Did my matzos come?

In response to a question from Hugh Hewitt about Steyn's experience with local school boards (ellipses in original):

MS: Well, I did get a bit annoyed once. I was . . . you know, I was [on] these things where they . . . they like to teach you all about gayness very early on, and Laura Ingraham has a great bit about this in her book [. . .]

HH: Yes.

MS: In Massachusetts, where they’re teaching all about sort of transgender identity and everything in second or third grade. And you get the feeling they won’t be satisfied until they turn at least three class members of Grade 4 into transsexuals.
 

If instead of "Death to America" Iran's favorite chant were "Death to Bollinger," would Columbia have invited Ahmadinejad? Because "Death to America" means, among many other things, "Death to Bollinger." I wonder if Columbia's president realizes that.
 

Imagine this situation:

I want to shoot a man and his son.
I hold my son as a shield in front of me, and start shooting at the man and his son.
The man shields his son and, trying not to hit my son, fires at me.
The man's shots kill my son.

The man has a choice: to defend himself and his son and risk killing an innocent, or to let me kill him and his son. I forced that choice on him. When he decides to defend himself and his son, and my son dies as a result, would any sane person fail to hold me responsible?

Let me make the analogy plain: I and my son are the Palestinian Arabs. The man and his son are Israel.

Why do so few in the West fault the Palestinian Arabs for using their civilians as shields during rocket attacks? Why do so few criticize Palestinian Arab terrorists for hiding among civilians? Why do so many blame Israel for retaliating in order to protect its own civilians? Must Israel surrender rather than risk the lives of Palestinian Arabs whose own leaders have placed them in danger?

I have no answers, because I don't understand the minds of those who make the questions necessary.
 

Last week David Brooks asserted "the diminishing influence of I.Q" in society. John Derbyshire, calling Brooks's column "remarkably lame-brained," responds:

Knowing that I lean to the nature side of most nature-nurture controversies, readers occasionally e-mail in with something from the newspapers offering evidence for nurturism. My stock response is: “All nurturist claims in the general press must be read with the understanding that there is terrific psychic & social pressure on any commentator or researcher who wants to keep his job and his friends to make as much as possible of any nurturist evidence, and as little as possible of any naturist evidence. You should apply an appropriate bias-correcting discount to all you read.”

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.

When the magical (I wish this to be so: Therefore it is so!) and the religious (we are all one! brotherhood of man!) and the social (this is what all good citizens believe!) come together, the mighty psychic forces unleashed can unhinge even the best minds. David Brooks’s embarrassing little venture into psychometry is only the latest illustration of this melancholy truth.
 

I was chilled by this passage in a column by David Brooks, about Hillary Clinton's new health-care platform:

Clinton is hard to interview because her answers are often just chunks of her stump speeches, but I thought I detected real warmth when she described the way she and her staff came up with the plan.

“It was an exhilarating process!” she enthused, describing how all sorts of different people came together to talk through issues. “There were countless meetings,” she remembered fondly, “with business leaders who were surprised to find themselves sitting next to me” and a long parade of academics, nurses, experts and friends.

Of course she found it exhilarating. That's how she envisions government: a group of intelligent and like-minded people, with her at its head, formulating policy to restrict the rights of Americans ("she’s not averse to creative solutions from the states, but she doubts that they’ll be able to lead the way since they rely on money from Washington"; "insurance companies . . . are commanded to insure everybody") in order to achieve her idea of the public good.

Terrifying. And I think she'll win.

(Rich Lowry discusses Hillary's scheme here.)
 

Ann Coulter (rhetorical excess untouched, though it pains me):

The only "crisis" in health care in this country is that doctors are paid too little. (Also they've come up with nothing to help that poor Dennis Kucinich.)

But the Democratic Party treats doctors like they're Klan members. They wail about how much doctors are paid and celebrate the trial lawyers who do absolutely nothing to make society better, but swoop in and steal from the most valuable members of society. . . .

