Why Dollhouse is a Flop and What It Means for Popular Culture

For those who care, and judging by the ratings, most don't, the latest TV series from Joss Whedon, "Dollhouse," is a flop. Judging by reviews, the series and lead actress (Eliza Dushku), have performed "below expectations" and even Television Without Pity, a forum of certified boosters of all things Whedon, have weighed in on a Dollhouse Cancellation Pool. Buzz has been negative, with delays in filming so scripts could be re-written, and the cast and producers/writers packed with various Whedon cronies and relatives.

"Dollhouse" is of course unimportant in and of itself. But it's probable failure, contains clues as to what will not work and what will in Television, and thus clues to important trends in popular culture: the end of "demassification" and subcultures, and the rise of a new mass unified culture. With of course, profound implications for politics and society.



Dollhouse is not very well executed. But it's likely execution does not matter that much. Had Dollhouse premiered in say, 1997, it might well have succeeded. But the recession, and changing ad market, are transforming the nature of television and pop culture in general. Contrary to the Long Tail hypothesis of continued "demassification" of culture, a lengthy recession is likely to significantly reduce fragmentation of culture, and produce a more unified culture. For simple business reasons: appealing to a broad group of society is the only way to make money given scarce advertiser dollars. Yes, we are entering an era of scarcity after nearly sixty years of nearly un-interrupted prosperity.

The failure of Dollhouse is thus a signal, of how the culture of America is being transformed from a fragmented mess of various sub-groups, into a more uniform (and populist) mass culture, not seen perhaps since the 1980's. This has significant impacts on how culture will drive politics and policy.

First, let's look at how pop culture worked under the old, "prosperity" model. A commenter on Television Without Pity summed up the old model, which traded mass viewers for a more "desireable" segment. This strategy of "demassifying" or cult culture, was pioneered by former NBC head Grant Tinker in the early 1980's, with renewals of low-rated but desirable demographics ( rich Yuppies) shows such as "Hill Street Blues" and "St. Elsewhere." This strategy sustained the low-rated "Seinfeld" during it's first few years (1989-91) as it drew low ratings initially but favorable demographics. Wealthy Yuppies that advertisers would pay premiums to reach created cult shows like "Hill Street Blues," and that model was later extended to young, female consumers with shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." A lot of money was made selling Pantene Shampoo and Conditioner to young women.

This was (and is) Amazon's model, selling lots of things that don't have mass appeal, but can be sold at a mark-up premium, to lots of people. Apple's Itunes store is another good example. Since their operating costs are low, and in the case of Apple inventory cost is near zero, they can afford to carry lots of songs or DVDs or books (in the case of Amazon, sitting in the inventory of partners) and sell them in small amounts (no major hits) to lots and lots of customers. Advertising had worked the same way, making lots of cult shows such as "Farscape" or "Battle Star Galactica" (the remake by Ron Moore) at least possible and sometimes even profitable, given the premium rates charged advertisers for desirable demographics, i.e. young and wealthy consumers.

As TV accelerated the process of dumping male viewers in favor of what advertisers wanted, which was female viewers (viewed as key purchase decision makers), this hyper-fragmentation continued. One network, the WB, was devoted almost entirely to young female viewers, and it's successor network CW has continued that focus. However, this strategy of cutting up the mass audience into small pieces and producing entertainment that appealed only to the small pieces required a constantly rising economy, rising consumer spending, and thus rising advertising rates as sponsors clamored to get their message across to ever smaller groups of tightly focused demographic segments. There was also the problem of the "missing men," who as they remained single longer and longer, remained out of reach of advertisers and relatively unimportant in consumer messaging.

This particular strategy of sub-group focus was failing even before the economy crashed. Last year it was rumored the CW network would shut down because of revenue shortfall caused by very low ratings and not enough advertising spending even with the desired 12-17 and 18-34 female demographic. The problem? Sponsors were seeing that demographic cut back spending on products such as specialty shampoos and conditioners, clothes, ringtones, and other luxury consumer goods that defined discretionary spending. Moreover, there just was not enough young women around, given the decline in birth rates.

Now ad spending is down even more dramatically. Of course Auto companies have been hit by the recession, even Toyota and Honda are shedding thousands of jobs and cutting back on TV and other advertising, let alone GM, Ford, and Chrysler. So too, banks, insurance companies, and other segments of advertisers, hurt hard by the economic crash, and in many cases taking bailout money that politically makes advertising almost impossible. Nor has there been any recent recovery in the spot market, indeed rates for spot advertising (instead of pre-arranged ad purchases) are lower than the contracted rates. Analysts don't see relief any time soon. Even Local TV stations are hurting. CBS, the most profitable of the networks, managed to eke out a small profit, but they are down more than 50% from last year.

The few advertisers willing to spend money, are packaged consumer goods companies like Proctor & Gamble, or Nabisco, and they won't pay extra to reach small segments of consumers, rather current advertisers want broader reach and all possible consumers, young and old, male and female alike. Since their message is value and affordability in a time of lasting recession and they cannot afford to ignore key segments such as men, as in the past. Advertisers such as Pantene have greatly reduced their advertising since their target customers, young women, have cut back on spending like everyone else.

A look at the ratings for 2009 is instructive. Fox's Ratings, NBC's ratings, ABC's ratings, CBS's ratings, and CW's ratings are all found at the links. Taking non-repeat showings, and averaging the numbers, produces the table shown below:

Network	Show	Average Non-Repeat Viewers (Millions)
Fox	Dollhouse	4.45
Fox	American Idol	25.49
Fox	House	14.88
Fox	24	11.74
Fox	Fringe	11.5
Fox	Lie to Me	12.1
CBS	The Mentalist	18.85
CBS	NCIS	18.45
CBS	CSI	19.3
CBS	CSI: Miami	15.05
CBS	CSI: NY	12.08
CBS	Without a Trace	12.82
CBS	NUMB3RS	10.33
CBS	Flashpoint	9.75
CBS	Ghost Whisperer	10.78
CBS	Eleventh Hour	12.02
CBS	Survivor	13.55
NBC	Medium	8.4
NBC	Heroes	8
NBC	Chuck	7.6
NBC	Law and Order	8.39
NBC	Life	5.4
NBC	Knight Rider	5.28
NBC	ER	7.28
ABC	Grey's Anatomy	14.5
ABC	Lost	10.85
ABC	Private Practice	11.02
ABC	Ugly Betty	7.42
ABC	Life on Mars	5.48
ABC	Desperate Housewives	13.95
CW	Smallville	4.03
CW	Supernatural	3.18
CW	Gossip Girl	2.43
CW	Privileged	1.43
CW	One Tree Hill	2.7
CW	90210	2.38

You can see in the data a few broad patterns. First, I've excluded sitcoms to focus on hour-dramas only. With a few high-rated reality shows to compare the dramas against. Even facing audience erosion after a number of years, a show like "American Idol" averages 25 million viewers. This is less astonishing, mind you, than at first glance.

In 1968, with a population of 200 million or so, "the Beverly Hillbillies" drew 60 million viewers. As compared to "American Idol" today with a full 33% more people, or 303 million. For "American Idol" to draw comparable numbers to the "Beverly Hillbillies" in terms of proportional amount of the population, viewers would have to reach 80 million or so. It's worth noting that the Superbowl the last two years has reached about 98 million viewers, so people will watch in those broad numbers if what is on offer is of enough interest. There is a great amount of money to be made in mass culture, "American Idol" alone is responsible for a great deal of Fox's revenues, given their only middling performance of other dramas.

But these issues aside, broad patterns emerge. Shows featuring a strong male lead, who in some way leads a team of disparate people, with strong female characters, generally will draw a lot of viewers. The shows feature a strong and conservative moral message, valuing teamwork, professionalism, loyalty, duty, family, decency and honor over career and status that mass audiences clearly like. Desire for closeness to family and loss (often of family) is a theme running through most of these shows. Moral lessons: don't cheat on your spouse, sleep around, neglect your family, put career first, act arrogantly, or care more about status than people, are often important plot points. CBS is chock-a-block full of those types of shows, their "Crimetime" police procedurals of one form or another, and their generally conservative throw-back nature (adult White Males are in charge in nearly all of them) appeal to both male and female audiences. Not lost on female audience is the fact that these types of shows almost always have strong female second leads who wield (responsibly) power and authority. These shows are the most popular after "American Idol," and include "the Mentalist" (18.9 million viewers), "CSI" (19.3), and "NCIS" (18.5). Even lesser rated or known shows such as "the Unit" (not shown) and "Flashpoint" ( a Canadian import) can pull in 9 million viewers or so. If CBS seems formulaic, they are. Because the formula works. Most of Fox's Dramas follow this pattern as well, from "House" to "24" to "Bones."

Female night-time soap operas, ranging from Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy, to Ugly Betty, will garner 14 to 7 million viewers or thereabouts. Not as much as the "Crimetime" formula, and less consistently, but still respectable. Unlike the "Crimetime" formula, however, these shows are strictly for women only, with nothing in them to interest men who are not gay. Since these shows leave out men, advertisers are beginning to lose interest in paying a premium for them, given the need in a recession to make every penny of ad spending count.

