about at cocktail parties.

A few people have asked me about Doris Lessing. I am embarrassingly unacquainted with her work. What do you think? Of her, I mean, not my ignorance.

LITTLE MISS CAN'T BE WRONG. John Derbyshire starts a weak National Review thread about how modern art is bullshit, and how brave he is to say so. As usual, Richard Brookhiser feebly offers resistance.

This tedious reminder of their Philistine leanings yields one blessing: acquaintance with a new culture warrior, one E.M. Zanotti, who contributes:

There seems to be a degradation of the concept of art that starts around the Enlightenment. Naturalism was a rejection of the spiritual art that came before it, then Impressionism and post-Impressionism are the beginnings of the interpretive approach to art. Modernism and post-modernism are the results of decades of hanging on to the idea that the standard of beauty is subjective and based on one's own vision of the world combined with a message about the rejection of anything eternal. Somewhere along the way, it became less about making a visionary artistic statement, and more about making a statement that was "counter-cultural" (the Dada movement, for example) and meant to shock the collective consciousness and open the minds of those who viewed it to new and wondrous avenues of thought (like contemporary art)...and what fit this qualification often garnered an artist fame in his own community and an increase in his paycheck. I suppose some might argue that that, in itself, goes toward proving that art is consciously fraudulent. Rothko and Warhol and others that recognized that art has a patently commercial aspect to it might just agree...

To condense: first came forced perspective, which was wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints, which was very wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints that didn't look like photographs, which was double-plus wicked, and then, fifty years before Theodore Roszak, a "counter-culture" of jokers and bicycle wheels, which ruined everything by increasing the artist's paycheck.

That's some tasty culture warring! You can find more at Ms. Zanotti's website. Among the choicer bits: rage at rock t-shirts with Arabic logos ("Sid Vicious might return as a zombie just to protest this"); rage at Bruce Springsteen ("What does seem funny, though, is that Springsteen has actively campaigned for people who support more government, not less"); rage at a female passenger who showed modest cleavage on an airplaine ("Nobody said we have to tolerate stupidity"), which morphs into rage at Britney Spears ("Nobody on Monday was complaining that the mother of two children was writhing around on a stage"), then into rage at the "porn culture" ("As we grew steadily more individualistic after the social revolutions of the sixites..."); and rage at some Hollywood movie ("Ironically, Italy is far closer to the Middle East than America has ever been").

Actually, having panned through three months' worth of her tripe, I can tell you unequivocally Ms. Zanotti is an idiot, which explains her inclusion on the National Review culture-cop roster. Look for her negative review of some movie with boobs or bad soldiers soon!

MIXED MESSAGES. Gateway Pundit notices Iranian dissidents declaring "Wish we were Columbia students." Haw haw, but a noble sentiment, even if the Ole Perfesser hehindeeds. But then GP asks, "Are you sure you want that, kids? It may be quite a culture shock." His link points to Free Republic, which we can assume means that whatever the Freepers want is even more freedom-loving than the Iranian protesters could get behind (at least, that is the most charitable interpretation). Let's see what the Freepers think:

Why should I care what a foreign country does to homosexuals?...

Guess that explains the low sales of Barbra Streisand CDs over there...

Why should I care what a foreign country does to homosexuals?
Nobody can be all bad, not even Amanutjob...

Didn’t say kill them but we don’t have to follow the Ancient Roman and Greek belief in accepting such sexual deviance as normal. The practices of gerbiling, fisting, rimming, and felching are not acceptable and the outcome is a lifestyle with a lifespan on par with IV drug users, which is another behavior that should not be tolerated. Sexual deviance, whether homosexual of pedophilic is not behavior to be condoned or accepted any more than theft, rape, or whatever form that is not in the interest of a stable society. The vast majority of male homosexuals seek sex with little boys. The “gay” parades used to always have Nambla representation — only recently has this part of the “gay” lifestyle become less acceptable....

yeah actually you have a point with the greeks. i had a landlord for 1 month who was this big obese married man who all of a sudden turned gay for me. worst month of my life, i almost did jailtime because of the final outcome of this pig. it also cemented (very biased) why the turks and greeks don’t get along. anyways it’s a month i don’t want to remember but he’s lucky he’s alive...

So, what I guess Gateway Pundit is saying is: Iranian dissidents should refrain from supporting American academic freedom until it is brought into line with the Gateway Pundit/Free Republic attitude toward homosexuals, i.e., disgust and homicidal hatred.

Refresh my memory: what makes us better than our enemies?

PS: For clarification as to what GP's pals at Free Republic think of gay people, try this search.