It's only a matter of time before the best and brightest students forget about medical school and go to law school instead. How long can a society based on suing the productive last?

You can make 30 times as much money as doctors by becoming a trial lawyer suing doctors. You need no skills, no superior board scores, no decade of training and no sleepless residency. But you must have the morals of a drug dealer. (And the bank wire transfer number to the Democratic National Committee.)
 

Jed Babbin, in a piece about MoveOn.org's "General Petraeus or Betray Us?" ad (pdf) and the Democratic candidates' decision not to criticize it:

Hillary Clinton is as spontaneous as a space shuttle launch.

Babbin writes, "If Republicans can capitalize on America’s reaction, the MoveOners will have made a mistake that costs the Democrats the White House."
 

Amazing video, and a great comment: "Admit it - back in the 20th Century, none of you imagined that World War III would be Robots vs. Muslims. Seems obvious now."

Two warnings: your sound shouldn't be up high (the first time you watch, anyway), and the language is salty.

*(At least until the Russians start supplying our enemies.)

(First two links via Chris Anderson.)
 

Jonah Goldberg:

John Podhoretz has a very good column today on Mukasey in which he recounts the incredible security measures required to keep Judge Mukasey safe from Islamist reprisals. . . . An important point JPod doesn't mention but that needs to be kept in mind when people call for treating terrorists like ordinary criminals is that this sort of thing could be multiplied a thousandfold if we lugged every terrorist before a civilian criminal court. In all the debate about the legal and constitutional issues — and it's a worthwhile debate to be sure — very few people address the simple logistics of how we would treat terrorism like just another crime which, by the way, it isn't.

Andrew C. McCarthy, who has experience in these matters, concurs.
 

Symbolism is the child of our inability and unwillingness to accept randomness; we give meaning to all manner of shapes; we detect human figures in inkblots. I saw mosques in the clouds announced Arthur Rimbaud the 19th-century French symbolic poet. This interpretation took him to "poetic" Abyssinia (in East Africa), where he was brutalized by a Christian Lebanese slave dealer, contracted syphilis, and lost a leg to gangrene. He gave up poetry in disgust at the age of 19, and died anonymously in a Marseilles hospital ward while still in his thirties.

Victor Davis Hanson (some punctuation edited):

In light of the UC Davis's recent refusal to have Larry Summers speak, we see once again what's behind the curtain at our top universities—a generic class of 9-5 boutique leftists who rant and rave over inviting a liberal President who only gave the various women's projects $50 million at Harvard, but who in turn are largely quiet about hosting a thug whose thugs recently imprisoned an Iranian-American female scholar and do more than any other nation-state in oppressing women.

But then for forty years we have been taught that there are no absolutes, only culturally-constructed relative impressions predicated on power. So while we "know" Summers, as a powerful, rich white man, is hostile to women, we can not use such standards to suggest the same of one of the multi-cultural other, long a victim of Western colonialism, racism, and sexism.
 

Update: A similar point from Michael Barone:

Columbia doesn't host ROTC or (I think) military recruiters on campus, because it would be just too offensive to do so, because the military obeys the law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Bill Clinton which bars open homosexuals from serving in the military. OK.

But Columbia does host Ahmedinejad who heads a government which executes homosexuals for the crime of being homosexuals.

So it's obnoxious beyond belief to exclude homosexuals from military service, but it's not obnoxious beyond belief to hang them from the neck until dead.
 

Michael Ledeen:

The current kerfluffle over Adhmadinejad's proposed pilgrimage to Ground Zero shows once again how bad ideas drag us irresistibly to bad policy. Having refused for nearly thirty years to deal with the reality that Iran declared war on us in 1979 and has been waging it ever since, we are now acting as if Iran were just another country and its president therefore entitled to all the usual courtesies for visiting foreign dignitaries. Ergo, Secret Service protection, normal protocol, the niceties of "international law," blah blah.