Hour long shows that tend to straddle genres, such as comedy-dramas like "Chuck," or Superhero soap operas like "Heroes" or quirky mystery-conspiracy crime dramas like "Life" tend to underperform relative to straight up Female Soap Operas or "Crimetime" procedurals with a strong White Male lead in charge. The terminally PC "Knight Rider" is probably a good example of this, well matched in the ratings with the equally PC-lecturing "Life on Mars" from ABC. [It's interesting that the same show on NBC, "Medium" does about 2 million viewers less, than the same show on CBS "Ghost Whisperer" in the much less desirable Friday time slot, suggesting that "Chuck" if shown on CBS would pull in about 2 million more viewers, but still rate only about 9 million viewers or so, about half of the traditional male roles of the "Mentalist" and "NCIS".]

The two shows that skew male (and older) for the CW, "Smallville" and "Supernatural" significantly outperform the teen girl oriented "Gossip Girl" which if one judged only by the amount of hype and publicity, would be the top rated show instead of 2.4 million viewers. Others such as "Privileged" gather only 1.4 million viewers, which is infomercial time. There just are not that many teen girls, given the birth dearth. Too bad the people running the CW don't look at demographics.

Dollhouse of course runs closer to uber-PC (and thus low-rated) "Life on Mars" and "Knight Rider" than it does say, "Fringe," or "Lie to Me" with traditional male leads on the same network. A commenter on Television Without Pity summed up Dollhouse's approach as being feminist, with lots of cheesecake or half-naked shots of Eliza Dushku, and with nearly all the men being nasty, unlikeable pieces of work. Clearly the intent is to "square the circle," but within PC constraints, having action and "hot chicks" that appeal to men and a heavy dose of feminism, along with status-mongering and disagreeable to repulsive male characters filled with Yuppie status angst and self-loathing.This brings to mind what the REAL Lieutenant Starbuck, Dirk Benedict, had to say about the remake of Battle Star Galactica, and specifically the inability to portray non-Angsty, fun, male characters in Sci-Fi or genre TV. A profile of Benedict at National Review has much of the same sentiments.

Benedict's larger point, that TV and film refuse to allow male characters, who are not angst-ridden and self-loathing, to kick ass and take a strong moral stand, instead demanding that this be done by stick-figure women, who haven't eaten since the Clinton Administration, is well taken. Hollywood keeps pushing that "solution" to it's reluctance to allow traditional men a role in TV and movies, be it Ron Moore's "Battle Star Galactica" or the Terminator series on Fox (not listed in the table above) which is near cancellation, averaging only 3.8 million viewers, or thereabouts. Viewers are not interested in seeing women in these types of shows, particularly not the waify kinds seen on "Dollhouse" or various model types on "Battle Star Galactica." Indeed traditional female soap operas far out-draw these types of shows ("Terminator," "Dollhouse," etc.) along with the terminally PC male-oriented shows ("Life on Mars," "Knight Rider") that also refuse to take strong moral stands and provide viewers with relatively un-conflicted, upbeat and optimistic male heroes.

Clearly, Hollywood's attempt to "square the PC circle" with women kicking ass, and men angst-ridden and disagreeable, has passed. These shows found some success and advertiser dollars in the go-go status-obsessed 1990's, where the only problem was where to put all the money people were making, but far less in the recessionary and terrorist-threat (of the nuclear kind) decade of the 2000's, ten years later. Niche cultures just are not making money.

What sells, clearly, besides a remake of "Major Bowes Amateur Hour" or "the Ed Sullivan Show" ("American Idol") is the traditional White Male, leading a team, with a White female as the second lead. Sometimes the female lead is the gun-play expert to the "smart" male lead (CSI's Marg Helgenberger, Chuck's Yvonne Strahowski, the Mentalist's Robin Tunney, and Eleventh Hour's Marley Shelton), keeping expensive and difficult to portray fight scenes to a minimum and making violence on-screen short and to the point, also more realistic. Since tiny, waifish models do not throw hulking men around. But the shows are just as importantly, generally free from excessive PC lecturing, at least, and generally take a positive attitude (professionalism, duty, loyalty, family) that is the antithesis of the dark, angsty world-view of the 1990's shows such as "the X Files."

Broadly appealing shows are what advertisers are paying for, as well, and it's unlikely to change even if/when the economy recovers, because it's unlikely we will see consumer spending at the levels of the 1990's as uncertainty about employment and wages remain, perhaps for years to come. This means a lot more shows like the "Mentalist" and a lot fewer ones like "Dollhouse."

This is mostly a good thing. Popular culture, as Andrew Breitbart noted, shapes politics. A culture which believes and responds to the values of team work, professionalism, loyalty, optimism, problem solving, family, and moral conservatism is one that is vastly different from the status-driven angst fests of the current "Battle Star Galactica" or "Dollhouse." In many ways, the start of the Obama Presidency coincides with an upsurge of conservative feeling in popular culture. Not because millions of people read Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" but because people under stress respond to entertainment that is both fun and stresses positive social and cultural messages to provide a sense of self-control in rapidly changing, and unfriendly economic and political-social climates.

Angst-A-Rama, it seems, is out.
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Decline of the West: Why Part One

Nearly every conservative commentator agrees on the West's decline. Whether it is Ann Coulter, or Victor Davis Hanson or Mark Steyn, Belmont Club or the lesser-known but just as well written Takuan Seiyo and Fjordman, who also posts at Gates of Vienna, all agree the West is beset by specific ills.

Among the ills are, multiculturalism, political correctness, statism, socialism, a spineless response to Islam and Jihad, phony "Green" scams and Global Warming humbuggery, and a general collapse of total standards in culture, morals. Theodore Dalrymple, who wrote "Life at the Bottom," and writes at City Journal as well, has written often of the total collapse of all standards and morals in modern Britain, from the underclass to the Upper Class, as part of this collapse of the West.

But hardly anyone understands WHY the West has declined. Declined so rapidly, so thoroughly, and so completely. The few who have tried to analyze the "why," mainly Seiyo and Fjordman, have gone astray. It is their belief that a few cultural Marxists have seized control of society, and created in Seiyo's words, a group of "Pod People" (from the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and it's many remakes). Obviously, Cultural Marxists exist, and they can be found in your nearest University faculty, in various NGO's connected to government, and even as a recipient of Bill Gates $2 billion in grants, such as Rick Ayers, brother of Bill Ayers and himself a fugitive from justice for seven years.

But these cultural Marxists don't have magical powers of "evil." If people find their ideas deeply attractive, something must be deep at work all over the West, to transform society so clearly and completely in less than fifty years.

Rather than some magical powers of persuasion, unstoppable, or deep conspiracy, or anything of that nature, what has happened all over the West, from Japan and Coastal China to Italy to Norway to the United States, is a broad set of changes, mostly demographic, that have tilted the West towards Multiculturalism, political correctness, and general weakness in all areas along with a general cultural collapse in music, arts, entertainment, and morals.

These broad trends are:

• A huge increase in wealth, through global manufacturing, spurring a global consumer environment


• The collapse of manufacturing in the West


• The so-called "Gentry" of Western nations becoming impossibly rich, and therefore influential outside their limited numbers


• The decline of the middle and working classes in the West


• The Pill, Condom, increased female earning, and anonymous urban living, leading to the death of the nuclear family


• The fragmentation of unifying mass communication institutions and media


• Consumerism, advertising, marketing, and mass media becoming a gay and female ghetto


• Lack of "affordable family formation" leading to hedonism instead of old Western cultural values

Let us examine these factors, and see how they created the decline of the West by undermining the West's fundamental advantage: how people cooperate, in high-trust networks, stemming from widespread nuclear families. Since the secret of the West's advance for nearly a thousand years, from 1000 AD to 1965 or so, is the story of the spreading and deepening of the nuclear family and the resulting cooperation among people in nation-states, driving ever greater increases in wealth, technology, and military, social, and cultural power.

Wealth

As in my post The Bailout, America and the West has since 1945 experienced an exploding GDP, even with intermittent recessions, as the graph below from the St. Louis Federal Reserve makes clear:



Oil Prices have remained mostly low for most of that period, not only in the US but globally:



Source: WTRG

The low oil prices allowed the export of manufacturing jobs to the lowest cost labor (and safety and environmental standards) nations. First, Japan and South Korea in the twenty years following World War Two, and then later to Taiwan, then China, Vietnam, and finally India. Textiles, consumer electronics, computer chip manufacturing, cars, whole classes of manufacturing where the lowest cost labor and least regulations meant lower cost, moved overseas. First from the US, then from Europe and even Japan. Indeed, Pioneer is considering closing it's production of televisions. Nissan will slash 20,000 jobs, but industrial output and employment in Japan has been declining for decades.

Cheap oil prices meant that producers with lowest labor costs could produce "disposable" products such as $25 DVD players, often at big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, with minimal transport costs. Companies like Komatsu and Caterpillar, which produce expensive, relatively long lasting, and complex earth moving equipment, were still competitive with lower labor cost Chinese and Indian manufacturers. But for the most part, the story of the Post-War global economy has been a growing abundance of cheap, disposable consumer goods of no particular value, but easily affordable. Enabled by cheap oil and relative peace and stability world wide. No submarines sinking cargo containers and ending global shipping.