So long as we continue to delude ourselves about the nature of the Iranian regime, we will continue to tie ourselves in strategic and diplomatic knots, and eventually to the terrible policy options (appease them or bomb them) about which we've heard so often in recent months, most recently from the French foreign minister.
 

A haunting post by Nancy Rommelmann.
 

It's about time. Melanie Phillips:

Good grief — Israel has finally woken from its seven-year trance and asked France 2 to provide it with the entire unedited 27-minute film that was shot by France 2’s Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, from which a 55-second excerpt was broadcast round the world that convinced people a Palestinian child, Mohammed al Durah, had been shot dead by Israeli forces as he cowered with his father behind a barrel to avoid the cross fire in a gun battle raging between Israel and the Palestinians in 2000. That iconic image, which triggered untold terrorist acts of violence and murder, is at the centre of a drama (about which I wrote here) in which a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, was successfully sued for libel in a highly suspect French court case after he claimed that France 2 had connived in a sensational (and murderous) fraud since Mohammed al Dura had participated in a staged atrocity and had not been killed at all.

Tomorrow Karsenty’s appeal, which started with legal argument last week, gets properly under way. Until now the Israelis, who initially accepted responsibility for al Durah’s death but then after an investigation concluded that it was physically impossible for him to have been killed by Israeli gunfire, have refused to protest this appalling scandal, despite the mounting evidence that a major journalistic fraud took place as a result of which the Arab and Muslim world was inflamed to butcher yet more Israelis, slaughter the journalist Daniel Pearl and incite the west to yet more demonisation of Israel. For reasons at which one can only guess, but which almost certainly have to do with that unique cocktail of arrogance, bone-headed belief in the self-evident justice of its cause and self-fulfilling fatalism which causes Israel as a matter of routine to fail to clear its name when it is traduced, it did not demand to see the footage shot on that fateful day, which France 2 has never made available for inspection and which may solve the mystery of what actually happened to Mohammed al Durah.

But now international protest has been steadily mounting. Thousands of people have signed a petition calling on France 2 to release this footage, and articles have appeared in various blogs and other outlets (not of course in the mainstream French or British media) — in particular, a savage piece by Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post which tore into the Israelis for their shocking indifference. Now, as Glick reports, the Israelis have finally stirred. The deputy commander of the IDF’s Spokesman’s Office, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, has asked to see the missing footage plus footage from the following day, and disputed the French judges’ version of events. . . .

It is essential that this footage is released, and that this monstrous betrayal by France of the Jewish people is finally held up to the light for all to see.
 

Daniel Pipes:

I understand the security-based urge to exclude the Koran, Islam, and Muslims, but these efforts are too broad, sweeping up inspirational passages with objectionable ones, reformers with extremists, friends with foes. Also, they ignore the possibility of positive change.

More practical and focused would be to reduce the threats of jihad and Shariah by banning Islamist interpretations of the Koran, as well as Islamism and Islamists. Precedents exist. A Saudi-sponsored Koran was pulled from school libraries. Preachers have gone to jail for their interpretation of the Koran. Extreme versions of Islam are criminally prosecuted. Organizations are outlawed. Politicians have called for Islamists to leave their countries.

Islam is not the enemy, but Islamism is. Tolerate moderate Islam, but eradicate its radical variants.

W. Thomas Smith Jr.:

[T]he Left in this country actually has two problems when it comes to Iraq: First, we’re making solid gains in a very tough counterinsurgency. Petraeus and Crocker have reported the situation as they know it to be, and as [Congressman Jim] Clyburn says, that’s “a real grave problem” for the Dems.

Second, the Left simply doesn’t understand the modern American military. These aren’t “kids.” These are professionals. And serving among these professionals are literally thousands of potential Petraeuses. Of course, they won’t all wear stars, because the competition for such lofty rank is so keen, their peers and competitors so sharp. But what the Left doesn’t understand — and what was so obvious to me in Iraq, and now watching the hearings here this week — is that the troops are reflected in Petraeus, and Petraeus can be seen in them.