The US Navy's dominance, and protection of world-trade, and cheap oil fueling massive cargo ships, created the global consumer economy. This global consumer economy in turn created a tremendous amount of wealth, among shippers, manufacturers, companies contracting out manufacturing under their labels, marketing professionals, and so on. With this wealth, naturally, came power. Political power, resting not in Western countries, but in many cases across their borders or entirely outside it.

It's easiest to see this effect by comparing the world of 1955 and 2005. In 1955, the economy was mostly American, the rest of the world still recovering from WWII and much of it Communist, outside global trade except for basic commodities. The world economy was dominated by GM, Ford, Chrysler, Motorola, Philco, and so on. Cars, televisions, radios, office machines, clothes, and so on were mostly manufactured in America, with the exception of a few cheap imports from Japan or Germany. In 2005, very little was manufactured in America, and even Ford, GM, and Chrysler had half or more of the content of their automobiles manufactured and assembled abroad. Nearly all consumer electronics and computers were imported, mostly from China, and of cheap quality. In 1955, most consumer goods, particularly electronics, were expensive. In 2005, most consumer goods, especially electronics, were cheap.

This global consumerism is not limited to America, or Europe either. Ford plans to sell it's Fiesta model in China mainly to young, affluent, and female consumers. This at a time when 70,000 factories are closing and there is 20 million unemployed in China. Not surprising, either, since global consumerism like all massive global trade systems, creates winners and losers.

The winners are those who can act as middle men in various trade systems, or have pursued the lowest cost strategy by moving production to the cheapest nations. It is not surprising that the vast amounts of wealth created by Nike, or Apple, or Microsoft, which has also moved production (software development) to India, have resulted in massive gains in political power. Middle men like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Nike's Phil Knight, replaced old-line moguls at GM, Ford, and Boeing. It's worth noting that neither Apple, nor Nike, nor Microsoft actually make anything in the US. Merely act as branding middle men, and hip designers.

Even less surprising is that this political power is expressed in support of soft multiculturalism, of the sort Bill Gates expresses (releasing mosquitoes into a ballroom conference on aid to the Third World, explaining that First World people should fear being infected as well). [The mosquitoes, he assured his audience later, were sterile.] Power and political influence shifted towards Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, whose fortunes depend mostly on a cheap labor force overseas, and good relations with repressive and anti-American foreign governments. It is no surprise at all that both men are substantial donors to Barack Obama, and various left-wing causes. Nor is it shocking that the fortunes of Nike, or Google, or other major international companies, depending on foreign labor almost exclusively, have embraced political correctness (Google famously refuses to celebrate most American holidays on their home page, particularly Veterans Day or Memorial Day, while celebrating the birthdays of Edvard Munch and Arthur Conan Doyle). Hardly anyone at Google is American, and the few who are embrace the culture that depends on cheap foreign labor, either the H1-B variety or actually outsourced. Microsoft is no better, having been rapidly transformed by the falling stock price (and Sarbanes-Oxley requiring the expensing of stock options) from American born, relatively well compensated software engineers, to Indian and Chinese H1-B Visa holders, with the notorious habit of squeezing out the few remaining American developers once Indian or Chinese program managers are hired in a division.

While America offers fertile ground for examining the money shifts to globalist businesses and figures, the similar rise in Germany of Adidas, in Britain of Saatchi and Saatchi, and the collapse of say, Triumph, BSA, and Goldstar Motorcycles, and Germany's Leica, offer the lesson that this process repeated itself over and over again in the West. Globalist middle-men like Britain's advertising giant won and manufacturers based locally like Triumph or Leica lost.

Collapse of Manufacturing in the West

Along with the rise of global trade based on cheap consumerism, and the massive money shifts to the winners like Microsoft, Nike, and Apple, has been the decline of manufacturing in the West. Takuan Seiyo in a recent article notes the decline of the San Francisco of Hitchcock's films, set in 1957-1963, including Vertigo and The Birds. But I want to refer to an earlier film Dark Passage, made in 1947, when San Francisco was a mostly working-man's town. A town of mostly White, Blue collar workers. A vanished San Francisco when US manufacturing, and it's labor force of mostly (but not exclusively) White men wielded considerable power. What's astonishing about this film is how ordinary and belonging working class White men are, in San Francisco. A town on film at least, of cheap boarding houses and apartments, of no great beauty and charm, of no glamor and excitement, of utter ordinariness.

One of the unseen, but huge transformations, has been that of what Joel Kotkin called the Gentrification of the Democratic Party, and the decline of blue-collar, lunch bucket unionism (which itself was mostly a White male affair). It's astonishing now, to look back upon "liberal" politics of Hubert Humphrey, Pat Brown, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and see how oriented it was towards White Working Class union men. Not because these politicians had some innate orientation towards the working class "goodness" of that group, but because that is where the balance of power existed.

Harry Truman beat Dewey on the strength of that White, Blue Collar unionism. Which itself rested on massive employment at places like Ford Motor Company, or Bethlehem Steel, or Lockheed, or McDonnell-Douglass. Jobs that paid good money, and created a large class of men who wanted stability, continued high wage employment, and the kind of American exceptionalism that drove the success of their employer.

As money and power shifted away to low-cost manufacturing countries, and with it employment and power, we could see many Pat Brown types succeeded by well, Jerry Brown. Tribune of the Marin County Gentry. Pushing the obsessions of those with inherited wealth, a concern to run other people's lives (for their general moral improvement of course), and constant status-mongering which is a feature of life among the wealthy, Brown (the very lesser) has been a fixture of California politics since the 1970s.

This is why Pat Brown built the state of California, with it's freeways and (then) world-class university system, and Jerry Brown presided over the start of it's demise, with political correctness, fawning over murderers and criminals, "small is beautiful," and other concerns of the Gentry. Neither were saints or sinners, and both politicians were arrows pointing directly where the power and the money were. For Pat Brown it was the dockworkers and autoworkers of the day (yes, once upon a time cars were manufactured in California). For Jerry Brown it was Silicon Valley millionaires to billionaires, and the old money of San Francisco.

This process, to one degree or another, played itself out in Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and pretty much all of the West.

Decline of the Middle Classes

That the middle classes are in decline in the United States (and across the West) cannot be doubted. Housing affordability is part of that, which in turn is driven by two factors: price of housing, and income.

Housing prices all across the West, from Ireland to France to the UK to America, have risen. They have risen the most in coastal or capital cities, with severe constraints on expansion, and lots of relatively educated, young, and ambitious people flooding into them. New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, and Los Angeles typify these job centers in the US, and London, Paris, Rome, and Barcelona typify them in Europe. Housing is less expensive in regional centers, away from the big money, and larger groups of young people. Cities like Dallas, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City have all grown through this appeal of cheap land. But the cheap land comes with lower salaries, and less opportunity to meet particularly younger, educated, professional women.

Meanwhile, real income has declined as a measure of housing affordability. Wage increases have not kept pace with inflation, and outside bubble occupations, such as software engineers in the Dot-com bubble, or real estate people in the housing bubble, actually declined in real purchasing power excluding consumer electronics (and before biofuel idiocy, food). It does a prospective husband no good to have a closet full of X-box equipment and no ability to purchase a house.

Even with the decline of housing prices, most properties remain without buyers, because income is so uncertain. The ability to buy a home, after all, is a bet that earnings for thirty years or so will be stable enough to provide enough money to cover the mortgage. Since the 1970's, the economy has been on one bubble after another, without sustained productivity growth and industrial production and exports that drive broad wage increases and thus wealth across the broad spectrum of the populace.

In short, the West has gotten poorer, mostly, in the most important things: the ability to buy a house and start a family. The move away from broad industrial production is the reason why.

Death of the Nuclear Family

Along with the lack of affordable housing, has come a profound shift in the way men and women relate to each other and form families. Or rather, fail to form families.

First off, women are increasingly having children as single mothers, as the 2006 US Census Survey on women and fertility shows. Depending on how you add things up (note page 6 of the PDF) "not married" can mean living with an unmarried partner or not, and can be either 36% or 41% of all births within the last twelve months of the Survey. I incline to the 41% figure (adding up the 35.5% of not married and 4.8% of "living with unmarried partner"). But to each his own. As noted in the report and elsewhere, births to Black women are 70% illegitimate, and 90% in the urban core, and among Hispanics it is approaching 50%.

The "good news" is that the Census Bureau is responding to these numbers by redefining "legitimacy" as a member of the opposite sex who resided in the household for at least a week. So if Mom's boyfriend stays over that long, the birth is reclassified as "legitimate" or with a claimed father. Political Correctness at it's finest.

Men and women used to get married far younger in the West. At far higher rates. See my posts here for example. Now, the trend is the opposite. Children are delayed, and when they come single motherhood is often a choice.

The typical path for a young woman in 1960, say, was to graduate from college, work for a few years, marry a man, probably 6-7 years her elder, have two kids, return to the workforce at some point. Now for a young woman, in 2009, it is to graduate from college, work for twenty years, a great many love affairs but no real desire to pair off with a "good enough" man rather than the perfect guy, and one designer eugenic yuppie baby, through IVF, or adoption from China.