At The Tank, Smith has posted emails (here, here and here) from Americans who regret not having served. Very much worth reading.

I never served, and I don't wish that I had. I'd have made a terrible soldier. But the messages from Smith's correspondents resonate with me. In 2005 Donald Sensing wrote this about his son's deployment to Iraq:

Lt. Col. Kuhn kindly dropped by our little family group after his short talk to the troops. Several families came to see their Marine off and I am pretty sure that the battalion commander spoke to every one. We had a good conversation for quite awhile. I told him what I had told my son the night before, that I was deeply envious of my son and his fellow Marines. Some people reach the end of their lives still wondering whether they ever made a positive difference in their country or the world. Marines don’t have that problem, and neither, of course, do soldiers, sailors, airmen or Coast Guardsmen.

My son and his fellows are producers of freedom, not mere consumers of it. And those who only consumed freedom will one night lie in their beds and think themselves accursed that they didn’t serve with them.

"Accursed" is wrong, because it implies an outside cause; "inadequate" is closer, and sometimes "ashamed." I hope I never lose my sense of gratitude toward those who risk their lives to protect me and the people I love.
 

Excellent summary from S. Fred Singer (some syllable-break hyphens removed):

What about the fact—as cited by, among others, those who produced the IPCC report—that every major greenhouse computer model (there are two dozen or so) shows a large temperature increase due to human burning of fossil fuels? Fortunately, there is a scientific way of testing these models to see whether current warming is due to a man-made greenhouse effect. It involves comparing the actual or observed pattern of warming with the warming pattern predicted by or calculated from the models. Essentially, we try to see if the “fingerprints” match—“fingerprints” meaning the rates of warming at different latitudes and altitudes.

For instance, theoretically, greenhouse warming in the tropics should register at increasingly high rates as one moves from the surface of the earth up into the atmosphere, peaking at about six miles above the earth’s surface. At that point, the level should be greater than at the surface by about a factor of three and quite pronounced, according to all the computer models. In reality, however, there is no increase at all. In fact, the data from balloon-borne radiosondes show the very opposite: a slight decrease in warming over the equator.

The fact that the observed and predicted patterns of warming don’t match indicates that the man-made greenhouse contribution to current temperature change is insignificant. This fact emerges from data and graphs collected in the Climate Change Science Program Report 1.1, published by the federal government in April 2006 (see www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/default.htm). It is remarkable and puzzling that few have noticed this disparity between observed and predicted patterns of warming and drawn the obvious scientific conclusion.

What explains why greenhouse computer models predict temperature trends that are so much larger than those observed? The answer lies in the proper evaluation of feedback within the models. Remember that in addition to carbon dioxide, the real atmosphere contains water vapor, the most powerful greenhouse gas. Every one of the climate models calculates a significant positive feedback from water vapor—i.e., a feedback that amplifies the warming effect of the CO2 increase by an average factor of two or three. But it is quite possible that the water vapor feedback is negative rather than positive and thereby reduces the effect of increased CO2.

Also:

Scientists have been able to trace the impact of the sun on past climate using proxy data (since thermometers are relatively modern). A conventional proxy for temperature is the ratio of the heavy isotope of oxygen, Oxygen-18, to the most common form, Oxygen-16.

A paper published in Nature in 2001 describes the Oxygen-18 data (reflecting temperature) from a stalagmite in a cave in Oman, covering a period of over 3,000 years. It also shows corresponding Carbon-14 data, which are directly related to the intensity of cosmic rays striking the earth’s atmosphere. One sees there a remarkably detailed correlation, almost on a year-by-year basis. While such research cannot establish the detailed mechanism of climate change, the causal connection is quite clear: Since the stalagmite temperature cannot affect the sun, it is the sun that affects climate.