The Pill, the condom, rising incomes for women, anonymous urban living, as Roissy in DC has noted [Don't let the Pick Up Artist stuff scare you off, he has startling insights into how dysfunctional the male-female relationship has become] enable women worldwide to achieve a seeming utopia, what City Journal writer Kay Hymnowitz has termed the "New Girl Order" of consumer goods, control over their own fertility and sexuality, fashionable clothes, independence, and all around fabulousness! Just look at how Ford in China is targeting "Mei" (the personification of their customer) for sales of the Fiesta. Even in the land of "Little Emperors" and male preference, Ford would believe that sales lie in the New Girl Order.

But like every other utopia, there is a catch. Falling Total Fertility Rates, in countries wherever there is enough female earning power, urban anonymity, and availability of the pill and condom, are the result. Italy, Spain, and Greece have point of no return TFRs. Around 1.1. White Britain and the US have under 2.1, the replacement rate, around 1.9 or so. Even places like Algeria, Tunisia, and Iran, of all places, certainly no feminist paradises, have TFRs of 1.7 or so. The rates are available at the CIA World Factbook, you can look it up!

This happens because women often delay marriage until well into their thirties, when excess baggage on both parties, rather limited attractiveness, and the dilution of the effect of bonding hormones released during sex make a high divorce or break-up rate (for those never marrying but cohabitating) a near certain thing. A man or woman with many, many sex partners will not have any practical hope of bonding with one partner. Certainly not when both have far less limited attractiveness compared to their salad days, when sheer physical attraction could get them over inevitable bumps in the relationship. Even worse of course is the pairing of a woman with many, many sex partners, and a man with relatively few.

Women spend most of their time single, and as a consequence care intensely about what their peers think of them. This bleeds over into men's relationships as well, any young man who is single knows well the importance of looking the "correct way" for whatever fashion holds, and having the "correct" opinions and accessories to have any success in the dating market.

I submit for your amusement: Victoria Beckham hates Straight Guys (most young White women do), Young British Women more promiscuous than men (not sure I believe this one, but data to back up Roissy's general first-hand observations about the dating scene), Britain the most promiscuous nation (this one I believe), same here, the Death of Dating, Certain women regard Drew Peterson as a Catch, and my all time favorite NY Times Redefines Family.

Now, by no means should these links be taken as endorsement that women are somehow "bad" or that they hold responsibility for the decline of the West. But I don't think any casual observer can say that the lack of social institutions, mores, and limits on women's (and men's) actions, sexual expression, and behavior has been a positive result. We see in these links the expression of hatred towards straight White men, general promiscuity that prevents any possibility of a happy marriage, the death of dating and judging the opposite sex on behavior, decorum, character, and other things other than pure physical animal attraction, and murderous thuggishness as the attractive markers of men for women. To round everything out, we have Single Motherhood by choice.

No single factor other than the collapse of how men and women relate to each other, and the inability to form even the nucleus of a nuclear family (lacking only the capital to start having children in a house of their own), explains the fall of the West.

Women live in a constant status competition, for fabulous clothes and pecking order. No article encapsulates this than the recent Marie Claire article "Why I Left My Beta Husband"

A few years ago, my husband, Mark, and I were at one of those hip downtown restaurants sipping mojitos and nibbling on lime-spiked seviche when one of my bosses appeared from a cloud of Cuban-cigar smoke and patted my shoulder. When I introduced him to Mark, he naturally asked what he did for a living. We both froze.

"I do some freelancing," Mark said.

"He studied film at NYU," I said at the same time.
Mark looked at me and shrugged. "I stay home with our daughter," he said, as my colleague quietly balked.

"He makes it possible for me to do my job," I said, laughing. But inside, I was mortified. Technically, I had it all back then, including a gorgeous toddler and a cool job.

What I didn't have was a husband I felt proud of.

Which is the social landscape women inhabit, all the time, of the constant pressure to be hip, cool, trendy, and of course with the correct accessories, Apple computer laptop, fair trade latte, and husband that impresses your boss.

This forms the social landscape of the culture at large, as appeals to women dominate the consumer products industry and the dating market of course. Seeing as how there are more men pursuing single women than single women pursuing men.

Women of course, hate Beta men. See Roissy's blog for more details, especially the comment on top by T AKA Ricky Raw, on the attitude of women towards the Mo Rocca types. Women really do hate most men, because after all, most men are indeed "Beta." Victoria Beckham might be extreme, but most women would share at least some of her attitudes.

It's easy to see why. Beta guys with no social dominance and status hit on them on all the time, and when they don't hit on them, they stare at them or other, unwanted attention. They also provide competition for the limited amount of high paying "cool" jobs that women either occupy or hope to move into, and worst of all, don't excite them. "Boring" is basically a synonym for White Guy among women. Gay men are "fabulous" without having any desire for them, don't block the access of the Alpha man, and are "interesting" in a way that boring guys who work in the office without status just are not.

These two measures, the constant unwanted attention from guys "beneath" them, and competition for scarce top jobs and status, account for how White women are always keen to sign up for a good dose of anti-White male bashing and discrimination. Not just Robert Reich, but most White women, would agree that "No White Men Need Apply" for bailout money, or much of anything.

If there was a process designed to create an alliance of women, gays, non-Whites, in attacking the traditions, cultures, and political alliances of the West as it was before 1965, it would be hard to top the current arrangements. Dear readers, please do not take my words for this. Check out yourself any of the following sites, and explore the attitudes of women towards Barack Obama, traditional Judeo-Christian culture, traditional morals, White men, the military, political correctness, and more therein. Explore: TMZ.com, Televisionwithoutpity.com, and Dlisted.com .

Do not just take my word for it, see for yourself.

Once you understand, most women will be single their entire lives, their social and emotional lives fed by a bunch of Alpha men, who decrease in frequency and duration as they age, and are transient in any case, and "friends" who are nearly all female, and replace the nuclear family, but require a constant struggle to maintain status-pecking order, things become clear. The dominance of political correctness, a fashion in opinions, mirrors that of fashion in shoes. Wacky fads, including "Green" mania and Global Warming, and the hatred of the White guy it all makes sense.

Even the desirable nature of men such as Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Drew Peterson, Chris Brown, and Roman Polanski becomes clear. Women, no longer needing to, on their own account, and not having social institutions and mores forcing them to, do not judge men by what they do and the content of their character revealed by action. Rather, they judge them based on how much status and social dominance they possess. A Roman Polanski, who drugged and raped a 13 year old, can be lionized by a female documentary director. Because he's famous and other famous people think he's cool.

This represents, by the way, a radical shift in how women viewed men. Enabled by the pill, condom, anonymous urban living, and the ability to live their own lives free of integration into a stable community (and fearing censure of same). Take away any two of these and women would revert back to what they were before. And such men would have much to fear from women on any jury.

Nor can the male sex escape censure. Britain's New Year looked like this. The inevitable result of men competing for women on social dominance quickly degenerating into pure thuggery. Just as bad were the drunken women falling apart into stupors on the sidewalk, and being left there, defenseless.

The failure to defend women, in either the Virginia Tech shooting (healthy young adult males did not feel their female classmates were worth dying for, and simply sat passively waiting to die) or the Montreal Massacre years earlier, are canaries in the coalmine. They along with the spate of horror movies showing young women killed (instead of young men killing the monster and well, marrying them or what have you) are part of the disconnect between men and women.

Increasingly, men are defaulting to a passive, disconnected mode when it comes to women. This is worthy of a separate post, but in brief men are largely unable to compete with the few "Alpha" types and women, increasingly, will share the Alphas among themselves, in a "soft" polygamy and choose single motherhood if they have any children at all. This is the downside of the "New Girl Order" and the changes wrought by contraceptive technology and urban living.

Women are not "bad" or responsible for the fall of the West. But the massive shifts in their behavior and lack of nuclear family formation due to the collapse of how men and women related, are indeed a large part of the decline of the West. Ann Coulter was right in that Single Mothers, and the general pain they create in poverty, early sexual contact, teen motherhood, promiscuous behavior, do indeed on average create crimes and misery. For a Black Blogger's take on this, do not fail to check out The Myth of the Ghetto Alpha Male at the Rawness.

Since this is a very long post, I will add my thoughts on how fragmentation of the mass media, consumerism and the capture of marketing and advertising by and for women, and the rise of hedonism to replace the nuclear family, have contributed to the decline of the West.

But in short, I think massive technological changes have created the decline of the West. The pill, condom, urban anonymous living, great mass consumerism wealth accruing to middle men elites, decline of industrial production in the West, and status mongering among single men and women account for pretty much all the decline of the West.
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Obama's People: Unconfirmable, Unqualified Disasters

A recent story in the LAT noted that of Obama's 300 foreign policy advisors in the campaign, not a single one has been appointed to a cabinet level position. The story is of course notable for the information that the by-lined reporter, Paul Richter, desperately seeks to conceal from his readers.

The truth is that Obama's people have a history of extreme statements and actions, corrupt relationships, or both. This makes nearly all of them unconfirmable. Disasters waiting to happen. And not so coincidentally, his staff, larded up with these folks, a coal-dust filled silo waiting to explode. Karl Rove, in a recent Wall Street Journal Editorial, noted that Obama's staff was exceptionally crowded. He missed the obvious point, Obama's staff is crowded because his closest advisors won't pass muster on Capitol Hill. Not even by the standards of Tim Geithner ("taxes are patriotic," unless you are a connected big shot, then they are not). Noted tax evader, pleader of special privilege, and US Treasury Secretary.