Singer's conclusion:

The nations of the world face many difficult problems. Many have societal problems like poverty, disease, lack of sanitation, and shortage of clean water. There are grave security problems arising from global terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Any of these problems are vastly more important than the imaginary problem of man-made global warming. It is a great shame that so many of our resources are being diverted from real problems to this non-problem. Perhaps in ten or 20 years this will become apparent to everyone, particularly if the climate should stop warming (as it has for eight years now) or even begin to cool.

We can only trust that reason will prevail in the face of an onslaught of propaganda like Al Gore’s movie and despite the incessant misinformation generated by the media. Today, the imposed costs are still modest, and mostly hidden in taxes and in charges for electricity and motor fuels. If the scaremongers have their way, these costs will become enormous. But I believe that sound science and good sense will prevail in the face of irrational and scientifically baseless climate fears.
 

Mark Krikorian (post reproduced nearly in full):

“No” Never, Ever, Means “No”

A year ago, the Department of Homeland Security said that “temporary protected status” for several thousand Liberians (no one really knows how many!) would be terminated as of October 1 of this year. TPS is a status used to avoid deporting illegal aliens who don’t qualify as refugees but who come from places suffering from short-lived extraordinary problems due to natural disaster or civil strife. It’s not small, with well over 400,000 otherwise illegal aliens now benefiting from it, most of them Salvadorans (I wrote about it several years back).

The Liberians were granted this “temporary” status in … 1991. Janet Reno tried to end it in 1999, three years after the end of Liberia’s civil war, and she was overruled by her boss. [. . .]

Right on schedule, the president has just given them yet another 18-month extension, this time using the made-up status of “deferred enforced departure,” which was one way presidents avoided enforcing immigration laws before Congress created TPS in 1990.

The Liberian illegals aren’t even really the issue, of course. Rather, it's a question of credibility. Just as foreign governments drew a lesson from Reagan’s firing of the air-traffic controllers, a different decision on Liberian TPS would have sent a signal to business lobbyists, racial-chauvinist groups, the Mexican government et al., that things really were different. Alas, no — the motto of the immigration service remains the same: "It ain't over til the alien wins."
 

Charles Krauthammer:

There is a realistic chance of achieving a separate success that . . . in the global context is of the highest order — the defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Having poisoned one country and been expelled from it (Afghanistan), al Qaeda seized upon post-Saddam instability to establish itself in the very heart of the Arab Middle East — Sunni Iraq. Yet now, in front of all the world, Iraq’s Sunnis are, to use the biblical phrase, vomiting out al Qaeda. This is a defeat and humiliation in the extreme — an Arab Muslim population rejecting al Qaeda so violently that it allies itself in battle with the infidel, the foreigner, the occupier.

Just carrying this battle to its successful conclusion — independent of its larger effect of helping stabilize Iraq — is justification enough for the surge.

And from a Washington Post story on the killing of Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, "who allied himself with the United States and rallied fractious Sunni groups against extremists":

Abu Risha's fellow tribal leaders, along with U.S. military officials, vowed to protect the Anbar Salvation Council and carry on his mission, and said they expected his death would galvanize further support. Ali Hatem Ali Suleiman, a leader of the Dulaim confederation, the largest tribal organization in Anbar, and a rival of Abu Risha's, lamented the loss. "His death has squeezed our heart and made us terribly angry."

"Now, I swear to God, if we will hear anyone is with al-Qaeda, even if he is still inside his mother's womb, we will kill him," Suleiman said. "The man was one of the swords of the council in the province. If one sword falls, other swords will rise."

(Washington Post link via Clifford May.)
 

I'm sure that something similar, and far more dangerous, is happening in Europe regarding Islam. The discussion there is constrained by fear that Muslims will respond with violence to something they dislike hearing.
 

Prof. Robert Weissberg of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

I once taught the basic American government lecture course and Constitution lecture covered the three-fifths compromise - the Article I, Section 2 provision that counted "other persons" (i.e., slaves and untaxed Indians - blacks are never mentioned by name ) as three-fifths of a person for purposes of House representation. I explained that Southerners wanted to treat slaves as a whole person since this would sharply boost their representation while abolitionist New Englanders proposed counting slaves as zero. Unfortunately, this three-fifths provision has now been interpreted by some black activists (including an African American colleague who stated her misinformed opinion in a public law school lecture) as "proof" of America's racist origins. Black students have probably encountered this historical mistruth elsewhere (Jesse Jackson once endorsed it) and it does appear superficially plausible.

Rather than risk being accused of covering up racism or telling lies, I dropped the topic altogether. I similarly removed all discussion of slavery so students thus never learned that the while the Constitution did not outlaw slavery, it did permit a ban on importing slaves after 1808 and this was, indeed, done - which, in turn, made those slaves already in America exceedingly costly and thus at times too valuable to risk at dangerous labor (I further skipped how the ever-plentiful Irish were instead hired for life-threatening jobs).

And, as one might become carried away in a long-delayed spring cleaning, out went most references to crime (no small accomplishment in a course covering the Supreme Court), the dubious legal use of racial gerrymandering to insure black election victories, the possible downside of affirmative action and anything else that might remotely prove an ideological fire hazard. And this clean up did not end with race-related issues.

The piece concludes with the tragic story of an academic who didn't sufficiently censor himself. Worth reading.

(Via George Leef at Phi Beta Cons.)
 

A short booklet (pdf), concise and well designed, from NCPA. Highly recommended.
 

David Frum, in a mixed review of a history of 18th-century France:

One fascinating detail: the most committed reformer of the pre-1789 chief ministers, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, passionately opposed French support for the American revolution. France (Turgot argued) was struggling to pay the debts bequeathed by the war that had ended in 1763. Support for the Americans would provoke another war with England that France could ill afford. Turgot was overruled and dismissed. To save the United States, the Bourbon monarchy started a war that lead to its own financial ruin and eventual overthrow. One wonders: Had this economic technician prevailed on this then seemingly minor diplomatic issue, would he have inadvertently prevented two of history's greatest revolutions with one small act of parsimony?
 

Not my area, but to this mortgage-free layman, Ken Fisher's assessment seems reasonable:

First, you have to understand that a subprime mortgage, from its origination, is the offering of a mortgage to someone who otherwise wouldn't qualify to buy a home.

If you look at the history of subprime loans, they tend to average about a ten percent default rate. Now we're up around 14 percent. So all this brouhaha is about the increase from that historic ten percent default rate to today's rate of 14 percent.

But a ten percent default rate means that 90 percent of the people who got these loans ended up owning homes that they wouldn't otherwise have been able to buy. The question is: Do we want more people to have homes or do we want fewer people to have homes? My view is more people owning homes is moral and good. Fewer people owning homes is immoral and bad.

We should be encouraging subprime loans. Because it's the way these people get homes.

Fisher is CEO of Fisher Investments, "a multi-billion dollar multi-product money management firm." He considers the current subprime situation "not a big deal for the economy and the stock market." Warren Buffett pretty much agrees with him: "'You'll see plenty of misery in that field [real estate]. You've already seen some,' Buffett said. 'I don't seen [sic] a big impact on the economy though.'" I hope they're right.
 

Mark Steyn, in a piece (sub. req.) about Pete Seeger's overdue and underwhelming criticism of Stalin:

Mr. Seeger has a song called “Treblinka,” because he thinks it’s important that we “never forget.” But wouldn’t it be better if we were hip to it before it snowballed into one of those things we had to remember not to forget? Would it kill the icons of the Left just for once to be on the right side at the time?
 

James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, once offered this trenchant analysis of Pete Seeger: “‘If I Had A Hammer’? Well, what’s stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they’re about a buck-ninety, tops.”

Very true. For the cost of a restricted-view seat at a Peter, Paul, and Mary revival, you could buy half a dozen top-of-the-line hammers and have a lot more fun, even if you used them on yourself.
 