For example, Paul Richter cites Richard Danzig, former Clinton Navy Secretary, and key campaign advisor on the military and national security, as a man inexplicably passed over for Defense posts in favor of Bush hold-over Robert Gates. No actual research is done as to WHY this man might not be offered a position requiring Senate confirmation.

No mention of the fact that Danzig in an interview believed that Winnie the Pooh and Star Wars held the key to stopping terror plots.

"Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security."

Danzig is noted for trying to put female sailors on nuclear submarines, a policy vociferously resisted by the Navy for obvious reasons (you can't simply discharge pregnant sailors from submarines as you can from surface ships). The fact that many female sailors get pregnant each cruise (an easy way out of the difficult environment of life at sea) escaped the man who spent not a day in the military and whose entire background is in Law. He has called for more Affirmative Action in the military, calling it a "white male bastion." This despite the fact that the military is all volunteer.

Danzig is also the CEO of Human Genome Sciences and National Semiconductor Corporations. A walking set of conflicts of interest, both are major contractors with the Defense Department.

Danzig is famous for calling the Pentagon a "communist system" and wants ad-hoc budgets made on the fly. [A guarantee for chaos only a lawyer could love.]

Any Cabinet level post for which Danzig would be nominated would entail a lengthy look at his movement from Clinton-era Navy Secretary to his posts at two companies for which, to put it mildly, he seems unqualified for excepting his influence peddling. Not to mention his anti-White male statements and positions, his repeated attempt to impose political correctness on the Navy at the expense of operational requirements, and rather lunatic statements about proper counter-terrorism policy and Iraq and much else. [Government by Winnie the Pooh.]

All this was found with just a few minutes of Google searching. Presumably Richter is not totally lazy, and knew this background well. He certainly did not wish to share this vital background information with his readers.

Richter next moves on to Ivo Daalder, Phd in Political Science from MIT. Daalder is the author of Obama's "Talk to Iran Without Preconditions" policy, and as such, raises a high stakes game over Iran policy. One that is inevitable the moment his name is put forward for Senate Confirmation. Made all the worse in that Daalder proposed in print to simply take Iran's word for it that the regime was not creating nuclear weapons material. Then there is his suggestion that any US intervention anywhere in the world needs either the UN Security Council's authorization or some ill-defined "League of Democracies."

Richter also mentions former US Ambassador to Israel, and Egypt, Daniel Kurtzer. As noted in the American Thinker, Kurtzer has a troubling background of extreme, anti-Israeli/Jewish statements: he blames Israel for the violent Palestinian terror attacks, holds the existence of Israel as provoking all Muslim terrorism, and has characterized/excused terrorism as "guerillas."

Kurtzer is a protege of pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish figure James Baker.

Like Jimmy Carter, Kurtzer is a proponent of a comprehensive, "fix everything" Middle East Peace settlement, a path rejected by both Presidents Bush 43 and Clinton. Nominating Kurtzer will bring all these issues up, in a way that Obama certainly does not wish, raising the questions of how much Obama believes in a big bang peace settlement, blames Israel for all terrorism, and implicitly wants Israel to cease to exist to "solve" the US terrorism problem.

Richter of course does not want to tell his readers these inconvenient truths, because they paint a rather ugly portrait of the team around Obama: riddled with conflicts of interest, extreme, hard-left and anti-Israel/Jewish statements, and laughably naive views about power and America's place in the world. Even more dangerous to Richter would be his readers finding out that these are the men making informal policy through staff positions, ad-hoc and by the seat of their pants, causing a whipsaw effect in the Obama Administration. Whichever staffer had Obama's ear last, makes policy. Until it too is reversed.

George W. Bush had many faults as a leader, lack of formal process for policy making and review was not one of them. One might quibble with the results and quality of the policy, but at least the process in which it was made allowed for some open-ness, input of policy opponents, decision making by Cabinet officers approved by the Senate, and a known cadre of advisors who were hardly invisible to the Press or public attention.

By contrast, the chaos, disorganization, ineptness, and weakness of the Obama administration in handling Cabinet appointments, the bailout bill, and initial discussions with Russia over missile defense, reek of policy by unappointed, extremist, unvetted staff.

The real lesson of Richter's article is that Obama's closest advisors can't get confirmed by the Senate, and that they are loons and riddled with conflict of interest. Something that the Press in general is desperate to conceal from the public.

Eventually, however, Obama's manifest incompetence of his team, lacking any formal review and depending on chaotic, relationship based policy making, will become evident to us all. God help us.

Television's Kick Ass Women and Smart Men

There's a new trend on Television: Kick Ass Women partnered with "smart" men, solving crimes and fighting evil. Seen so far mostly on hour-long dramas (a few sitcoms such as "Big Bang Theory" have semi-touched on this pairing), the device is both a response to a genuine fondness for the pairing among male audiences, and the type of social engineering that Hollywood is famous for. This dramatic device does however offer some insight into how both men and women relate to each other, in changing ways, and how Hollywood sees this change.

It is important to remember that Western civilization has always had a strong preference among it's men for "strong" or independent women with their own minds, able to make their own choices. As far back as the Greeks, plays like "Lysistrata" had a preference for women who were able to make up their own minds, and make their choices stick. In Medieval romances and tales from El Cid to "Song of Roland" to various tales of King Arthur or Robin Hood, there is always a strong and independent woman at the center of the tale, to be won (or not) by the hero's courage, devotion, and manly attributes of self-sacrifice and duty.

Much of Western literature is centered around what amounts to a "how-to" manual for young men seeking to woo and win a strong, independent woman. Western society faced the task, throughout it's history, of managing a lot of young men who could present a threat to the established order, but were also needed for defense and obviously, local wealth creation. Compared to other societies, Western Christendom offered a different solution to this problem — monogamous marriage, based at least in part on romantic love. Muslim societies to this day, retain both arranged marriages and polygamy, making them intrinsically unstable and prone to export their surplus young men via conquest or Jihad. By contrast even in Medieval times, various troubador ballads would lament, in bald terms, the loss of their beloved's favor. Which implies that their beloved could indeed choose not to love them. Something simply unthinkable in Muslim societies, and by contrast the constant obsession of Western ones.

Western societies have a clear line from Medieval troubadors to Mississippi Bluesmen, with song after song after song, nearly all of them, dealing with romantic love in form or another. The thrill of a new romance, a woman's favor, the celebration of the love, and the crushing feelings of loss in one aspect or another, form the basis for most popular music in Western culture from the 1200's onward. All this creative energy suggests that Westerners, unlike other societies, place far more importance on romantic love. Romantic love where the woman is both worthy of struggle, and has the ability to choose.

Pretty much most of Western literature, therefore, has been entertaining but "how-to" manuals on how to win the type of strong Western women that dominate Western literature: Maid Marian, Lois Lane, Mary Jane Watson. It's no surprise either that the "strongest" female characters often appear in male-oriented fiction. If there is a woman to be won, she must obviously be worthy of winning. Hence the strength of the female characters, who are often important partners in the adventures of the male heroes.

Western literature both reflects, therefore, the obsession of Western men in winning a woman worthy of being won, and the strong social suggestion that winning such a woman is a more worthy endeavor than overthrowing the King and replacing him, and constructing a harem. While Western nations obviously have throughout history had a great deal of social disturbances, in general, compared to their Islamic and Asian contemporaries, they had more social peace and stability. The stability of the West in turn depends on the ability of the average man to form a family, one based mostly on love and the free romantic choice of the woman. That social structure allowed massive mobilization of resources at places as various and terrible as Lepanto, Tours, Ypres, and the skies over Germany.

Of course, Western men find strong women very attractive. Buried in the "Taming of the Shrew" is the assumption that Petruchio finds Katherine attractive and worth "taming" instead of simply pursuing another more pliable woman. Western men find strong women, of independent judgment and character, deeply attractive for obvious emotional reasons. Strong women are less likely to be swayed by other men, who might temporarily have an advantage in power and strength and standing over her husband. Strong women offer their own counsel which is vital for a man navigating the complex and changing society of the West. Finally, the desire to pass on to one's children the positive, independent aspects of character of one's wife as well as one's own is strong among men in the West.

Almost every comic book in the "Golden Age" of the late 1930's to mid 1940's had strong women, as the central women to be won throughly manly adventure. This continued in the "Silver Age" of the 1960's, from the "Incredible Hulk's" Betty Ross to the "Invisible Woman" of "the Fantastic Four." Not to mention Spider-Man's Mary Jane Watson.

It's important to note that the emotional and mental characteristics of the characters were as important if not more important than their physical beauty. While none of the characters was ugly or plain, they all possessed independence and their own judgment, rather than merely being "pretty." The "Invisible Woman," Susan Storm, even had powers of her own. Importantly of course, when "won" by the hero she stayed "won."