And this, about the kinds of songs Seeger wrote and popularized, is very sharp:

Yet in a sense Lileks is missing the point: Yes, they’re dopey nursery-school jingles, but that’s why they’re so insidious. The numbing simplicity allows them to be passed off as uncontentious unexceptionable all-purpose anthems of goodwill. Which is why you hear “This Land Is Your Land” in American grade schools, but not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The invention of the faux-childlike faux-folk song was one of the greatest forces in the infantilization of American culture.
 

One salutary effect of the Hsu affair: it recalls the tawdriness of the Clinton presidency. Remember Whitewater, cattle futures, Travelgate, Filegate, Marc Rich? We can expect more along those lines, I fear, with Hillary in charge. Plus the Macarena might return.

(Wikipedia has a "Clinton administration controversies" page with many more links.)
 

Tim Blair, 9/5/07:

The New York Times exposes a demonic Bushler scheme:

Iraq is a long way to go for a photo op, but not for President Bush, who is pulling out all the stops to divert public attention from his failed Iraq policies ...

Bush diverts attention from Iraq by visiting Iraq. How does that work, exactly?
 

In Spin, Charles Aaron on a promising band's quest for a deal:

In many ways, Uncrowned exemplify the volatile, vulnerable state of today's music business, a world rife with confusion, delusion, great promise, and great risk. With CDs being eclipsed by downloading (which brings in far less revenue), major record companies are more desperate than ever to score megapopular acts. A band that sells, say, 300,000 albums is negligibly profitable at best. The large-scale services a major offers -- distribution, marketing, promotion -- are more suited to pushing Justin Timberlake from two million to five million copies sold. Few new rock bands approach that level. . . .

And what does a "hit" mean anymore? Radio rotates only a handful of songs to an ever-declining audience, and MTV airs just a smattering of videos. Fans are more likely to encounter new artists via TV commercials or soundtracks, video games, file-sharing, Internet radio, MySpace, YouTube, etc. People are listening to much more music, and it's not uncommon for a random track to get passed around or downloaded by millions in a weekend's time. But it's rare for a single song to capture the mass imagination long enough for it to translate into a real career for the artist. So why would a young, loud, aggressive rock band like Uncrowned, or their management, bank on that one demographically transcendent fluke?

"Their problem is, they're functioning in the old system of waiting to be swept off their feet by a label or some giganto marketing push that's going to propel them to stardom," says a record executive who has met with the band and asked not to be named. "The new paradigm calls for you to take care of your own niche first."

. . . It's finally a DIY world (bereft of political context, of course). Musicians across all genres are necessarily, obsessively business-minded; it's not just gimme-the-loot rappers anymore. Since the Internet can reach millions of consumers directly, even standard indie labels may soon be pass é -- managers and booking agents wield the influence. The money isn't in record sales (down 20 percent this year), but in diversifying your brand beyond hoodie/T-shirt merch -- just recently, press releases have hyped Beck's Sketchel shoulder bag, an All-American Rejects-designed Pepsi can, a skate-shoe partnership between Etnies and Chester Bennington's tattoo studio, and an Urban Outfitters indie-rock tour featuring the Ponys, Voxtrot, and Tapes 'N Tapes. Artists who have yet to release a record are pursuing publishing and sponsorship deals. One of the most talked-about indie bands of the past few years -- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah -- is perhaps more notable for its no-label business model than its music.

But the problem with a DIY approach is that you have to do it yourself. And that means a generation of artists who spend countless hours attempting to manage their own affairs and hustle every angle. But what if you're not Pete Wentz or Jay-Z or Arcade Fire? What if you can't trade on a punk or hip-hop or indie tradition? What if your numerous marketing ideas haven't quite panned out? What if you've got a killer MySpace page and consistently draw 300 people in clubs three states away and sell several thousand copies of your self-released record, but can barely pay the rent? What if you were a passing industry fancy a couple years back, but now that you're a far better band, interest has waned? What if you're so anxious to jump-start your career that you let your manager come hat in hand to the freaking guy from Hinder?

Here's Uncrowned's MySpace page.