So strong female characters are nothing new. Men have always liked them, and women readers of authors as diverse as Jane Austen to Candace Bushnell have also liked women of strong character and independent judgment. Hollywood has mostly shown strong women. Soap operas and night-time soaps like "Days of Our Lives" to "Dynasty" to "Desperate Housewives" have all featured women who were not exactly shy or wallflowers. Hollywood's classic age, with actors such as Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, and Humphrey Bogart paired with strong women such as Katherine Hepburn, or Lauren Bacall, speak to how enduring that attraction has been, and remains to this day. These films are remembered still, in part because of the strength of the women.

But what has changed is how men and women relate to each other, both in real life and Hollywood's fantasies on Television.

In real life as I've noted in my posts Hollywood's Romantic Comedies for Men, and Modern Romance, and Dating Capital and Chuck: Men, Romance, and Female Empowerment, there are serious demographic changes taking place.

First, men and women are getting married later and later in life, compared to the last seventy years, with these trends picking up in the late 1960's. Next, demographics crunch men because the female cohort that is younger is numerically smaller, a given of the declining birth rates. Because of the preference among both men and women for a man about six to ten years older than the woman, the men face more contemporaries competing for the smaller pool of women, instead of the other way around in increasing birth rates, with profound effects on the relationships between men and women. Men face a decreasing social power (more of them pursuing fewer women) and women increasing social power in romantic matters.

Mediating institutions such as churches and neighbors and close families no longer exist in today's highly mobile and urban societies. Moreover, women face so much choice that they tend to retreat to the most simple of criteria: power and social dominance. This decisively tilts power and even the ability to find romance for most men and towards the few "players" who can appear to be the most socially and physically dominant men in the bar. Since bars and other venues like them are the way in which women find and choose their romantic partners, highly mobile, urban professional environments.

Finally, contraception, cheap and easy and effective, in the form of the condom and the pill, along with anonymous urban living and female wealth and power equal to that if not more than men (in urban information-age occupations), means women can afford to choose on everything BUT character, a complete reversal from times past. There is no downside risk perceived at any rate for choosing Mr. Wrong.

Which leads to the irony of our times. Never have so many men so wanted strong women, of independent character and assertiveness, and never have strong women wanted most men less. The dirty little secret of female empowerment is that it merely shifts female choice ever-upward, to men who are of higher social and physical power than themselves. Any casual perusal of female-oriented entertainment will confirm this. "Sex and the City's" "Mr. Big" or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer's" characters "Angel" and "Spike" are measured by the power and strength and social dominance over other men they possess, not inner qualities of mercy, kindness, self-sacrifice, or adherence to Western/Christian morality. Because a strong woman does not need those qualities in a man, if he fails to please he can be simply replaced. With no risk or penalty.

This dynamic is why most strong, independent women in urban centers end up sharing a few socially dominant men, in a de-facto polygamy. Even women who complain about dates don't complain that they cannot get them, merely the quality of men they must consider in their thirties, as they age out of peak desirability. That in itself is a measure of the dating disparity. Since if men were simply sitting out the dating game, in pursuit of unobtainable women of great beauty, there would be many women of average looks sitting alone at home, which is not the picture we see in complaints about dating.

All of this has created a market, and a considerable one, looking at the receipts for "the Wedding Crashers" ($209 million domestic gross), or "Superbad" ($121 million domestic gross), or "Knocked Up" ($148 million domestic gross), among mostly men (though with some women) for romance involving strong female characters and somewhat funny, ordinary guys. [Source: Boxofficemojo.com ]

This has created a backlash. Hollywood Elsewhere by Jeffrey Wells has talked about the "eclipse of the hunk" and the "Apatow Schlub," in which he bemoans ordinary looking guys paired with attractive women. He's not alone. The female star of "Knocked Up," Katherine Heigl, has objected (after collecting her paycheck and being made famous by the role) to the movie itself, particularly the premise that her attractive and powerful character would have sex with the loser played by Seth Rogen. Who just was not attractive enough. It's clear that the gay and female aesthetic in Hollywood is deeply challenged by the popularity and money-making effect of the average Joe paired with an independent and beautiful woman.

The threatis obvious: far fewer roles for the female and gay-appealing pretty boys, promotion of a more straight guy appealing romantic agenda (i.e. choose Joe Average when he demonstrates proper heroism and stick with him), and general themes and plots that are alien to gay and female dominated Hollywood — gone is flitting to the most powerful and appealing man of the moment, and present would themes of sacrifice, duty, courage, endurance, and a traditional culture resurgent.

Hollywood hates this development. But all that money is nearly irresistible. So Hollywood, particularly in Television, where the ability to move quickly and cheaply (well, by Hollywood standards, anyway) allows exploration and experimentation more so than film, has chosen to hesitantly exploit that massive audience of lots and lots of men without any significant romance, hungry for stories about men like them winning the girl, with the cherry on top of some extra women watching as well, drawn by the strong female characters. Of course, there is lots of PC messaging, and a real reluctance to fully exploit this theme, even given the dramatics inherent, but that it is taking place at all is significant.

[Serenity, the "Firefly" movie, cost $39 million to make, with a 2 hour running time, according to Box Office Mojo, while the series itself likely cost about $3 million per episode, or 45 minutes of actual screen time. That makes TV cost about $60,000 per minute raw production costs, versus $325,000 per minute, even with the same basic material.]

Now, Television has started to explore that Apatow pairing, but with Kick-ass women and Smart men fighting "evil" as the more threatening aspect of living ordinary lives. Shows as disparate as "Chuck," and "Fringe" and "Eleventh Hour," and "the Mentalist," have a "smart" guy paired with an aggressive, no-nonsense woman who visibly kicks ass.

What's notable is how tentative the pairing is. In each show, the setting is "professional." In "Chuck" and "Eleventh Hour," the aggressive, no nonsense female agent is assigned to protect the smart guy, who is consistently portrayed as not very good in purely physical confrontations (and therefore a romantic turn-off to women). In "the Mentalist," the canny social observer played by Simon Baker avoids physical confrontations and is often bailed out by the tough, female agent (and boss of the unit) played by Robin Tunney. "Fringe" treads the same ground. "Chuck" is constantly rescued by his female protector, as is the hero of "Eleventh Hour."

In each show, while romance is hinted at, it is just a hint. No real romance exists, merely the possibility, however fuzzy and uncertain. The social reality is that being "smart" is a loser for men romantically, since it generally correlates with lower levels of testosterone. Various studies shown here and here how rising IQ strongly correlates with far fewer sex partners. "Smartness" has a trade-off, and that trade-off seems to be lower levels of testosterone and the characteristics associated with high levels of testosterone, such as physical and social dominance. In other words, the very things women find attractive about men.

What's interesting is that the audience for these shows is mostly male, although there is a strong female component to the viewership, attracted no doubt by the presence of strong female characters. Female audiences, and actresses, have complained for years about the lack of strong and interesting female characters in movies and television. For the most part, since the end of the golden era of the 1940's "women's pictures" there have been few interesting and strong roles for women in movies. Television, however, has had a plethora of strong and independent women. "The Pretender's" "Miss Parker," and "X-Files" Agent Scully, and their successors: "Life's" "Detective Reese" and "Chuck's" "Sarah" and the female leads in "Eleventh Hour," "the Mentalist," and "Fringe" all are not just, but more tough than the male leads, carry guns (the men don't), and face "interesting" personal-professional dilemmas (often work-life balance).

Men of course like the "tough but vulnerable" female characters, and all of the female characters above have personal issues that suggest inner vulnerability and the need for male comfort: "Life's" "Detective Reese" is an alcoholic, "Chuck's" "Sarah" is closed off emotionally and a work-a-holic, and so on. The male audience enjoys seeing lead male characters offer comfort and support, and this particular dramatic aspect is noticeably lacking in the movies, as opposed to episodic Television.

What is telling about Hollywood, however, is how tentative they are even in episodic Television, where fast and cheap (again, by Hollywood standards) is the norm and where themes and structures can be easily explored, as a sort of creative laboratory, in using the romance between the "Kick Ass Woman" and the "Smart Guy" to build audience. Only on "Life" is there an explicit romantic pairing, and while the Sarah Shahi character ("Detective Reese") is most certainly "Kick Ass" and tough, her romantic partner, played by the always excellent Donal Logue, is more amiable doofus than explicitly "Smart."

You would expect that the huge box office, for not much production money, of the Apatow-themed comedies, with together, savvy, and beautiful professional women paired with good natured average guys, would be quickly exploited on Television. Instead, a "credible" reason for the "Kick Ass Woman" and the "Smart Guy" to work together is constructed: the "Smart Guy" needs protection from rival secret agents ("Chuck") or threats ("Fringe" and "Eleventh Hour") or he is a consultant ("the Mentalist"). Mutual attraction is never the reason for why the two characters interact. Even more puzzling, the pairing is depicted as "friends" (which is of course incompatible with romance) and remain a respectful romantic and sexual distance from each other. Expressions of desire for the other by one of the characters come, and are quickly snuffed out.

Part of this, of course, is the PC ideology of how men and women work together. In the professional workplace, it is necessary for any overt expression of desire (particularly among men for women) to be suppressed. This is required for actual work to be done and for everyone to get along rather than escalating mating competitions.

Beyond this actual, real-world requirement to make the workplace about work, not finding a romantic partner, is how PC believes men and women should relate. PC holds that the "best" way for a man to win a woman is to be respectful, kind, and supportive. This is basically the path to becoming the "gay best friend" beloved of women's comedies. Something that creates a lot of anger, parenthetically, when men find out how false that belief really is in actual reality. PC of course holds this because the fairy-tale of how men and women interact benefits PC's promulgators. Women and the few socially dominant men obviously benefit from the average guy believing that being supportive and respectful is a way to win a woman's heart. Instead of being socially and physically dominant over other men, which is the actual path to success with women for men. Women benefit because average men don't waste their time approaching them, only socially dominant men, and the latter face far less competition.

PC, by painting a false, unworkable picture of the world, and how it works, benefits those who ignore it's dictates and act on how the world really works.

It's natural therefore that Hollywood, which is more PC bound than any other (being run by basically, a few dominant men, gays, and women) would encourage a PC-driven view of relationships between the "Smart Men" and "Kick Ass Women." That the way to win the "Kick Ass Woman's" heart is to be her "friend." Or basically, the "gay pal."

But Hollywood has another problem — it's gay-female-Big Man power axis finds pairing attractive, accomplished women with a guy who is NOT the classic "Big Man" deeply offensive. This is what got both Katherine Heigl and Jeffrey Wells upset. Female audiences don't like it either — "Smart Men" are not very attractive to women for obvious reasons. Hollywood just can't believe itself in an explicit romantic pairing of "Smart Men" and "Kick Ass Women." Despite explicit, and quite graphic romantic-sexual pairings of lesbians, or powerful older men and their younger female subordinates, or gay men, or even polygamists and their many wives.

It's pretty telling that Hollywood can portray ANY romantic-sexual pairing BUT that of a "Smart" guy and a "Strong" woman. Too many Hollywood constituencies would be upset by that pairing, never mind that it could make money, lots of it. Gays would be upset by promotion of a monogamous romantic choice. Women by "settling" for a less than socially dominant man. "Big Men" by an erosion of their social power and control.

Hollywood likes the money that promoting that type of romantic pairing could bring, but can't bring itself to quite pull it off. There are too many taboos and people made angry internally for Hollywood to collect the "money on the table." In terms of increased male viewership, men being far under-served in Hollywood, with the exception of the Summer Action Blockbuster ("Dark Knight," "Indiana Jones," etc.) which are also known as the few films that actually make money in Hollywood. Apatow's movies don't cost too much. They make nearly as much money as the expensive Hollywood Action movies. They don't require big stars who cost lots of money either. You'd think that TV would be filled with that type of pairing, or something like it, but it's not. The closest Hollywood can get in it's "laboratory" for dramatic exploration is a professional partnership with mere suggestions of romance quickly shot down, from time to time.

Which leaves potentially a huge opening for Hollywood's competitors. Peter Jackson ("Lord of the Rings") showed how New Zealand could be used to make big-budget and very successful films. Other strategic competitors of Hollywood would be Australia, and Ireland, and Canada. Filled with low cost labor, favorable tax treatment, and skilled actors and others who can work quickly and cheaply. Eventually the rise of such centers, and the ability to distribute TV series and films on the internet through sites such as Hulu.com (deriving money from advertising) will present the threat to Hollywood that Japan presented to Detroit.

Already, Hollywood's moguls are asking for bailouts. Maybe they know something. Someone, someday, is going to exploit the demographic changes (a lot of lonely and single men) and make a lot of money by being there first.
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The Bombay World

The Jihadist, terror attacks in Bombay, which have at latest report have as many as 300 feared dead, are the symbol of the problems of the modern world. For most of the Twentieth Century, threats to Western nations were from industrialized, modern powers. Either other Western nations, such as the Kaiser's or Furhrer's Germany, or Soviet Russia, or modernized Asian nations such as Tojo's Japan or Mao's nuclear armed China. Failed nations and states like Pakistan or Somalia were not considered threats. What armies did they have? What navies? What strategic air forces or ICBMs? That of course has all changed, mostly without anyone noticing it until now. When it must be noticed.

The problem is that the diffusion of modern technology, like the AK-47, across the globe allows even failed societies like Pakistan to export their troubles to neighbors, or even distant places. Like England or the United States. Technology has become so cheap and widely available that even places that can't produce it on their own can buy the technology in the global marketplace. The United Nations in 2001 estimated that an AK-47 could be purchased in many places in Africa for as little as $6. That is the price of something that is a commodity. While doubtless prices have risen since that report, the ubiquity of the AK-47 worldwide is proof that Western nations no longer have technology advantages.

From what is known, by reporting from various sources, the Bombay assault was planned for a year in advance. Training was conducted in Kashmir and Rawalpindi (the military heart of Pakistan). The attack team consisted of between ten and possibly as many as twenty men. Considerable logistics support was required, to stash arms and water and ammunition inside the hotel, and other places, and keep the hotel staff away from the rooms or prevent them from reporting the arms and water caches. Targets were carefully surveilled, and the targets included the very obscure Lubavitcher Jewish Center in Bombay, which was unmarked and unknown to nearly all of Bombay (so much for security by obscurity). The gunmen operated in pairs, in the manner of US Marines and other American combat infantrymen. The gunmen, according to the survivor, expected to survive and escape. The goal, according to the survivor, was to kill as many people as possible, the number that the attackers desired to reach was 5,000 people.

India is a nation of about a billion people. The "demands" of the group claiming responsibility, the Deccan Muhajideen, were for the entire Indian subcontinent to be put under Islamic rule and Sharia Law. It was not of course, a serious demand. The purpose of the attack was not hostage-trading, or publicity for demands. Or even killing to achieve a political objective from the target, i.e. "negotiations" or giving in to demands that did not require great sacrifices from the target. No, the killing was all about raising an exile army. Liberals consistently ask "Why do they hate us?" and Conservatives answers are often "They hate us for our freedoms." Neither provide a good answer for why Bombay's atrocities took place. It is not about us, it is about them.

Westhawk believes that the attack, like 9/11 organized by Al Qaeda, is all about mobilizing the Caliphate. The attack, in other words, was designed to create a backlash against Muslims in India and create a religious-ethnic war between India and Pakistan. This is only partly right. What Westhawk misses are the goals of men like Ayman Al-Zawahari and Osama bin Laden. As amply documented in Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower," the goal of both Al-Zawhari and Bin Laden was to create an exile Army. An exile Army capable of overthrowing the regimes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where each could then rule his native land. This is the big flaw of Islam, in that there is no other path to power in Islamic societies except sitting out in exile somewhere, and organizing a coup, or assassinations of the leaders. There are no peaceful paths to power, by political organizing, as there is in the West. There is no accommodations, for powerful forces, as there is in say, China or Japan, in a more consensus-driven environment (and ruthless suppression of those who do not cooperate). Thus, Islamic society, heavily influenced by it's polygamy and "Big Man" society, with a chief who runs everything and owns everything, and everyone else below, predictably creates these exile forces. Algeria is plagued by the GIA and GSPC, Egypt by Islamic Jihad, Saudi Arabia by Al Qaeda, Morocco by Al Qaeda, Indonesia by the Jemaah Islamiyah, and so on. Pakistan is the worst, with an alphabet soup of terrorist groups, all fighting for influence and power. Each group is hoping to overthrow the current regimes, using Islam as a lever (and the convenient tactic of labeling the current regime as "infidel") and assembling it's own exile Army and group of supporters inside the nation.

Simply put, these men want power. The power of the ruler. They aim to get it. And the way they get it is by demonstrating they are winners.

Wright demonstrates how Al-Zawahari and Bin Laden only fitfully arrived at the "winning" model for assembling lots of men, money, and supporters inside their target country. At first, both tried assassination attempts and terrorism against the regime. Egyptian Islamic Jihad had a series of failed attempts to kill Mubarak, and attacks against tourists in Southern Egypt and elsewhere. Osama's attacks against Saudi regime figures, and agitation got the same results as Al-Zawahari's Egyptian endeavors. Police crackdowns, imprisonment of supporters, execution of a good many suspected backers, and very visible failure. Funding and support from backers dried up. Men stopped coming to the camps in Sudan, or Somalia, or Pakistan. Their host nations got nervous and informed them that perhaps they would find a better climate elsewhere, under pressure from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Then, with the tactic of killing lots of Americans, with impunity, both Al-Zawahari and Osama bin Laden found men and money pouring into their camps. Al Qaeda went from an obscure bunch of "losers" who were nowhere near the vanguard of Islamic Jihad to the leaders. This success of course attracted considerable American retaliation in the end, and put both men on the run and unable to take full advantage of their ability to raise money and men and gain followers inside their target nations (for takeover). But every would-be usurper and terrorist leader took notice. To gain the lion's share of money and men, one must successfully attack and kill lots of Westerners.

The danger of American retaliation could be finessed in several ways. First, by not claiming direct responsibility, and using a cover organization, while covertly spreading the word that it was, indeed, your own that directed the attack. Second, by banking on the election of Muslim-friendly (if not Muslim himself) Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States, who has written in his autobiography "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" that he would "stand with Muslims" rather than America in the event of a Muslim attack on the US. Third, by manipulating the desire for legalistic "proof" in Western societies before any action in retaliation for an attack takes place. By carefully choosing men who have no direct connection to a terrorist group, there can be no "proof" that a terrorist group was responsible.

Meanwhile, the advantage for any would-be terrorist kingpin for pulling off such an attack is great: he can very likely receive tens of millions of dollars at least from Gulf oil interests, and others, around the Muslim world. Not the least of which is the money that can be raised from Muslims in the West. It is alleged that much of the financing for the Bombay attack came from Muslims in Britain. It is further alleged that some of the dead attackers were British Citizens as well. At least the former seems plausible and the case of the latter is bolstered by the number of British Muslim Citizens (and Canadians, for that matter) captured or killed in the battlefields of Afghanistan in the last seven years. This is not surprising, a recent poll reveals that forty percent of British Muslims want Sharia Law in the UK. A full twenty percent had sympathy for the 7/7 bombers.

The problem for the West, and other non-Muslim societies, is that there are too many would-be "Big Men" sitting out in exile, figuring that they can quite reasonably expect to at least run their own lucrative private Armies, if only they can figure out a way to kill lots of non-Muslims and get away with it. This has of course, always been the case for Islamic societies, while both Western and Eastern societies have largely done away with exile leaders since well, Napoleon.

What has changed is the ability of technology, and the weakness of both Western and Eastern societies, which depend on cooperation and non-violence, to make this desire of Muslim exile leaders quite possible.

In examining the Bombay Jihadist atrocities, the relative cost of the operation is not high. Almost any well organized terrorist group could pursue it, at relatively little risk. The surveillance of the targets was relatively low risk, even if discovered the PC attitudes of most nations and screaming of "profiling" particularly America and Europe, would lead to charges being dismissed. Try again with another target. Groups of two men, five to six teams in all, could produce enough reporting and raw data to plan an effective attack. The cost for the surveillance could be as little as $20,000.

The training of the men who would carry out the attack, and their careful selection, would take more time, but would not cost much. AK-47's are ubiquitous and easily obtained in places like Pakistan, or Somalia, or many other parts of the world. Creating mock-ups of the targets, screening the men, training them, providing them with meals and sleeping arrangements, could very likely be done for only $70,000. The largest cost component of this phase would be security and investigations of the proposed attackers.

Next comes the plausible deniability. Care must be taken to feed appropriate intelligence agencies fake plans, intentions, and so on. Perhaps fake denunciations of schismatic people conducting the training in case of their involvement being revealed. Payoffs and bribes to the local authorities, must also be considered. This could be a sum as little as $80,000.

After that, comes the positioning of the arms and other supplies used in the attacks. The difficulties encountered by the Bombay attackers in coming from sea (the Indian Coast Guard nearly caught them) means that it is unlikely this means will be pursued further. It is more likely that the arms will be smuggled in or purchased piecemeal off the black markets, one at a time. This is likely to cost around $130,000 or so. Perhaps more in societies with a larger, more robust police presence, and concentrated geography, perhaps less in places with a more spread out geography and less able police. The aim being to keep the arms and attackers separate until right before the attack begins, for maximum surprise and effectiveness.

Finally, comes the infiltration of the attackers. Ideally they should enter the country through normal commercial means, as many of the 9/11 Hijackers did, though under assumed identities. They would be indistinguishable from the mass of people moving in and out of modern Western societies. The cost for this would be only $20,000 or so. Very cheap.

So the total cost of $320,000 give or take, could be estimated to produce around $20 million in funds raised from sympathetic Gulf interests and Jihadist networks in Europe and America. It certainly is risky. But then so is sitting out in the desert in Pakistan, hoping to overthrow the Egyptian or Saudi government, or the Pakistani government for that matter. Men who will take that risk, will take this risk. The only trick is to avoid retaliation by the Americans, who are at this point the only forces capable (well, besides the Chinese and Russians) of producing misery for the men who would plan the attacks.

The widespread affordability of cheap but reliable AK-47's, grenades and other weaponry, makes this tactic of mass-killing by sudden assaults likely to be repeated. Until they stop working, which means they fail to produce money and men and supporters at "acceptable" levels of risk for the plotters. Which means in turn that the plotters don't end up dead.

The likely targets would not at first be American. India was chosen for a reason. It was next door to Pakistan, it had poor security, and exiting to Pakistan was theoretically possible. Indeed if there were twenty not ten attackers, then ten have escaped. The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Spain, France, Britain, are all convenient targets. All these nations lack any meaningful ways of killing the plotters, which to them is the only thing that matters in considering such attacks. Neither Britain nor France will nuke Pakistan. Certainly not over an attack that "merely" kills 5,000 people. These societies present a "free shot" for men who wish to become Caliph.

Which brings to mind the irony of how technology has created this situation. In the movie "The Man Who Would Be King," Sean Connery and Michael Caine use their superior technology (repeating rifles) and military know-how to become kings of "Kafiristan" (in reality the last pagan outpost in Afghanistan before it was conquered in 1895-96 by Muslims). Their reign as "Kings" comes to an end, however, when they are revealed to be men not gods, and the Kafiris turn on them. In that instance, the superior technology of the West enabled for a while, the Connery and Caine characters to pose as Gods and rule as Kings.

Now, cheap transportation from anywhere in the Globe, and cheap and available weaponry, means that the Man Who Would Be King is not a some ex-Sergeant Major of the British Army in India, looking for an easy target, but an ambitious exile from Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or perhaps a native Pakistani, who would be King himself. And his means is not seizing a weak, broken place like Kafiristan, separate and outside of modern technology. No, the ambition is to be like Reza Khan, who rose from an officer in the Persian Kossack Army, to Shah. Or Saddam Hussein, who rose from a simple assassin in the Baath Party to undisputed leader of Iraq. Or Gamel Abdel Nasser, or any one of the strong men who control the Muslim world. Muslim history and particularly modern Muslim history is littered with examples of people who assembled an exile and internal army and staged coups to become undisputed rulers of their countries. All that is needed is men and money.

Both readily available to anyone who can attack Westerners with impunity.

So these types of attacks will not end any time soon. If anything they will only increase. Because they are the quickest path to power in the Muslim world.

These attacks are not about Israel, or Jews, or Freedom, or why they hate us. It is about power and money, pure and simple, and enabled by modern technology along with the limits of the West.

However, like everything else, it will not last forever. The West has been coasting on the internal peace and prosperity bought by cheap energy, as documented in my post The Bailout, along with a lack of any serious threat impacting security and safety. The Soviet Nuclear Threat was largely neutralized by America's nuclear arsenal, creating a stand-off. Soviet Marines did not pose a constant threat of landing in New York City or Barcelona and massacring holiday shoppers in a shopping mall. Success and managing the one threat facing the West depended on cooperation and signaling (to the Soviets) a lack of any aggressive intent.

That is now changed. It is quite possible and eventually likely, that holiday shoppers or stadium-goers or attendants at Mass, or any other large public event could be massacred by Jihadis intent on killing as many infidels as possible, just so their masters and planners can assemble an exile Army.

This will change Western society in profound ways just as the threat of global nuclear war with the Soviets helped produce a deep and profound feminizing influence on the West (which was in some ways deeply beneficial).

First, in culture we will see a shift away from consumerism and status (which mean nothing if there is a realistic chance of being shot up by a jihadi in a large social setting) towards independence and self-reliance. Since those are the traits that provide success when realistically threatened by sudden violence at any moment. We will see a celebration of the spread out suburbs, which are unattractive targets to gunmen, and a disdain for the "loser" cities and concentrated urban areas.

The cry of the Indian photographer of "I wish I had a gun" will be felt more sympathetically. India has strict gun control laws, and the idea that armed Jihadis will be stopped by making sure their targets are unarmed will be deeply unappealing. The alliance of women, progressives, Blacks, Hispanics, etc. who are anti-gun ownership by ordinary people, will not change. However, their influence as more and more shootings happen, particularly in European nations with strict gun control, and horror stories of defenseless victims, is likely to wane.

SWAT teams and police units are likely to be the last line of defense. Even in compact cities like New York City, there simply won't be enough police to combat the attackers. Particularly if the police face multiple attacks to spread out their response. Politically, cities will be the last to allow hand gun possession by licensed legal owners. Because of the political alliances inherent in urban politics (women, gays, non-Whites).

However, that will just reverse the trend of "new urbanization" or the move to the cities. Instead, the safe suburbs, and shopping online, will dominate. Places that allow licensed concealed carry will have more people moving into them, and those that don't (in the US) will not. In Europe, it is likely that people will simply carry concealed and highly illegal weapons.

These attacks will not fundamentally threaten Western civilization. However, they will significantly change it. When people face the prospect of being killed at random in public places, they change their behavior. We are likely to see a switch from centralized, SWAT type response, while people wait to be killed, to a series of gunfights with the attackers. We are also likely to see the development of more powerful firearms that can stop attackers quickly, and alternatives to firearms that promise the same (vortex ring weapons, sonic weapons, microwaves, etc). Particularly as body armor becomes part of the attacker's gear.

After all, SWAT is designed to respond to fairly infrequent, violent threats. That type of protection, based on a centralized and governmental response, does not work (and certainly did not) when faced by a large number of attackers over a dispersed area.

The threat from the attackers is distributed and decentralized. It is likely that the response to the threat to be effective will be decentralized and distributed also.
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